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The Prince
| Article
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20028 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1992 |
2,591 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gottfried
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought
section of The World & I and author of The Search for
Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right. |
KISSINGER
A Biography
Walter Isaacson
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992
891 pp., $30.00
Walter Isaacson's biography of Henry Kissinger is notable for several reasons: its gargantuan size (almost nine hundred pages of text); the fact that the author has researched and written so much about a former but still living secretary of state; and the care that is given to its subject's intellectual and social development.
It is indeed remarkable that Isaacson found time to complete such an undertaking. Still in his late thirties, he has worked as an assistant managing editor of Time magazine and written, in collaboration with Evan Thomas, a voluminous study of the thought and activities of six Brahmin career diplomats of the forties and fifties, including Dean Acheson and George Kennan. One wonders how he got around to doing this immense biography.
In reading this book, it becomes apparent that Kissinger has achieved a goal often--and justifiably--ascribed to him: fascinating and newsworthy. His glibness in interviews, his dropping of learned references in conversations with historical and political theorists, and his studied indifference toward the elected or self-proclaimed custodians of American democracy all helped create or sustain Kissinger's magical aura.
Although he said and did things that rattled the media, Kissinger also became their darling. There are several possible reasons. He pooh-poohed anticommunists or any opponent of the treaties he negotiated with the Soviets and North Vietnamese as Richard Nixon's secretary of state. Also, he had been a Harvard professor and a refugee, with his family, from the Nazis.
Unlike his hapless boss, with whom journalists often compared him, Kissinger did not start his career in public life as a "Red-baiter." Indeed, he was a junior member of the eastern Establishment, as an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller.
Though Isaacson's biography is by no means uniformly favorable, the flattering attention it bestows on its subject appears more significant than many of its judgments. It may be argued that Kissinger contributed no more to the foreign policy achievements or problems of the Nixon presidency than the president himself,
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