HENRY KISSINGER AND AMERICAN POWER

A foreign relations expert reassesses Henry Kissinger’s central role in American foreign policy.

Overall, Schwartz, a professor of history at Vanderbilt, aims to remain “dispassionate” in his account of Kissinger during his years of real power under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The author downplays some of the more “thundering moral pronouncements of condemnations” leveled at Kissinger over the years, such as his role in widening the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, among others. Seeking to “reintroduce…Kissinger to the American people and to an international audience,” Schwartz is particularly fascinated by his subject’s courtly personality, his “intellectual brilliance, skill as a courtier, and Machiavellian maneuvering within and against the bureaucracy.” As a Harvard professor, Kissinger was chosen to serve as Nixon’s national security adviser, a position that Kissinger himself had helped devise as a way to bring “a more centralized and secretive approach to foreign policy…into the White House, something both [John] Kennedy and [Lyndon] Johnson had also sought to do.” Eventually, this “odd couple” complemented each other in setting policy: aiming to end the Vietnam War, navigate arms control with the Soviet Union, achieve détente with China as well as peace between Israel and the Arabs. As the author shows, all of these diplomatic projects were guided by “new realism” rather than ideology. Kissinger was Nixon’s “secret agent,” undermining Secretary of State William Rogers. As Watergate hearings heated up in the summer of 1973, Nixon felt compelled to replace Rogers with Kissinger (“Nixon’s own Frankenstein monster”) in hopes of maintaining the focus on the president’s largely successful foreign policy. Using the era’s ample TV record as part of his presentation, Schwartz asserts that “it is not necessary to render a moral judgment on Henry Kissinger in order to learn from his career.” Many readers and historians will disagree, but the author provides a useful political biography for those interested in modern American history.

An elucidating, stick-to-the-record study for students of foreign policy.