 We're very fortunate to have one of the world's preeminent historians, Neil Ferguson. Neil is a native of Scotland, and he's a graduate of Oxford, got his PhD at Oxford. He has been a tenured professor at Harvard, and at Oxford, and at Cambridge, and now he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He's written 15 books, 15 books, and I would say no gray hair to show for it. I've written one book, and I've got a lot of gray hair to show for it. And he's now working on the second volume on his book, on a person who's had enormous impact on American foreign policy in the last 40, 50 years, and that is Henry Kissinger. And that book will be due out in, do I have to answer that question? It'll be due out when it's done, okay. Two years, I think. It's a very large, it's a large challenge. So when you were growing up in Scotland, did you say I wanted to be a historian? Relatively early on, I wanted to be a writer, I think I knew that. I'd tried my hand at fiction and was lousy at it. Was reading Tolstoy's War and Peace in the back garden aged about 15. And at the end of War and Peace, as you may know, there's this extraordinary reflection, a kind of coda in which Tolstoy asks, well, now that we've seen all these lives turned upside down by the invasion of Russia, by France, what does it all mean? It's a kind of historical essay. And I read it and was captivated and at the end of that thought, well, that's what I'm gonna do. So it was about that time. My view is War and Peace is an extraordinary book, but the book that is the most picked up and read the first chapter, but I don't think people actually get to the end because it's so long and there's 500 characters in it. It's absolutely gripping. It's one of the greatest works of literature and I've read it three times and I'll probably read it again and each time I see some new feature. Remember it's a historical novel, but it offers at the end a reflection on historical determinism. I mean, was it all just bound to happen or were there elements of contingency? And the central question that Tolstoy poses is how much power did Napoleon really have? Was it really, he says, was it really Napoleon's orders that led to all this? And he concludes that it wasn't, and at 15 I was just fascinated by that question. Let's talk about writing history books because it is a thing that's interesting. A person we just talked about, Andrew Roberts, who wrote the book on Winston Churchill, maybe the best one-volume biography, told me that what he does is, when he did on that book, I think he said he researched it four or five years and then wrote it in three or four months. And he gets up early in the morning and he writes all day until midnight. Some writers, let's say, would write 500 words a day, and then they're done, even if it's early in the day. And some writers will write only in night, some in the morning. What do you do? How much can you write a day, and then you call it a day, or you just keep writing until you get tired? As you were asking that question, I was thinking about a parallel universe in which both Andrew Roberts and I became judges. What a disastrous universe that would be. Luckily, not all historians have the experience of the Chief Justice. And he and I had parallel lives. He was at Cambridge I was at Oxford. We never met as students. And then I remember receiving his first book to review his biography of Lord Halifax and being deeply impressed by it. The Churchill biography is a fantastic work. My approach is quite different in a lot of ways. I like to accumulate, when I'm writing a primary source-based book, a really vast amount of material from as many different places as possible. And I use a database to store that and try to get it into a searchable form. And what I do is to write rather less intensely than Andrew. I can't really do more than a thousand words a day. And I find that anything after that tends to rapidly decline in quality. So I'll do a kind of bout of writing and then I have to do other stuff. Now, when you write, do you do all the research and then you write? Or some people research, write, research, write. How do you do that? Do all the research. And that's why when you asked me, when will Kissinger be done? I hesitated because all the research is done, but I now have to immerse myself in it. And in that book, as with the history of the Rothschild family, which was under the financial books I wrote, I will go through each page in chronological order. No matter where the documents came from, ultimately they all end up in one great hopper and then I go through and I try to reenact in my mind the events that I'm able to infer from the documents. Collingwood, R.G. Collingwood, the great Oxford philosopher of history, whose work hardly anybody reads but everybody should read, said that really history was the reenactment of past thought. Because in a sense, all you really have with documents is a lot of thoughts written down. So you have to kind of reenact the thoughts. And I find the only way to do that is actually to put them in chronological order. And that's a very laborious process if you've got, as I have for the Kissinger book, hundreds and thousands of documents. Now when you write, do you write in longhand or you do it on a computer? No, I write on a laptop and I always have. I mean, I've always written on a computer. I took notes in longhand for many years. Did you ever lose anything you put on a computer or you never lost that? Everybody, every writer has had at least one ghastly moment. And you really only should have one after which you should learn. But nothing can compare with what happened to Thomas Carlisle. I don't know if you know this story, David. I think Carlisle's a great name, but I don't know what happened to him, but. Well, there were Carlisles before you were Carlisle. And Thomas Carlisle, maybe you're named after him and I just didn't know it, was one of the