Kissinger’s Shadow

PRELUDE: ON NOT SEEING THE MONSTER

INTRODUCTION: AN OBITUARY FORETOLD

4. Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis was written under the direction of William Yandell Elliott, who applied Kantian thought to diplomatic history. But by the time he arrived at Harvard, Kissinger had a prior engagement with Continental philosophy, under the tutelage of Fritz Kraemer, a Prussian anti-Nazi conservative whom Kissinger met while he was stationed as an infantry private at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. Kraemer held a number of graduate degrees, including one from the University of Frankfurt in 1931, just around the time Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other social theorists formed what is now known as the Frankfurt School. Astute readers will clearly recognize in Kissinger’s writings themes and arguments often associated with the Frankfurt School, and Kraemer might have been a link. “Over the next decades,” Kissinger said at his 2003 funeral, “Kraemer shaped my reading and thinking, influenced my choice of college, awakened my interest in political philosophy and history, inspired both my undergraduate and graduate theses.” Bruce Kuklick, in Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006), notes that there were a number of scholars critical of positivism at Harvard at the time Kissinger was an undergraduate, including Henry Sheffer and W. V. O. Quine.

16. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a speech to the American Council on Education on October 8, 1970, seems to be the first to use the term “adversary culture,” which he said was “entrenched in higher education.” He went on: “The intellectuals’ propensity to condemn in the sixties what they helped formulate in the fifties has only helped to further the breach between the public and the university.” Early neoconservative attempts to formulate the concept tended to stress psychological explanations having to do with the softness and prosperity of bourgeois society, in which young people seek “meaning” through protest. See Norman Podhoretz, “The Adversary Culture and the New Class,” in The New Class?, ed. B. Bruce-Biggs (1979); Irving Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals,” Encounter, October 1979. More recently, Paul Hollander revived the concept in the wake of 9/11 and cast a wide net: “Adherents of the adversary culture can be found in a wide variety of settings, organizations and interest groups. They include postmodernist academics, radical feminists, Afrocentrist blacks, radical environmentalists, animal rights activists, pacifists, Maoists, Trotskyites, critical legal theorists and others. They often have different political agendas but share certain core convictions and key assumptions: all are reflexively and intensely hostile critics of the United States or American society and, increasingly, of all Western cultural traditions and values as well. The most important among their beliefs is that American society is deeply flawed and uniquely repellent—unjust, corrupt, destructive, soulless, inhumane, inauthentic and incapable of satisfying basic, self-evident human needs. The American social system has failed to live up to its original historical promise and, they insist, is inherently and ineradicably sexist, racist and imperialist” (“The Resilience of the Adversary Culture,” National Interest [2002]).