Happy Birthday, Mr. Kissinger
The influential former secretary of state—courtier, careerist, proud American, conflicted Jew—turns 90
Henry Kissinger, who turns 90 this Monday, May 27, is one of the most influential Jews in American history—and one of the most controversial. In the 1970s, if Woody Allen was all about using Jewish smarts to manage the world’s insults and sorrows, Henry Kissinger was all about using Jewish smarts to manage the world.
This brilliant refugee from Nazi Germany with the gravelly voice, Teutonic accent, and thick Poindexter glasses, embodied the pinnacle of a certain type of Jewish aspiration and achievement in 20th-century America, becoming a Harvard professor in 1954, Richard Nixon’s foreign-policy mastermind in 1969, and the first Jewish secretary of state in 1973, as well as the era’s most surprising sex symbol. For the past four decades, he has remained the dean of America’s foreign-policy establishment, advising presidents and foreign governments alike. Just this month, at the Atlantic Council, Hillary Clinton wished him an early happy birthday. “Everywhere I go,” she said, “people talk to me about Henry.” Yet at the same time he remains a profoundly polarizing figure. In the last few years alone bloggers have called him a kapo who should have been gassed, and the late Christopher Hitchens pronounced him a “vile creature.”
Jews have similarly ambivalent feelings about the man. The Richard Nixon tapes released in 2010, in which one can hear Kissinger advising the president that “if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern,” triggered a new round of denunciations. Indeed, just as Kissinger has long struggled with his Jewish identity, Jews have long struggled with him.
The particularly Jewish indictment of Henry Kissinger features four major aspects: attacking Kissinger as a non-Jewish Jew who was actively ashamed of being Jewish; for his Machiavellian manipulations during the 1973 Yom Kippur War that critics believed spilled more Israeli blood than necessary; for his insensitivity to the plight of Soviet Jewry; and for undermining U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s heroic fight against the General Assembly’s infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution out of a cowardly fear of being “too Jewish.” That each of these charges is backed up by vivid, epigrammatic, self-incriminating statements from Kissinger’s own mouth is not surprising, considering Kissinger’s rhetorical rowdiness in his heyday. Yet each situation was actually more complex than Kissinger’s devastating one-liners suggest and must be understood in the context of Kissinger’s own tragic, traumatic, and yet surprisingly characteristic nine-decade Jewish journey from Fürth to Fifth Avenue.
In the 1970s, many traditional Jews considered Henry Kissinger the ultimate contemptible German-American hofjude, the court Jew who succeeded in the world by betraying his people—and himself. In this popular Jewish narrative, Kissinger seemed to imagine that the price of his journey from persecuted Bavarian Jewish teenager who fled the Nazis in 1938, to Washington Heights immigrant yid, to Harvard whiz kid, and then to the White House was to deny his Jewish identity. Critics grumbled about the three S’s: that he married a shiksa on Shabbes and served shrimp—a pained judgment on his second wedding to the tall, blonde, well-bred WASP Nancy Maginnes. Kissinger fueled perceptions of self-hatred by rudely ignoring old friends who called him “Heinz” or tried to “bagel” him—today’s shorthand for the Jewish tendency when out in public to connect, subtly or otherwise, with a fellow member of the tribe. But, as befits an intellectual swashbuckler who coined memorable phrases such as “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” Kissinger distanced himself from his Jewish roots with damning wisecracks. “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic,” he once quipped, and “any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” Another time, he told a friend, “I was born Jewish, but the truth is that has no significance for me. … America has given me everything.”
In fact, in a sense, Kissinger was right: He needed to negate his identity to climb as high as he did in the Nixon Administration. White House tapes capture Nixon’s contempt for Jews generally—and for his “Jew boy” foreign-policy maven particularly. Especially when Kissinger was national security adviser, Nixon tried banning all Jews from Middle Eastern matters, doubting their objectivity. At one point, after Kissinger analyzed an Israel-related issue, the president crudely asked: “Now, can we get an American point of view?” John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s closest aides, would recall that “For Kissinger, being Jewish was a vulnerability as he saw it, and he was not fond of being vulnerable. But Nixon liked him to feel that way.”
Yet despite Nixon’s contempt, he also needed Kissinger. Kissinger was the superstar diplomat who helped establish détente with the Soviet Union and Communist China, ending decades of isolation. Kissinger—perhaps the most influential, famous, and talented secretary of state since Thomas Jefferson—was, in foreign-policy circles, both pop star and powerhouse. And later, as the administration imploded in scandal, Kissinger became even more important, reassuring worried Americans and foreigners that all remained normal and functional—even when it was decidedly not.
This rivalry between Nixon and Kissinger—and its toxic turn, thanks to Watergate—provides the essential context to the Yom Kippur War. After Egypt and Syria surprised Israel on its holiest day, Kissinger can be heard saying on the tape that the “best result would be if Israel came out a little ahead but got bloodied in the process.” He believed an Egyptian-Israeli “standoff” could produce a “viable peace agreement.” These comments, as well as Kissinger’s two-and-a-half-hour delay before telling a vacationing Nixon in Key Biscayne, Fla., about the “war dangers,” impute to Kissinger an omnipotence he never had. Israel was so “bloodied” it almost collapsed, suffering 2,656 dead. Kissinger eventually jump-started the Middle East peace process with his “Super-K” peace shuttling that enhanced his legend and established the groundwork for 1979’s Israel-Egypt peace treaty.
All this evidence can be marshaled in a way that blames Kissinger for delaying Israel’s life-or-death military resupply to advance his Machiavellian vision. But that harsh interpretation overlooks the war’s chaos, Nixon’s Watergate distractions, Washington’s bureaucratic torpor, and America’s historic, generous resupply effort—all of which took place within one week. The official who truly resisted the resupply was a different neurotic Marrano with a Germanic-sounding last name—James R. Schlesinger, Nixon’s secretary of defense and Kissinger’s main rival within the administration. Schlesinger, who was born into a middle-class Jewish family of Lithuanian origins and converted to Lutheranism, initially doubted that Israel needed help, so confident was he—like most—that Israel would win easily. Kissinger and Schlesinger clashed over the timing, the volume of weaponry, and America’s direct involvement in the 1973 war. As historian Robert Dallek concludes in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, Kissinger “persuaded Nixon to ignore Schlesinger’s advice and allow him to begin a large-scale resupply of Israel that would allow it to achieve a balanced outcome to the fighting.”
As political and financial crises deepen in Western Europe, French Jewry is facing a familiar test