"Leadership: Six Studies in World Leadership," Henry Kaufman

 At a time when the world sits precariously, in an apparent Thucydides Trap, between a self-indulgent West and an assertive China, this book has relevance.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” Henry Kissinger

February 18, 2023

 

“For a nation to pretend to total autonomy is a form of nostalgia;

reality dictates that every nation – even the most powerful – adapt its

conduct to the capability and purposes of its neighbors and rivals.”

                                                                                                                Henry Kissinger (1923-)

                                                                                                                Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy 2022

 

The leaders Kissinger discusses were forged in the crucible of the Second World War, the three oldest as players, the three youngest as observers. They were all classically educated, at a time when character was emphasized; they were intelligent, aspirant, and advanced to positions of authority based on merit. They had a positive effect on the world they inherited. Kissinger writes: “…[In] the unending contest between the willed and the inevitable, [they] understood that what seems inevitable becomes so by human agency.”

 

Another author might have selected different leaders; this list comprises those whom Kissinger knew, worked with, and respected. The central foreign policy challenges of this period – the end of World War II through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and the building of a world order; the Cold War; and the struggle between liberty and tyranny. While each was unique, these six had in common directness and boldness, and they were unafraid of offending entrenched interests.

 

Through biographical sketches, Kissinger presents a history of those forty-five years, which saw the economic and political revival of former Axis powers, the end of European imperialism, the birth and struggle of new nations, and the collapse of the Soviet Union:

 

           Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967): He served as Mayor of Cologne from 1917 until 1933. “As an adult,” Kissinger writes, “Adenauer had experienced the German state’s three post-Bismarck configurations…under the Kaiser…under the Weimar Republic…and under Hitler, culminating in self-destruction and disintegration.” He was elected the Federal Republic of Germany’s first post-War Chancellor. In ten years, his Country had become a full partner in Europe and the Atlantic Alliance.

 

            Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970): “A sensitive reader and author of poetry as a child…The virtue of self-mastery, sketched in his journal, was to become a central feature of his character.” During the War, he kept alive the concept of sovereign France, saying she must be on the side of victory. “If she is,” Kissinger quotes from de Gaulle’s journal, “she will become what she was before, a great and independent nation. That, and that alone, is my goal.” De Gaulle restored the dignity of France.

 

           Richard Nixon (1913-1994): Kissinger served as Nixon’s Secretary of State, so knew him well. He doesn’t shy from his faults. There was the decisive and thoughtful Nixon, the one he describes in this book. But there was also the insecure Nixon “uncertain of his authority and plagued by a nagging self-doubt.” We are told that Nixon’s foreign policy views were “more nuanced than his critics’ perception of them.” “The essence of Nixon’s diplomacy lay in his disciplined application of American power and national purpose…,” with the opening of China his principal accomplishment.

 

           Anwar Sadat (1918-1981): “Of the individuals profiled in this volume,” Kissinger writes, “Sadat was the one whose philosophical and moral vision constituted the greatest breakthrough for his time and context.” “His policies,” he adds, “flowed organically from his personal reflections and his own interior transformations.” He believed “that Egypt’s freedom would be achieved through independence…His aim was to resurrect an ancient dialogue between Jews and Arabs…their histories were meant to intertwine.” This he did, as Egypt’s President from October 1970, until he was assassinated on October 6, 1981. 

 

Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015): The first Prime Minister of an independent Singapore, he served from 1959 until 1990. Singapore is an authoritarian state, but Lee’s rigorous enforcement of the city-state’s laws has made it one of the least corrupt nations in the world. In a world of relaxed Western morals, which Lee saw as “freedom run amok,” he was a pragmatist. He preferred a market economy to statism, because it produces higher growth rates. He sought talented foreigners and brought women into the workforce, because he could not achieve his goals without them. “I was never,” Kissinger quotes Lee, “a prisoner of any theory. What guided me were reasons of reality.”

 

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013): She was brought up in rooms above her father’s store, “lacking hot water and an indoor bathroom.” A graduate of Oxford with a degree in chemistry, she was turned down for a research job at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI): “This woman is headstrong, obstinate, and dangerously self-opinionated,” was ICI’s internal assessment. Ironically, those qualities led to her political success. Thatcher, Kissinger writes, “was an implacable advocate of self-determination…in the right of citizens to choose their own form of government…and in the responsibility of states to exercise sovereignty on their own behalf.” She restored England’s economy, her sense of dignity and self-respect, in a world where she was no longer hegemonic. 

