62 NOVEMBER 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL “I once did a paper on him …” trailing o to allow for, even invite, a follow-up question. at was his senior thesis at college. Kissinger told me Kant took his symbolic logic too far, but he clearly felt an intellectual sympathy with Kant, and there was palpable pride in his long-ago thesis. In fact, I had heard of his senior thesis while I was in college, not because of its treatment of Kant but of Spengler, who was the subject of my own paper. Kissinger was surprised that I knew of the unpublished manuscript. I said that Spengler’s Decline of the West had riveted me, both its method of universal cultural comparisons and its doomsday prophetic tone. Spengler, Kissinger said, o ered a new way of thinking about cultures that he had never encountered before. And in Spengler’s lesser-known work, Prussianism and Socialism, Kissinger contended, he was right in predicting what actually happened in the 1930s in Germany. Reasons of State I brought up Kissinger’s recent work, Diplomacy. When it rst came out, in 1994, I was working in the State Department and, at the morning meeting of o ce directors in the European bureau, read out the book’s dedication: “To the men and women of the Foreign Service of the United States of America, whose professionalism and dedication sustain American diplomacy.” Kissinger was pleased with the book’s reception as well as with the German translation of its title, Staatsvernunft. “ at’s a good title in German,” he said, one that suggested raison d’état above and beyond diplomacy. I asked when he found time to write. “Mostly on weekends,” he said, in longhand on a yellow legal pad. “I’m obsessive about it.” And did he feel, when he nished a book, that sense of relief but also emptiness, the melancholy that comes with saying farewell to a long-term companion that Edward Gibbon noted after completion of his volumes on the Roman Empire? “ ere is a void,” he said. Kissinger had brought along copies of his latest book, the third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, as gifts for his German hosts. I asked about the last section, “A Personal Note,” in which he wrote about his grandfather’s words of wisdom, conveyed in German: “Der Mensch muss seine Schuldigkeit tun [A human being must always ful ll his moral obligation].” I said, “Schuldigkeit is an old-fashioned term, not heard often anymore; it’s really a form of virtue.” Kissinger agreed, “It’s all about virtue.” I wondered if the principle had also guided his Staatsvernunft. One of the last events of his visit was a television interview. His hotel suite was transformed into a studio with lights and cameras. Kissinger pushed to nd out what questions might arise, though he was not worried about one particular area. “It’s ne if they ask about Vietnam. I can handle myself on Vietnam,” he said, like a hardened litigator. Baby Chickens and Crayfish On the evening of March 30, the American Academy in Berlin, of which Kissinger was a founder, hosted a dinner in his honor. e back of its menu (entrée: crepinet of baby chickens and cray sh with Swiss chard and sa ron noodles) served as my notetaking paper for his speech at the event. I recorded themes clustering around statesmanship: the importance of a “sense of direction and national interest” derived from a study of history; examples of both great leadership (President Harry S Truman after WWII) and inept (Kaiser Wilhelm before WWI); and the need for gradualism rather than absolutism in diplomacy. He concluded his remarks on a clarion note, a reference to his revered Kant and the philosopher’s prophecy that “eternal peace” would come from either catastrophe or insight. As he nished his extensive program in Berlin, Kissinger was keen to return to New York, judging by an overheard phone call to his wife and their discussion of what she would serve him upon his return (scrambled eggs). For me, the assignment had not been a rotten plum after all. e sour apple was handed to his shotgun-riding security aide, a young man on his rst overseas outing with a very demanding boss. Kissinger taunted him and, behind his back, ridiculed him. It left me shaking my head. It was the Kissinger sometimes spoken of in State Department corridors, brusque with subordinates, less than generous in spirit. Insistent. Controlling. He was uncannily like the layered, prodigious metropolis he had just explored. n Kissinger’s writings make clear that he viewed the return of Germany after World War II to the community of nations as one of the greatest successes of American diplomacy. Now he was troubled, however.
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