Tom Lehrer, a letter-writer to The Guardian recently reminded us, justified his retirement by remarking that since the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to Henry Kissinger, satire was no longer a viable career.
This final volume of Kissinger memoirs, dealing essentially with his role during the Ford presidency, offers evidence both for Lehrer's thesis and for its opposite. It is an extraordinary gallimaufry of a book: vainglorious, self-important, blind to inconvenient facts, full of name-dropping and folie de grandeur - and also fascinating, witty, revelatory and challenging.
There is plenty of material here to justify the 1960s view of Kissinger with which so many of us grew up: the evil genius behind the Nixon and Ford thrones, the international diplomat who cloaked American ambition for world domination in the language of international morality - Louis XlV masquerading as Metternich. But there is also an implied challenge: how many of us, knowing now what he and his administrations knew then (and which he and they manfully concealed from everyone at the time) would have reacted differently, or more wisely?
It is difficult to deal with a book which skips from crisis to crisis, and continent to continent, at the turn of a page. It is equally difficult to respond in any measured way to a man so innocent of self-doubt: you will not find, in the copious index, any subheading for Kissinger entitled "mistakes of". But there is a central theme, enunciated in his peroration: the task of "articulating a relationship between the pragmatic and the moral" in foreign policy.
This is not just a simple tale of intelligent human beings taking difficult decisions. It shows that, when the chips are down, pragmatism and morality are ill-matched. Kissinger's memory-selection process has been hard at work, expunging or minimising (no doubt often without the direct instruction of its owner) inconvenient facts. On Chile, for example, the Kissinger stance is still one of injured innocence, at a time when previously secret government archives, now widely available on the internet, actually highlight the nature and extent of his approbation of, and support for, the Pinochet coup. He is able to avoid any serious moral judgment on Nixon - an interesting enough feat in itself, given his claim to judge all political actions by moral criteria - by confessing to being '`mystified" by the man. There are other occasions on which the blame for various sanguinary events is allocated to conveniently depersonalised forces. A section on the trials and tribulations of the Kurds, manipulated both by the Americans and by all their immediate neighbours in strategies marked by deviousness and cynicism of a high order, finally ascribes the plight of that unfortunate people to "history."
His account of the 1970s energy crises is fascinating, as is the breathtaking hypocrisy of the US argument against the OPEC countries: that by hiking the price of oil, they were inflicting severe infrastructural damage on the Third World. Coming from the Americans, that is rich indeed. If, however, you read this book with a fine filter for the special pleading and for the well-honed elisions between the demands of morality and those of practical politics, you can derive real insights from it. Few people were as close to the action as Kissinger was in the years which this book covers, and it contains real insights and absorbing gobbets of information. His extraordinary access to documentary records underlines the truth of the mournful comment made to him by Nixon on the eve of that hapless president's resignation, when Kissinger tried to reassure him by telling him that history would treat him more kindly than his opponents had done. "It all depends", Nixon remarked ruefully, "on who writes the history."
Kissinger isn't a man to leave this kind of thing to chance. And, as he writes it all down, he leaves political reputations bobbing in his wake. General Goncalves, who was Prime Minister of Portugal from 1974 to 1975, although "not an outright Communist, only refrained from membership in order to save paying his party dues". Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is characterised by his "subtle ambivalence". There is an extraordinary pen-portrait of Mao, almost completely incapacitated from two strokes and dribbling as he spoke, but still in command of the language of international diplomacy. Not even his friends are spared. Genscher, the German Foreign Minister on whom Kissinger later came to rely, is initially described as someone "whose grasp of foreign policy could most charitably be described as incomplete."
For those of us still with the whiff of 1960s cordite in our nostrils, however, there is some grim satisfaction in his account of the final stages of the US withdrawal from Vietnam, forced by their military inferiors to leave the country they had devastated to no good purpose. `We were in the humiliating position summed up by British historian Edward Gibbon: that persuasion is the resource of the feeble, and the feeble can seldom persuade."
There is one huge absence from this enthralling and infuriating book. The balance-sheet is reckoned only in terms of diplomacy and geopolitics, in a context in which there is an unspoken assumption that the end justifies the means. The human, social and economic cost of the non-diplomatic means employed by the governments Kissinger served so loyally, in pursuit of objectives which he regards as morally sound, are rarely even hinted at, much less described, or judged. That would have complicated Dr Kissinger's moral simplicities in a way which would have taken at least another thousand pages to elucidate.
John Horgan is Professor of Journalism at Dublin City University, and the author of biographies of Sean Lemass and Mary Robinson