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free person was here, and that it was threatened by the demand for separate nationhood. In his fierce desire for proof of assimilation, he established his summer home, when he was in his seventies, in the Wasp stronghold of Bar Harbor, Maine, consorting with the snobs, to my acute embarrassment on my visits. Possibly they liked or admired him—he was a man of great charm, known as Uncle Henry to all acquaintances from FDR to the policeman on the beat—but what slights he may have endured I cannot tell. Yet he never for an instant attempted to play down his Jewish identity or remain passive in regard to his people. On the contrary, he emphasized his ties to them throughout his life, serving as founder, trustee, and officer of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, the American Jewish Committee, B’nai B’rith, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and every kind of Jewish organization.

Assimilation, for him, did not mean to cross over to Christianity; it meant to be accepted in Bar Harbor as a Jew: that was the whole point. He wanted to be a Jew and an American on the same level as the best. He wanted America to work in terms of his youthful ideals—and of course it did not. Perhaps the dilemma was America’s, not his.

Address, American Historical Association, December 1976. Commentary, May 1977.

* Since the appearance of this article, Mayor Teddy Kollek, the alert presiding genius of Jerusalem, has invalidated my statement.

Kissinger: Self-Portrait

In the last century the historian Leopold von Ranke laid down the dictum that foreign relations were supreme among the influences that shape the history of nations. This may be arguable, but for the immediate past it is certainly maintainable. No one has been more deeply engaged at so influential a level in the conduct of foreign relations than former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, or gained so much public recognition of his role. He became a cult figure, a popular celebrity, the subject of countless full-length books, studies, and analyses. Publication of his own version is thus something of a historical event.

With some relief I can report that it contains no more Metternich. Because Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation and first published book, A World Restored, dealt with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, and the resettlement of Europe after the windstorm of Napoleon, everyone writing about Kissinger since then has made a comparison between them. Kissinger, writing about himself, does not mention Metternich—rightly, for the world he has had to deal with is so different in such absolute ways that a comparison is inapplicable. The differences are important: Whatever their rivalries, the nations at the Congress of Vienna had a common outlook and a common goal—restoration of the status quo ante. Today nations are split between two opposing ideologies, and the globe is dominated by two antagonistic superpowers locked in quarrel. Balance of power is inoperable; the third world has emerged to upset any balance; a new risk center exists in the Middle East; the industrial nations are in thrall to the oil of the undeveloped; nuclear weaponry overshadows all.

In such a world Kissinger’s task as he saw it on taking office in the administration of Richard M. Nixon in January 1969 was to end the Vietnam war, manage a “global rivalry” and nuclear-arms race with the Soviet Union, reinvigorate alliance with the European democracies, and integrate the new nations into a “new world equilibrium.”

How well did he succeed in his mission? He himself offers no over-all assessment—perhaps because he has allowed himself no time for reflection. To make ready for publication a text of 1,476 pages in two and a half years since leaving office is an Olympic feat leaving little room for philosophy. Kissinger has been in such a hurry to vindicate his management of complex and turbulent events that he seems not to have let a day elapse between doing and writing or removed himself in any way to gain perspective. The book is all record, no assessment. He has written too much too