Global villain or strategic genius? Neither, asserts new book on Henry Kissinger

From UW Communications

Author: “What are your core moral principles - the principles you would not violate?”

Henry Kissinger: “I am not prepared to share that yet.”

This peculiar exchange hints at one of the central themes of a new book about the enigmatic statesman, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century,” written by University of Wisconsin-Madison historian Jeremi Suri. In examining Kissinger’s complicated and controversial legacy, Suri creates a portrait of a man whose political career was motivated by deep moral convictions, yet the outcomes of many of his policies were viewed as morally horrendous.

“What I am interested in is how can someone who is so smart — and entered politics for moral reasons, because the experience of the Holocaust loomed so large in his life — how does someone like that produce results such as the bombing of Vietnam?”

While many books have been written about Kissinger’s policies, Suri says his book is the first to offer a deeper understanding of the man based on Kissinger’s remarkable life history. Suri conducted intensive research on all phases, including Kissinger’s childhood in Furth, Germany; the disturbing rise of Hitler and his family’s status as Jewish-German refugees in New York City; his return to occupied Germany as an American soldier in World War II; his Harvard-educated rise to international prominence as a Cold War strategist; and his foreign policy counsel to nearly every president of the modern era.

 

Suri’s book examines how these life experiences — especially Kissinger’s Jewishness — impacted the way he viewed the world and its threats. Suri also had unprecedented access to the man himself, getting the opportunity over three years to have more than a dozen sit-down interviews with Kissinger.

New Southeast Asian Studies Publications

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the University of Wisconsin Press announce two new publications in their New Perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies, edited by Professors Alfred W. McCoy, Kris Olds (Managing Editor), R. Anderson Sutton, and Thongchai Winichakul. The books are: Viet Nam: Borderless Histories, edited by Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid; and Pretext for Mass Murder, by John Roosa.

Deputy British Ambassador on Climate Change

Alan Charlton, Deputy British Ambassador to the United States, focused on global climate change in a talk on the Madison campus February 28. For press coverage, click on the URL below.

http://www.dailycardinal.com/news/ambassador-focuses-on-climate-change.html

The Capital Times: Protest in France sees law as slap against young workers

By Aaron Nathans, The Capital Times

French students and young workers are fighting a new labor law in the streets because it cements their status as second-class members of the workforce, said panelists at a University of Wisconsin-Madison forum.

Jonathan Zeitlin, a UW-Madison professor of sociology and public affairs at the La Follette Institute, said young French people are employed with precarious contracts that don’t give them more than a few months’ job security. The new law would “institutionalize second-class status” for those under 26, he said.

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=79045&ntpid=19

AIDS course explores ‘perfect ecology’ of a killer

by Brian Mattmiller, UW-Madison Communications

Few infectious diseases in human history have posed more public health challenges than HIV/AIDS, a disease that has emerged in the past three decades to infect more than 40 million people worldwide.

But it is not only the medical challenges of AIDS that make the disease so vexing. Behavior, politics, economics, ideology and culture have all played a role in fostering “a perfect ecology” for the pandemic, one that will require more than just medicine to control.

A new course at UW-Madison is exploring the AIDS pandemic from all of these varied points of view. Global AIDS: Interdisciplinary Perspectives has attracted undergraduate students from biology and medicine, political science, foreign language and history who are looking for a bigger-picture understanding of the disease… Click here for the entire story.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/12098.html