Where are the Henry Kissingers when we need them?

It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that I came to realise how riven by ideology the world of US foreign policy had become. For 20 years I had been moulded by the resolute pragmatism of British diplomacy. My American sabbatical threw open the door to intellectual conflict in the study and practice of international relations unlike anything I had experienced. Two great warring clans — the realists and the idealists, those who took the world as they found it and those who saw the world as they would like it to be — were at each other’s throats. At the head of the realists towered Henry Kissinger, as he does to this day, aged 96.

Kissinger remains a figure of profound and sometimes bitter divisiveness. That in itself is astonishing. It is 43 years since he held office. He was in government for only eight, from 1969 to 1977 under Presidents Nixon and Ford, first as national security adviser, then as secretary of state, with a spell in between when he held both offices. As Barry Gewen reminds us in his fine biography, Kissinger’s popularity in America in the early 1970s attained ‘incredible heights’. This was based on solid, even brilliant, achievements: the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union and the peace deal with North Vietnam to name but three. The Foreign Office, in which I worked at the time under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, nicknamed him the ‘Wizard of the Western World’.

But that was not all of it. Somehow or other Kissinger’s portly figure became a sex symbol, a celeb. His sky-high popularity reached parts never penetrated before or since by an American government official. In 1972 Playboy Bunnies voted him the man they would most like to date.