The Searing Experience of Kissinger

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A lot of historians have attributed to Kissinger, that it was Weimar and the chaos of Germany that led him to be an orderist. You think it's a much more complicated story than that? Kissinger had to put up with quite a bit of psychobabble from writers who wanted to infer that he was in some way hostile to democracy,. This is nonsense. The experience of totalitarianism made him a committed believer. Not only in American democracy, but also in the idea of freedom about which he wrote with extraordinary emotional commitment.

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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