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It's amazing to consider what Henry Kissinger saw in 100 years of life. Henry Kissinger is, I think anybody who has met him or worked with him or heard him speak, is without question an intellectual genius.
He is also a world-class strategic thinker. Many, many remembrances of him are from different perspectives this week. In the passing of someone who had had such a significant impact on American diplomacy, history, foreign policy, security, and the like.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about what he meant in terms of our history on the conservative side of the foreign policy debate. Obviously Kissinger served presidents Nixon and Ford as White House National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. He was the first naturalized citizen to hold either office. He negotiated with the Soviets the first strategic arms limitations treaty, otherwise known as SALT.
and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He made the opening to China happen, as well as the ceasefire in the Yom Kippur War and the end of US involvement in Vietnam, for which he won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.
He had arrived in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He studied at night, he sold shaving brushes during the day, and he served in the army during World War II. But instead of turning to academia, an area where he had already shown prowess, he turned to politics. There is no country in the world where it is conceivable
that a man of my origins could be standing here next to the President of the United States. It was there that he made his incredibly substantial mark.
President Nixon, then as vice president for Dwight Eisenhower, was the one who convinced the president to bring him into the field of foreign policy. But Kissinger is a professor, Dwight Eisenhower said. You ask professors to study things. You never put them in charge of anything. There he was mistaken.
Kissinger would be incredibly powerful when it came to his role in charting foreign policy in the coming years. He was also someone who became a public figure in ways that secretaries of state and diplomats over the years had never really been before. The British Foreign Office referred to him at the time as the wizard of the Western world.
He was also someone who was known as a bit of a playboy, a swinger, even had connections with Candace Bergen, with Shirley MacLaine, Jill St. John, Marlo Thomas, and Diane Sawyer all during the course of his single years in Washington.
A 1972 poll conducted of Playboy Club bunnies found that Kissinger emerged as their top choice for the man I would most like to go out on a date with. That's not the typical thing that you think of when it comes to being a secretary of state. But I want to focus on one particular moment because I think it tells us a lot about the nature of Kissinger and the.
his limited role in charting foreign policy in the post-Nixon Ford era for Republican politics, something that I think is underestimated as a moment in which Republican politics took a turn that was both beneficial in terms of the ramifications for the world, but also potentially one that was challenging in terms of our current stature.
You have to go back to 1976 when you have the far right darling, former California governor Ronald Reagan,
on the campaign trail and in broadcasts, citing in terms of his opposition to then incumbent President Gerald Ford, not just Ford's approach to foreign policy, but Kissinger's approach to foreign policy explicitly, calling it out as being at odds with his approach, one which would favor a more direct conversation with the Soviet Union. Speaking in March 1976,
Reagan gave a speech in which he gave really his outline of the case in a way that Kissinger in his own memoirs would find to be pretty objectionable. Despite Mr. Ford's evident decency, honor, and patriotism, he has shown neither the vision nor the leadership necessary to halt and reverse the diplomatic and military decline of the United States, Reagan said.
That is the truth. And even those of us who like Gerald Ford as a person know it is the truth. I believe in the peace, which Mr. Ford speaks as much as any man, but in places such as Angola, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the piece they have come to know is the piece of the grave. All I can see is what other nations of the world oversee collapse of the American will and the retreat of American power.
There's little doubt in my mind that the Soviet Union will not stop taking advantage of detente until it sees that the American people have elected a new president and appointed a new secretary of state. He said that the framework of detente as pursued by the administration was one of making preemptive concessions while the Soviet Union was engaged in military and diplomatic adventures around the world.
Last year in this, the Soviet Union, using Castro's mercenaries, intervened decisively in the Angola Civil War and routed the pro-Western forces, Reagan said. Yet, Messrs. Ford and Kissinger continued to tell us we should not let this interfere with detente. We have given the Soviets our trade and our technology, Reagan went on. At Kissinger's insistence, Mr. Ford snubbed Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the great moral heroes of our time.
