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A factor that Indyk omits is the disdain Kissinger repeatedly demonstrated for Arab leaders (“pathetic,” “wily,” “uncouth,” “quixotic,” and “machismo-driven,” which is rich coming from him) and peoples (“mad,” their “ways” a mystery, above all in the Persian Gulf, home to “eight million savages”). Indyk dismisses it as mere “frat-boy talk.” Decades ago, journalist Seymour Hersh instead insisted that the racism of Kissinger and his two closest and most hard-core anti-communist sidekicks, Haig and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, was as entrenched as Nixon’s. This was true whether they were assessing the intelligence of the African Americans then rising through the ranks of the State Department (“Do you think he’ll understand the cables?”) or hosting Organization of African Unity officials (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like”).
The contempt and condescension won’t surprise anyone familiar with the record of, say, Kissinger’s complicity in the slaughter of Bengalis during the Indo-Pakistani War.
Master of the Game shows that there is no disputing Kissinger’s reputation as a virtuoso negotiator. So too his notoriety as a “domineering, scheming, at times almost paranoid personality.” His negotiating successes depended on his constant bureaucratic maneuvers, use of back channels, circumvention of Congress, and other “questionable and ultimately counterproductive methods.” Why counterproductive? His obsessive secrecy produced a backlash that engulfed the Nixon administration and made its signature policy of détente — in addition to Kissinger himself — a political liability for Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, in the run-up to the 1976 election. And yet, as Yale historian Greg Grandin argues, the anti-détente militarists who took control of the national security state after Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 would pay Kissinger grudging tribute by turning to many of his signature methods — secret wars, back channels, proxies, and the like.
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