This is particularly true for Henry Kissinger. No twentieth-century statesman approached foreign policy with a more reasoned, articulate, and informed perspective on international relations. Before he entered office, Kissinger wrote more books, articles, papers, and letters about foreign affairs than almost any of his contemporaries. His energy has not flagged since he left office. Despite his many tactical shifts, he has acted with remarkable consistency throughout his career, embracing a set of core assumptions and beliefs that allowed him to make sense of a complex world. This was, of course, one of his greatest strengths, commented upon by almost everyone who worked with him. Kissinger cultivated a talent for penetrating masses of diverse information and offering what appeared to be simple, coherent, and practical proposals for action. “From the time we first met, I have always been listening to his analyses with the greatest admiration,” commented Ernst Hans Van der Beugel, a former Dutch Foreign Office official and one of Kissinger’s closest friends in Europe from the mid-1950s. “They reach a level that you hardly ever come across. Never, in fact…. He is one of the most brilliant ‘minds’ of our generation. It sparkles with astonishing brilliance.”²⁹

Kissinger’s brilliance and the policies he produced hinged on his fear of mass violence and intolerance, and on his faith in the righteousness of the American dream. Throughout his career Kissinger presumed that democracies were weak and prone to extremes of both action and passivity, based on his experiences as a Jew in Weimar Germany. He did not simply opt for a world of order and authority, as many writers have argued. Instead, he looked to political arrangements that could assure the protection of values such as social tolerance and the security of a stable hierarchy of international power—with the United States at the top. This was how Kissinger translated his American dream into a workable global blueprint, and this was how he fought, as a Jew, against what he viewed as the ever-present danger of civilization’s descent into another Nazi (or Stalinist) darkness.

Commenting later in life on what he learned during his early years in Weimar Germany of the “fragility of societies and the fragility of achievement,” an emotional Kissinger explained: “[I] saw the collapse of what was a very secure society, because the German Jews were very middle-class, and they were actually more integrated into German life than American Jews on the whole.” For him, the experience of the Holocaust

Kissinger’s experiences as an immigrant and a Jew made him uncomfortable with both the idealism of president Woodrow Wilson and the realism of American diplomat and political scientist George Kennan. As a young man who had witnessed the depths of human brutality, Kissinger recognized the violence and hatred that permanently imperiled democracy, even in an “advanced” society such as Germany. He also understood that brute force alone could not combat threats to the human condition. Citizens and leaders needed something transcendent to believe in; they needed hope and inspiration. A strong, humane state—with charismatic, enlightened leaders—was the ballast that Kissinger looked to for protection against the obstacles he experienced as an immigrant and a Jew.

This description of Kissinger’s thinking and its origins is not merely interpretive. One can find clear and consistent evidence of it throughout his life. It pervades his policymaking. In all regions of the world, he pursued diplomatic relationships that strengthened the United States through cooperation with strong, often undemocratic regional partners. In all regions of the world, Kissinger’s background as an immigrant and a Jew was a topic of diplomatic discussion and an influence on policy outcomes. The man known as “Super K” was always an immigrant Jewish-American figure of fascination.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Middle East. In this part of the world, Kissinger’s background threatened to implicate him in the Arab-Israeli conflict and to undermine his efforts to dominate negotiations with all sides. During the 1970s Kissinger confronted these issues head-on when he brilliantly turned his experiences as an immigrant and a Jew into sources of greater regional effectiveness with both Arabs and Israelis. Once again, he derived power from acting as a bridge between societies, making his contested identity a political asset. The scope and content of Kissinger’s influence in the Middle East—and its continuing controversy—reflect his background and how he has translated it into policy leverage. For Henry Kissinger, the personal is political. This is a feature that proved especially useful in navigating diplomacy around the Holy Land.

 

 

Kissinger was one of many observers to anticipate another Arab-Israeli war, but he was surprised nonetheless to learn on the morning of October 6, 1973, that Egypt, Syria, and their allies were poised for attack. However, he did not believe that they could defeat Israeli forces on the battlefield. The 1967 Six Day War had made Arab weaknesses abundantly clear. According to Kissinger, Egypt and Syria were “insane” for initiating another war they could not win.³¹

Before the outbreak of hostilities, Israeli leaders shared this underestimation of Arab military capabilities. They discounted the ability of their adversaries to challenge Israel’s proven battlefield superiority and were skeptical regarding the prospect of coordinated and effective action among the various Arab states. Even in the early morning hours of October 6, when Egyptian and Syrian forces made their final preparations for attack, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir ruled out the kind of preemptive military strike employed by her predecessors in the Six Day War. She believed that Israel could repel an Arab attack, and she also recognized the importance of maintaining a defensive position. “If we strike first,” Meir explained to her advisers, “we won’t get help from anybody.” She sought to repulse Arab aggression and, at the same time, gain support from the United States and other countries.³²

The Arab armies fought better than either the Americans or the Israelis expected. During the first day of the war they drove deep into Israeli-held territory on the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The attacking Arabs had momentum, and they appeared ready to extend their gains. The Israeli army quickly lost its attitude of invincibility and found itself on its heels, disorganized and uncertain. Surveying his country’s early battlefield losses, Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, warned that the initial Arab successes would only mobilize more support from the Arab world. Soon, he feared, his nation of three million Jews would confront eighty million confident and zealous Arab citizens. “This is the war of Israel against the Arabs,” he proclaimed. Dayan worried that Israel would get smothered in a sea of enemies.³³

Nixon and Kissinger were less alarmed by the military situation than their counterparts in Jerusalem. They believed that the Israelis would halt the Egyptian and Syrian advances and eventually launch an effective counterattack. Instead of the details on the ground, the American officials focused on how the United States could transform this crisis into a source of stability and influence in the region. Speaking with the president in the early hours of the war, Kissinger explained that “the primary problem is to get the fighting stopped and then use the opportunity to see whether a settlement could be enforced.”³⁴

In an effort to bring an American-led peace to the region, Kissinger worked through diplomatic channels. Washington initially consulted with Moscow but ultimately proceeded to “take the initiative.” In a flurry of phone calls and meetings, Kissinger opened a series of intensive discussions with Egyptian and Israeli representatives as well as with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. “Your Arab friends were terribly deceitful,” Kissinger scolded Dobrynin. “We are taking this matter extremely seriously. If you will let your colleagues know, we would appreciate it as quickly as possible.”³⁵