What the Kissinger Obits Got Wrong

The outpouring of obituaries for Henry Kissinger by and large have fallen into two categories. First, there are the Great Man elite-columnist obits, some of which recount the writers’ personal relationships with Kissinger. Second, there are the evildoer obits, retelling, usually accurately, Kissinger’s misdeeds, from Cambodia to Chile to the Indian subcontinent.

What struck me, though, is how so many of the obits accepted without question Kissinger’s own memes and narratives — the series of very broad, misleading stories and lies he constructed about himself throughout his career. This was particularly true when it comes to China. Much of the hagiography of Kissinger, even when it acknowledges his deadly policies in places like Vietnam and Cambodia, has tended to credit him with being a visionary statesman and architect of the opening to China.

In the course of writing several books, I’ve examined Kissinger’s record through archives, Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and the memoirs of those who worked with him, and those sources tell stories that vary, sometimes in fundamental ways, with the flattering narratives that Kissinger penned in his memoirs or plied to friendly columnists.

So let’s set the record straight.

The opening to China was not Kissinger’s initiative.

The driving force behind the decision to reestablish diplomatic relations with Beijing wasn’t Kissinger; it was President Richard Nixon. In fact, Kissinger was at first astonished by the idea and even snide about it. Alexander Haig, who was Kissinger’s deputy in 1969, recorded in his own memoir how, a few weeks after Nixon took office, Kissinger emerged from a meeting with Nixon and told him, “Our Leader has taken leave of reality. He thinks this is the moment to establish normal relations with Communist China. He has just ordered me to make this flight of fancy come true.” In Haig’s description, Kissinger then grasped his head in his hands and said in astonishment, “China!”

It became Kissinger’s role to carry out Nixon’s initiative, which he proceeded to do, often skillfully but also often mendaciously. But it wasn’t his idea, and it took a bit of time before he embraced it.

Kissinger lied about the most fundamental, consequential aspect of his secret trip to China.

The lie was about Taiwan. For decades, the principal source of information about what happened on Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing in 1971 was Kissinger’s own account in his memoirs. In it, he wrote that Taiwan “was only mentioned briefly” during his first, groundbreaking meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

In 2002, the record of that Kissinger encounter with Zhou was declassified and released. It showed that, contrary to “barely mentioned,” the subject of Taiwan had taken up roughly the first third of the meeting. What’s more, Kissinger made crucial concessions during that discussion that have governed and constrained American policy towards China and Taiwan from then until the present day. Before Kissinger’s trip, the official position of the United States was that sovereignty over Taiwan was “an unsettled question.” But Kissinger promised Zhou that the United States would not support two Chinese governments (one in Beijing, one in Taipei); that it would also not agree to a solution of “one China, one Taiwan”; and, finally, that it would not support an independent Taiwan.

Were these concessions ones that had to be made for the opening to China to proceed? That’s not clear, and some people think not. Remember that America’s opening to China was also China’s opening to the United States — that at the time, China, desperately poor and in an increasingly militarized conflict with the Soviet Union, eagerly wanted a new relationship with the United States. So in retrospect, it’s not clear that Kissinger needed to have made such a significant concession so early in the discussions.

The late Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, a highly respected Georgetown University historian, examined the opening to China in a scholarly article and concluded: “Nixon and Kissinger wanted so intensely to realize their goal that they surrendered more than was necessary to achieve, and the price was paid, not in the near term by the Nixon White House, but over the long term by the people of Taiwan and by U.S. diplomacy writ large.” Tucker concluded that “the president and his national security advisor viewed Taiwan as dispensable.”

Kissinger left out the parts of his China diplomacy that failed.

The declassified records show that there were aspects of Kissinger’s China diplomacy that were either unsuccessful or downright embarrassing and thus not disclosed. In 1995, after a five-year battle, the Los Angeles Times (where I worked at the time) won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain a secret, previously classified study by the U.S. intelligence community of early American negotiations with China. The study showed that Nixon and Kissinger wanted help from China in resolving the Vietnam War, help that they never got. In early 1972, they asked Beijing to bring North Vietnam’s peace negotiator Le Duc Tho to China for talks on Chinese soil in the middle of Nixon’s historic trip. China rebuffed the overture.

