When I mentioned to friends and colleagues that I was writing a book about the legacy of Henry Kissinger's foreign policy, many often made mention of Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger . I think then that here would be the place to point out that I see my interest in Kissinger as somewhat antithetical to Hitchens's 2001 polemic. The Trial of Henry Kissinger is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as a “devil theory of war,” which blames militarism on a single, isolatable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard said, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be triedâand convictedâfor war crimes, Hitchens didn't look at the big picture. Instead he focused obsessively on the morality of one man, his devil: Henry Kissinger. It must have been a fun book to write, giving the author the satisfaction of playing the people's prosecutor. Yet aside from assembling the docket and gathering the accused's wrongdoing in one place, The Trial of Henry Kissinger is not very useful and is actually counterproductive; righteous indignation doesn't provide much room for understanding. Hitchens burrows deep into Kissinger's dark heart, leaving readers waiting for him to come out and tell us what it all means. That is, besides the obvious: Kissinger is a criminal. But Hitchens never does. In the end, we learn more about the prosecutor than the would-be prosecuted. The book provides no insights into the “total situation” in which Kissinger operated and makes no effort to explain the power of his ideas or how those ideas tapped into deeper intellectual currents within American history. Hitchens depicts Kissinger as a ravager of American values, so out of place in his adopted democratic land it was as if Wagner had wandered into a production of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring , muscled the baton from the conductor, and added a little Götterdämmerung to the square dances and fiddles.
Hitchens is by far the most damning of Kissinger's chroniclers, but he is not alone in missing the point. Most students of Kissinger find it hard to say anything about Kissinger that isn't about Kissinger. He is such an outsized figure that he eclipses his own context, leading his many biographers, critics, and admirers to focus nearly exclusively on the quirks of his personality or his moral failings. Seymour Hersh's The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House , published in 1983, did capture the secretive world of the national security apparatus as it was functioning during the Vietnam War, and his study of Kissinger's paranoia reads like a (somewhat innocent) prelude to the all-pervading surveillance and counterterrorism state we now live under. But Hersh, writing in the early 1980s, couldn't know the long-term effectsânot only of specific policies but of how Kissinger's imperial existentialism enabled a later generation of militarists who, in the 1990s, took us, after a quick detour through Central America and Panama, deeper into the Gulf, and then, after 9/11, into Afghanistan and Iraq. Kissinger's Shadow .