great Victorian historians. In fact, he was perhaps the preeminent intellectual of Victorian Britain. He was a Scotsman. He wrote many histories of which the history of the French revolutions, perhaps the most extraordinary. But he lent the manuscript. There were no word processes in those days. He wrote it all down in longhand. And he lent it to John Stuart Mill, his friend, so that he would go in and read it and John Stuart Mill's housekeeper saw the manuscript, assumed it was waste paper and burnt the entire thing. And Carlisle then sat down and rewrote it. And I never had an experience that bad, but I have lost whole chapters. Remember in the early days of Microsoft, I don't know if Bill Gates is here. The programs are always crashing. And if you would have a program crash, lose the entire damn chapter or it would come up corrupted. And then you have to do what Carlisle did and redo it. And of course, the human brain is remarkable because it in fact can remember quite a lot of what you've written. Some historians I've interviewed would say they write 300 words a day and then they're done. Some will say they write long hands, some will say they do it by computer. One person, David McCullough, has a very interesting way of doing it. He writes out a paragraph and then he gives it to his wife, Rosalie, who has been his wife for 65 years. They do every book together. She then reads it back to him. He wants to make sure it sounds right. So she will read it back to him. And one time, I think it was his biography of John Adams. She read the paragraph back to him and he said, okay. Now she said there's a sentence in there. I don't think that sentence really works. He said, read it again. Read it again. No, it's okay. No, it doesn't work, she said. I just found a good sentence. Read it again. Read it again. No, it's okay. She said it really isn't. He said, god damn it, it's okay. It's locked, let's go on. And okay, so the book came out and won the Pulitzer Prize. Got a great review by Gore Badal. And Badal said this is a spectacular book, but there's one sentence in that book. I don't know how David McCulloch could write that sentence. Okay, so. His wife must have got to Gore Badal. So when you, now as a student of history and a scholar of history, what would you say is, let's take the World War II post-World War II post-period of time after World War II. Who would you say are the two or three or most important people that affected the way the world is today post-World War II? Would you say there are heads of state, scientists, scholars? Who would you think has had the most impact in the life that we now live that people would say when history's written 100 years from now, 200 years from now, but post-World War II period of time, these are the giants. That kind of Walter Isaacson question, isn't it? Because it's a question about individuals and their contribution. And yet, most of us certainly in my generation were encouraged in university not to think about history that way, not to attribute great agency to individuals. And indeed it's taken me a while to wean myself off the habit of mind of an economic historian, which is in fact not to think about great men or great women. There's also a temptation which comes of the fact that we tend to study the history of our own countries first to think in my case a rather Eurocentric way about the most important people. But actually when you think about the question in a rational way, who had the biggest impact on the largest number of people? You wouldn't come up with a European or even I think an American. You'd probably say it was Deng Xiaoping because in turning China away from the lunacy of Maoism and setting it on a course for reform, he probably changed the lives of more people than anybody else in the post-World War II world. So you raise a very important question. Historians have debated for centuries. Is history really driven by great people or great causes that people get swept up in? And where do you come out on that? Well, that's Tolstoy's question. I mean Tolstoy says asks, what is the power that moves nations and concludes that it can't just be one insufferable Corsican who made it all happen? And I think that that's right. We must of course acknowledge the extraordinary importance of individuals. Churchill plays this fundamentally decisive role. A.J.P. Taylor-Colden, the savior of his nation. Churchill 38, 39, 40 is the crucial man. Without Churchill it's easy to imagine the rest of the British political establishment folding. So that's part one of my answer. But part two is what exactly was it that enabled Churchill to turn the disaster around in 1940? He alone could not do it. He had at his disposal still the vast resources of the British Empire. The humiliation of Dunkirk hadn't in fact greatly impacted that. So I think any answer to this question has to be a bit of both unsatisfying though that is. Debates about great men versus huge historical forces are actually pretty futile, because clearly it's both. And that's how we need to think about the past is this interaction between agency, exceptional individuals, and the circumstances that make possible their achievements. Marx makes this point in the 18th Bermet. Let's talk about, let's say people who've lived great men and women over the last 100 years or so, or 200 years. If you could have a chance to have dinner with any one or two people or three, who would you most want to have dinner with? Well, Churchill would certainly be the most fun. We were talking earlier about- Because he drinks a drink. The importance of alcohol in history. Okay. Imagine if you picked one of these great figures and they turned out to be like you, a T-totaler or a dull dinner, that would be. I think iced tea is very good too. You know what? It does nothing for the quality of conversation. Okay. I just want to break a lance for alcohol because I wrote a book called Civilization, which