But Enough About You: Essays (31 page)

—
The New York Times
, January 2003

Ah, warm and fuzzy China. Torturing and jailing dissidents, hacking into Gmail, cozying up to the worst regimes on earth, refusing to float the renminbi, spewing fluorocarbons into the ozone, building up its navy, and stealing military secrets—all while enabling America’s fiscal incontinence by buying all our T-bills. The $1.1 trillion question at the start of what’s been called “The Chinese Century” is simple: Friend or enemy? Frenemy?

While Henry Kissinger doesn’t quote Mario Puzo, Don Corleone’s maxim, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer,” echoes throughout his grand, sweeping tutorial,
On China
. Kissinger has been the go-to China wise man since his first secret meeting there in 1971. In the intervening decades, he’s made fifty-odd trips back, often carrying critical messages between leaders, defusing crises, or pleading with each side to understand the other’s position. His perennial ambassadorship-at-large puts readers right in the room with Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao.

It also overflows with a lifetime of privileged observations. Here’s a great one: Why did China invade Vietnam in 1979? To “teach it a lesson,” Kissinger writes, for its border clashes with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. But when the Soviet Union failed to come to Vietnam’s aid, China concluded it had “touched the Tiger’s buttocks” with impunity. “In retrospect,” Kissinger explains, “Moscow’s relative passivity . . . can be seen as the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. One wonders whether the Soviets’ decision a year later to intervene in Afghanistan was prompted in part by an attempt to compensate for their ineffectuality in supporting Vietnam against the Chinese.” As such, Kissinger concludes, the 1979 clash “can be considered a turning point of the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the time.” Of course. Just the proverbial game of dominoes—with the pieces very widely separated. As for the psychology behind China’s extraordinary death toll in Vietnam, more on that in a minute.

While Kissinger can sometimes appear to be an apologist for—or explainer-away of—Chinese unwarm and unfuzzy behavior, he demonstrates a profound understanding of the impulses behind that behavior. And those impulses, he believes, go back many thousands of years. During a meeting in the 1990s, then President Jiang Zemin wryly remarked to Kissinger that seventy-eight generations had elapsed since Confucius died in 449 B.C. By my count, we in the United States have seen eight generations since the Declaration of Independence. Rather puts things in perspective.

According to Kissinger there are four key elements to understanding the Chinese mind: Confucianism (“a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion”); Sun Tzu (outsmarting: good; direct conflict: bad); an ancient board game called
wei qi
(which stresses “the protracted campaign”); and China’s “century of humiliation” in the 1800s (karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, you Imperialists?). Actually, make that five: Wei Yuan—a nineteenth-century mid-ranking Confucian mandarin—developed the Chinese concept of “barbarian management,” which was at the core of Mao’s diplomacy with the United States and the Soviet Union. How one wishes China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would change its name to Office of Barbarian Management.

No, sorry, make that six: overwhelming fear of internal disorder or chaos. The resulting gestalt is an absolute imperviousness to foreign pressure. Kissinger recounts a chilly moment when, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng tells him that overreaction by the United States “could even lead to war.” He meant it. Even more chilling were Mao’s repeated, almost gleeful, musings about the prospect of nuclear war. “If the imperialists unleash war on us,” Kissinger recalls him saying, “we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.” Those grim and quite believable words sound as though they came from the last scene of
Dr. Strangelove
. But Kissinger reminds us that during the first Taiwan Strait confrontation in 1955, it was the United States that threatened to use nukes.

Several other episodes since have combined—rightly or wrongly,
as Kissinger might put it—to turn Chinese popular opinion against America: Tiananmen Square; the accidental 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; and the Hainan incident in 2001, when a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. reconnaissance plane and precipitated George W. Bush’s first foreign-policy crisis. Then there are more recent, obvious events, such as the collapse of the American and European financial markets in 2007 and 2008, which stripped much of the luster from our image as the global economic leader. That latter year, as the world’s Olympic athletes gathered in Beijing for a proxy celebration of China’s arrival on the world stage, Washington was busy coping with a distressed Wall Street, two quagmire wars, and three ailing auto companies.

Is Kissinger optimistic about future relations between the United States and China? In a word, yes and no. No, because of a disturbing, emergent “martial spirit” that envisions conflict with the United States as an inevitable consequence of China’s rise—much as the Kaiser’s naval buildup led to World War I. In this Chinese view, the United States is not so much Mao’s famous “paper tiger” but “an old cucumber painted green.” In retrospect, I think I preferred it when we were a paper tiger.

On a more upbeat note, Kissinger explains that despite its unprecedented economic ascendance, China has one or two problems of its own. Its economy has to grow annually by 7 percent—a goal that would leave any Western industrialized nation gasping—or face the dreaded internal unrest. Corruption, meanwhile, is deeply embedded in the economic culture. “It is one of history’s ironies,” he writes, “that Communism, advertised as bringing a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.” Then there is China’s rapidly aging population, which may dwarf our own impending Social Security crisis.

Yet the Chinese may be better equipped, psychologically and philosophically, to withstand the coming shocks than the rest of us. A country that has endured four thousand years of uncounted wars and upheavals, through the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s (tens of millions killed), and man-made calamities such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward (twenty million) and the Cultural Revolution, is nothing if
not resilient. Sun Tzu coined a term,
shi
, which roughly translates to “the art of understanding matters in flux.” Writes Kissinger: “A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution.” The Chinese get it—
shi
happens.

It’s hard to imagine a U.S. president holding such a view, much less expressing it out loud. But by the time one reaches the far shore of this essential book, there’s little doubt that Henry Kissinger, historian and maker of history, Nixon consigliere, and secretary of barbarian management, also takes the long view. Perhaps, from the heights on which he perches, it may be, for better or worse, the only view.

