Political Science Quarterly
Volume 114 No. 4 (Winter 1999)

 

Years of Renewal
By Henry Kissinger. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1999
Reviewed by Walter LaFeber

 

In this second draft of history, Henry Kissinger details the 1974 to early 1977 years when he served as Gerald Ford's secretary of State and, until Ford reduced Kissinger's power if not his visibility by replacing him in October 1975 with Brent Scowcroft, as national security adviser. The book works on two levels. One is a detailed account of specific foreign policies. The other is Kissinger's reflections on the larger meaning and historical contexts of the policies.

Specific analyses range from the painful withdrawal from Vietnam through the breakthroughs with China and the aborted detente with the Soviet Union to comprehensive accounts of dealings with African front-line states; Latin America, especially Allende's Chile; the Middle East, the Sinai agreement, and the energy crisis; Cyprus; the Helsinki conference breakthrough (in which Kissinger pictures himself more in favor of the conference's decisions, especially on human rights, than was thought at the time or since); and the Kurdish problem. Richard Nixon is again seen as a statesman: his "eccentricities . . . must be balanced against the fact that, in the field of foreign policy, he achieved almost everything he set out to do" (p. 72). The "almost" only partially hides the failures of Nixon's policies toward the Soviets by 1974 and the final humiliations, told here in detail, of his Vietnam policies. Both defeats are ascribed with some accuracy to American politics and specifically the U.S. Senate. Henry Jackson appears as the winner in the contest over who would shape key parts of policy toward the Soviets, although according to Kissinger, the senator later regretted much of what he did to stifle Nixon's detente approach. Aside from Kissinger himself, Ford emerges as a hero, a steady, straightforward, commonsense type who understood Washington politics and restored "calm and confidence to a nation surfeited with upheavals" (p. 17).

The book's second level is the more interesting of the two. Kissinger has devoted much of his writing over the past half-century to tilting against what he considers to be "Wilsonianism," and here it becomes a main target. It is blamed for major U.S. errors in Vietnam, for Americans having so little tested philosophy when dealing with complex foreign affairs, and for their supposed rejection of balance-of-power politics and the attractions of equilibrium. In all, "Wilsonianism . . . had become dominant in the twentieth-century" (p. 103). From McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt through Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton this statement is arguable, although Kissinger is doubtless correct in ascribing Reagan's political success to his "Wilsonianism," a combination of "pragmatism and idealism" (p. 110) that won public support. This does not mean, however, that Reagan's policies were Wilsonian; it might indicate that Americans like to think idealistically about their acts, especially when they know they are using power quite brutally (as did Wilson) to get their way. The U.S. Foreign Service is meanwhile criticized in the present tense for being "conventionally Wilsonian" (p. 76), although given George Shultz's use of Foreign Service Officers, the characterization seems to work only for certain secretaries of State. On the other hand, Kissinger applauds U.S. diplomats and soldiers who "sustained America's idealistic tradition" (p. 542) to the end in Vietnam. At times, Wilsonianism can be convenient.

"Reflections," the last chapter, is especially notable as the need to rationalize specific policy decisions gives way to general observations on the role of public opinion, technology, and intellectuals, as well as the relative importance of equilibrium over justice as a policy guideline. These are important pages, even as the detailed history of 1974-1977 serves as history's second draft that later writers will modify and challenge.

Walter LaFeber
Cornell University