Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [127]
That would explain why—for the sake of dignity—Kissinger as a personality, the phenomenon of Super-K, the swinger, the media’s delight, is missing from this book. Beyond some rather stilted references to “my warped sense of humor,” no hint comes through, yet the attention showered upon him must be a factor in the record. “Power is an aphrodisiac,” Kissinger himself has said (though not in this book), and although popularity is a different thing, it reinforces power. Kissinger’s explanation of his popularity with the press is that because its members disliked President Nixon they tended to give credit for favorable developments to “more admired associates … and I became the beneficiary of this state of affairs.” Clearly more than that was at work; a distinct personality made itself felt. Kissinger was refreshing and the press succumbed to the wit and charm he knew how to exercise, although they find virtually no expression here.
How did the sudden blossoming of this pudgy professor into the rose of the Nixon administration affect American foreign policy? I would speculate that it enhanced his belief, already embedded intellectually, in his own powers of manipulation and hence in over-reliance on personal negotiation. It may have nurtured fantasies of omnipotence. Although his text is impersonal, that is not from modesty. The illustrations tell a different story. Out of sixty-five photographs, Kissinger himself appears in sixty-three, twenty-eight of them in the company of Mr. Nixon, as if to assure posterity of his close and constant access to the President. It seems that he even needed to reassure himself. Apropos of the low protocol rank of his office, which seated him far below the salt at official dinners, “I spent much time calculating the distance separating me from the Presidential person and the odds on my reaching my car before the Presidential limousine pulled out.” Who can envy the life of officialdom weighed down by these concerns?
If there is a key to Kissinger’s concept of a minister for foreign affairs, it lies in this sentence: “My approach was strategic and geopolitical; I attempted to relate events to each other, to create incentives and pressures in one part of the world to influence events in another.” Here is the activist, the great manipulator, convinced that he can pull the strings that will make the nations, like puppets, play out his scenario. No matter how often they evade or refuse, he pursues his objective with unswerving persistence and intensity. “Geopolitical” is his favorite word, applied to every problem in every region—and it is, in this outsider’s opinion, the explanation of American mistakes. Our approach is too geopolitical and not sufficiently local. If we had paid more attention to the history of Vietnamese nationalism or to the internal stresses in Iran, we could not (one hopes) have invested our policy and support in regimes lacking a valid mandate from their own people. “Geopolitical,” as Kissinger uses it, is just another word for cold war. It means combating the machinations of communism wherever they are exercised on the globe. The contest with communism is indeed serious, but, as we should have learned by now, the opponent is divided and disparate, not solid, and the combat will be lost if we are not more sophisticated about conducting it in local terms.
Kissinger’s activism was risky because it set in motion reactions and consequences that could not be controlled