Het blijft boeiend om over Kissinger te lezen: een complex persoon die in complexe tijden een belangrijke rol had. Maar dit boek voldoet niet aan de verwachtingen. Het voegt weinig toe en had ook een strengere eindredactie verdient. Sommige passages worden bijna letterlijk herhaald en het verhaal wordt niet altijd even logisch verteld. En de schrijver vertelt te veel over zichzelf. De vraag of Horne wel de geschikte figuur was voor dit boek moet dus uiteindelijk negatief worden beantwoord.
Zie mijn bespreking op www.boekenstrijd.nl ( )

I read this book as a follow up to Margaret Macmillan's book about Nixon going to China in 1972, because it picks up timewise where Macmillan left off. (The author speaks highly of the Macmillan book). The Kissinger book was good from that point of view and moreover it showed that Nixon and Kissinger had more to deal with than China. The chapter on Chile seemed out of place except to again illustrate the scope of the issues in 1973. The chapters on the October War is probably the best and the end of the book seems rushed and perfunctory.

I found some of the writing unnecessarily dense and elliptical, but I recognize that may be the author's style. It meant that some paragraphs needed to be read more than once to get the message. ( )

A Good Overview

If you've read any of Alistair Horne's other works like "A Savage War of Peace" or "The Fall of Paris" then you'll know what to expect of Horne -- a well-researched, well-written, historical survey of a certain epoch. It is a little odd in this way that a historian of mostly European, specifically French history would write a partial biography on Henry Kissinger, but once you get into the book, you'll quickly realize that Horne is not out of his league in writing about American history.

The book can be roughly divided into 5 themes: Watergate, Vietnam, China, Chile, and the Yom Kippur War. In my opinion Horne could have skipped the first 4, and focused exclusively on the Yom Kippur War where his research is the sharpest and details the most voluminous. For Watergate, Vietnam, China and Chile, he relies on mostly secondary literature, of which his own work "Small Earthquake in Chile" is cited.

Horne does a good job outlining the unique relationship Nixon and Kissinger shared. How foreign policy was centralized by Nixon by having the NSC and Kissinger take the lead in the backdoor through the White House, away from the Secretary of State and Rogers. As for Horne's treatment of the most controversial aspects of Kissinger's tenure, such as the bombing of Cambodia, Horne is very measured showing both sides of the debate.

At the end of the book, Horne echoes Kissinger's major regret as written in his published memoirs, that the failure in Vietnam haunted him and plagues him relentlessly. Could the U.S. have somehow salvaged the South, what mistakes did they make which resulted in their shameful withdrawal?

Well, there really isn't anything new in this book that isn't already available in other books. But I recommend Horne's book because of the way he is able to synthesize all the different view points and present a nice coherent narrative. ( )