Walter Isaacson

A biography of the political figure, based on more than one hundred and fifty interviews with Kissinger and others, chronicles his childhood in Nazi Germany, his rise in politics, and his political relationships.

A Biography

Kissinger

Patrick Book

As usual with Walter Isaacson books, I learned more that I might've ever thought possible about the man and his work. And trust me, I knew absolutely nothing about Kissinger except for that one time he was on The Simpsons. More or less.

Gavin

Balanced coverage of the great monster, including his meteoric rise from penniless immigrant German Jew to a permanent spot in the highest caste of global influence; his academic conceit (the longest-ever thesis at Harvard), and his ceaseless inveigling and brown-nosing. (In case you don't know, Kissinger is probably the greatest war criminal in American history.) Res ipsa loquitur:


  Whenever peace — conceived as the avoidance of war — has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. [A more proper goal is] stability based on an equilibrium of forces.

If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.


There's not a lot of editorial from Isaacson. He respects Kissinger's single-mindedness and intellectual clout, while giving us plenty of his egotism and blandly evil wonkishness:

  
Here was an example of what would become a pattern in Kissinger’s diplomacy: his attempt to mediate a dispute by finding a semantic formulation to finesse differences. In this case it was devising a phrase that linked the bombing halt to the negotiations, without sounding like a condition. Later, at the end of the war, he would search for ambiguous phrases about the demilitarized zone and South Vietnamese sovereignty that could be read differently in Hanoi and Saigon. Sometimes these word games paid off. But usually they opened Kissinger up to accusations that he had left important disagreements unresolved by talking out of both sides of his mouth.

[during the 1970 election, R v N ] At the convention, the Rockefeller forces, with little to lose, sent Kissinger to talk to the Iowa delegation. “It was so novel to me,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’d never met working politicians before. I didn’t attempt to talk their language. I just talked what I knew.” The Iowa delegation voted overwhelmingly for Nixon.


Isaacson soft-pedals the mass chaos and death Kissinger gave rise to. And much more has come to light about Kissinger's personal responsibility for it, since Isaacson published this. 

Dr Strangelove wasn't based on Kissinger, but I find it impossible not to think of Peter Sellars (or Woody Allen) when reading about the tragic success of this erotomaniacal egomaniac.

Hitchens' Trial of Henry Kissinger is much more salient.

Keven Wang

Masterpiece. Robert Caro probably does it better

Kissinger A Biography

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