 

The world in which these six leaders lived had changed from an hereditary-aristocratic model prior to World War I to a middleclass-meritocratic one in the post-World War II period. During that time, the sun set on the British Empire, affecting both Egypt and Singapore. World War II saw the collapse of France in 1940, the near collapse of England the same year, and the devastation of Germany by 1945. The United States emerged as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth. None of the six profiled grew up privileged. Two of them – Adenauer and Sadat – spent time in prison. De Gaulle and Lee had to deal with enemy occupiers of their countries. All were students of history.

 

Henry Kissinger has provided an intimate and masterful history of that time, with an emphasis on six individuals who played out-sized roles. In his conclusion about Thatcher he writes, in words appropriate to all six: “But only love of country and her people can explain how she wielded power and all that she achieved with it.”

"Madame Fourcade's Secret War," Lynne Olson

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Lynne Olson

April 17, 2022

 

“Although they were from varied walks of life and political backgrounds, a moral common denominator overrode 

all their differences: a refusal to be silenced and an iron determination to fight against the destruction of freedom and human dignity. In doing so, they, along with other members of the resistance, saved the soul and honor of France.”

                                                                                                                     Lynne Olson (1949-)

                                                                                                                     Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, 2019

 

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo speaks to the wizard Gandalf: “’I wish it had not happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do we all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” Lynne Olson’s story is of a young woman who lived in such times and the decisions she made. 

 

Using her second husband’s surname, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born into wealth and privilege to an expatriate French family in Shanghai in 1910. Seven years later, upon the death of her father, her mother moved the family back to Paris. She grew into a beautiful young woman: “Cool and elegant, with porcelain skin…” At seventeen, she married and bore two children but soon separated, as she wanted more than to be a wife and mother. Her first husband was an army captain and through him she met many young men who would serve in the war to come, including Charles de Gaulle. When France capitulated in June 1940, she fled Paris with her children to the resort town of Vichy where she became involved in espionage.

 

French resistance was divided into three groups – saboteurs who blew things up, like communication and rail lines; those who manned escape lines, helping shot-down British pilots and others escape back to Britain, and espionage – spies, messengers and radio operators who gathered intelligence on German-commandeered factories, naval bases and gun emplacements, etc. and sent it on to the Allies in London. Madame Fourcade was involved with the latter. The group she joined, and of which she became its leader, was known as Alliance and became the Allies largest and most important espionage network in occupied France. They provided schedules for departing German U-Boats from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, and they supplied a fifty-foot-long map of the beaches at Normandy prior to D-Day; they radioed to London information on Germany’s V1 and V2 rockets, which allowed the Allies to bomb launch bunkers in northern France. Three thousand individuals served Alliance, of whom 438 were captured and executed by the Nazis. (Another 150 survived captivity.) Because the code names assigned each agent was an animal or bird, the organization was known to the Germans as Noah’s Ark, the title Fourcade took for her post-War memoir. Fourcade chose the name Hedgehog for herself, a small mammal, beloved by writers from Louis Carroll to Beatrix Potter, that protects itself from the fiercest predators by rolling into a ball with its spines extruding.

 

Madame Fourcade had to overcome the chauvinism of most male members of her organization, as well as those in England who Alliance served; she had to constantly move, changing her name and her appearance; she was once smuggled over the Pyrenees in a trunk to meet her British counterpart in Madrid; she was captured and escaped from a Nazi prison; she rarely saw her two children. After the war, her exploits were initially ignored: a spy was less visible than a resistance fighter blowing up rail tracks, and in the early years of the war she had coordinated with the Vichy government, which was a no-no with Gaullists. But most important, remembrances of her war-time leadership were initially shunned because she was a woman. However, as the years went on, that changed. When she died at age 79 in 1989, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides where Napoleon is buried.

 

She was proud of the role Alliance played in helping save France during the almost five years of German occupation. She led the effort to return to France the remains of those members of Alliance who had died in German prisons. In her memoir, Fourcade wrote: “The connection formed by a threat to one’s country is the strongest connection of all. People adopt one another, march together. Only capture or death can tear them apart.” It is a spirit alive today in Ukraine.

 

As Tolkien wrote, none of us chooses the time and place to be born. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born at an inauspicious time, yet she accepted the fate that was hers. Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is the tale of a brave young woman who used intelligence, guile and persistence to help free her beloved France. It tells of how ordinary people can and will do extraordinary things.