America's Metternich

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TITLE: KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY

AUTHOR: WALTER ISAACSON

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 893 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: An engrossing critical portrait of the former Secretary of State deftly analyzes the impact of the man's flaws on U.S. policy.

When Henry Kissinger returned to Germany in 1945 as a U.S. Army sergeant, he discovered a friend from Furth who had survived the concentration camps. He watched over him during his recovery, and when he left to live with an aunt in the U.S., Kissinger tried to prepare her. The survivors, he wrote, "had seen man from the most evil side. Who can blame them for being suspicious?"

Kissinger denied that the Nazi holocaust, which forced him and his family to flee to the U.S., and which claimed many of his relatives, had an impact on his thinking. He once told a reporter that his childhood in Furth "seems to have passed without leaving any lasting impressions."

But as Walter Isaacson's biography reveals, Kissinger's brush with evil lay at the heart of his "gnawing insecurity" as a man and his rejection of ideology and moralism as a statesman. Kissinger's life was a consuming quest for respect and esteem, while his diplomacy was an attempt to restore the balance of power among nations that prevailed before Nazi and Soviet revolutions.

Drawing upon extensive interviews with Kissinger and with his colleagues, friends and enemies, Isaacson's book is the most complete record yet of the former Secretary of State's life and foreign policy. It is filled with spicy revelations about Nixon and Kissinger's tortured relationship: Nixon, we learn, believed Kissinger was mentally unbalanced and at one point in 1971 considered firing him, while Kissinger referred to Nixon behind his back as "our drunken friend" and the "meatball mind." Isaacson also details Kissinger's passionate distrust of even his closest aides, which led to his wiretapping them and helped lay the foundation, Isaacson argues, for the Watergate scandal. But more important, Kissinger also contains the most credible account of Nixon and Kissinger's inability to disengage from the Vietnam War and the collapse of Kissinger's detente strategy in 1975.

Isaacson, an assistant managing editor of TIME, credits Kissinger and Nixon with transforming America's understanding of the world. Instead of seeing the U.S. as engaged in a struggle against an evil monolith, world communism, Nixon and Kissinger viewed the Soviet Union and China as traditional nations driven by competing interests; they designed U.S. foreign policy to exploit that competition in order to create a new, stable balance of power. It was, Isaacson writes, "a triumph of hard-edged realism worthy of a Metternich."

Isaacson faults the two men, however, for their indifference to "the moral values that are the true source of ((America's)) global influence." He reveals how Nixon extended the Vietnam War for six months solely because he believed a "hawkish image" would benefit his 1972 election campaign, and he portrays Kissinger as having acquired a coroner's callousness toward the victims of geopolitics. According to Isaacson, Kissinger told Gerald Ford's press secretary on the eve of Saigon's fall in 1975, "Why don't these people die fast? The worst thing that could happen is for them to linger on."