Part one of a new Henry Kissinger biography sheds light on the legendary diplomat's mind, Andrew Moody reports.

Niall Ferguson says China's leaders are now more likely than US President Barack Obama to seek out Henry Kissinger for advice.

The professor of history at Harvard University, who has just published the first volume of a biography of the former US secretary of state, insists it is one of the reasons America's foreign policy is in such a mess.

President Xi Jinping met again with the 92-year-old former foreign policy guru at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday.

"It is remarkable to my mind that President Obama thinks he doesn't need Kissinger's expertise and, apparently, believes he can do grand strategy all by himself," Ferguson says.

Ferguson, 51, was in London to promote the 1,000-page Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist that takes the diplomat's life up to the point he entered the White House and wielded political power for the first time.

In his review in the Financial Times, former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten joked he hoped Ferguson did not suffer the fate of another biographer, Rohan Butler, whose own similarly epic first volume took the life of the French statesman Choiseul only to the point where his career begun, and then died before he could produce a second.

"I think this first volume in this case is worth 1,000 pages," insists Ferguson. "I don't think you can possibly see how he becomes national security adviser to Richard Nixon if you don't see his evolution as a strategic thinker and public intellectual.

"As Kissinger himself says, you have to live off your intellectual capital in office because you don't have time in government to acquire any more."

Authorized bio

Ferguson, a Scot and internationally-renowned author of several highly successful books, including High Financier: The Lives and Times of Siegmund Warburg and Civilization, which examined China's new challenge to the West's dominance, was actually courted by Kissinger to write his biography more than a decade ago.

"I met him at a London drinks party. He did this thing that was so flattering to young academics. He said he had read one of my books and we talked about it."

During later correspondence, Kissinger asked whether he would take on the task but Ferguson initially refused.

"He wrote back (when Ferguson declined) saying, 'What a pity. I have just found 45 boxes of documents that I thought had been lost'. And, of course, I fell for that," he recalls.

The biography, highly readable despite clearly being the result of monumental research, is more favorable to its subject than a previous one by Walter Isaacson but to what extent was it authorized?

"The term 'authorized' is a dodgy one for me because it implies the subject has editorial control over the text. I said to him very clearly at the outset that if you give me access to your private papers I am not going to be bound by you about what I write. I know there are parts of the book he doesn't like," he says.

The book opens with how the initially idyllic childhood in Fuerth in Bavaria of the then Heinz Kissinger, the son of a senior staff member at a public school, turned into a nightmare with the rise of Hitler. He managed to flee with his immediate family to New York in 1938.

"They got out in the nick of time. They avoided by a matter of months the pogrom organized against the Jews. If he had stayed in Germany as the majority of his wider family did, including his grandmother, he, his brother and parents would have been killed like them."

The biography also follows his return to Germany with the US army and witnessing the pitiful and dehumanized state of survivors at the Ahlem concentration camp.

" I think this was the most formative experiences of his life, seeing with his own eyes the horrors the Nazis had perpetrated," he says.

After the war Kissinger took advantage of the GI Bill and went to Harvard to study, eventually becoming one of America's leading foreign policy academics.

With his thick Bavarian accent he has always been seen as something of an outsider by some in Washington.

"I think it would be a mistake to think - as some have suggested - there is an affectation about his accent. I have lived in the US for 12 years now and although I might have a few Americanizations in my voice, I still retain my accent. It is not so incomprehensible you retain the accent of your teenage years."

Defining point

Vietnam remains the defining point in his career. Some such as the late Christopher Hitchens have held him responsible directly for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Ferguson's book makes clear his efforts to stop the war from 1965 onward.

"I think that is where the book makes an important contribution. From that point Kissinger is trying to end the war and extricate the US from the mess," he says.

Ferguson says Kissinger, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine 15 times, feels frustrated by the state of US-China relations and by the downgrading of the role of secretary of state.

"Nowadays, the job is almost the consolation prize for the failed presidential candidate and neither (John) Kerry nor Hillary Clinton has exactly made a major contribution to the theory of international relations," he says.

Ferguson, who remains in good health, is currently doing the research for the second and concluding volume, which will take in the opening up of US relations with China.

"Volume two will probably take me another three years, so don't hold your breath."

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/04/2015 page20)