—
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
, June 2011

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields’s sad, often heartbreaking biography,
And So It Goes
, that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did try to flag down Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and booze), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But then Vonnegut’s relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was twenty-one, his mother successfully committed suicide—on Mother’s Day.

It’s a truism that comic artists tend to hatch from tragic eggs. But as Vonnegut, the author of zesty, felicitous sci-fi(esque) novels
such as
Cat’s Cradle
and
Sirens of Titan
and
Breakfast of Champions
might put it, “So it goes.”

Vonnegut’s masterpiece was
Slaughterhouse-Five
, the novelistic account of being present at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945. Between that horror (his job as a POW was to stack and burn the corpses); the mother’s suicide; the early death of a beloved sister, the only woman he seems truly to have loved; serial unhappy marriages; and his resentment that the literary establishment considered him (a mere) writer of juvenile and jokey pulp fiction, Vonnegut certainly earned his status as Man of Sorrows, much as Mark Twain, to whom he is often compared, earned his.

Was Kurt Vonnegut, in fact, just that—a writer one falls for in high school and college and then puts aside, like one of St. Paul’s “childish things,” for sterner stuff?

This vein of anxiety runs through Shields’s diligent, readable, but uneven biography. But the question seems self-answering: When did you last reread
Slaughterhouse
or
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
? That long ago? Okay, but when did you last read
Huckleberry Finn
or
To Kill a Mockingbird
?

Or we could just crunch the numbers: in the first six months of 2005,
Cat’s Cradle
, published the year JFK was assassinated, sold 34,000 copies;
Slaughterhouse
sold 66,000. Most of those are probably being read in the classroom. But so what? You want to shout across the River Styx: “It’s all right! Cheer up! You’re immortal!”

Vonnegut and the other great “comic” (or if you prefer, ironic or tragico-comical-ironic) novelist of World War II, Joseph Heller, are getting their biographical due, almost simultaneously. Tracy Daugherty’s fine biography of Heller was recently published, in time for the fiftieth anniversary of
Catch-22
.

There are some odd synergies. The two men met years after their respective wars, onstage at a literary festival in 1968, and became great friends and eventually neighbors. Heller’s war was up in the air, as a bombardier in the nose cone of a B-25. Vonnegut’s was at ground level, as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, and ultimately beneath ground level, in the basement of Schlachthof-Fünf during the firebombing.

Both men were profoundly, and with respect to their war novels, specifically influenced by the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Both their novels were numerically titled—Heller had to retitle his original
Catch-18
when Leon Uris brought out
Mila 18
.

In a detail that struck me as, well, weird, Vonnegut’s breakthrough moment while he was trying to get a handle on how to write his novel came during a visit to a war buddy—in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. But perhaps most ironic of all is that both their World War II novels ended up being Vietnam novels.

Heller’s appeared in 1961, just as American pacificists were starting to ask, What exactly are we
doing
there? Didn’t the French try this?
Catch-22
became an existential field manual for the antiwar movement, and a must-read for the grunts and soldiers doing the fighting. Vonnegut’s novel came out in March 1969, by which time the question had pretty much been answered. It made him famous—the proverbial “voice of a generation” (always a problematic title)—and a Pied Piper to disaffected American kids. It also made him rich.

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 into squarely bourgeois circumstances. His father, an architect, lost his money in the Depression; his mother, unable to cope without the luxuries to which she had become accustomed, killed herself. (Thanks, Mom.) Kurt’s older brother, Bernard, was the star; he became a physicist and climatologist, experimenting with ways to supercool water, a detail that perhaps seeped into his brother’s fourth novel,
Cat’s Cradle
, in the form of “ice-nine,” the substance that turns all moisture on Earth into a supersolid.

Kurt dropped out of several colleges, but worked while he was there on school or local newspapers, where he learned to write clear, concise, punchy, and often very funny sentences. “Writing that was easy to scan,” Shields tells us, “would become one of the hallmarks of his fiction.” He worked as a reporter at a news bureau in Chicago, covering a city beat, and later as a publicist at General Electric.

“A lot of critics,” Vonnegut would say later with some asperity, “think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.”

He did, cranking out short stories, some of which he sold to “slicks” like
The Saturday Evening Post
; in those years, a single story could earn him the equivalent of six weeks salary at G.E. An editor and old college friend named Knox Burger (to whom Shields dedicates this biography) took him on, publishing him first at
Collier’s
magazine and then at Dell paperbacks before trying to become his agent in 1970. One of Vonnegut’s less admirable traits was his tendency to throw his mentors—decisively—under the bus. He did this not only to Burger, backing out of their representation agreement, but also to the legendary editor Seymour Lawrence.

This, as much else here, does not make for pleasant reading. Vonnegut was Whitmanesque, contradictory, containing multitudes. As a parent, he could be sweet and generous but also aloof, and even, according to one nephew, “cruel” and “scary.” When his sister died of cancer within a day of her husband’s ghastly death in a train wreck, Vonnegut and his wife took in and raised three of their four orphaned children. But the domestic scenes do not read like
Cheaper by the Dozen
.

Shields has a deep affection for his subject and does what he can to rebut charges of hypocrisy, but in this he is not entirely convincing. Vonnegut the staunch anti–Vietnam War spokesman couldn’t be bothered to help his wife campaign for Eugene McCarthy; more disconcerting is the revelation that as an avid purchaser of stocks, he had no qualms about investing in Dow Chemical, maker of napalm. At the least, it seems an odd buy for a survivor of the Dresden firebombing. The champion of saving the planet and the Common Man also, we learn, owned shares in strip-mining companies, malls, and corporations with antiunion views. So it went.