Former U.S. President Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger conferring on the White House porch in1972.The White House/The New York Times
In the late 1960s, a renowned Harvard professor was asked to sketch out some foreign-policy talking points for a Republican presidential candidate who was jockeying to build public support in a nation riven by a wretched, ongoing war.
Henry Kissinger came up with five lessons – five principles to keep in mind about America's proper role in world affairs. But just as Nelson Rockefeller, the candidate, went on to lose the nomination, his lessons have largely fallen on deaf ears.
"The United States has been extremely bad at learning from its own history," explains historian Niall Ferguson, whose latest book, Kissinger: The Idealist, takes a fresh look at a figure widely vilified as the evil, scheming, foreign-policy mastermind for Richard Nixon (who beat Rockefeller for the nomination and went on to disgrace the presidency).
Almost a half-cenury later, the five Kissinger lessons easily could have been used in the Republican debate last week, as presidential hopefuls vied to denounce current U.S. policy in the Middle East and vowed to avoid making the same mistakes.
Here is what Mr. Kissinger wrote:
"We cannot act as the world's policeman, … our commitments cannot be open-ended, … before we commit even small forces, all the far-reaching implications must be faced, … we must support our allies and not substitute for them. … and unilateral U.S. intervention should only be a last resort and only in response to overwhelming danger."
His conclusions were drawn from the U.S. experience in Vietnam and, had they been embraced, the Iraq war might never have been fought or, more likely, wouldn't have morphed into the current widening conflict.
That's just one of the insights the Oxford-educated Prof. Ferguson, who now teaches at Harvard himself, offers in his portrayal of Washington's most prominent and controversial foreign-policy player in the second half of the 20th century.
The Kissinger who emerges from this first of two volumes (1923-1968) is a more complex figure than he has seemed in the past: still driven, still hypersensitive, still seeking to play a pivotal role in shaping great events – but far more humane and genuinely interested in people, not just power. (And not just beautiful women, although Mr. Kissinger's penchant for dating celebrities, especially lovely young ones, infuriated Mr. Nixon.)
Prof. Ferguson first met Mr. Kissinger at a London party thrown by Conrad Black (when he was still a press baron). He admits to being "naturally flattered when the, then, elder statesman" expressed admiration for a book he had written – and equally "impressed by the speed with which I was dropped when the model Elle Macpherson entered the room."
Still, that meeting eventually led Mr. Kissinger to offer him access to a vast archive of private letters, notes and diaries. It is from those personal papers – ranging from the letters home from a young soldier and notes taken after a harrowing Huey flight to a remote Marine firebase in Vietnam to drafts of unpublished books – that a more nuanced, more intriguing, more likeable Mr. Kissinger emerges.
"I'm not sure he was a thrill-seeker, but he clearly had physical courage and no compunctions about dangerous situations," Prof. Ferguson says.
Heinz, the Jewish boy who sneaked into see his beloved local soccer team play, becomes Henry, the teenage German refugee struggling to master English in New York City and then a conscript infantryman who returns to Europe as part of the liberating allied armies.
Even then, the young Kissinger was finding bigger roles to play and showing a penchant for the finer things in life. "I live rather comfortably," he wrote to his parents, explaining that the villa he had requisitioned came with a big staff, "so that now we get our shoes shined, clothes pressed, baths drawn and whatever else a butler does."
Kissinger the soldier was to go home and, with characteristic verve, tell Harvard that it should admit him (to a course of studies the university didn't offer), thus beginning the brilliant academic career that would serve as a launching pad for his interwoven roles as historian, policy expert, occasional envoy and fact-finder and, eventually, a statesman of remarkable power.
Sometimes he seems curiously ill-suited, perhaps insufficiently partisan, for a such a role. So he worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Prof. Ferguson suggests Mr. Kissinger wasn't a Republican but rather a "conservative in a very intellectual and very European" manner with a "genuine sense of public service," who wanted "to see the statesman as someone could be apolitical, someone who should be able to [serve] a Kennedy or a Rockefeller."
The first volume ends after Richard Nixon sweeps to power in November, 1968, and, almost immediately, taps Mr. Kissinger as his national security adviser.
And what is left for the second volume? The idealist becomes an actor on the global stage. Over the eight years that followed, through the Nixon and Gerald Ford presidencies, Mr. Kissinger became the shaper of superpower policy, managing détente and altering history by reopening Sino-American relations – a feat that, unlike his five lessons, has not been forgotten, almost half a century later.
This week, still active at 92, Mr. Kissinger was in Seattle to attend a dinner to welcome visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping.