Living with Henry

Gazing up at me from the jacket of one of his own massive volumes is Henry Kissinger. I have been living with this face for the past five years. That was how long it took me to write the story of a single year in the life of America’s 56th secretary of state. It says, I hope, more about his restless activity than my indolence.

I share at least one attribute with Kissinger: we were both refugees from Hitler, although rather different ones. As Jewish refugees, he and his family fled Germany in 1938; I was sent from England as a “bundle from Britain” to school at Millbrook, NY, in 1940. He joined the US army in 1943, the same year I returned home to serve in Britain. We were both demobbed in 1947: he as a sergeant, I as a captain.

I first met Kissinger in 1980, when I was writing the official biography of Harold Macmillan. My research took me to the US where I was asked to act as host to Macmillan at an evening event. By chance I was seated next to Kissinger. He was out of office at the time. Macmillan, then in his late eighties, looked terrible. Over dinner Kissinger asked me in a guttural whisper: “Do you think the old man will die before he speaks?” “No, he always looks like that,” I replied. “Once he’s spoken he’ll be completely rejuvenated, and keep us up all night.” And so it came to pass. The old actor-manager’s wit and erudition, his ability to evoke tears when speaking of the lost generation of 1914-18, held a hardened Washington audience spellbound. At the end, Kissinger turned to me and said “You were right,” and invited me to breakfast. It proved to be the beginning of a friendship, more spasmodic than close.

Then in 2004, my British publisher George Weidenfeld proposed that I write Kissinger’s official biography. I had just finished three books on the history of France and was in a state of depleted afterbirth. The proposition was tempting. But I felt deterred by the amount of work: Supermac measured his archives in feet, but it was rumoured that Kissinger’s totalled 33 tons. I declined as gracefully as I could. Immediately I regretted it; how could I turn down an offer to write about one of the most significant men of our times? I flew to New York to see Kissinger. We lunched and

I came up with a counter-proposal. Perhaps I could write about just one year? “Which year?” “1973?” To my surprise he said “That’s a great idea.” A deal was struck and I started shortly after.

Why 1973? It was the big year. In October, the world was rocked by the Yom Kippur war. The previous month, in Chile, President Allende had been overthrown by General Pinochet. It was the year of the pact to end the Vietnam war, détente with the Soviet Union, and Watergate. And Kissinger both won the Nobel peace prize and became secretary of state.

The terms of my engagement with Macmillan and Kissinger were similar. Both promised full access but neither would read my manuscript. Macmillan, well into his eighties when we started, attached the proviso that the biography was not to be published in his lifetime. (“That will make it easier for both you and me, dear boy!” he said.) Kissinger, concerned about his place in history, encouraged me to publish the book as quickly as possible. He was generous enough to assure me of his continuing friendship, whatever I wrote.

Macmillan housed most of his papers in his chilly house at Birch Grove, Sussex. I would work in a freezing cell known as the “muniments room.” There we would spend afternoons taping his responses to the questions I had prepared. His memory was prodigious, and we filled some 40 tapes. Every once in a while he would pause, prod the recorder with his stick, say “turn that machine off a minute,” and relate a scurrilous anecdote. But the best conversations were over dinner, fortified by whisky, when he would discourse on anything from the origin of the Guards’ bearskins and Hardy versus Kipling as stylists, to the Victorian empire-builders and sexual repression. Fearing it would be bad form to record at the table I made secret notes and transcribed them afterwards.

Kissinger was similar. He would suggest meeting in New York or in his office in Washington. But my visits to his country hide-out in the depths of upstate Connecticut were the most agreeable. Occasionally there would be sightings of black bears in the woods; one hard winter a neighbour’s pony was eaten by one. I sensed that Kissinger, if cornered, could resemble one of those creatures. But I only felt it once, when a paw lashed out after I had indiscreetly given an interview to New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd in 2007, which Dowd twisted to poke fun at President Bush’s reading ability.

When visiting Connecticut I lodged in comfort in the guest house. From jelly beans to Imodium, every possible requirement was catered for by Henry’s wife Nancy. Yellow sticky notes even indicated which way the lights switched on. Mid-morning I would amble half a mile through the woods for a session. Kissinger’s office lay at the top of the main house, accessible by a terrifyingly steep staircase. The room was packed with videos and memorabilia, along with signed photographs of the Queen and the Pope. Most prominent was a spoof poster, made by the exhausted press team on his diplomatic shuttle flights of 1973, saying “I’m Henry, fly me to Damascus.” Often he would be watching baseball, his favourite sport, on a vast screen. I said that I found it an incomprehensible sport. “But it’s not a sport!” he interjected, “it’s a science—a mathematics: that’s why it fascinates me.” He told me once he found few men imposing, but that the baseball star Joe di Maggio, along with Chairman Mao, were among the very few who could “fill the room” as they entered.

