Dictionary of Literary Influences

Kennedy, Robert Francis

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

Priscilla Roberts

KENNEDY, ROBERT FRANCIS (1925–1968)

Robert F. Kennedy was an American political figure who, even in a relatively short career, had a lasting impact on U.S. history and culture. Born in Massachusetts to a wealthy Irish-Catholic family, his multimillionaire father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a Wall Street trader and U.S. ambassador to England. His oldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., was killed in an air combat mission during World War II. Another older brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, became president of the United States in 1961. Robert Kennedy briefly served in the navy during World War II before earning a law degree at the University of Virginia. During the 1950s, his brother John Kennedy began his rapid ascend into national politics—and younger brother Robert became an integral part of that rise. As his brother’s campaign manager and principal advisor, Robert Kennedy proved to be a brilliant strategist and political organizer, helping his brother win two terms in the United States Senate as well as a razor-thin victory over Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential contest.

President-elect John F. Kennedy surprised the nation by appointing his brother Robert as attorney general. It was during Kennedy’s tenure that the federal government was summoned to enforce civil rights laws in the South. He was equal to the challenge and helped Washington begin to fulfill its responsibility of providing equal justice throughout the land. In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, and Robert Kennedy’s political rival, Lyndon B. Johnson, became president. With his political future unclear, Kennedy resigned his cabinet post in 1964 to run for a United States Senate seat in New York. Kennedy was elected by a comfortable margin and immediately became a leader in national politics.

By 1968, Kennedy was having doubts about the nation’s Vietnam War policies— and party leaders were urging the New York senator to challenge President Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy entered the race and appeared to have a formidable chance to win his party’s nomination and carry on his brother’s political heritage. But on June 5, 1968, after a victory in the important California primary, Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin. He died the following day and was buried near the grave of his brother at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Robert Kennedy’s early reading choices do reveal future political tendencies. One of his favorite childhood books was John Buchan’s spy thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps. And Buchan’s autobiography, Pilgrims’s Way, was a favorite of both Kennedy brothers. One can see a connection between Buchan’s plots and the Kennedy administration’s covert foreign policy actions in Cuba and Vietnam. Later, Robert Kennedy moved on to other spy stories, specifically Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Kennedy saw the adventuresome heroes in these novels as nothing like the bland and bureaucratic CIA agents he witnessed in Washington.

Kennedy was always self-conscious about his intellect and spent years in a quest for self-improvement. He read many American Civil War books—Bruce Catton being his favorite author. During the Vietnam War, he even sent President Johnson a copy of Catton’s Never Call Retreat, a book explaining how President Abraham

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Lincoln had stood up to both his generals and meddlesome politicians. RFK was also intrigued with Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and E. S. Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Kennedy even held monthly seminars at his Virginia estate of Hickory Hill where he and wife Ethel invited national and world leaders to speak on various subjects.

Kennedy’s intellectual and philosophical development blossomed after his brother was assassinated. His faith was tested and he began questioning life’s meaning. During his intense mourning in 1963, his brother’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, gave him a copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way—a book about history and tragedy in fifth-century Greece. Kennedy read the book for hours, underlining numerous passages. Seeking to make sense of his brother’s death, he found some answers in Greek history. And it was in Hamilton’s book that Kennedy was introduced to Greek writers and poets like Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. Kennedy began to find some solace in Greek poetry. His two particular favorites were by Aeschylus: Oresteia and Prometheus. Both examined topics such as injustice, fate, and the arrogance of great and powerful men.

In 1965, RFK began reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, nineteenth-century American poet, writer, and essayist. Kennedy owned an old copy of Emerson’s Essays— which he kept with him and often quoted in speeches and in conversation. He was particularly influenced by Emerson’s ideas about self-trust and self-reliance. Kennedy discovered French writer Albert Camus in 1966. Kennedy was impressed with Camus’s idea that because of life’s constant tragedy and unpredictability, man should begin anew each day. Kennedy, by 1966, agreed that fate and suffering were perpetual—but one had to move on. His favorite Camus works included The Stranger, Notebooks, and Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Kennedy often had his secretary type Camus quotes on index cards. By the end of his life, Robert Kennedy had become an iconoclastic politician—often quoting Greek poets and citing passages from radical existential writers.

