1: A COSMIC BEAT

   1.  “The Salad Days of Henry Kissinger,” Harvard Crimson, May 21, 1971.

   2.  James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans (2004), p. 77.

   3.  All quotations from Spengler taken from 1926 translation, by Charles Francis Atkinson, of The Decline of the West, hereafter cited as DW. This sentence is from p. 425.

   4.  DW, p. 17.

   5.  MH, p. 15.

   6.  MH, p. 17. A good way to understand the influence that Spengler’s critique of positivism had on Kissinger is to consider a short book the liberal Arthur Schlesinger published in 1967, The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941–1966, which set out what has since become known as the “quagmire thesis.” America, Schlesinger said, slipped into Vietnam by accident; the war was a “triumph of the politics of inadvertence.” “Our present entanglement,” he argued, stemmed not from “deliberate consideration” but rather from “a series of small decisions,” one misstep after another, “until we find ourselves entrapped today in that nightmare.” Schlesinger offered no theory of history that could explain this absentmindedness, no way to account for how, exactly, the most powerful and prosperous nation in world history, at the apex of its attainment and creativity, might stumble like a drunk down a blind alley and wake up lost in the rice paddocks of Southeast Asia, bankrupting itself in an unwinnable war. Kissinger, unlike Schlesinger, did have a theory and he got it from Spengler: purposeless war is a symptom of civilizational decline, and the descent begins imperceptibly. States might continue to amass and project power, but at some point in their evolution, at the height of their success and complexity and largely because of that success and complexity, they lose a sense of self-understanding.

   7.  The quotation regarding objective laws comes from Morgenthau’s classic 1947 work, Politics among Nations, offered as a simplified definition of what political realists believe, one that Morgenthau immediately qualifies.

   8.  H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler (1991), p. 70. John Farrenkopf, in his book on Spengler, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (2001), p. 41, writes: “Spengler criticizes cause-and-effect historical analysis because it implicitly denies that cultures have the capacity to burst forth as foci of pristine and nonderivative cultural creativity and vitality. According to the mechanistic, causal approach, ‘everything follows, nothing is original.’”

   9.  Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 68, wrongly suggests that Kissinger “sidled away” from this critique of causality. He didn’t, expressing variations of it throughout his career, as we shall see.

10.  Henry Kissinger, White House Years (2011), p. 56.

11.  MH, pp. 13–14; 75; 102; 105; 194; for the quotations on causality and militarism.

12.  For these two memos, see the William Y. Elliott Papers at the Hoover Institution Archives, box 28.

13.  Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955 (1992), p. 140. Most Kissinger biographers, when they discuss Kissinger’s Harvard mentor, William Elliott, focus on his “flamboyance,” downplaying his very close ties with domestic and national intelligence agencies and his unapologetic advocacy in favor of domestic surveillance. Diamond’s chapter “Kissinger and Elliott” does a good job (based on declassified US government documents) at tracing the complicated nexus of Harvard Yard and Langley, at the center of which was Elliott, a committed Cold Warrior who suggested (in a 1958 article that he inscribed to J. Edgar Hoover) that an “Atlantic Round Table for Freedom,” based on the “Round Table of Arthurian legend” that held “the West against Hun and Moslem,” be established, composed of “ten outstanding Companions,” or modern “Knights.”

14.  Among the most interesting of these early articles are: “American Policy and Preventive War,” Yale Review (1955); “Military Policy and Defense of the ‘Grey Areas,’” Foreign Affairs (1955); “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” Foreign Affairs (1956); “Reflections on American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs (1956); “Controls, Inspection and Limited War,” Reporter (1957); “Missiles and the Western Alliance,” Foreign Affairs (1958); “The Policymaker and the Intellectual,” Reporter (1959); “As Urgent as the Moscow Threat,” New York Times Magazine (1959); and “The Search for Stability,” Foreign Affairs (1959).

15.  Kissinger, “Military Policy and Defense of the ‘Grey Areas.’”

16.  Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), p. 190.

17.  The term “grey areas” to refer to the nations outside of Europe was first used by Secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter in February 1951 (later expanded on in his 1954 Power and Policy). Interestingly, Kissinger, in his 1951 memos cited above, criticized the “grey area” concept, associating it with Washington’s tendency, as evinced in Korea, to allow the Soviets to dictate where and when it would fight. But Kissinger’s evolution into a nuclear strategist, and his advocacy of limited, tactical nuclear war, allowed him to embrace the idea of fighting in “grey areas”: if Washington could back up its conventional forces with the credible threat of nuclear power when it fights in, say, Indochina, then it wouldn’t necessarily be ceding the advantage to Moscow.

18.  Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age.”

19.  Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 7.

20.  Kissinger, “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium,” p. 7.

21.  Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, pp. 236; 249.

22.  Henry Kissinger, Necessity for Choice (1961), p. 15.

23.  James and Diane Dornan, “The Works of Henry A. Kissinger,” Political Science Reviewer (Fall 1975), p. 99.

24.  Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Journals: 1952–2000 (2007), p. 84.

25.  “Reflections on Cuba,” Reporter, November 22, 1962, p. 21.

26.  “Strains on the Alliance,” Foreign Affairs.

27.  Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2003), p. 229.

28.  According to Ellsberg, Kissinger by 1967 was expressing, at academic conferences and in private conversations, “a point of view that was well in advance of that of any other mainstream political figure at that point.” Washington’s “only objective” should be to ensure a “decent interval” between US withdrawal from South Vietnam and the country’s complete takeover by troops from the North (Secrets, p. 229). See William Safire, Before the Fall (1975), p. 160, for the quote.

29.  “Educators Back Vietnam Policy,” New York Times, December 10, 1965.

30.  “Harvard Debates Oxford on Vietnam,” New York Times, December 22, 1965.

31.  Robert Shrum, No Excuses (2007), p. 15.