What has the United States gotten in return other than Soviet belligerence in the Middle East, Soviet duplicity in Southeast Asia, and Soviet imperialism in South Central Africa? Mr. Ford and Dr. Kissinger ask us to trust their leadership. I confess I find that more and more difficult to do. Henry Kissinger's stewardship of the United States foreign policy has coincided precisely with the loss of the United States military supremacy.
The truth is that this nation must trust less in the preemptive concessions we are granting the Soviet Union and more in the reestablishment of American military superiority, Reagan said. The concern that Kissinger operated under was fueled by his understanding of what had happened in Europe in the years of his youth and what he feared for the world in the years to come.
Fear was essentially that liberal democracy would serve merely as a momentary discourse, something that would fill the void in between anarchy and total assertions of tyrannical order.
Government of the people by the people is a fine thing when it works. But the fact is, as Kissinger knew so well, frequently it doesn't. One of his biographers wrote, this is one of the things that animated, obviously, his approach to detente, his approach of a pursuit of order, as opposed to any kind of mission that would result in the freedom of people around the world. One that he thought was dangerous and risky.
It was one that became a ripe form of target for this rising challenger, this far-right darling, Ronald Reagan, who had more ambitious views of what could be achieved. In the 1976 election, it's easy to forget how close Gerald Ford came to actually losing the renomination fight.
The battle that would present him with the potential to challenge Jimmy Carter and to have a back and forth between two people who had not been elected president before. Ford, you will recall, was promoted after dealing with the ramifications of the fallout from Spiro Agnew and everything else related to the Nixon administration.
He had chosen to pardon Nixon. He had chosen to do a lot of things that were leading him to an area of unpopularity. And the polls showed him losing pretty consistently to this aspiring younger governor, Jimmy Carter, who's coming up through the Democratic ranks.
It was at this moment that Governor Reagan chose to seize the opportunity to try to take hold of his party away from the old moderate authorities that had been running it for many years. He did so very successfully in a lot of different circumstances, you know, beating Ford in key states and rising the level of different, you know, sort of delegates and support that he needed in order to make a real test of the nomination battle.
1976, the convention was in Kansas City. Both sides claimed that they had a lock on the requisite number of delegates they needed for the nomination. That total was 1,130. But the AP, when they actually polled the delegates in question, found that Ford had 1,118 and Reagan had 1,035. In other words, both were in shooting distance.
This was the situation that confronted Ford, and it's one that really animated his approach to this issue and others as well. But one of the things that Reagan tried to do in order to extract some kind of victory from the situation was the possibility of perhaps making a challenge on ideological grounds that would force
the Ford people into a position of authorizing a new Republican platform, one that would reject many of the different foreign policy and security policy decisions that had been made in the previous several years, having inherited the Nixon White House and Henry Kissinger among them in terms of the foreign policy advice that they were getting.
So this took place in the form of numerous little battles that played out as they do within conventions. But most of all, it came down to this battle over a foreign policy plank that was known as morality in foreign policy. It was a direct challenge to Henry Kissinger and his policy on to taunt.
Kissinger wanted it struck from the platform. Dick Cheney, who was working for the Ford campaign at the time, would later tell biographer Craig Shirley that the platform change did everything but strip Henry Bear of every piece of clothing on his body.
Tom Corologos, who was an RNC official at the time, told Politico when they were doing an oral history of this convention, Henry Kissinger started raising hell that we got to get this piece out of the platform. And we're in the meeting with Ford and Cheney. We were in there and Henry said, I will resign.
We were counting votes. Everybody was half in the soup. The convention delegates had gone all over Helltown, come back half-soused, and there was no way we were going to have a roll call vote at night. Henry kept demanding and insisting that the platform vote was a close call.
And I blurted out in the meeting, hey, Henry, will you resign now? We need the votes. Everybody laughed and it broke the ice. Henry still grumbles about it every time he sees me. It's almost 50 years ago, but that's in there. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.
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What was that foreign policy statement? What was the piece of the platform that Reagan so wanted and Henry was willing to resign from the Ford administration in order to defend that foreign policy plank, which the Ford committee and campaign ended up allowing to go through read like this.
