Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography.

• Author: Schwartz, Thomas A.
• Position: Book review

Title: Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography Author:Fletcher M. Burton

Text:

Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography By Thomas A. Schwartz

Hill and Wang, August 2020

ISBN-10: 0809095378

ISBN-13: 978-0809095377

560 pages

With Edward Gibbon listening in the gallery, a speaker took to the floor of Westminster Hall to commend the historian's monumental work on the Roman empire, praising its "luminous pages"--only later to claim he had said "voluminous." This controversy from 1788 seems picayune; while smiling at it, we may yet draw on it to evaluate Thomas Schwartz's new book Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography. The book is wonderfully luminous. It comprises one volume, "short and concise," as the author says, a distillation compared to the three volumes Kissinger filled with his memoirs, not to mention his dozen other works. Any serious student of Kissinger, and any meticulous scholar like Professor Thomas A. Schwartz of Vanderbilt University, must contend with what might be called Kissinger's MAD doctrine: mutually assured documentation. Kissinger is voluminous.

The premise of the book is short and sound. Revere or revile Kissinger, we must try to understand him. His impact was deep; his legacy is large. A judgment must therefore be dispassionate--not void of conclusions at the end but free of indictments at the beginning. And Schwartz has pursued his premise and sifted his research with outstanding results. Above all, he brings original scholarship to bear on three aspects that, interwoven, make up Kissinger's exercise of American power, particularly from 1969-1976: foreign policy, domestic politics, and public persona. In these pages we find Kissinger the statesman, the operator, and the showman.

A high school student in the early 1970s, I followed Kissinger's diplomacy with avid interest, watching many of his TV appearances and compiling an entire notebook with his press profiles (the origin of my ambition to join the Foreign Service). This is the Kissinger in Schwartz's pages: the consultant, then National Security advisor, then Secretary of State as he rocketed up in the administrations of that time and in the media of that day. This approach has real value for history-telling. Today Kissinger is a polarizing figure in a polarized culture. It was not always so.

Drawing on his field of expertise at Vanderbilt, Professor Schwartz reconstructs the foreign policy of the Nixon and...