I ’D MADE IT 375 pages into Niall Ferguson’s newish first volume of a planned two-volume life of Henry Kissinger before receiving in the mail a copy of Greg Grandin’s review of same, in which the author of last year’s excellent Kissinger’s Shadow sums up Ferguson’s tome as follows: “The irony is that it has been Kissinger’s sharpest critics who have most appreciated his acute sense of self, who have treated him, however disapprovingly, as a fully dimensional individual with a churning, complex psyche. In contrast, Ferguson, tone deaf to Kissinger’s darker notes, condemns him to a literary fate worse than anything that Hitchens could have meted out: Kissinger, in this book, is boring.”

This is about as true a thing as has ever been written about any other thing, so much so that I feel both morally and professionally justified in simply abandoning this charmless book unfinished despite having promised to review it at the end of my last column (I would have figured out some other convenient justification for this regardless, but it’s always good to be able to show your work). Nor am I being insulting to Ferguson simply because I disagree with the pro-Kissinger stance he’s taken as the fellow’s authorized biographer and ideological admirer; two years ago I reviewed Kissinger’s own 1,200-page memoir, White House Years, which, though likewise betraying something of a pro-Kissinger stance, was also undeniably compelling and well-written. And while Kissinger is clever enough that one often needs to sort through a great deal of raw material in order to do a proper job of making fun of him, with Ferguson the threshold is somewhat … lower. Here, then, is my review of Ferguson’s 33-page introduction to Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist.

“A plainly unhinged woman writing as ‘Brice Taylor’ insists that, when she was a child, Kissinger turned her into a ‘mind-controlled slave,’ repeatedly making her eat her alphabet cereal in reverse order and taking her on the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride at Disneyland,” writes Niall Ferguson, Harvard’s Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and a Hoover Institution senior fellow, who also scrutinizes Lyndon LaRouche’s claim that Kissinger is a British agent and David Icke’s assertion that he’s a reptilian shape-changer from the lower fourth dimension before concluding, “No rational people take such nonsense seriously. But the same cannot be said for the allegations made by conspiracy theorists of the left, who are a great deal more influential.” The conspiracy theorists of the left, it seems, include not only Oliver Stone but also Howard Zinn and Hunter S. Thompson.

Before things get totally out of hand, as they’re clearly about to, keep in mind that Ferguson was chosen by Kissinger to do this biography 10 years ago, which is to say that Ferguson had a decade to come up with some way of depicting the great bulk of anti-Kissinger sentiment as not only misguided but also malicious and at any rate beyond the pale of American political discourse as usually conducted, and that what follows is nonetheless the best that he could do.

Back to the text:

In his People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn argues that Kissinger’s policies in Chile were intended at least in part to serve the economic interests of International Telephone and Telegraph. In place of evidence, such diatribes tend to offer gratuitous insult. According to Zinn, Kissinger “surrendered himself with ease to the princes of war and destruction.” In their Untold History of the United States, the film director Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick refer to Kissinger as a “psychopath” (admittedly quoting Nixon). The doyen of “gonzo” journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, called him a “slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure” — adding, for good measure, “pervert.”

So Ferguson promises us influential left-wing conspiracy theorists, which we’re to understand are inherently silly things to be, as if one is not forced into theorizing about conspiracies when one studies a man who conspired to secretly carpet bomb Cambodia, and who did so under the aegis of a presidential administration in which was discussed the viability of assassinating a troublesome newspaper columnist by having LSD applied to his steering wheel.

Still, every allegation must be considered on its merits — something we are unable to do in the case of the single conspiracy theory Ferguson attributes to anyone by name, an allegation supposedly made by Howard Zinn, as Ferguson does not see fit to actually quote it for us. But he does find the space to quote Zinn deploying a disapproving metaphor to describe Kissinger’s decision to go to work for a man he himself had declared not long before to be unfit for the presidency. This, in Ferguson’s accounting, constitutes a “gratuitous insult” on Zinn’s part, whereas referring to another historian’s words as a “diatribe” without having the decency to even reproduce them is presumably not gratuitous at all.

