Years of Renewal.

• Author: McDougall, Walter A.
• Position: Review

Henry Kissinger, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 1119 pp., $35.

According to Walter Isaacson's Kissinger: A Biography, the consulting firm of Kissinger Associates became active in 1982, when the firm's chief "realized he did not feel like writing a third volume of memoirs and that Ronald Reagan was never going to make him secretary of state." Perhaps so, but that does not explain why we had to wait seventeen years for the finale of the trilogy that began with White House Years (1979) and Years of Upheaval (1982). More to the point are the facts that Kissinger Associates proved more successful, hence time-consuming, than expected; that Kissinger wanted to devote what spare time he had to more interesting projects (above all, his magisterial Diplomacy, 1994); and that the memoirs themselves had to be revisited in light of the end of the Cold War, the death of Nixon and each new revelation about the 1970s.

Thus, even though the author must have begun Years of Renewal years ago, the final product contains subtle replies to William Bundy's A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (1998), William Burr's The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks With Beijing and Moscow (1999), The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (1994), Isaacson's biography (1992) and the selective release of Nixon tapes by the National Archives. One result is that although Kissinger's third volume covers his service in the Ford administration, the first 166 pages consist largely of rebuttals and clarifications made necessary by all the above. For instance, Kissinger bluntly disputes Bundy's "caricature" of policy making in the Nixon administration as obsessively secret, deceptive and thus self-defeating. No recent president, he argues, tried harder than Nixon to explain to the Congress, media and public what he was doing and why. The audiences just hated the message, or messenger, and refused to listen. Moreover, Kissinger adds, by 1972 he himself was often called to the microphone to explain and persuade, and while he grants that domestic politics were hardly his long suit, he denies trying to mislead.

One may add that if charges of willful hypocrisy are to be hurled about, the veterans of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who designed, then deserted, the Vietnam War amidst yawning "credibility gaps" are ill-advised to cast the first stones. As for the transcripts of taped conversations, avidly peddled as the unvarnished truth by those who would profit from them, Kissinger warns that they are "flotsam and jetsam" of little historical use because it is impossible to gauge the moods, motives and contexts of remarks made in private. Nixon in particular was prone to venting his deepest insecurities about people not present, while at the same was "obsessively incapable" of disagreeing with people who were present. Kissinger grants that Nixon's language was at times inexcusable, but denies ever seeing him intoxicated during working hours, and stands by the eulogy he delivered at Yorba Linda in praise of a flawed but courageous and "near great" maker of tough decisions.

Enter Gerald R. Ford, who, by contrast, was guileless: "With Ford, what one saw was what one got." And given that he was an unelected president taking office in an era of polarization and paranoia, "Providence smiled on Americans when - seemingly by happenstance - it brought forward a President who embodied our nation's deepest and simplest values." In an unspoken comparison to Clinton, Kennedy and perhaps Reagan, Kissinger meditates on how television and the computer have replaced the written word - and a politics of substance - with the visual image - and a politics of impressions:

The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values, stars by consensus. When a candidate's views are...