Kissinger refused to use a tape-recorder; perhaps memories of Watergate were too vivid. So I relied on handwritten notes, transcribed later on. More difficult were the breaks that took place in the ferociously heated salt-water swimming pool. Just as Macmillan became more lucid late at night, so some of Kissinger’s best thoughts emerged from the depths of the pool: recollections of Brezhnev in Moscow, Israel’s Golda Meir, or his hero the Egyptian President Sadat. It was, though, difficult to record his thoughts underwater.

After a swim we would often lunch with Nancy, who as a young woman had worked on the staff of Governor Rockefeller of New York and had received a thorough grounding in politics there. I came away impressed by the depth of affection that bonded this somewhat physically incongruous couple and their manifest devotion to each other. It made for a happy atmosphere in which to work.

Following our evening sessions the house would often be filled for dinner by a miscellany of locals, writers, doctors, academics from nearby Yale, New York gallery directors and so on. It was always convivial. Henry loved good conversation. By contrast, the final years of Harold Macmillan were lonely and austere. His life seemed to me a part tragedy; the last act being the medical error which led him to resign in 1963, leaving him with 23 years of what he called “life after death.” After his official retirement in 1976 Kissinger too was condemned to such a life, one that has now lasted 30 years. Yet his is still crammed with interest and action. In private he quietly acts as a consultant to political and business leaders. He was even called in by the Bush administration and asked for his views during the most difficult stages of the Iraq war. This was after Bush had asked Kissinger to lead the official investigation into 11th September, a role he had to give up a month later because of concerns over potential conflicts of interests with his consultancy company, Kissinger Associates, which had clients in the middle east.

Just as secret diplomacy was his hallmark in 1973, today he remains inscrutably discreet about his activities. Although a loyal Republican supporter, he has a high opinion of President Obama and of Hillary Clinton, who followed in his footsteps as secretary of state. I would be surprised if he were not now working actively for the Obama administration in “back-channel” operations. Although 86 in May, his wanderlust is still formidable. In one month this year, for instance, he flew to Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo in swift succession. In Beijing, where he is revered as the elder statesman who brought China in from the cold, he knows everyone that matters. In Moscow, he has an open door to President Putin, who has come to trust him. And he has even now things he wants to accomplish in public life. He is a longstanding campaigner on nuclear non-proliferation, and I think that he would like his legacy to embrace new moves to end the scourge of nuclear weaponry. This is certainly a target that preoccupies his thoughts, perhaps more than any other.

During our many sessions Kissinger was always available, but how open was he? His successor as national security advisor Brent Scowcroft warned me “Henry could tell the same story ten different ways to ten different people and never fib!” As his German biographer, Evi Kurz, discovered, he could also be opaque on questions about his personal life. And only after four years of interrogation did he reveal details of his experiences during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. Did I like him? Yes, unashamedly, and more as I came to know him better. And as I became aware of the problems he faced in 1973 I admired his achievements all the more. Far removed from the image of the cold practitioner of realpolitik, I came to discover in Henry a highly emotional being and a soft heart. In office he was a tough taskmaster; yet all but a tiny number of his staff remain affectionately loyal, many continuing to work for him. In 2008, when I was knocked sideways by a triple heart-bypass, Henry would ring my wife almost daily with kind advice. (He, of course, was one-up, having had a quadruple.)

I asked him if he had regrets. “Yes,” he replied, “the failure to achieve peace in Vietnam.” Perhaps the harshest blow fate dealt him was to award him the Nobel peace prize in October 1973 for his role in the Vietnam peace negotiations. After North Vietnam breached the peace accords and invaded the south, the honour swiftly turned to ashes in his mouth. In April 1975, after the fall of Saigon, he offered to return the gold medal, having never accepted the money. To my mind, however, Watergate was as much to blame for that defeat as Kissinger’s efforts in peace negotiations. And if the Scandinavians had hung on for longer, history should have recognised Kissinger for achieving peace after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, convincing Israel to hand back some of the land it had won and paving the way for negotiations with Egypt.

Kissinger is sensitive about his position in history. And not without reason. He remains a controversial figure; in America people either love him or hate him. Some writers—most vocally Christopher Hitchens—want to see him indicted for war crimes over the overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile, or the bombing of Cambodia. My research largely refutes the former charge: Kissinger had specifically instructed the US ambassador in Santiago against involvement in the coup. On Cambodia, my criticism would be that the bombing was strategically ineffective, as well as being morally questionable.

One of Kissinger’s past biographers accused him of being “strong on realpolitik, but weak on human rights.” (To me he once rebutted this with a laugh—“America has to be the only country where reality isn’t a virtue!”) His record says otherwise. In 1973 alone, he helped to bring peace to a middle east crisis and got the Soviet Union out of the region, while preserving the détente between east and west. I believe future generations will view him as one of the outstanding statesmen of our times. And I, for one, shall miss living with Henry.