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Niall Ferguson

Subtitled: 1923-1968: The Idealist

This official biography is essentially a love letter to Henry Kissinger. In spite of this, I can't say it is entirely without merit. Its main benefit is the sheer quantity of information within its pages. Ferguson has plowed through reams of material written by and about Kissinger (or HAK, as he sometimes labels his subject), and a lot of what the biographer found appears in these pages. In fact, there is at times too much detail offered, as when HAK, visiting Washington while still a scholar, meets with one official after another and the results of practically every meeting are offered to the reader for consideration. This means the readability suffers at times, though the material presented should be useful to future researchers as a kind of encyclopedia of HAK 1923-1968.

The main weakness of this biography, however, is that the writer's obvious effort to make HAK look good undermine its trustworthiness. Ferguson seems unwilling to merely argue that Kissinger is an amazing individual whose contribution to American foreign policy is overwhelmingly positive. The author is also determined to smear those with whom Kissinger (or Nixon) might have disagreed. For example, he makes the entirely gratuitous comment that John F. Kennedy's widely reported reaction of "shock and dismay" at the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem was "surely theater." More than one observer has commented on JFK's shock at Diem's murder, and really, isn't it rather weird that Ferguson insists on making this accusation of Kennedy fakery in a biography of HAK?

President Johnson fares even worse. "Lyndon Baines Johnson was not a very nice man," Ferguson writes, and then goes on to explain how LBJ had calculated that Kennedy's death offered him his best chance of getting to be president. Granting that this is a rather cold-hearted calculation to make, one should also grant that the kind of people who aspire to be president would virtually all be likely to weigh this exact same prospect. If this makes LBJ a "not very nice man," I suppose it does the same for Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Al Gore, etc. On top of these two slaps at JFK and LBJ, there are a number of gratuitous comments about them that are distracting and whose effect is to undermine confidence in the author's trustworthiness.

Finally, Ferguson seems to want us to believe that HAK was not only a very brilliant and decent man, but an extraordinarily valiant one. He recounts Kissinger's braving artillery fire on the western front in WW II, and later commends him for his courage when, during the Vietnam War, he visits Saigon, the Central Highlands and other areas fraught with danger. Be still my heart.

In short, this book provides a lot of data that should be useful for other authors with an interest in Henry Kissinger. I hope that these other authors will be more honest and straightforward in their use of this material.

Idioma Inglés
Publicación 2015
Editorial Penguin
Categoría Biografías y Memorias


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