In a new PBS biography of Henry Kissinger, viewers learn how growing up in an observant Jewish household in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s shaped the future secretary of state. Kissinger witnessed the Nazi regime’s rise to power as it imposed terror on large segments of society and fled to the United States in 1938 to escape persecution. He was horrified, Roham Alvandi, a history professor at the London School of Economics, says in the documentary, to see how “a society was seemingly so civilized, so refined, could descend into this kind of madness.” Thirteen members of Kissinger’s family were killed. Then, as a U.S. soldier in World War II, Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp. What he saw there shocked him and left him with a deeply pessimistic view of human nature. “It was an illustration for him that strength was an unavoidable facet of resisting evil,” recalls his son, David. The documentary’s featured experts conclude that Kissinger had a crucial realization as a result of this encounter with totalitarianism: Norms and rules could not protect people from the danger of fascist totalitarians taking over the world. Only power could achieve that goal.
The two-part Kissinger, showing as part of the American Experience series, does an excellent job portraying how the national security advisor (1969 to 1975) and secretary of state (1973 to 1977) under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford deployed his own power to try to stabilize the Cold War and prevent a nuclear holocaust. Kissinger’s achievements are many. In the Middle East, when several Arab countries went to war with Israel in 1973, he engaged in tireless shuttle diplomacy that helped bring the conflict to an end. As the driving force behind détente, Nixon’s policy of easing relations with communist adversaries, he diminished the risk of war. And especially as the mastermind of Nixon’s opening relations with China and signing the SALT I treaty with the Soviets in 1972, his legacy is undoubtedly large. It is also complicated.
In a new PBS biography of Henry Kissinger, viewers learn how growing up in an observant Jewish household in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s shaped the future secretary of state. Kissinger witnessed the Nazi regime’s rise to power as it imposed terror on large segments of society and fled to the United States in 1938 to escape persecution. He was horrified, Roham Alvandi, a history professor at the London School of Economics, says in the documentary, to see how “a society was seemingly so civilized, so refined, could descend into this kind of madness.” Thirteen members of Kissinger’s family were killed. Then, as a U.S. soldier in World War II, Kissinger participated in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp. What he saw there shocked him and left him with a deeply pessimistic view of human nature. “It was an illustration for him that strength was an unavoidable facet of resisting evil,” recalls his son, David. The documentary’s featured experts conclude that Kissinger had a crucial realization as a result of this encounter with totalitarianism: Norms and rules could not protect people from the danger of fascist totalitarians taking over the world. Only power could achieve that goal.
The two-part Kissinger, showing as part of the American Experience series, does an excellent job portraying how the national security advisor (1969 to 1975) and secretary of state (1973 to 1977) under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford deployed his own power to try to stabilize the Cold War and prevent a nuclear holocaust. Kissinger’s achievements are many. In the Middle East, when several Arab countries went to war with Israel in 1973, he engaged in tireless shuttle diplomacy that helped bring the conflict to an end. As the driving force behind détente, Nixon’s policy of easing relations with communist adversaries, he diminished the risk of war. And especially as the mastermind of Nixon’s opening relations with China and signing the SALT I treaty with the Soviets in 1972, his legacy is undoubtedly large. It is also complicated.
More than almost any other figure of his time, Kissinger articulated and championed the philosophy of realpolitik in foreign policy that influenced generations of elected officials. As the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson says in the documentary, “It’s Henry Kissinger’s world.” Ferguson’s comment raises a number of pertinent questions for viewers: What does “Kissinger’s world” look like? What were the trade-offs that Kissinger accepted in pursuit of his vision? And how should we balance the bold achievements with the dire costs of his policies?
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger walk down a street with other men in suits beside and behind them. Soviet buildings and trees are see on the horizon.
Kissinger and U.S. President Richard Nixon walk in Moscow on May 29, 1972.The National Archives and Records Administration
Kissinger came to prominence as a professor at Harvard during the 1950s, where he had earned his doctoral degree in government. His thesis explored the balance of power through an examination of the international system constructed in Europe in the 19th century following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Kissinger used his position to make a name for himself in foreign policy circles. He gained widespread attention with the publication of a controversial, influential book in 1957, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, that outlined the benefits of limited nuclear warfare. The media started to recognize him as an important figure on international affairs.
Kissinger, however, was not an overzealous hawk. Following a trip to South Vietnam in 1965, he concluded that the United States could not win a war in the region through an alliance with such an unstable regime. He believed the only way out was through a negotiated settlement.
Nor was Kissinger only concerned with amassing power for its own sake. He remained focused on designing strategies that could prevent the world superpowers from engaging in a nuclear war. “He was not just trying to advance the power of the United States in some kind of Darwinian struggle,” David Kissinger argues in the documentary. “He was advancing the strength of the United States, in his mind, because America was the last best hope of humanity. And he had experienced that personally.”
Yet in the process of pursuing that balance of power, seeing the world as a massive chess board, the film also explores how Kissinger broke norms, weakened institutional processes, and sacrificed human rights.
Kissinger’s willingness to ignore institutions and norms was a defining feature of his leadership style. As Nixon’s national security advisor, Kissinger pursued his foreign policy agenda through covert backchannels, lies, deception, and intimidation. He was a formulator of Nixon’s secret military campaigns in Cambodia. When the press revealed to the public what was happening in 1970, triggering the anti-war movement into another round of full-scale protest, Kissinger worked with Nixon to plug further leaks from coming out of the administration. Anthony Lake, who worked in the State Department from 1962 until 1970, and Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times reporter, share unsettling stories about how they discovered that the government was wiretapping their phones.
Richard Nixon holds papers in one hand and points with the other to a map of Cambodia.
