Intelligence, to Work Together over the whole region. Once they find a job, more, more education, good government, they will coexist. They will try to keep this. But if there frustrated, humiliated, marginalized, i think this will create instability. We have a lot to money there it should be spent by wise guide of the west in the region to make it bigger and in this case we will have a definitely middle east. Even put in said in a recent address is that there are mercenaries and he even knows the price at which you can buy them back. Youre presenting us with a different view than what is happening there. This is an organized government. They have health care system. Can you give us better information then what were receiving . In addition to your book, for example our children going to school . What is happening . We hear about recruiting but how will that change in the coming year quest marks to thank you so much. So we see the pictures of the executions in the brutality and the chaos that might be present in the Islamic State. Can you say just a bit more about the daytoday administration, the way health and education in Public Services are being done . A year ago i was giving a talk at a book fair. While i was talking and then after that there was a signing ceremony. A man came to me with his two daughters. He said to me, i arrived three days ago. I said you look very westernized. He said sir, it is the most secure part of iraq. [inaudible] he said people in the middle east, they are looking for security. Theyre looking for lawn order. Before the Islamic State there were several militias there. War lords that were terrorizing the people. Now you have one dominant organization. The safety is there, the police is there, so he said the needs are the people are met. If you dont provoke them, them, if you accept their laws, at least temporarily, its safe. [inaudible] this is a very wrong concept, these are highly educated people. They brought their expertise to the Islamic State. It is very brutal, but it is a modern state. In the end of every month, everybody has food and medicine without differentiation. So those people are running the Islamic State. Water is running, elect the city is running. The problem that the majority of the people, they try to live under this rule. It is brittle and i wouldnt live one day under the Islamic State. I saw a remarkable picture a couple of days ago of a city worker in rocca fixing the water main under a street. He had the uniform on and he was part of the Public Service of the Water Department in rocca. We have kept you very late this evening. It is almost time for you to wake up in london so we very much appreciate you giving up and spending such time with us [applause]. I invite you to thank him [applause]. Im really thankful and i wish i could have be there with you. I was looking forward to coming to you but unfortunately that these a question surprised me from actually being among you and knowing you facetoface which is a great loss honestly for me. We look forward to hosting you when your next book comes out which is probably three months from now. [laughter] thank you very much. Good evening. [applause]. Your watching book to be, television for serious readers. Next on books book tv after words, he discusses his book kissinger which looks at the early life of Henry Kissinger. He is interviewed by carla and roberts. Welcome prof. Ferguson. Thank you so much for doing this. Its nice to be here. This is the first of a two book authorized biography. The book has been written by suggestion and approval of Henry Kissinger. How does that happen question. When he suggested this to be which was more than ten years ago, i said yes i will be willing to do this, but one condition that i i have a free hand, you have to kind of accept that if you asked me to do this you give me access to your private papers, i will write write what i think is the truth. That is incidentally the basis of what i wrote the previous book on. He agreed to that. I think i wouldnt have taken it on on any other basis. How did it happen . Did you know him beforehand . Did he know you beforehand . He read my stuff and we met at a party in london. I say this story in the front of the book for full disclosure. We met at the party and sometime after that the subject came up and i think he was attracted to the idea of a scholarly biography being written. When he put the question to me, i initially said no and he then wrote me a very Henry Kissinger letter. Wasnt a letter and or an email . It was a letter. The letter said to the effect, what a great shame. Just when i had decided you were the ideal man to do this and just as i had found 150 boxes of my private papers that i thought were lost, and just a week or two later i was looking at those papers. Ive been a bit daunted before because it is a difficult life to write, its controversial and documented in all those difficult things to do. Within a few hours i thought i really have to take this on. So this is not a man who is undocumented. He has written his own men moores extensively. Why do you think he wanted this book written . One of the points i make in the book is he is by training a historian. A historian knows that the memoirs are different from the histories from the biographies. His three volumes, after all, cover mostly his time in government and had nothing before 1969. It was half of his life that he hadnt written about. Walt isaacsons book is essentially a journalist book with interviews and very few documents there. I think the idea was somebody should write a scholarly biography, based on the document in the archival sources because that simply didnt exist although there were a whole bunch of books you could find in libraries about kissinger, and most of them are not based on much more than hearsay. I think the argument for scholarly biography is a compelling one and as it turns out it was good. I was lucky because that hole. From his earlier stage growing up in germany right down to the moment Richard Nixon offered him a job as National Security adviser in 1968 have largely been