Review: The Kissinger Saga - The Jewish Chronicle

By Evi Kurz
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99

Henry Kissinger always refused to give interviews about his private life until he eventually agreed to speak to Evi Kurz, a tenacious journalist from Furth in southern Germany — where the Kissinger parents, Louis and Paula, and their sons, Walter and Henry, had lived until their escape to New York in 1938. “First you are an exile,” Paula was to exclaim years later when Henry became America’s Secretary of State, “and then you are treated like a royal highness.”

Henry’s brother didn’t do so badly either. A Harvard MBA, Walter became a successful industrialist, a “made man” at 38, able to retire to his ranch in Colorado Springs to enjoy a daily four-hour ride on his stallion, or listen to Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms, besides handling a bundle of charitable work.

Where Henry would offer the author a 20-minute appointment three months ahead (only to plead pressure of work at the last minute), Walter was more approachable. But, after several years of tactful persistence on Kurz’s part, this highly readable book — and a film — were completed and Henry was delighted.

Paula made the decision to emigrate as the Nazis’ destruction of the family’s community became increasingly unbearable. Not that life in the USA was all that easy to begin with — Walter, 14, delivered newspapers; Henry, 15, worked in a shaving-brush factory; while father Louis found a job in the accounts department of a metal processing firm. Paula learned to cook the American way and started a catering business. At the outbreak of war, both boys joined the American army.

So, how did Henry progress from there to US Secretary of State, achieving international fame — and blame — over Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Chile? How did he progress to a full Harvard professorship, top advisory posts, high office, the Nobel and the International Charlemagne Prizes?

He was clearly ambitious. Even as a student he ran an annual meeting of young careerists from all over the world — a generation of future presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, bankers and journalists.

An essay in foreign affairs led to an offer from the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. He went on to run its study group on nuclear weapons and foreign policy and published a best-selling book on the same topic.

In his mid-30s, as Kurz relates, Henry too was a “made man”. He came to the attention of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, son of the oil magnate, and foreign policy adviser to President Eisenhower. And when Richard Nixon was elected President, he appointed Kissinger as his Secretary of State. The whole Kissinger clan was there in September 1973 when Henry was sworn in.

The Middle East was soon top of the political agenda and, over the next two years, Kissinger visited the region 11 times, managing to play a part in the agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1974.

Kurz’s book tells the story of a typical middle-class Jewish family in Germany in the late 1930s, overtaken by the worsening Nazi oppression. It also offers an example of the American dream writ large and of a gifted writer who could not have tried harder to understand and portray this extraordinary family.