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So long Henry Kissinger, statesman and sex symbol. Throughout the 1970s, the architect of detente cultivated a reputation as a ladies man, and was frequently seen in the company of beautiful women.<\/p>\n
When forced to use commercial flights rather than travel with the president, he told journalists that he considered this an upgrade \u2013 for \u201cthere are no air stewardesses on Air Force One.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Ever the cowboy: Henry Kissinger tries on a cowboy hat in Texas in 1975.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>UPI<\/cite><\/p>\n Oriana Fallaci, the brilliant journalist who interviewed him after he took Nixon to China in 1972, called Kissinger \u201csuperman, superstar, superkraut\u201d \u2013 fashionable and urbane, yet also \u201cicy\u201d, his voice so lacking emotion that the dial on her tape-recorder never jumped (she had to check that it was working).<\/p>\n Tell me, she asked, how have you managed to go from refugee to world statesman? Because, he explained in his \u201csad, monotonous\u201d voice, \u201cI\u2019ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.\u201d<\/p>\n He was probably right. Nixon resigned in disgrace two years later, yet his partner in various overseas crimes enjoyed an approval rating of 85 per cent and was re-hired by Gerald Ford. His secret? In a decade of living dangerously, millions considered him indispensable to world peace.<\/p>\n Henry Kissinger in Canberra in an undated photo.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Fairfax<\/cite><\/p>\n Kissinger is often called the face of \u201crealism\u201d, which is often meant as a synonym for amorality. The Left says he was happy to sacrifice soldiers and civilians to maintain the balance of power, and that he built alliances with evil. The Nixon\/Ford administrations tolerated ethnic cleansing in Bangladesh, the invasion of East Timor and the rightwing coup in Chile (\u201cI don\u2019t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,\u201d said Kissinger).<\/p>\n Conservatives also found him cynical, borderline treasonous, for they argued that detente (a thawing of Cold War tension) handed Moscow a strategic win while blurring the moral mission.<\/p>\n What was the point of containing the USSR, let alone tens of thousands of Americans dying to keep South Vietnam independent, only to hop into bed with Red China? Decades later, with Beijing on the up, what Kissinger grandly called \u201ctriangular diplomacy\u201d looks surprisingly naive.<\/p>\n Of course realists do not just let the chips fall; they try to shape difficult events to achieve a better outcome. And though the bombing of Cambodia backfired horribly, hastening the advent of Pol Pot, Nixon did save Israel in 1973 with arms and prevented a global confrontation via diplomacy.<\/p>\n President Nixon congratulates Henry A. Kissinger after he as sworn in as secretary of state in 1973.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>UPI<\/cite><\/p>\n Kissinger believed that power competition is part of life, that if the US became lost in abstractions and humanitarian ideals, it would simply allow a more hard-headed opponent to take advantage.<\/p>\n If the US wasn\u2019t nice to some skull-collecting general, Moscow would be; if it tolerated a communist revolution here, it would mean Soviet missiles there. The realist shuttles back-and-forth to strike deals and tether politics to a reality shaped by history, personality and contingency. Kissinger always adapted.<\/p>\n It\u2019s notable that in recent years he disapproved of the West\u2019s courting of Ukraine; this, he warned accurately, would make Russian aggression more likely. But when Putin did invade, he switched to advocating Ukrainian membership of Nato \u2013 for Kyiv, it turns out, has a pretty good army. To the frustration of his critics, he could be both contradictory and correct.<\/p>\n To prevent chaos, great powers must demonstrate their capacity and willingness to act. Kissinger and Nixon knew before they took office that the Vietnam War was lost; the issue was how America could best withdraw. A hasty retreat would signal communist superiority; a display of force, at the same time as building a counterweight to Vietnam and the USSR via China, could give the impression of \u201cpeace with honour\u201d, that the US was getting out on terms that maintained a global stalemate. One of Kissinger\u2019s aides remarked: \u201cWe bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.\u201d Image is all, be it war or women.<\/p>\n The supreme diplomat aspired to serve the state rather than a party; he was bitterly accused of serving himself. Kissinger flirted with the Kennedy administration, then with Republican Nelson Rockefeller, briefly with Democrat Hubert Humphrey and got hitched to Nixon and Ford.<\/p>\n In 1980 he offered his services to Reagan, even though he had once agreed with Nixon that he would make nuclear war more likely (a cartoonist portrayed him as a jobseeker holding up a sign that read \u201cAVAILABLE\u201d). Reagan\u2019s polite decline did nothing to diminish his reputation, however, and throughout the Eighties he remained the third most cited person in the US press, behind the president and Elizabeth Taylor.<\/p>\n To those who despised him this was an indictment of American shallowness. Rube audiences were seduced by a has-been who rattled off the names of sheiks and chairmen as if they were Hollywood icons. Kissinger\u2019s endurance was almost as galling as Nixon\u2019s rehabilitation.<\/p>\n Academics and journalists, however, typically evince a low opinion of the public; my guess is that Americans understood entirely what shabby deals Kissinger had shaken hands on over the years, but saw these as necessary trade-offs in pursuit of a foreign policy that put their own interests above all others.<\/p>\n In the 1970s, two disasters seemed plausible: that the world would go to war, or that the Soviets would quietly outpace an America in decline.<\/p>\n Nixon and Kissinger avoided either outcome \u2013 and without starting a war, as Democrats Truman and Johnson had done, but while extricating themselves from one. Kissinger was admired because many voters felt he kept them safe at a time that was close to High Noon.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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