The goal of Republican foreign policy is the achievement of liberty under law and a just and lasting peace in the world. The principles by which we act to achieve peace and to protect the interests of the United States must merit the restored confidence of our people. We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the natures of tyranny.
Ours will be a foreign policy that keeps us ever in mind. Ours will be a foreign policy which recognizes that in international negotiations, we must make no undue concessions and that in pursuing detente, we
We must not grant unilateral favors with only the hope of getting future favors in return. Agreements that have been negotiated, such as the one signed in Helsinki, must not take from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day gaining it. Finally, we are firmly committed to a foreign policy in which secret agreements hidden from our people will have no part.
It was this piece of material that Henry Kissinger found so objectionable at the time.
And yet it passed. It passed. And Ronald Reagan, when given the opportunity to be called down at the last minute, even after Gerald Ford had given his acceptance speech to give an impromptu speech favoring his support for the Ford candidacy, trying to unify a party that had been broken really by a distracting and awful primary that found so many people at odds over ideological issues.
This is what he had to say. Better than we've ever done before. We've got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we've ever been, but we carry the message they're waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true. There is no substitute for victory. Mr. President...
After Reagan gave those remarks on the floor of the Kansas City Convention, there was no doubt in the minds of many of the convention delegates that they had nominated the wrong man.
As it turned out, of course, Reagan would return four years later and not just win the nomination of the Republican Party, but win an overwhelming victory against Jimmy Carter and an even more overwhelming one after that in 1984. Reagan's approach to foreign policy would be markedly different than Kissinger's. It was fueled and backed by
by conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr., who believed that the Nixon era had included too little confrontation, too little willingness to invest in military resources in order to send a message around the world of American strength. From Kissinger's perspective, though, there was something else going on. Here's something that he wrote in his last volume of his memoir when he came to analyze this particular moment.
Even after the neoconservatives had achieved major influence with the Reagan ascendancy, Kissinger wrote, "...they continued their assault by insisting on a version of history that lures the United States away from the need to face complexity."
According to this version of history, a group of accommodation-prone European-influenced leaders was overcome by the ninth errant who had suddenly appeared on the scene and had prevailed in short order by proclaiming the distinction between good and evil and the revolutionary role of democratic principles. Reality was more complex than this and has become even more so as of this writing.
Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve much credit for the denouement of the Cold War, but the United States will not harvest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan's policy was, in fact, a canny reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford administrations clothed in the rhetoric of Wilsonianism.
a quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism. In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Reaganite variant, not a rejection of the strategies of the 1970s. The degree to which this is true depends on your own perspective, but it is interesting to consider how much of Reagan's approach still embraced the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger while
Clothing it in the language of aspiration, freedom, liberty, and the shining city on the hill as the aim, as opposed to the pragmatic goal.
almost clinical environment that Kissinger's words seem to endorse. For myself, I view Henry Kissinger as a fascinating figure, one who I had more than one instance of being able to meet, to talk with, and to have conversations about the future of the country and the world. I was very fortunate to be able to do so.
but he's also one who I think is in some sense a cautionary tale, someone who brought a European's focus in terms of their understanding of the dangers of aspirational foreign policy to a country that has tended to aspire to much greater than what it could potentially achieve on paper in one instance after another. But it's often found itself
reaching those actual goals in ways that no one could have expected. Kissinger is a figure of enormous. He is someone who is worth studying in so many different respects.
He's also someone who became a pop culture figure of some note. Thank you so much for visiting our plant, Dr. Kissinger. It was fun. Well, I'll let you know if your glasses turn up. Yes, well, I'm sure I left them in the car. No one must know I dropped them in the toilet. Not I, the man who drafted the Paris Peace Accords.
And so perhaps it's best to remember him as all of these things, a fascinating figure, one marked by controversy, but also one who had incredibly important roles in shaping the world around us and the future.
Henry Kissinger, RIP. I'm Ben Domenech. You're listening to Fox News Radio. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. ♪
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