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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 72

BOOKS

America's Metternich


By JOHN JUDIS

John Judis, a contributing editor to the New Republic, is
the author of Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the
American Century.

    TITLE: KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY
    AUTHOR: Walter Isaacson
    PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster; 893 pages; $30

    THE BOTTOM LINE: An engrossing critical portrait of the
former Secretary of State deftly analyzes the impact of the
man's flaws on U.S. policy.


    When Henry Kissinger returned to Germany in 1945 as a U.S.
Army sergeant, he discovered a friend from Furth who had
survived the concentration camps. He watched over him during his
recovery, and when he left to live with an aunt in the U.S.,
Kissinger tried to prepare her. The survivors, he wrote, "had
seen man from the most evil side. Who can blame them for being
suspicious?"

    Kissinger denied that the Nazi holocaust, which forced him
and his family to flee to the U.S., and which claimed many of
his relatives, had an impact on his thinking. He once told a
reporter that his childhood in Furth "seems to have passed
without leaving any lasting impressions."

    But as Walter Isaacson's biography reveals, Kissinger's
brush with evil lay at the heart of his "gnawing insecurity" as
a man and his rejection of ideology and moralism as a
statesman. Kissinger's life was a consuming quest for respect
and esteem, while his diplomacy was an attempt to restore the
balance of power among nations that prevailed before Nazi and
Soviet revolutions.

    Drawing upon extensive interviews with Kissinger and with
his colleagues, friends and enemies, Isaacson's book is the
most complete record yet of the former Secretary of State's
life and foreign policy. It is filled with spicy revelations
about Nixon and Kissinger's tortured relationship: Nixon, we
learn, believed Kissinger was mentally unbalanced and at one
point in 1971 considered firing him, while Kissinger referred
to Nixon behind his back as "our drunken friend" and the
"meatball mind." Isaacson also details Kissinger's passionate
distrust of even his closest aides, which led to his wiretapping
them and helped lay the foundation, Isaacson argues, for the
Watergate scandal. But more important, Kissinger also contains
the most credible account of Nixon and Kissinger's inability to
disengage from the Vietnam War and the collapse of Kissinger's
detente strategy in 1975.

    Isaacson, an assistant managing editor of TIME, credits
Kissinger and Nixon with transforming America's understanding
of the world. Instead of seeing the U.S. as engaged in a
struggle against an evil monolith, world communism, Nixon and
Kissinger viewed the Soviet Union and China as traditional
nations driven by competing interests; they designed U.S.
foreign policy to exploit that competition in order to create
a new, stable balance of power. It was, Isaacson writes, "a
triumph of hard-edged realism worthy of a Metternich."

    Isaacson faults the two men, however, for their
indifference to "the moral values that are the true source of
[America's] global influence." He reveals how Nixon extended
the Vietnam War for six months solely because he believed a
"hawkish image" would benefit his 1972 election campaign, and
he portrays Kissinger as having acquired a coroner's callousness
toward the victims of geopolitics. According to Isaacson,
Kissinger told Gerald Ford's press secretary on the eve of
Saigon's fall in 1975, "Why don't these people die fast? The
worst thing that could happen is for them to linger on."

    Isaacson attributes the collapse of detente and the
beginning of a decade of arms buildup to the political backlash
that occurred because of Kissinger's indifference to human
rights and obsessive secretiveness, but he also puts
considerable blame on Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson
and his aide Richard Perle, who later joined the Reagan
Administration. In 1974 Jackson and Perle, who were opposed to
detente, held the treaty granting the Soviet Union most-favored
nation trading status hostage to Soviet agreement to allow
expanded Jewish emigration. The Soviets retaliated by shutting
off emigration and also, as Isaacson argues, by giving the green
light to North Vietnam to make the final push toward Saigon.

    Isaacson's judgments are generally sound, but like other
Nixon and Kissinger biographers he is driven to take sides
between the two men. He compares Kissinger with Metternich and
Nixon with the wily diplomat's slow-witted superior, Austrian
Emperor Francis I, but it was Nixon who persuaded Kissinger to
encourage West Germany's overtures to East Germany and who
initiated the opening to China. Clearly the two men had similar
conceptual strengths and personal weaknesses.

    Isaacson's book is brilliant journalism, but he doesn't
make us see and feel the drama of events through Kissinger's
eyes. Except for the occasional tantrum, Kissinger disappears
behind Isaacson's analysis of controversial policy decisions.
But this is now the definitive account of Kissinger and one of
a handful of books that should be read by anyone concerned with
the Nixon era and American foreign policy.