Kissinger on Kissinger

People love talking about themselves. Henry Kissinger is no exception, and talk about himself he does in this little book. At length. The project was initially a one-off, hour-long interview, but the guy wouldn’t shut up, so his old buddy (and one-time special assistant at the State Department) Winston Lord said, “screw it, let’s keep it going.”

Of course, when Henry Kissinger talks about himself, he’s also talking about the world: Nixon and China and Vietnam and the Soviets and about a billion other things he managed to get himself involved in over his decades and decades and decades haunting the halls of power.

Those decades, in the mid-twentieth century, were fascinating, horrifying, and featured a seismic shift in world culture. The impact and consequences of those decades are still being felt big-time, so the goal of distilling Kissinger’s foreign policy views “in a fashion that [interests] the generations that succeeded us, for whom this period [1969-1974] may seem like ancient history” is a lofty but worthy one.

Kissinger, like ol’ Tricky Dick himself, may have a cloud (or a gigantic fucking typhoon, depending on whom ya ask) hanging over his legacy, but he’s certainly interesting, and whether for good or ill, he did a lotta shit that’s still reverberating through foreign policy half a century later.