The Non-Relationship Between Nixon and Kissinger

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Kissinger, in common with most people at Harvard, or for that matter in New York, loathed Nixon. When Nixon reached out to Kissinger in 1960 after Rockefeller had lost the nomination, Kissinger invented a trip to Japan to avoid taking the meeting. And this was partly because Kissinger avoided Nixon. There are all kinds of theories about why that came about incidentally. Some of them are enormously complex and conspiratorial detail.

No American statesman has been as revered and as reviled as Henry Kissinger. To the late Christopher Hitchens he was a war criminal who should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. To his admirers he is the greatest strategic thinker America has ever produced, the ‘indispensable man’, whose advice has been sought by every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Internationally renowned Harvard historian Niall Ferguson came to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss his new appraisal of Kissinger. In his view, far from being the amoral arch-realist portrayed by his enemies, Kissinger owed a profound debt to philosophical idealism. In this exclusive London appearance, Ferguson was joined by the distinguished historian Andrew Roberts, who brought his expertise from writing about great statesmen of the past – from Napoleon to Churchill – to the examination of this controversial figure. How did Kissinger’s worldview develop over the course of his early years, as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, a...

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