Archives

John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts. There are numerous RFK sources at the John F. Kennedy Library: RFK’s Senate Papers, 1965–68; the Papers of Adam Walinsky (a Kennedy advisor), which also contains The Bedford-Stuyvesant Development Project Overview: A Working Paper; the Papers of Peter Edelman (a Kennedy advisor); and the Joseph P. Kennedy Papers.

Printed Sources

Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1969). One of the most critically acclaimed books about the Kennedy administration and the Vietnam War. Author David Halberstam chronicles the inner workings of the Kennedy White House, including Robert Kennedy’s role as policymaker and principal advisor to his brother.

Kennedy, Robert. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Norton, 1969). Robert Kennedy was part of the now famous executive committee that helped President Kennedy settle the turbulent Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This postcrisis memoir shows the close personal and professional relationship that existed between President Kennedy and his brother.

———. To Seek a Newer World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967). Robert Kennedy’s speeches and policy statements during his senate years. This book offers insights into his views on the major public issues of the times: race, urban affairs, Vietnam, nuclear war.

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Schlesinger, Arthur. Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978). The first comprehensive biography of RFK. Schlesinger’s massive book—over 1,000 pages— is impressive in both scope and detail. But when the book was written, many national security documents, especially concerning Vietnam and Cuba, were still classified.

Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy: His Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Best contemporary biography of Robert Kennedy. This book examines national security issues using a variety of declassified information that Schlesinger did not have in the 1970s.

David E. Woodard

KEROUAC, JACK (1922–1969)

Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Kerouac attended Horace Mann Prep School in New York City and later Columbia University in 1941. He eventually quit Columbia and spent time as a merchant seaman. Kerouac completed his first novel, The Town and the City, in 1948, after which he began to write On the Road, the novel that was to make him famous. Kerouac completed several trips across the country during the 1950s, a subject that he visited in On the Road. In 1954 Kerouac began studying Buddhism during a stay in California. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Kerouac published many novels and works of poetry including The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, and Big Sur. Kerouac maintained his nomadic lifestyle for most of the 1950s, living in places such as Tangier, Mexico City, Florida, California, and New York. Kerouac’s constant battle with alcohol plagued him for most of his life. He died on October 20, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida. Kerouac’s main contribution was the inspiration he gave to the emerging Beat generation of writers, poets, and musicians that prefigured the cultural radicalism of the 1960s and helped challenge the tone of conformity that plagued American culture in the 1950s. Likewise, his use of spontaneous writing techniques and his improvisational style help set the tone for much of postwar American literature.

Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City (1950), was heavily influenced by the dynamic literary style of Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938). At Columbia University Kerouac befriended many writers and poets who were to compose the Beat Generation and who were to influence Kerouac’s own writings and philosophy. His friendship with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg introduced Kerouac to the liberating possibilities within the aesthetic form. Kerouac’s intense interest in the process of “automatic writing” was influenced by surrealist themes in the writings of André Breton and Phillippe Soupault as well as the French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. Kerouac’s prose style was also influenced by his reading of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926) and L. F. Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1934). His interest in novels narrating the liberating aspects of voyage and travel was influenced by John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1928). Like many countercultural writers of the postwar period, Kerouac was influenced by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his theories concerning the psychological harm of sexual repression. Kerouac also maintained an interest in Eastern philosophies, particularly through his reading of Ashvaaghosa’s The Life of Buddha and the anthology of Buddhist scriptures entitled The Buddhist Bible (1932). Kerouac’s interest in Buddhism developed after studying the work of Henry David Thoreau and other American transcendentalists. During the time Kerouac spent in northern California, he was introduced to and influenced by the emerging San Francisco renais-

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sance of poets including Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Kerouac’s writing style was also enormously influenced by his lifelong interest in jazz, particularly the music of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.

Archives

Kerouac’s unpublished work remains in the possession of the Kerouac estate in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Printed Sources

Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973). Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981). Jarvis, Charles. Visions of Kerouac (Lowell, Mass.: Ithaca Press, 1973).

McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: A Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: Random House, 1979).

Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats (London: Virgin Publishing Ltd., 1998). Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University Press, 1987).