made the argument that there were six things that set Western civilization on a trajectory that was exceptional. But there was a secret unwritten seventh chapter that I one day will rise, which was alcohol. And because Western civilization consumed alcohol in more elaborate and sophisticated ways than any other civilization, I think that mattered. And Churchill consumed almost every variety of alcohol. And what a fun dinner that would be. So you would like to have one dinner with him and if he had dinner with him, what would be one question you would like to ask him? Other than related to alcohol, but. I would ask him if he thought that there was a way he could have won the 1945 election. Remember, it's extraordinary that he leads Britain to victory and is immediately thrown out of office. And one argument is that he campaigned in the wrong way, quoting Hayek's road to serfdom, implying that labor was going to establish some kind of authoritarian regime. I would love to ask him about that moment in his life which must have been crushing, a crushing rebuke after he'd achieved so much. And that would have been the question I have asked. Now, you've heard Churchill, there's a lot of great Churchill stories, speeches, and he'd give these very famous off the top of his head apparently talks with great wit and so forth. Was that planned, did he rehearse those as I've been told, or he really came up with these things off the top of his head? Well, I think Churchill was somebody who prepared and Andrew shows that in his book. I mean, there was an enormous effort that goes into developing Churchill's speech-making style and he modifies it in his career, becomes more less aristocratic, more demotic. But he was a witty man and there's no doubt that not everything was carefully worked out. There's this wonderful story that I don't think is in Andrew's books, but I think of it every time I go to the loo, every time because especially here when there's a great kind of crowd and you're in a rush there's not always really good times to wash your hands, let's be absolutely honest, right? So the story about Churchill, which I love, is that it's wartime and he's having a pee and there's a foreign office official next to him and as they're leaving, the foreign office Mandarin just can't resist saying, Prime Minister, at Eaton we were taught to wash our hands after we peed. And Churchill replies, at Harrow we were taught not to piss on our hands. Well, nobody, yeah, that's off the cuff and I think of it every time I go to the loo. I don't want to keep this into the, make this a joke relating to that only but I'll give you another Churchill joke like this. So Churchill's a member of the majority party, conservative party in the parliament and he goes out to the urinal and he is standing in front of the urinal and quickly he sees Clement Adley, the labor party leader coming in and quickly zips up and walks away and Adley said, what's the matter? Are you embarrassed to stand next to the leader of the opposition party? He said, it's not that but any time you see something big you want to nationalize it. I'll tell you one more Churchill story then we'll get off Churchill. History is much more fun than law. So Churchill goes to Richmond, Virginia in his dotage years and he is being led around by a Dowager lady from Richmond, Virginia and she says, can I help you get your food? And he says, well, okay. And she said, let's go to the line here to get the food. And she says, what would you like? And he says, I'll have some of that chicken breast. Oh, she said, in mixed company we don't use the word breast, we use the word white meat. He said, okay, give me some of the white meat, fine. So he eats it and so forth. The next day he leaves, sends her a corsage saying, thank you for a wonderful dinner. Please put this over your white meat. Okay, so by the way, by the way before I sell any more copies of Andrew Roberts's book, one of the appeals of writing Henry Kissinger's life is that he too has a very modern sense of humor. Although sometimes that's been used against him by his critics because Henry's sense of humor is almost of the Groucho Marx vintage. You sense that he picked it up having come to the United States in the mid 30s into the world of the Marx brothers. And if you hear him say it, you get that it's a Marx brothers type joke. A good example is at the beginning of a meeting to break the ice with some Turkish diplomats. He says, the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes longer. And it's obviously a joke, but the critics of Kissinger, ever since that document came out have repeatedly quoted it as if it was meant quite literally. And there are a great many jokes of the same variety. The most famous thing I think he ever said was that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But when you see that in its context, it's obviously, it's meant as a self-deprecating joke and answers the question, why do you get to date with so many, take out so many starlets on dates? So part of the fun of writing volume two is the Kissinger jokes, which I think I will be spending some time on trying to show that many of them were jokes. Well, see, John Kennedy perfected self-deprecating humor because he was very secure and so he could get away with it. Kissinger perfected self-deprecating humor, but which shows you how great he is. The power joke being one where he basically saying, well, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac and I have a lot of power. Right, okay, so let's talk about Kissinger for a moment. Kissinger was a Democrat and he wanted to work in John Kennedy's administration. McGeorge Bundy didn't want to give him a job. So how did he manage to kind of do anything with Kennedy and how did he actually take the rejection by McGeorge Bundy? Well, it's not quite true to say that he was a Democrat. He was one of the very few Harvard professors who at that time