neglected by previous writers. Youre often described as a conservative historian. Do you think he chose to impart for that reason . Was the other unnamed person he offered it to a conservative journalist . Yes he was i think its more important that i am british because i think its some advantage of being an outsider in writing a work of american history, oddly enough. One characteristic feature feature of his life has been the extraordinary that has raised on ever since. The generation that came of age during the vietnam war. Im somebody who can come at this as history. I dont have memorabilia from woodstock in my attic. Thats important. On the question of conservatism i think its worth to add a loop because its different if youve grown up in the u. K. Its not republicanism, the u. S. Version. I am not by any means a republican in my politics now that i live in the United States. Im a conservative in the way that Henry Kissinger was a conservative. Im sort of a year p. M. Conservative. He often feel like a liberal if youre a european conservative in the United States because things that american conservatives say are completely shocking to you. In the same kind of way that kissinger is concerned with the year p in variant, so is mine and that might be one reason he thought it would work. When you say european conservative, are you talking about the social issues . Yes the social issue. Those things i feel are not the main of politics. Our National Security issues for instance. Are its often that people get confused that there is an argument going on about National Security. I was very critical of president obama but i was also critical of his predecessor. I am extremely radical of the invasion of iraq and the way it was handled. So i had been drawn into a debate about u. S. Foreign policy from the moment really that i set foot in the u. S. I probably approached it rather naively thinking i could criticize both republicans and democrats. Its hard to be in that position. You are never expected to be on one side of the other but i think on National Security issues im more of an independent. Im not sure, theres no question that theres been a convergence since the end of the cold war and you know there are people on the left to saw the humanitarian challenges and people on the right who were isolationist. Im not sure what an independent is rather than somebody who looks at it casebycase . Right or at least some of you recognizes there cant be a simple party line on these National Security issues. Interestingly, i found that kissinger, as a young man was in the same position. He thought of himself as a conservative. He didnt identify as a liberal in 1950s or 1960 harbored. He was appalled at the convention in the 1960s. [inaudible] thats one of the interesting things and then they explain, he has enemies on the left and he also has many enemies on the right. The book is called the idealist which is a rather interesting take on kissinger who is described as the ultimate realists. Can you explain to the audience at home what you mean by an idealist when it comes to kissinger when we think it might be communism . Its true that many think of him as a a realist and the names they throw around our maca valley and maca pitch. Maybe its not surprising that people have fallen into that trap he really wasnt a realist. There are realists. [inaudible] when i started to read his writings which i begin to think not many people have done, i was really struck by something that they were in fact critical of realism. And then i dug deeper into his intellectual development. Three things are striking. He was highly critical of Foreign Policy and dictators. They thought they were pursuing a narrow approach to Foreign Policy. Number one, they had been suspicious of what he saw as the realists. Number two, he comes to harvard and he is a rather pushy undergraduate and they say go away and read a manual and come back when youre finished not expecting to see him again and underestimating kissinger. Thats actually been the problem that on the one hand if the experience of freedom is real, but they cant he concludes that there is another way of reconciling and ultimately the choice is a real one and freedom as he defines it is this experience he also rejected materialism. He also viewed materials views of history. If our growth rate is higher than their growth weight then we will win the cold war. So i think on those three counts he emerges as a realist. Although you have many quotes in the book that make him sound as if he is an idealist and certainly someone who is horrified by the appeaser and believes the u. S. Is more likely to win on ideals then materialistic issues, at the same time his writing and other biographies are filled with pretty brutal quotes as well. I think he quotes kissinger as pushing back asking why is it our business how the government felt . He defends saying covert action should not be described as missionary work. That doesnt sound to me like an idealist like someone who doesnt feel the u. S. Has to be defended by human rights because of their oppressive nature. There are two answers to that. One is youre really talking about volume to which i havent written about. Theres no telling what the subtitle will be. Im a little cautious since i am still doing the research. I havent made up my mind until i plow through a lot of documents and sort through a lot of answers. I think most are saying that we cant really understand what kissinger and nixon and ford served or what they were trying to achieve if we just look at isolated cases and throw up our hands because these isolated countries have to be seen as part of a grand strategy. Most are critical of kissinger tend to focus on a particular issue and disregard the strategic framework. The strategic framework as he said in his early time is that there may be other things that you have to sacrifice to that and. If your second goal is to use an opening to china to put pressure on the soviets, then you may have to make compromises with the pakistani government. If you have no other concerns you might not