Robert Genter

KEYNES, JOHN MAYNARD (1883–1946)

John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, England, on June 5, 1883. He died at his country home, Tilton, in Sussex, England, in 1946 of a heart attack at the age of 62. With the help of a scholarship he went to Eton and then to King’s College at the University of Cambridge where he took a degree in mathematics in 1905. In 1908 he began his academic career at Cambridge with a lectureship in economics. It was around this time that he got involved with the famous Bloomsbury group, an eclectic group of writers and artists who had a strong literary and artistic influence on Keynes.

With the beginning of World War I, Keynes took a leave of absence from Cambridge and joined the Treasury Department. He advanced quickly up the ranks in the department and in 1919 became the principal treasury representative at the Peace Conference at Versailles. He strongly disagreed with the position of the English government and resigned his post. His first major publication was on the political consequences of the conference, Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920). He went back to Cambridge and in 1925 married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that he wrote or published his most influential books: A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), A Treatise on Money (1930), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Essays in Persuasion (1931), and Essays in Biography (1933).

The publication of Keynes’s collected writings from 1971 to 1982, with the bibliography and index in 1989, has provided scholars with an opportunity to see and evaluate the chief intellectual influences on Keynes’s writings and thinking. By far the two most influential thinkers on Keynes were G. E. Moore and Edmund Burke. As a young man Keynes admired the work of both of these thinkers, and their influence can be found in his economic and literary writings throughout his career. In his essay “My Early Beliefs,” Keynes describes the importance of Moore’s classic work Principia Ethica on his intellectual development. Keynes also felt Moore’s

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influence in a more indirect way through the writings of his Bloomsbury friends, many of whom were associated with the secret society at Cambridge University called the Apostles. The views of Moore on ethics, aesthetics, and friendship can be seen in the art, literature, and politics of fellow Apostles like Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Sir Ralph Hawtrey, H. O. Meredith, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Desmond Turner, who were all friends or close associates of Keynes and influenced his literary taste and artistic development deeply.

The influence of Burke dates back to Keynes’s days at Eton. In 1904 he wrote a 99-page essay on “The Political Doctrines of Edmund Burke,” which won the university’s English Essay Prize. From Burke he took away the importance of looking at reform instead of revolution in societal change and recognizing the limits of individual behavior compared to the state in providing political and economic stability for all. Keynes used Burke’s writings as the bedrock for his political views on what is good government, which should focus on means and not ends.

Archives

The primary archives of J. M. Keynes’s unpublished writings can be found in the Marshall Library, Cambridge; University, King’s College, Cambridge; and the Royal Economic Society, London.

Printed Sources

Harrod, R. F. The Life on John Maynard Keynes (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962).

Keynes, John M. The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vol., D. E. Moggridge (ed.), (London: Macmillan, for the Royal Economic Society, 1971–89).

Moggridge, D. E. Keynes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976).

Skidelsky, R. John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920–1937 (London: Macmillan, 1994).

———.John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937–1946 (London: Macmillan, 2000).

———.John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883–1920 (London: Macmillan, 1986).

Richard P. F. Holt

KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH (1894–1971)

Nikita Khrushchev was born of peasant stock in Kalinovka, Kursk Province, in the Ukraine, part of the Russian Empire, to Sergei Nikanorovich Khrushchev, a coal miner, and his wife, Aksinia Ivanova. During the winters an elementary parochial school, where Russian Orthodox worship was compulsory, taught Khrushchev, in childhood a shepherd and farmhand, to read and write. Fascinated by everything mechanical, at 15 Khrushchev was apprenticed as a fitter in Donbass, an industrial city. Employed in the Rutchenkov mines as a metal worker, he quickly became a labor activist, from around 1913 helping to organize numerous strikes. An enthusiastic Bolshevik supporter, although he only formally joined the Communist Party in 1918, from November 1917 Khrushchev headed the local mineworks committees soviet. During the Russian Civil War he became a Red Army military commissar, and in 1921 the Rutchenkov mines deputy manager. Shortly thereafter the Yuzovka Mining Institute worker’s training school gave him secondary and further party instruction. In 1914 Khrushchev married Yefrosinya Ivanovna, who died of typhus during the Civil War. In 1924 he remarried, to Nina