didn't mind being seen as a conservative. Arthur Schlesinger, his friend, the historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and he would have political arguments in the 50s and the Harvard faculties. It was well known that Kissinger was a conservative if not necessarily a registered Republican and in fact I think he'd already become involved with Nelson Rockefeller even before then. But like most Harvard professors then and ever since he was not content with merely lecturing students and wanted to spend at least some time in the corridors of power. So the opportunity arose when John F. Kennedy was elected because Kennedy intended to bring as many Harvard professors to Washington as possible. I mean, more or less having won the election went to Cambridge with a bus and said all aboard. It was remarkable. I don't know who did the teaching in 1961 because the place must have been empty. And one of the people who got on the bus was the young Henry Kissinger and he made a fatal mistake which maybe McBundy led him into which was to be part time. Now nothing in Washington works on that basis. You are either all in or not in. So being a part time advisor to the National Security Council ensured that Kissinger had minimal access especially to Kennedy but minimal access to any of the key decision makers. So he had this very, very frustrating experience and it took him a while to realize that Bundy whom he thought was a friend was in fact, quietly marginalizing him not least because Kissinger knew too much about the big issue which was Berlin. Even before the Cuban Missile Crisis there was the huge Berlin crisis and Kissinger actually knew about Berlin and he'd grown up in Germany. So he was sidelined and I think he learned the first of a series of important lessons about the nature of the realm of power. You can't be part time. In 1968 campaign I was said that he was advising Humphrey and also advising Nixon. Now I've heard of people advising many different candidates in the same party but rarely do people advise candidates of different parties. Is that true that he was doing both? It's not really true. He was advising Nelson Rockefeller but periodically people would come to him. He was a foreign policy expert. He'd been in Vietnam several times and they would come and pick his brains and Kissinger's attitude was, if you ask me a question I'll give you an answer. So it wasn't quite that he was advising them. He was being consulted by them. He was close to Nelson Rockefeller. Then Nixon offers him or more or less offers him the job. He was supposed to offer him. He didn't quite offer him the job of being national security advisor. So he gets the job offer but he says I have to clear this with Nelson Rockefeller because I'm close to him. He goes to Nelson Rockefeller and says I have this offer to be national security advisor but I won't do it if this would upset you. Did he ever think that Nelson Rockefeller was gonna say no you don't do it and what would he have done if Nelson Rockefeller said no you can't take that job? Well I don't think that was quite the thought process. The problem was that Kissinger expected Rockefeller to be offered defense and that he then would go and work at the Pentagon with Rockefeller. Whereas Nixon's aversion to Rockefeller was so bitter that he had absolutely no intention of offering him even the job of janitor. Kissinger was so expecting that to be the plan that when in his very oblique way Nixon asked him to be national security advisor he didn't even realize he was being offered the job. So there was a good deal of confusion and I think when Kissinger went to report to Rockefeller that he'd been given this offer it was slightly in an embarrassed way because he was also telling Rockefeller that he wasn't gonna get a job at all. But I don't think he knew Rockefeller really well. It devised Rockefeller through three different campaigns each unsuccessful to try to become the Republican nominee in the president of the United States. So I think he understood that Rockefeller wasn't gonna stand in his way. Why would he have taken, why would Nixon have taken somebody who was Nelson Rockefeller's advisor, Harvard professor and Jewish and given him this important job, what was the thinking? It's a great question and in volume one I tried to come up with the answer. There's a funny answer and since we promised we'd be funny. Gita Goldman who was one of Kissinger's students at Harvard had the explanation that Henry Kissinger was the only thing of Nelson Rockefeller's that Richard Nixon could afford. That I quite like as an explanation but it's not the right explanation. They had only met once before. So Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had met once before Nixon offered him the job which is remarkable when you come to think of it and had been at a cocktail party in New York and Nixon who was not noted for his social grace had asked the one question that you love to be asked if you're a professor, especially Harvard professor or rather he didn't even ask him a question. He simply said I've read one of your books, music to the ears of the vain intellectual. So they had a kind of brief conversation and that was the last Kissinger heard of it. I assumed when I went through the records I would find previous meetings, earlier encounters that the relationship had to go back further. It turned out that every time Nixon had reached out to Kissinger before that point, Kissinger had dodged the meeting feeling that he didn't want to be involved with Nixon that he wanted to be loyal to Rockefeller. So they'd never met other than that one time. So the only explanation that makes any sense is actually an intellectual one that Nixon who had a national security guide during the election campaign was deeply impressed with Kissinger's work. And they'd come to at least the same conclusion albeit from different directions that the key to