George Packer
Henry Kissinger spent half a century pursuing and using power, and a second half century trying to shape history’s judgment of the first. His longevity, and the frantic activity that ceased only when he stopped breathing, felt like an interminable refusal to disappear until he’d ensured that posthumous admiration would outweigh revulsion. In the end none of it mattered. The historical record—Vietnam and Cambodia, the China opening, the Soviet détente, slaughter in Bangladesh and East Timor, peace in the Middle East, the coup in Chile—was already there. Its interpretation will not be up to him.
Kissinger is a problem to be solved: the problem of a very human inhumanity. Because he was, undoubtedly, human—brilliant, insecure, funny, gossipy, curious, devious, self-deprecating, cruel. In Martin Indyk’s book Master of the Game, about Kissinger’s successful efforts to end the 1973 Yom Kippur War, you meet a diplomat with a deep knowledge of the region’s history and personalities, operating with great subtlety and stamina to bring about a state of equilibrium that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. If you read Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram, about the 1971 Pakistani civil war that created Bangladesh, you meet a policy maker with a shocking indifference to human life, willing to aid Pakistan in committing genocide so that Islamabad would continue to be a conduit between Washington and Beijing.
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