I think then that here would be the place to point out that I see my interest in Kissinger as somewhat antithetical to Hitchens’s 2001 polemic. The Trial of Henry Kissinger is a good example of what the great historian Charles Beard, in 1936, dismissed as a “devil theory of war,” which blames militarism on a single, isolatable cause: a “wicked man.” To really understand the sources of conflict, Beard said, you had to look at the big picture, to consider the way “war is our own work,” emerging out of “the total military and economic situation.” In making the case that Kissinger should be tried—and convicted—for war crimes, Hitchens didn’t look at the big picture. Instead he focused obsessively on the morality of one man, his devil: Henry Kissinger. It must have been a fun book to write, giving the author the satisfaction of playing the people’s prosecutor. Yet aside from assembling the docket and gathering the accused’s wrongdoing in one place, The Trial of Henry Kissinger is not very useful and is actually counterproductive; righteous indignation doesn’t provide much room for understanding.