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Petrovna Kukharchuk, a well-educated Communist activist and instructor. Appointed party secretary of Petrovsko-Mariinsk, Yuzovka, in 1925, the energetic Khrushchev moved steadily up the Ukrainian party hierarchy in Kharkov and Kiev, aligning himself with Josef Stalin, the emerging Soviet dictator. In 1929 he studied metallurgy at the Stalin Industrial Institute in Moscow, winning influential party contacts, and in 1931 moved to Moscow, becoming first secretary of the Moscow city region in 1935. One of only three provincial secretaries to weather Stalin’s purges, Khrushchev conformed and survived. From 1939 he was a full Politburo member and, until 1949, first secretary of the Ukraine. As a Second World War lieutenant general in the Soviet military, he handled political liaison and stimulated civilian resistance. In 1949 Khrushchev resumed his old Moscow responsibilities, simultaneously becoming secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

On Stalin’s death in 1953 Khrushchev contended ruthlessly for supreme power, becoming first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1955 and Soviet premier in 1958. Khrushchev soon demonstrated an unanticipated reformist streak, in 1956 secretly condemning the excesses of Stalin’s one-man rule, personality cult, and purges, and releasing millions of political prisoners even as he repressed dissident intellectuals and forcibly suppressed the 1956 Hungarian rebellion. He attempted to humanize Soviet Communism, emphasizing the production of consumer rather than military goods, and instituting wide-ranging though ultimately unsuccessful agricultural reforms. Khrushchev also sought to defuse cold war nuclear tensions through arms control agreements with the West. In 1964 perceived international Soviet humiliations over Berlin and Cuba and Khrushchev’s agricultural failures and erratic personal behavior brought his overthrow in a Politburo coup. In retirement Khrushchev lived quietly, writing lengthy memoirs which were gradually published abroad and in Russia.

A bookloving fellow miner and poet, Pantelei Makhinia, whose verses Khrushchev often recited later, introduced him to both Russian literary classics and revolutionary writings, including the Communist Manifesto and the French novelist Emile Zola’s Germinal. Khrushchev subsequently recalled his intense emotional empathy with such works and those of Karl Marx. In 1914 Khrushchev began distributing a labor broadsheet, The Miners’ Leaflet, and in 1915 the new Communist journal Pravda and other underground materials, devouring them voraciously. Unlike the cosmopolitan first generation of “Old Bolshevik” intellectual Communist leaders, Khrushchev received limited formal education, much of it being technological or ideological. Yet his memoirs demonstrate his familiarity with works by numerous Soviet novelists and poets, and he subsequently regretted his refusal to authorize the Russian publication of Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr. Zhivago.

Archives

The following Russian archives contain official former Soviet materials (some still closed) relating to Khrushchev: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, Moscow; Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, Moscow; State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow; Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History, Moscow; Central Archive of Social Movements of the City of Moscow; Central State Archive for Social Organization of Ukraine, Kiev, Ukraine.

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Printed Sources

Khrushchev, Nikita S. Khrushchev Remembers, Strobe Talbott (ed.), (Boston: Little, Brown,

1970).

———.Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, Jerrold L. Schechter (ed.), (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).

———.Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, Strobe Talbott (ed.), (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).

Taubman, William, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason (eds.). Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Priscilla Roberts

KING, MARTIN LUTHER JR. (1929–1968)

Heralded as “a spokesman for the conscience of America,” Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the key leaders of the civil rights movement. A staunch advocate of nonviolent resistance against injustice, Dr. King’s struggle for human rights began with the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks and ended with his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march for the city’s sanitation workers. King’s activism was instrumental in the passage of key civil rights legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968.

Michael Luther King Jr. (whose name was changed to Martin at age six) was born January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Martin Luther King Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta (Williams) King, a teacher and minister’s daughter. After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, King—following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather—enrolled at Morehouse College. At Morehouse, college president Benjamin Mays and philosophy professor George Kelsey—both ordained ministers—inspired him to enter the ministry. In 1947, while still a student at Morehouse, King joined his father as co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. After earning his B.A. degree, King went on to earn a B.D. degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. degree in systematic theology from Boston University.

