Apparently I’m on a losing streak with my new reads. In my last post, I talked about a book I hated from an author I enjoy. Well deja vu ladies because I ran into the exact same problem. I love the author but wasn’t wild about this book.
On the plus side, my dislike of this upcoming book is nowhere near as intense as my dislike for the book in the last review. On the downside, this book is about an important subject, so the fact it has tons and tons of problems is itself a huge problem.
This is: Kissinger: 1923-1968 by Niall Ferguson.
Background
Of all the controversial figures in Richard Nixon’s already controversial administration, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wound up the magnet for the most heated debated. (Side note: President Nixon and I are not related.)
Right up until his death at the age of 100 in October 2023, Kissinger was continually called upon as an elder statesman and veteran diplomat while also being reviled by some as a war criminal for his conduct during his government service. Whatever one’s feelings about Kissinger, that he was important is incontestable. Naturally, such importance would make him a fascinating biography subject.
In the early 2000s, Kissinger granted acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson access to all his papers, many in his own hand and previously unpublished. Already, this is a promising start. Readers will know I’ve positively reviewed a Niall Ferguson book before. Given Kissinger’s prominence in public life, Ferguson elected to split the biography into two volumes, not an uncommon practice.
The first volume, the subject of this review, was first published in 2016 while the second is still unfinished (we’ll return to this). For now, Ferguson covers Kissinger’s birth in Weimar Germany, fleeing the Nazis, returning as an American GI in occupied Germany, going to Harvard and becoming a unique public intellectual with various stints in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The book ends with the event that made Kissinger a household name: his appointment as Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1968.
These first 45 years of Kissinger's life span some of the most significant events in world history, o how did Ferguson put it all together?
And here’s where the wheels come off…
As one puts on their Wellington boots and begins stomping through the marshes of Kissinger Volume 1, one fact will become staggeringly apparent: of the 800+ pages in this book, Kissinger is probably only in 60% of them.
The rest of the book, meanwhile, concerns everything else happening around Kissinger, so much so that Kissinger’s role in his own biography is ironically diminished. Each of the key events shaping Kissinger on the road to his most job appointment is given several pages of context, which demonstrate Ferguson did his research, but almost too much research. For example, when covering Kissinger’s arrival at Harvard, Ferguson devotes many pages in that section to Harvard’s middling status as an academic institution in relation to Oxford and what certain academics were doing to improve Harvard’s stature when Kissinger arrived.
Is it related to the main subject? Yes, so slicing it out wholesale wouldn’t necessarily improve the book.
But the problem is every massive historical drama Kissinger found himself receives Ferguson’s overpowered historian’s analysis. Among the other subjects in this volume include Weimar Germany, the Nazi seizure of power, how well Jews immigrated and assimilated in America, how the U.S. went to war in 1941, how the Allies managed occupied Germany, Harvard, the emerging Cold War, containment theory, The Korean War, and finally, the hideous quagmire of Vietnam. And none of that includes Ferguson’s work tracing Kissinger’s intellectual development, itself a massive and abstract theme.
And so, what starts as a biography of Henry Kissinger balloons into a schizophrenic history book that tries to keep the reader grounded in its time while also providing the relevant 20/20 hindsight. But that is the case for most biographies. As I talked about in this post, what makes the genre so effective is the powerful combo of using a person’s life to understand the history happening around them.
That is the case with Kissinger, but what turns that previous strength into a weakness is that this is merely volume one. If the book somehow included all of the above while squeezing in the rest of Kissinger’s life, then it would be among the most thorough, effective, and comprehensive biographies ever written. Instead, it runs the length of a full-biography while delivering only half the goods and recall that it ends before Kissinger’s most substantial role in government. If none of Kissinger’s service as NSA is present, it makes one wonder what Ferguson was doing for 800 pages.
Splitting a biography in two is by no means a deal-breaker. Some individuals, like Winston Churchill, live a life so significant that fitting everything into one book is impossible. In Churchill’s case, Martin Gilbert’s official biography runs no less than eight volumes along with twenty-three companion volumes. Given Churchill’s preeminence among history’s statesmen, I have no doubt such huge volumes were justified.
In terms of prominence, Henry Kissinger comes nowhere close to eclipsing Winston Churchill…and yet, there’s still a single-volume biography of Churchill just as authoritative as Gilbert’s work. That book is Churchill, Walking With Destiny, by Lord Andrew Roberts. Roberts somehow fit all of Churchill’s momentous life into 1000 pages while Ferguson fit half of Kissinger’s life into 800.
Conclusion
Is Kissinger: 1923-1968 a bad book? Not exactly. It is comprehensive and covers everything. But that’s precisely what makes it a slow reading experience.
It could easily have been one book.