Segregated into crowded university living quarters for Jewish students—a Jewish ghetto at postwar Harvard—Kissinger’s fellow students remember that he was a grave and super-serious individual, a premature curmudgeon. Herbert Englehardt, who lived downstairs from him, recounts that Kissinger was an outcast among his peers, including other immigrant Jews: “He was deadly serious all the time. He never liked to chase after women. His famous wit and nuance were not in evidence when he was an undergraduate.”¹⁵

As a student, a non-tenured lecturer, and later a professor, Kissinger combined firsthand policy knowledge with intensive academic study, writing extensively about how the United States should mobilize diplomatic and military capabilities for the protection of basic values. In a series of letters that he wrote as an early graduate student, which his mentors conveyed to Paul Nitze, the director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, Kissinger criticized the “fundamental timidity and at times superficiality of conception” behind American policy. Accordingly, he advocated the mobilization of public opinion in support of the use of force, possibly including nuclear weapons, in order to protect the institutions threatened by communist expansion. To avoid the mistakes associated with appeasement, he argued, the United States needed to combine conspicuous displays of force with a steadfast commitment to a world devoid of extremist ideologies. Commenting on the Korean War after the devastating Chinese attack on American forces north of the thirty-eighth parallel, he wrote:

At Harvard, Kissinger founded the famous International Seminar, which invited young, politically ambitious individuals from Western Europe and other non-communist states to discuss common intellectual and governance challenges. Through this program, which he directed from 1951 to 1967, Kissinger created a special niche for himself as a figure who nurtured vital links between societies. In fact, he established himself as a bridge between the intellectual and policy communities, bringing together representatives from both groups in his seminar. Nevertheless, Kissinger continued to confront frequent prejudice from those who did not consider him either a “real” scholar or a “real” practitioner. Yet, in reality, he derived enormous power from his ability to move between these communities, and by the late 1950s Kissinger had become one of the most influential Cold War cosmopolitans.

Cosmopolitanism was a source of intense nationalism for Kissinger. And yet, perhaps ironically, his experience and his understanding of foreign societies confirmed a strong belief in American exceptionalism. As a uniquely wealthy, open, and free society, the United States was far from perfect, but it had a great deal to offer countries that had suffered centuries of war and devastation. Like other cosmopolitans, Kissinger lamented the naïve optimism and superficiality of many Americans. And like other cosmopolitans, Kissinger also recognized that the sources of American naïveté and superficiality were an enduring, and endearing, national strength. Only the United States had the reserves of power, energy, and ambition to build a new future for Europe and other continents amidst the destruction and disillusion of two world wars. Americans expected too much, Kissinger believed, but they had the inner will to make a unique difference. The United States was, according to this logic, the only truly great power left standing after 1945.

Kissinger defined himself as a figure who would build “spiritual links” between peoples and societies, asserting the power and righteousness of the American state in its global battle against extremism. He used his international experiences to highlight the exceptionalism of the American nation in contrast to the violence and hatred characteristic of other societies. He also mobilized his international connections to promote the American dream against its critics at home and abroad. The International Seminar, in Kissinger’s words, built “a spiritual link between a segment of the foreign youth and the United States.”¹⁷

Drawing on his own background as a member of the troubled new generation of citizensacross the globe for whom “war has come to be a normal state,” Kissinger pledged to “create nuclei of understanding of the true values of a democracy and of spiritual resistance to communism.” “A basis for international understanding would thus be created among groups of promising young individuals,” Kissinger predicted. On the American side, he called for the selection of a “committee of inwardly alive, interested United States students”—often recent immigrants, like himself, who would serve as partners and guides for visiting figures to America.¹⁸

International agreements—a central facet of foreign affairs—required, according to Kissinger, both flexibility and ballast. The statesman had to make compromises, but he also had to protect principal moral values. Diplomacy was about cross-cultural exchange, not cultural relativism. For Kissinger, the American state—the greatest contemporary embodiment of Western civilization—was the basis of all diplomacy and the touchstone for all international values. In his view, there could be no human rights, no justice, and no social progress without a powerful American state to support and protect these pursuits. Moreover, according to this outlook, diplomatic agreements could guarantee further advancements in international politics only if they strengthened the American state. Kissinger imbued his adopted country with the spiritual substance that made it both a means and an end for the goals he set out in his foreign policy strategy.

Kissinger was personally and emotionally attached to the American dream, which was, as he saw it, embodied in the United States government. His intense patriotic nationalism—quite common to other recent arrivals at the time—was the foundation on which he built the professional and policy connections that would define his career. It was this devotion that made Kissinger almost incapable of criticizing the American state. His emotional connection to it, born of his immigration, overrode analytical judgment.

Historians have become much too enamored with the assumption that nationalism is “constructed” and “imagined.” Such labels make personal attachment to state and society sound ephemeral and superficial. This clichéd perspective misses the true depth of feeling for the nation state exhibited by individuals like Kissinger. As a refugee saved from almost certain extermination, he was “born again” in the United States. The American government saved him, made him a citizen, and provided him with professional opportunities. It became the fount for the values he would pursue. In truth, it was so foundational that it justified the violation of other values in its defense.