In the category of simply embarrassing behavior, the secret U.S. intelligence study quoted Kissinger as exclaiming at one point during the historic Nixon visit in 1972, “After a dinner of Peking duck, I’ll agree to anything.” Yet Kissinger became enamored of China in ways that look seriously wrong today. In one secret 1973 memo to Nixon, he offered this startling proposition: “We are now in the extraordinary situation that, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the PRC might well be closest to us in its global perceptions. No other world leaders have the sweep and imagination of Mao and Chou.”

Kissinger’s role as an intermediary for presidents and world leaders was largely self-appointed.

Some of the obituaries and other stories about Kissinger’s death have described Kissinger as an intermediary between the United States and other countries, particularly China, after he left government. This notion seems to imply that American officials asked Kissinger to serve as an interlocutor — but that was usually not the case. Instead, Kissinger tended to insert himself as go-between, without being asked and even when unwanted.

Kissinger’s method of operation was this: He would travel on his own to China, often for commercial purposes. When he obtained audiences with Chinese leaders, he would take it upon himself to tell them what U.S. officials in Washington were saying and thinking. Then, back in the United States, he would show up at the White House or State Department and volunteer to tell American officials the thinking in Beijing. He sometimes did the same in Moscow, inserting himself unasked into ongoing Soviet or Russian diplomacy with the United States.

After being cast out of office in 1976 (after Jimmy Carter was elected president), he was repeatedly trying to get back in. At the 1980 Republican National Convention, he was one of the architects of a proposed deal in which former President Gerald Ford would become Ronald Reagan’s vice presidential nominee. Under the deal, Ford was to be co-president — and, in a provision many have forgotten, Kissinger was to return as Secretary of State and be granted complete control over American foreign policy. The Reagan team said no thanks. After Reagan became president, Kissinger secretly advised Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that “the Reagan administration had no coherent program to deal with the Soviet Union because Reagan had never thought about it seriously,” according to Dobrynin’s memoir. After George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election, and before he even took office, Kissinger proposed to the president-elect and his team that he take over Soviet diplomacy as the incoming administration’s principal emissary to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. That was too much for incoming Secretary of State James Baker, who scuttled Kissinger’s idea.

In short, it was Kissinger who saw himself as an intermediary far more often than American presidents or secretaries of state wanted him to play that role.

The Kissinger testimonials inflated his role in diplomacy with China until the end.

Some of the recent coverage of Kissinger’s death has suggested that he played a role in bringing about the recent flurry of high-level contacts between the Biden administration and China. This is said to have been based on Kissinger’s own visit to Beijing last summer.

But once again, the facts say otherwise. Kissinger visited China in mid-July. By that time, the Biden administration had already sent Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to Beijing, and discussion was already under way for Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping to visit the United States in November. Kissinger played no role in this diplomacy. If anything, his role was that, as in the past, the Chinese regime seized on Kissinger as a way of guilt-tripping Americans, sending the message that the United States has strayed from the good old days when American policy was to keep Beijing happy.

On China, Kissinger wasn’t as much of a realist as he claimed.

Of course, the obituaries characterize Henry Kissinger as a foreign policy realist. Philosophically, he was. And indeed, in many parts of the world, as his critics accurately note in the obits, Kissinger operated as a cold-blooded, even brutal realist.

But when it came to China, Kissinger was more of a romantic than a realist. During the opening to China his attachment to the Chinese regime became deeply personalized and emotional. (Later on, it became commercialized as well.) Nixon was far more the detached realist on China than Kissinger; in his later writings, the former president warned that China could rise to become a formidable adversary of the United States. Kissinger until his death resisted the idea that China was a U.S. adversary.

Consider one of Kissinger’s private memos to Nixon about China, this one after a 1973 visit to Beijing in which he met Mao Tse-tung. Mao, he wrote, “radiates authority and deep wisdom. … I was even more impressed by the grandeur of the Chairman this time than last. One can easily imagine the power and intelligence of this man in his prime.”

That is hardly the dispassionate judgment of a realist.

Henry Kissinger was many things, and his impact on U.S. foreign policy was significant and enduring. But when it comes to China in particular, his reputation is largely a result of his own myth-making. His actual record on China is much less flattering, a record that unfortunately rarely emerged in his obituaries.