"I've always acted alone. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse. He acts, that's all: aiming at the right spot at the right time."
Henry Kissinger was terribly embarrassed when Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci quoted him describing himself as a character out of Zane Grey. He did not deny that he had said those words—"Why I agreed to it [the interview], I'll never know," he confessed later—but it was a little hard to imagine just how the precise, bespectacled professor of history at Harvard could see himself as a lean, flinty-eyed macho on horseback. Still, in a way Kissinger's self-portrait was not so preposterous as it sounded. Proud, private and consummately confident of his ability, Kissinger has always acted alone, rising to his present eminence with the aid of almost no one but himself.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the German town of Fürth, Kissinger grew up as the Nazis were coming to power, and so found himself an outcast. Heinz, as he was then called, was denied admission to high school, forced to attend an all-Jewish school, and often beaten up by gangs of pro-Nazi toughs on the way.
His family's escape to America in 1938, when Kissinger was 15, hardly ended his sense of isolation. At George Washington High School on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Kissinger generally avoided his classmates, often crossed to the far side of the street when he saw other youngsters approaching. His greatest ambition was to become an accountant.
The Army, in which he enlisted in 1942, changed all that. Kissinger's linguistic ability quickly won him a post as a translator and interrogator in counterintelligence and, eventually, a job teaching modern German history to officers. He also raised his sights. Germanborn Fritz Kraemer, an Army instructor who became his friend and mentor, informed him that "gentlemen do not go to the College of the City of New York," so Kissinger obtained a scholarship and went to Harvard.
Once there, he did brilliantly, winning an A.B. in government in 1950 and a doctorate four years later. By 1954 he was teaching at Harvard and serving as consultant to several Government agencies, including the National Security Council's Psychological Strategy Board. He was also writing, making major contributions to the literature of international relations, demonstrating ways in which the display of force could and should be used to avert international catastrophe.
His earliest books—Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, The Necessity for Choice and The Troubled Partnership—all called for balancing military power in order to achieve greater international stability. A 1968 study of Bismarck, whom Kissinger admires for his grasp of geopolitical realities, argued the importance of restraining contending forces by manipulating their antagonisms and of moving decisively to carry out policy decisions. "A policy that awaits events," wrote Kissinger, "is likely to become their prisoner."