foreign policy in the post-68 period would be to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and they had both arrived at this idea from very separate directions. But I think it was pure intellectual kinship. This was a very cerebral relationship. They were not friends but as strategic thinkers they were uncommonly well matched. So the ultimate answer to the question is that Nixon who was quite antisocial picked Kissinger for his mind. So he was also quite anti-Semitic and how does Kissinger answer the questions that have come out of the tapes about Nixon saying these fairly unkind and inaccurate and ridiculous things about people who are Jewish and Kissinger's kind of either goes along with it or doesn't say anything. Well, I haven't really got to that part of the book. It's difficult to, well it's difficult, isn't it? Because we all have observed in our lives, I certainly have, subordinates putting up with dreadful behavioral language from their superiors. And I'd be amazed if I was the only person in this room who'd observed that. And I suspect there may be a certain amount of that going on in the White House these days too. I mean, it's not as if Richard Nixon was unique as president in saying offensive things. Lyndon Johnson wasn't exactly an angel either. So I think that those moments in Kissinger's career when he contemplated resignation were moments related to major strategic decisions like, for example, the rapid reduction of troop forces in Vietnam. That was in Kissinger's mind a potential resignation issue. Nixon's casual anti-Semitism, which was of a piece with his tough guy talk, the sort of- Resignation issue being- But Kissinger certainly on more than one occasion contemplated resignation on policy issues. Because? Because there were fundamental differences about how to handle the situation in Vietnam. But never, I think, contemplated resignation because Nixon was an anti-Semite. After all the time you've spent, how many years have you spent researching Kissinger now? I'm afraid it's 15 years. It's been a very long project. And you've interviewed him many times? Many times. And when you came out with your first volume, did he say, great job, you really captured the essence of me? When you write the biography of a living person, you must be careful not to become so close to them that you can't do the job of a critical assessment. And so I always resisted the telephone. As you may know, Henry Kissinger is a great believer in the telephone and I prefer the written word. So I tried not to be drawn into too many conversations in case I started to lose that ability to be critically distant. So when I finally delivered the manuscript of volume one, there was a very long silence, a very long silence. He didn't have script approval though. No, he did not, except in one respect, that letters relating to family matters, private family matters, such as his divorce from his first wife, he reserved the right and I thought that was legitimate to limit quotation of very personal material. And I agreed to that, but there were no other constraints on me. After all these years, 15 years on Kissinger, are you happy you spent this much of your life on this one person? And do you admire him more or less than you did 15 years ago? I think the challenge of writing a biography that is as rich and as complex as a real human life is worthwhile. It's a very different exercise from writing a history of Western civilization. It's tremendously difficult technically because what you have to do is to combine the real complexity of a genuine human being with something that makes sense. Now we actually are not like characters in fiction because characters in fiction have a sort of internal consistency, but real people aren't like that and they change over time and they contradict themselves and they sometimes do strange things that don't quite make sense. The biography has to show that and at the same time make the whole thing plausible to the reader. I find that technical challenge really rewarding in the case of Kissinger because his intellect is such a rich and complex one. So I don't regret doing it and I don't regret taking this much time over it. The other reason that I'm glad I'm spending all this time on it is that there are still fundamental questions about American foreign policy that we haven't quite figured out. Did we still seem unable to solve some of them? What on earth is it that we're doing in the Middle East? And I think Kissinger's thought more profoundly than these questions than anybody else. So it's quite worthwhile going deeply into not only his writing but his actions and offers. If we've run out of time, let me ask you one last question if I could, which is if you could recommend to people here one nice biography history book that would be really attractive to people to read that wasn't written by you. Which book would you recommend? There's one or two books that you've read recently or that you think are so powerful that if somebody wants to get a sense of a great person or a great trend in history that you would recommend. There's a very good British historian, Tom Holland. Who's just recently published a book called Dominion, which is a history of Christianity. And it's a powerful and profound book that argues that the influence of Christianity is far more enduring and all pervasive in very large parts of the world than we in our secular age realize. It's a fantastic achievement. He's a charming man, self-deprecating, makes more of his cricketing skills than of his writing skills. But if there's one book that has deeply impressed me in the last year, it's Tom Holland's Dominion. Well, that's because you haven't read my book yet, right? It's true. So when you read that, you will recommend. Okay. All right, we are out of time. Thank you, I'm sorry. We went over time, we don't have time for questions, but I think it was worth it. Thank you all very much.