In September 1954, King moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to accept a post as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. To encourage his parishioners to become involved in community affairs, he organized a committee that focused on social and political issues such as black voter registration. Two years later, King emerged as a leader of the civil rights movement when, as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, he led the Montgomery bus boycott, which after 382 days resulted in Blacks being able to ride integrated city buses.

In February 1957, King, an executive member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was elected president of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Over the next decade, his continued dedication to civil and human rights and his commitment to nonviolent resistance earned him worldwide recognition as an empathetic, compassionate leader as well as numerous honorary degrees and awards from religious and civic organizations. In 1963—the same year he was arrested in Birmingham for defying a court order barring demonstrations for fair hiring practices and the desegregation of local facilities and wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—he was chosen as

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Man of the Year by Time magazine. In 1964, at age 35, King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which he accepted on behalf of the civil rights movement. On January 14, 1994, President Bill Clinton proclaimed King’s birthday a federal holiday.

A devout follower of the teachings of Jesus and Mohandas K. Gandhi, King once commented that he gained his ideals from his Christian background and his technique of passive resistance from Gandhi. An avid reader, King was especially influenced by the philosophical works of G.W.F. Hegel, Henry David Thoreau, Paul Tillich, and E. S. Brightman. He was also inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar. King’s literary legacy includes five books that chronicle his journey from local minister to international spokesman for civil and human rights: Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958); Strength to Love (1963); Why We Can’t Wait (1964); Trumpet of Conscience (1968); and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (1967).

Archives

Martin Luther King Jr. Archives, Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, Atlanta, Georgia.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia.

Printed Sources

Bennett, Lerone Jr. What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964).

King, Martin Luther. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Carson Clayborne (senior ed.), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–2000). Vol. 1: Called to Serve ( Jan. 1929–Sept. 1951); Vol. 2: Rediscovering Precious Values ( July 1951–Nov. 1955); Vol. 3: Birth of a New Age (Dec. 1955–Dec. 1956); Vol. 4: Symbol of the Movement

( Jan. 1957–Dec. 1958). First volumes of a projected 14-volume series.

Moses, Greg. Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Philosophy of Nonviolence

(New York: Guilford Press, 1997). Focuses on King’s political philosophy.

Durthy A. Washington

KISSINGER, HENRY (1923– )

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state for two presidents, was destined for a public life. It is not apparent, however, from his early years. Kissinger was born in Furth, Germany, in 1923. Despite a happy young childhood, his life would be forever changed by the assumption of power by the Nazis in 1933. In 1938, his family fled to the United States and settled in New York City. As an adult, he would return to Germany as part of the occupying American army. Once discharged, he resumed his college career, finishing his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he would later become a tenured, full professor in the Department of Government. In 1969, he was tapped to join the State Department and in 1973, he became secretary of state under President Richard Nixon. He would remain in that post under Gerald Ford. Since then, Kissinger has continued to teach, to write, and to comment on a number of issues concerning American foreign policy.

Although not particularly religious later in life, as a young boy in Furth, Kissinger had been exposed to and discussed the Torah on a regular basis (Isaacson

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1992, 25). This interest did not survive the Nazi era in Germany. One constant through more than 70 years of his existence was his mother, Paula Stern Kissinger. Two individuals would have profound impact on Kissinger’s intellectual growth: Fritz Kraemer, who pulled the young private out of the ranks to handle postwar denazification and occupation duties in a small town in Germany, and his dissertation advisor, William Elliot, a professor of government at Harvard.

Kissinger is one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent practitioners of the Bismarckian concept of realpolitik. As such, he has advanced the concept of balance of power within the twentieth-century superpower structure. He has shown the influence of nineteenth-century foreign policy practitioners like Klemens Von Metternich, Austrian foreign minister (1813–1848), and Otto von Bismarck, German chancellor (1862–1890), in both his historical works.

Kissinger is a conservative. His foreign policy closely mirrored that of Metternich and Bismarck. Indeed his doctoral dissertation was an examination of the balance-of-power system created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century. In his writings, one can pick up the influence of European politicians and intellectuals of the nineteenth century, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, G.W.F. Hegel, and Immanuel Kant (Isaacson 1992, 31). One childhood friend recalled that “[Kissinger] was always reading about politics and history . . . ” (Isaacson 1992, 36).

