Sherard Cowpercoles

A hero of our time

Former British ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles hails the Kissinger biography as ‘a great work about a great man by a great historian’

I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting Edward Heath, I had to secure for an almost desperate former British prime minister a meeting with the former US secretary of state, also in town. Once with Kissinger, Heath promptly subsided into a deep slumber. I had the alarming experience of trying to keep the conversation going. The other occasions were more recent, but almost as scary. My hostess at the ‘secret’ (but much publicised) transatlantic talkfests which Kissinger (92 this year) still attends twice summoned me to sit beside the great man at dinner.

On each occasion I felt like the luckless passenger in the Economist’s vintage television commercial. Settling into seat 2A for a transatlantic flight, he finds Dr Kissinger descending into seat 2B. Not being a subscriber to that magazine, the traveller wonders how on earth he is going to make intelligent conversation with the great man for the next seven hours. But I at least needn’t have worried. In each of my talks with Kissinger, I found him not at all as advertised: unpretentious, charming, full of humour, plenty of small talk, with refreshingly sensible views on subjects as close to my heart as the Arab-Israel dispute and Afghanistan.

And that is the picture of Henry Kissinger, of high but deeply human intelligence, that leaps from the nearly 900 pages of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s magnificent new biography. If the second volume is as good as the first, Kissinger will be remembered as Ferguson’s masterpiece. On the strength of the first (divided into five ‘books’, taking Kissinger from his childhood in Germany to the eve of starting work as Nixon’s National Security Adviser in January 1969), this will rank alongside Edmund Morris’s treatment of Teddy Roosevelt and David Gilmour’s account of Curzon as one of the great biographies of statesmen.

Like those works, Ferguson’s book is about not just the man but also his times.

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