Nixon announces that several thousand U.S. troops have entered Cambodia on April 30, 1970. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
A man with long hair and sunglasses moves toward the camera as a crowd of protesters is seen behind him.
A group protesting the shootings at Kent State University in Ohio and the war in Vietnam and Cambodia crowds the steps of the Massachusetts Statehouse in Boston on May 5, 1970. Joe Dennehy/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Despite Kissinger’s brilliance, his determination to do what he believed was right led him to create a dysfunctional Oval Office culture that tolerated elected officials doing whatever was necessary to avoid accountability. The decision to prioritize power over norms and institutions—in pursuit of grand strategy, as the film convincingly argues—paved the way to Watergate. Kissinger’s penchant for secrecy and his obsession with stopping opponents at all costs grew out of the Cambodia operations being exposed. Together with his willingness to work outside the normal processes of decision-making, Kissinger’s instincts shaped an “anything goes” mentality in the White House. The administration never stopped trying to plug leaks and intimidating perceived domestic enemies, all in the name of doing what its members thought was best for the country. Whereas Nixon initially dismissed the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times as irrelevant because the material dealt with his predecessors (Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson), Kissinger convinced his boss to clamp down on the freedom of the press.
Just as damaging as the methods Kissinger used to implement his policies were the sacrifices that he insisted upon when turning a blind eye to the internal politics of allied countries.
Realpolitik could be devastating on the ground. The filmmakers expertly use still images, video, and audio to expose those harsh realities. The “lesser evils” Kissinger believed were necessary to tolerate included support for a brutal government in Pakistan that engaged in ferocious state violence. In Chile, Kissinger shaped U.S. policy that allowed the military overthrow of a democratically elected regime in 1973 and resulted in the reign of General Augusto Pinochet, who systematically violated human rights. Toward the end of the second episode, viewers hear—while seeing still photos of many other victims of the Khmer Rouge—from Cambodian American political scientist Sophal Ear, who recounts how his family was directly impacted by policies that Kissinger helped to put into place: “They were all supposed to be well intended decisions. My father who died, my oldest brother who’s still missing to this day. Are they the victims of geopolitics and of decisions made with good intensions but that led to disaster? Yes absolutely.”
A side by side photo shows two boys in suits and a man in a suit wearing glasses.
Left: Kissinger at the age of 11 with his 10-year-old brother Walter in pre-World War II Germany. Right: A portrait of Kissinger as U.S. secretary of state in 1973.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; U.S. Department of State
According to the featured experts, Kissinger learned the wrong lessons from his experiences with Nazi Germany. By keeping his eye trained so high above the ground, not only did he accept rampant political violence and repression but crafted foreign policies that strengthened those very forces. In doing so, his policies intensified the exact kind of instability that he promised to avoid. U.S. bombs from Kissinger’s watch “are still blowing off the legs of little kids,” as Barack Obama noted in 2016, asking, “In what way did that strategy promote our interests?”
The price of Kissinger’s diplomatic decisions was known at the time. The film does not devote time to Kissinger’s legendary battles with Washington Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who sought to predicate Nixon’s détente efforts with the USSR on the Soviets letting persecuted Jews emigrate.
Some of the most fascinating parts of the documentary revolve around the negotiations in the Soviet Union over SALT I. One of the most bizarre stories centers on Kissinger’s discovering that the Russian copy machine—which he needed to make copies of the final treaty for everyone to sign—was broken. Thinking on his feet, John Negroponte recalls, Kissinger grabbed the treaty and held it up to the chandelier through which he knew the KGB was monitoring and asked the general on the other end to make and send over six copies right away.
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A scene from the documentary Kissinger.PBS
But such lighter moments, as well as commentary about breathtaking achievements with the USSR and China, are overwhelmed by the potency of other footage. Watching the barrage of bombs falling from planes during the Christmas bombings in 1972 or, even worse, their calamitous impact on the ground, is overwhelming. The images of broken bodies, abandoned skulls, and wrecked infrastructure in Cambodia in the mid-1970s is a scathing reminder of what this all meant to the regular people living through the era.
Two men lean in the frame of a tall window flanked by arm chairs.
Kissinger and Nixon in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington on Feb. 10, 1971. The National Archives and Records Administration
Was Kissinger a brilliant diplomat, or a war criminal? The narrative method of the documentary offers a refreshing alternative to the black-and-white lens through which many have debated his career. Drawing on a superb array of visual sources, the film features insightful experts who navigate the complexities and contradictions that are an inevitable part of understanding a man whose career spanned so many landmark moments.
Yet, as a whole, the episodes also make clear that the long-term costs of Kissinger’s style of politics were enormously destructive to democratic institutions. By treating governing norms and political processes as expendable, he and Nixon established a dangerous precedent that would erode guardrails that citizens depend on to assure that elected officials remain accountable to the electorate and Constitution. By accepting governments that were guilty of egregious human rights violations as part of U.S. foreign policy, the administration jettisoned certain red lines that diminished trust and confidence in many parts of the world about the democratic intentions of the nation. Indeed, in the 1976 Republican primaries, Ronald Reagan made détente a prime target. Reagan ferociously attacked Kissinger for being too weak against the Soviets and demanding an even more militaristic approach.
Whereas Kissinger and Nixon undertook all of these measures with a compelling policy objective—creating a balance of power between dominant regimes that limited the risk of nuclear war and totalitarian expansion—in recent years, the nation has witnessed a president approach foreign policy with a similar Machiavellian mindset but without any clear strategic objective. Donald Trump and his advisors ignore norms, shatter institutions, and breach human rights in pursuit of power. In 2025, it has become normal for the military to conduct lethal military strikes on boats in the Caribbean based on unsubstantiated claims that they are filled with gang members trafficking drugs to the United States.
In many ways, it is thus true that we live in Kissinger’s world.