Henry Kissinger broke away from the idealistic tone of the young individuals who had surrounded John F. Kennedy and who were kept on by Lyndon Johnson. Instead, like Richard Nixon, Kissinger looked at the reality of the situation and, instead of believing in the goodness of humans, seemed to hold that foreign policy should instead focus on how to insure that two superpowers, and the nations they used, held a balance of power. While he was certainly anti-fascist and anticommunist, Kissinger attempted to work with the Soviet Union to ensure that neither side so threatened the other as to cause a nuclear war. He was one of the few to survive Nixon’s fall from power, but not without some cost. He continued to write books, articles, and commentary pieces that in themselves continued to influence new generations of historians, politicians, and political scientists.

Archives

Public papers of Kissinger can be found in various government archives, such as the National Archives, particularly the State Department and the records of the National Security Council. The Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford Libraries also hold some public documents.

Printed Sources

Bell, Coral. The Diplomacy of Detente: the Kissinger Era (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977). Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

Kalb, Bernard, and Marvin Kalb. Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Kissinger, Henry. American Foreign Policy (New York: Norton, 1977).

———.Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).

———.Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Towards a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

———.For the Record: Selected Statements, 1977–1980 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).

———.Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969).

———.Observations: Selected Speeches and Essays, 1982–1984 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985).

———.White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).

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———.A World Restored: Metternich and Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

———.Years of Renewal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999).

———.Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982).

Mazlish, Bruce. Kissinger: The European Mind in American Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

Schulzinger, Robert D. Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

Phyllis Soybel

KLEE, PAUL (1879–1940)

Paul Klee was born in Munchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and at the age of ten entered the gymnasium, where he became fascinated with the study of literature, music, and fine art. Graduating in 1898, Klee moved to Germany to pursue private studies in art and eventually enrolled in the Munich Academy to become a fellow student of Wassily Kandinsky. His early etchings and pencil drawings reflected the fantasy and satire of Francisco Goya and William Blake, but his numerous travels in middle age to locales such as Tunisia, Paris, and Italy exposed Klee to a wide variety of styles and ideas. In 1911 he joined Der Blaue Reiter and perfected his expressionist and abstract technique. After a brief stint in the military during the First World War, Klee was appointed to the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught until he accepted the position of professor of fine art at the Dusseldorf Academy in 1931. In the following years, the Nazis dismissed Klee’s work as degenerate and he was forced to seek refuge in Bern. Klee was a lifelong proponent of simplicity and conservatism in art. A master of exact, fluid line, his work transformed traditional romantic motifs into a visual language appropriate to the scale of children. In 1935 Klee contracted scleroderma and his once playful and colorful compositions such as Twittering Machine (1922) and Pastoral (1927) became brooding and sombre works, epitomized by creations such as Death and Fire (1940). Klee was admitted to the Victoria Sanatorium in Muralto and died before the full effects of his influence on the American abstract expressionist movement could be felt.

Klee was a voracious reader of fiction. His diaries are filled with entries regarding his daily literary conquests, including the fantastical short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Adolf von Wilbrandt, Honoré de Balzac’s Les Contes Drolatiques, Voltaire’s Candide, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. His interest in the alternate realities that fiction could create was heightened by the work of playwrights Henrik Ibsen and Friedrich Hebbel (whose journals Klee frequently referenced) as well as by the early writings of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Sophocles. Authors of a more serious nature that Klee read included Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lev Tolstoy, although the artist often found their works to be overtly ethical and lacking in humor. Klee was an ardent proponent of early twentieth-century German idealistic metaphysics and believed that the visible world was one of many latent realities behind which existed a deeper state of being. To explain his theories regarding the science of design, Klee wrote The Thinking Eye. This monumental work contained the idea that painters could produce visual equivalents for spiritual states on their canvasses, that music in the form of eighteenth-century counterpoint could be translated directly from aural to visual motifs demonstrating gradations of value and color, and that fantasy was legitimate subject matter for painting, as the world

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