The two faces of Henry Kissinger

In the coming days, many will lavish praise and blame on Henry Kissinger for what he did and did not do. A prime example is the coup in Chile that removed Salvador Allende in 1973, which Kissinger welcomed but did not cause. With thousands of US academics teaching the falsehood of his guilt as truth, Kissinger just had to live with the calumny.

Instead of assigning blame or praise, I will limit myself to personal recollections. Soon after arriving in the US in 1972, to pursue accelerated doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University (already 27 and married with a child, I had no time to lose), an older London acquaintance, the eminent contemporary historian Walter Laqueur introduced me to his close friend from Berlin, Helmut Sonnenfeldt — then the senior figure on the National Security Council headed by Kissinger. When Kissinger became Nixon’s second Secretary of State in September 1973, Sonnenfeldt became Kissinger’s Counsellor, a role analogous to the “consigliere” of fictional Mafia families (I never heard the term in Sicily, where I grew up). While the job of the Secretary of State is to shield the US from foreign antagonists, the Counsellor’s job is to shield the Secretary of State from his bureaucratic enemies in other departments of government — and, most of all, from his own State department officials.

That Laqueur shared Sonnenfeldt and Kissinger’s uncontrollable passion for the German Bundesliga‘s football teams was an additional bond between the three German Jews, which I failed to share as Laqueur’s sidekick, although I too was a German speaker. While Kissinger didn’t like to hold entire conversations in German, he enjoyed using less translatable German expressions such as Hochstapler, loosely defined as a confidence trickster, and Betrüger, an impostor and deceiver.