Dr. Henry Kissinger (1,292)

Edited version

1973 Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Medal of Liberty.

In 1944, I was in the Army as a private and was sent to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana for infantry training. There was another private who, like me, was a refugee from Germany, but he had left by choice while I, being Jewish, left out of necessity. He was 38 and had two Ph.D. degrees. I was 19 and had two years of night college. His name was Fritz Kraemer, and he was the greatest influence of my formative years. The General in charge of our 84th Infantry Division had Kraemer dress up in a German uniform, complete with monocle and riding crop, to give a speech to the rest of us about the moral and political stakes of war. Afterward, I did something that I never do, which is, I wrote him a letter and told him how impressed I was by his talk. A few days later, now dressed in an American uniform, but still carrying the riding crop and wearing the monocle, he found me during training and invited me to have dinner with him. He asked me what I was studying. I responded I was studying accounting at City College in New York. We spoke about my views and his values, and he told me, "You have one of the best political minds that I've ever encountered, and you ought to work in political science." He continued, "If you go and complete your training with a good attitude, I will find you." A month after my division reached the front line, he pulled me back to the G-2 intelligence section. We worked together and, over the next decade, he shaped me in manifold ways. He influenced my reading choices, my thinking and my choice of college. He inspired my graduate theses. He once said, "Intellectuals have always preached that everything is relative and that there are no absolute values...The result is spiritual emptiness. Everything is possible, and therefore nothing is. The worst thing about a loss of faith is not the fact that someone has stopped believing but that they are ready to believe anything." He was a devout conservative, but he made no allowance for the contingent in history regarding values. I accepted his proposition and that we had to fight communism, but I could not follow the absolutist way he insisted on. Later on, I got attacked by the Liberals for fighting communism too much and by Conservatives for being too flexible. Fritz Kraemer didn't speak to me for the last 30 years of his life, because he thought I was insisting on negotiation, while he preferred confrontation. There was no hostility between us. I had a job to do, which was to help steer America though cataclysms while preserving an option for peace. He had

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absolute values to keep. I spoke at his funeral affectionately, even though he hadn't spoken to me for so long.

At the height of the Cold War in 1953, I was at Harvard as a graduate student. At that time, I was working on early 19th-century European history, and I was going to write a book on the making of the peace after the Napoleonic wars up until the outbreak of World War I. I'd also spoken on campus a bit about foreign policy. One day, I was walking across Harvard yard and ran into Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He gave me a letter that he had received from the Secretary of the Air Force, Thomas Finletter, regarding nuclear weapons and the then dominant strategy of massive retaliation. He asked me, "What do you think?" I then wrote Arthur a memorandum on the problems of massive retaliation. Unbeknownst to me, he sent it in to the editor of *Foreign Affairs*, who invited me to turn it into an article. I had never published anything. I'd certainly never intended to publish this. In fact, the thought hadn't even crossed my mind. On the basis of that article, I was later made Executive Director of a study group at the Council on Foreign Relations called, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy". This turned into a bestselling book and that, in turn, moved me into contemporary foreign policy, although I'd never worked in the area before. If I'd not had that encounter with Arthur, I may have ended up in the same place in my life, but it would have taken quite a bit longer. I keep teasing Arthur, whenever he complains about my foreign-policy points, that he's the one who put me here!

In 1969, when Richard Nixon took office, I was teaching at Harvard University. I had spent 12 years opposing Nixon in campaigns at the side of Nelson Rockefeller, so I really couldn't believe it when Nixon called me and offered me the position as national security adviser. I was very honest with him and said, "Mr. President, I have opposed you all my life, and I'll need to speak with some of my friends to find out whether I can keep their friendship if I go to work for you." He should have told me to get lost. Instead, he said, "Take a week." I had never met Nixon and really wasn't sure what to do. I was very close to Nelson Rockefeller and a few days later, when he came back from his ranch in Venezuela, I told him what happened. He said, "You must be out of your mind! The President-elect is taking a much bigger chance on you than you are on him. Secondly, when the President of the United States asks you to do something, you say, "Yes," unless you have an overwhelming reason to decline." He continued, "Here's a telephone. You call him immediately and say you're accepting without conditions." I took the job but, as it happened, I lost all the friends,

including those from Harvard. I didn't lose them for taking the position; I lost them for carrying out the policies of the president.

I've learned that you can't use history like a cookbook. You learn as a child that a hot stove burns you, but the knowledge is useless unless you're able to recognize a hot stove. In this sense, you can learn from history. Kraemer gave me a real sense of history, which I hadn't had in that type of really profound way. Nelson Rockefeller taught me how to operate in the practical world, meaning the world of big organization, and in the political world. But, keep in mind, he lost every campaign where I worked with him. So, my lessons were in a way negative, but I learned from them and from him. Later on, when I became famous, I was at a lunch at the University Club. Rockefeller's office was right behind the building. There was a big crowd assembled in front of the club, and I was pretty shy. I didn't know how to handle the crowd. I found a side door to his office and said to him, "I really can't handle this." He responded, "Never do this again. People do you the honor of wanting to touch you, or see you, and wave to you, and you owe them that. You overcome your feelings, and you go out there and let them do it." I have acted on this advice ever since.

> The second quote (italicized) from Fritz Kraemer is from the eulogy. I thought it was wonderful and explained the reason for his absoluteness in thought. Please let me know if you would like me to remove it. DR. KISSINGER SAYS THIS IS O.K.