NYTBR reviews Barry Gewen new book on Henry Kissinger nytimes.com/2020/04/28/boo…
I adored the Gewen book as a study - not of Kissinger alone - but of his circle of highly intellectual German-Jewish refugees from Nazism: Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, et al. ... 1/x
I adored the Gewen book as a study - not of Kissinger alone - but of his circle of highly intellectual German-Jewish refugees from Nazism: Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, et al. ... 1/x
... and their startled encounter with a country of refuge that seemed to them dangerously over-confident about its democracy and its security. They were escapees from an ideological plague arrived in a land that still scoffed af ideological face masks. 2/x
These refugees from Nazism disagreed among themselves about so many things. They shared blind spots: settling in New York, Chicago, Cambridge - never the segregated South - they accepted US democracy in the 1930s and 1940s more at face value than it deserved. 3/x
But the refugees also *knew* things about human capacity for irrationality, cruelty, and destruction that most white Americans of their time did not know. They felt a duty to warn. And Gewen's brilliant book studies how, via Kissinger, those warning shaped US foreign policy 4/x
There's a lot to say about all this, and Twitter is not the place to say it. Gewen invites deep meditation on how power can be exercised for good in a world in which the good so often end as victims. 5/x
Count Cavour, the mastermind of the unification of Italy, supposedly quipped to his associates: "Gentlemen, if we did for ourselves what we have done for Italy, what great scoundrels we would be!" 6/x
Americans tend not to like thinking about *all* that democratic powers need to do to survive in a world stalked by anti-democratic forces. I gave great offense a couple of days to the producer of "Plot Against America" by remarking FDR's ruthless methods vs his domestic opponents
But those things that Americans dislike to think about are things Americans *need* to think about. Barry Gewen's Kissinger book thinks about them hard and clearly, and as you read the book, you will think harder and clearer too. -END- wwnorton.com/books/97813240…
