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The first khbrknews I met Henry Kissinger, he tried to hijack my car – sort of. As we waited at the entrance of the Bayerischer Hof Hotel after a dinner at the Munich Security Conference in his native Germany, he gingerly descended the stairs and settled into the back seat of one of the sleek black Mercedes sedans forming a caravan to chauffeur us away. But the alphabetically strict concierge insisted that Dr. Khanna be escorted before Dr. Kissinger, and ushered him into the car behind mine. I found myself apologizing to him, for I would certainly have preferred to share the ride.
There was never a dull conversation with the original Dr. K. A couple of years ago in my native India, we chatted just before going on stage in New Delhi. It happened to be November 9, so I asked him if he recalled where he was and what he was doing thirty years earlier – precisely the day the Berlin Wall fell. Even nearing 95 years of age, he didn’t miss a beat.
I first visited Berlin just weeks after the Wall came down, sparking my love affair with the homeland he fled as a teen. At the same age he was when he arrived in New York as a Jewish refugee, I left New York to attend a German gymnasium high school near Hamburg. My parents mailed me care packages full of Doritos and letters from friends, but the cardboard box I most eagerly awaited came in April 1995, containing a hot-off-the-press copy of Kissinger’s instant classic Diplomacy. The 800-page tome immediately became my Berlin Wall of geopolitical literature, my first textbook in classical realism, my constant companion as I Euro-railed for weeks on end. (Together with Paul Kennedy’s even girthier Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, it also left little room in my backpack for anything other than a toothbrush.)
Kissinger’s own former colleagues such as historian Ernest May of Harvard criticized the book as a haphazard…
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