I F ONE BOTHERS to check Ferguson’s footnotes, one comes across the first of several ethical oddities with which his introduction is dotted — for one finds that the “princes of war and destruction” remark is actually from another book written years after People’s History, and thus can hardly be said to constitute an especially good example of an insult offered “in place of evidence,” the place for evidence generally being in the vicinity of the allegation (but we’ll look at the actual evidence in a bit). We are not treated to any better examples down paragraph, where Ferguson quotes Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznik quoting Nixon insulting Kissinger — out of bounds, gentlemen, out of bounds! — without this time deigning even to summarize what allegations the two of them may have leveled at Kissinger to get them thrown in with the likes of Crazy Old Howard Zinn. Hunter S. Thompson makes an appearance as well, unencumbered by anything approaching a reason for being included in what was originally billed as a paragraph detailing unfounded conspiracy theories directed against Kissinger by influential leftists; by now Ferguson seems to have resorted merely to trying to prove that some on the left have insulted Kissinger, or at least quoted Nixon insulting him. To Ferguson’s credit, he does indeed prove this.

Ferguson himself may be aware that he’s promised more than he can deliver here; it may also have occurred to him that he’s just accused several people of failing to back up their allegations with evidence while he himself fails to back up this very allegation with evidence and that this sort of thing might be frowned upon in some circles, if not necessarily at the Hoover Institution. But rather than just deleting this paragraph due to one or more of these several distinct problems, which each on its own makes it worthy of deletion, Ferguson decides to just make it longer. “One left-of-center website recently accused Kissinger of having been somehow involved in the anthrax attacks of September 2001, when anthrax spores were mailed to various media and Senate offices, killing five people.”

Here we have finally been provided with something on the order of an implausible conspiracy theory emanating from the left. And we will be satisfied with this so long as we are willing to overlook the fact that Ferguson promised us that the bearers would be “influential” and yet here cannot bring himself to name the author or even the outlet, presumably in hopes that we won’t realize that both outlet and author are somewhat obscure and that this is merely the same manner of accusation that can be found on any number of minor websites about any number of powerful men.

If we check Ferguson’s endnotes again, we find that he’s referring to a piece by a certain Kevin Barrett titled “Arrest Kissinger for Both 9/11s.” If we check the URL he provides, which comes in the form of a blind bit.ly link-shortener, we find that it’s a dead link. Fair enough; perhaps it’s been taken down since then. If we simply Google the title and author (or have someone else do it for us because we’re in prison), we discover that the piece in question has appeared on a couple of sites, the most mainstream of which would seem to be presstv.ir, itself based on an Iranian host. If we go so far as to read the article, we find that the author does indeed accuse Kissinger of perpetrating the anthrax attacks. But he also accuses him of involvement in “the explosive demolition of the World Trade Center, and massacre of nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington in 2001,” going on to denounce “Kissinger’s complicity in the coup d’état of September 11, 2001” and noting in passing that the former secretary of state was involved in “helping design the 9/11 shock-and-awe psychological warfare operation.”

One might ask why it is that Ferguson neglected to mention that this “left-of-center” website that’s supposedly mainstream enough to be worthy of inclusion in a paragraph with Zinn and Thompson actually went so far as to accuse Kissinger of involvement in 9/11 itself. After all, that would seem to be the smoking-gun proof that Kissinger really is subject to unsubstantiated allegations from influential leftists, an argument that Ferguson is plainly desperate to make. If we’re feeling gentlemanly, we might allow for the possibility that Ferguson is incapable of understanding what he’s reading — but then that would be something of a knock at Harvard, would it not? So wouldn’t it be even more polite to conclude, as is obvious anyway, that he left this out lest we realize that whatever site he’s taken pains not to name for us isn’t at all “influential” or even mainstream? Because, after all, Harvard?