make that. I think any judgment you make about Foreign Policy has to be done not on a casebycase basis but in a strategic framework. It is the nature of statesmanship that you have to make choices in your free to make these choices. But there really thats the problem and the challenge of the statesman that there are sometimes no good options. There are just evils that you have to choose between. All that is persuasive but i wouldnt put that in the real policy camp. Are you seeking stability for the sake of peace. Were having to look the other way in pakistan or his joint decision for the bombing of cambodia. You do some of this in the book, his role in chile these sound like realpolitik to me and they are the reason he is so controversial himself. In january 1969, the question is does he remain an idealist . Does he adhere to the principles that he set out as an intellectual . Or did the experience of government change him into a realist . That question i have yet to answer and it is clearly central to volume two of this biography this biography, it covers the first half of his life. In that period, although he was involved in government, for example, it was actually mostly a collection of books and articles. I think it is fascinating, he was hit by a bus in january january 1969. It seems to me that his contributions, at a time when. [inaudible] he argued, you have to have historical framework. History is part of a persons character. I think that was very important. Think about central problem he defines the problem of conjecture. Thats when he gets to the heart of some of the questions youre raising. He said not only do you have to choose between evils, but you also dont really know, you may take a difficult preemptive action and prevent disaster, but if youre successful, the early decision may get you no payoff because in preempting disaster you basically prevent it from happening and you pay rent people from suffering it. If you get lucky people might think you are tremendously wise. The temptation is, to kick the can down the road. You have to ask yourself how does this fit into the ground strategy but also at the time the decision was taken was this the right decision at the time could you say with confidence that this is the lesser evil of any two courses of actions . Thats the ive set for myself. As you said the book began with his childhood in germany and you note several times that he places an impact on that child childhood and the fact that he lost many friends and many members of his family to the holocaust. You quotes about his experience discussing about his memories of the friends and family he lost in the holocaust. Whats going on . Im a Jewish American and a lot of my attitudes about my horror whats go on in the world along with my responsibility to fix things comes out of that past and i certainly didnt look to the holocaust. Whats going on there and i would say in this alleged origin. What you think is happening with him . Ive tried in the book to tell the story as accurate as i can. It is a remarkable one. He grew up in a part of germany and as he grew up he became a teenager and the nazi regime. They had to flee six years after leaving in a u. S. Army form. He witnessed the liberation of a concentration camp and then discovered after the war was over that nearly all those family members who had not left germany had died including his grandmother so clearly these were searing experiences. I think the reason he subsequently thought to downplay them was the tendency of earlier rights to describe so much importance to those investments that his subsequence development was a kind of response to trauma. He is very clear in the letters that he writes home to his parents in the late 1940s and the things that he writes about the war experience that he is not traumatized and its something that he explicitly says. I think we need to understand that the war experience was not quite as we might imagine it. Those who were too young to experience it, for example i think its very striking that he writes a short essay, the eternal jew really for his own use to record the experience after seeing the liberation of the concentration camp. Its a remarkable document which i reproduce in full because it discusses witnessing the holocaust and at the same time the war had changed him in a very important way. It had destroyed his religious faith and he and his younger brother had to confront their parents with this change. He writes very openly, i am different. This has changed me. It has made me fundamentally different. I no longer can really believe in what you brought me up to believe. Its that moment and i think it explains his jewishness. Hes a man who identifies as a jew but hes not a believer. Hes not an observant jew. I think what i tried to do in the book is show how he arrives at that decision after that orthodox upbringing that he had. Being a believer is different than being orthodox. For any religion. Absolutely. Are you suggesting that he is no longer believing that god existed because of his experience in germany . Thats not explicit in anything that he said. He is not writing to say i am a reformed jew. That was definitely not the message. He did not subsequently. [inaudible] in that sense i think it was a loss of his state. But he didnt deny his jewishness. Its not as if he was looking to convert to christianity. On the contrary. He is a jew but he is not a believer and thats an important consequence of the war experience. Its unusual, but its well documented that he spoke with his parents about what this meant for the rest of his life. Idealism, doesnt that relate to each other . He doesnt subscribe to a traditional deity. He may acknowledge a supreme being in purpose but he is much more interested in the freedom of choice. That allknowing deity plays very little role. So to move it from that notion to another, one of the things i hadnt realized is that he really made his name it and became something of iraq star at a young age by writing about Nuclear Weapons. Being a strong advocate of the concept of limited war and limited use of