The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (40 page)

Jerome Robbins demonstrating before a class.

Robbins returned to the Ballet Theatre with a colossal and highly acclaimed production of Igor Stravinsky’s
Les Noces.
Working simultaneously and then exclusively with the City Ballet, Robbins composed the masterworks of his maturity,
Dances at a Gathering, The Goldberg Variations, Watermill, Scherzo Fantastique, Mother Goose, The Four Seasons, Glass Pieces,
and
Ives, Songs,
among several others.

The production in 1989 of
Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,
a seventeen-number compilation of his greatest dances from thirty-five years of shows, was a hit, confirming his continuing influence on American dance and theater. Although Robbins had turned to classical ballet after
Fiddler,
his dazzling theatrical work retained its fresh appeal and vibrancy. With De Mille and Bennett, Robbins is America’s greatest dance master, its particularly jazzy soul arresting our consciousness with ecstatic visions of young people dancing in joy and sorrow, geometric shapes made personal by the interaction of flesh and form.

S
urely one of the most controversial Americans of the second half of the twentieth century, Henry Kissinger guided his country’s foreign policy through the escalation of and then the withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia, the opening to China, and detente with the Soviet Union. Except for Haym Salomon, and more than Judah Benjamin, Bernard Baruch, or Henry Morgenthau, Kissinger was the most influential Jewish political figure in United States history. Many have argued that his activities were not the most beneficial.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany during the early years of the Weimar Republic. His father, Louis, was a schoolteacher, proud to be German, intellectual, quietly dignified. Louis’s wife, Paula, evidently transmitted her wit and practical approach to their shy, studious son.

The Nazis came to power when Heinz was ten. Kissinger’s profound mistrust of people and his sad, dark view of human history were surely grounded in a youth spent in segregated Jewish religious schools, unable to go to soccer matches for fear of beatings by fascist thugs, fleeing with his parents to safety in New York before the Holocaust engulfed his remaining family. Settling in the German-Jewish neighborhood of Washington Heights at the northern tip of Manhattan, Heinz became Henry, attended George Washington High School and then City College.

The Second World War interrupted his education, but provided remarkable opportunities and life experiences. A U.S. Army officer, Fritz Kraemer, vigorously anti-Nazi but of German extraction, recognized Kissinger’s special talents and brilliance and relieved him from infantry duties, letting him use his mind for more suitable work in counterintelligence. Kissinger’s wartime life as a general’s assistant and later the administrator of the German city of Krefeld exposed him to American government and military practice (and won him the Bronze Star).

When he returned to the States from the war, Kissinger enrolled at Harvard. Under the tutelage of another powerful man, Professor William Yandell Elliot, Kissinger studied philosophy and history. Even early on, he established a reputation for grandiose statements and a verbose, leaden way with words. His senior thesis on the meaning of history broke all Cambridge records for length and depth.

His career at Harvard was exemplary and formed the basis for later success in diplomacy. As a graduate student he founded the Harvard International Seminar, to which were invited many future leaders (his later close ties with Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France, and Israel’s Yigal Allon date from this period). Kissinger also created a journal called
Confluence,
enlisting such contributors as Hannah Arendt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Nitze, and McGeorge Bundy.

Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation, not surprisingly, was about Prince Metternich and the making of the post-Napoleonic peace. For Dr. Kissinger, the problems of peace after Waterloo mirrored the era of Cold War. While others were devising nuclear test ban concepts, he was contemplating the Realpolitik of Metternich and Viscount Castlereagh of 1812—22. The Harvard professor thrilled to Metternich’s vision of diplomacy as rooted in the limitations of personality. Kissinger also admired Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Prussia, who so humiliated the French while unifying his country into a world power. Kissinger preferred Bismarck’s view that foreign policy must be based not on feelings but on the weight of military, economic, and political strength.

Before his appointment in 1968 as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon, Kissinger built up his base of influence at Harvard with an appointment to the Center for International Affairs Defense Studies Program (where he developed academic theories of arms control), by writing a bestseller on the tactical use of nuclear weapons (which first attracted Nixon’s attention to Dr. Kissinger), at the Council on Foreign Relations (creating ideas of fighting limited nuclear wars—the so-called flexible response theory—and graduated deterrence), and as special consultant to the perennial presidential candidate, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York (for whom Kissinger suggested a new, open policy toward then hated China).

Henry Cabot Lodge recommended Kissinger to Nixon, who had read the professor’s books and journal articles. Nixon and Kissinger, two highly emotional and introverted men, would for five tumultuous years run American foreign policy out of the White House, circumventing the State Department at every turn. Both men apparently felt that they lacked the support of the American people for Lyndon Johnson’s war policies. During their tenure, foreign policy decision-making was closed to public view, relying more often than not on deceit and obstruction. Both felt that the Vietnam War could not be won, but that an American presence in the area assured an honorable peace. Most important, peace “with honor” (vain words to the millions of Cambodians and Vietnamese still to die) would prove America to be the credible and reliable defender of freedom it had represented itself to be.

Kissinger’s great influence on American foreign policy thereafter was his view (first clearly stated during the Vietnam conflict) that before our country engaged in any major foreign effort, the long-range effect of that effort must first be understood and agreed to by as many citizens as possible. He felt that the great tragedy of the Johnson administration was its failure to identify those long-term goals.

The Nixon-Kissinger reliance on power coupled with credibility proved effective in the opening to China. Nixon’s historic visit to China was probably the most important and intelligent American foreign policy maneuver since the Truman administration’s Marshall Plan. However, the frigid realism of Kissinger’s worldview led to a power-driven diplomacy unmarked by American idealism and morality. Kissinger viewed foreign relations only for its effect on the balance of power and influence, not as an agent for good or for American values.

His personality and ideals led to a unique style of negotiation, which was rapidly dubbed “shuttle diplomacy.” His paranoia and fear of American public opinion resulted in the fourteen-month secret bombing of Cambodia, the vicious Christmas bombing of Hanoi, and the creation of the “Plumbers’ Unit” to ferret out the source of State Department leaks. His denial of his Jewish identity (Nixon never forgot Kissinger’s religion and referred to him on the notorious White House tapes as “my Jew boy”) may have partially led him to delay aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War (until Nixon, threatened by the modest Soviet airlift to Syria, ordered military supplies rushed to the Israelis).

Although Kissinger would grant Nixon other great successes in the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) and the signing of a peace treaty with North Vietnam (the war would still drag on until the American withdrawal in 1975 despite Kissinger’s assumption of duties as the first Jewish secretary of state and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize), their legacy remains disturbing. Many of their policies reflected their personalities. Seemingly brilliant in strategy and tactics, both men failed to identify and support human rights movements founded in open, democratic values that their basically authoritarian personalities could not understand. The secretive Kissinger also did not give press conferences for most of Nixon’s first term for fear that the press would mock his rough German accent and call him “Dr. Strangelove.”

A survivor of Nazi persecution, Kissinger sought order, but often at the expense of American values and ethics. The secret war followed by the invasion of Cambodia widened the Vietnam conflict, leaving a power vacuum which the murderous Khmer Rouge filled with bloody terror and killing fields.

Kissinger too often failed to comprehend the importance of local political and ethnic trends, supporting the Shah of Iran, for example, to guard U.S. power interests while ignoring the burgeoning Islamic fundamentalist movement of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Kissinger was the first European-style practitioner of official American diplomacy. His ice-cold realism led to the highly influential view that American foreign power had its limits. Détente with the Soviets meant, more often than not, cooperation brought about through grand strategies of restraint and threat. Kissinger’s clear expression of balance-of-power thinking, despite being alien to an open democracy, remains highly influential and controversial.

B
efore Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, Samuel Reshevsky, Saviely Tartakower, Akiba Rubinstein, and Emanuel Lasker, the greatest—and the first—Jewish chess champion was the irascible, supposedly mean-tempered Wilhelm Steinitz. Lasker remains probably the most successful chess master of all time, Tartakower one of its greatest teachers, and Fischer the man who made chess into a worldwide fad. Steinitz, however, was the first chess player to be recognized as a world champion, is widely regarded as the founder of the principles of modern chess, and was the first to give the game a truly international prominence.

He was born in Prague, studied the Talmud as a young boy, and journeyed to Vienna in his early twenties. Forsaking mathematics classes, Steinitz played chess wherever he could. Representing Austria at an English tournament in 1862, he remained in London, earning his living playing chess. In 1866, Steinitz fought the great Adolph Anderssen, master of the so-called cut-and-thrust style, a romantic in the grand manner. Steinitz prevailed, eight games to Anderssen’s six. As Anderssen was then widely revered as the world’s best player, Steinitz concluded, and wildly shouted, that he had become the world champion. Steinitz never hesitated to make it clear just who he was. Claiming to hold the title for twenty-eight years, Steinitz took off much of the period to perfect new ideas, resuming play at tournaments but holding off championship matches until he was sure of his refined technique.

His rivals, before Lasker, were Zukertort and Chigorin. Mikhail Chigorin is widely regarded as the beloved founder of Russian chess, still a revered figure. Riga born, German speaking Johannes Zukertort was a cultured man, a skilled musician and linguist. Both could not have been more different from Steinitz. He was perhaps the most disliked man in chess history. Nothing could be so trivial that it would not cause the great Steinitz to erupt. His colleagues simply hated to be near him.