That most Strangelovian of public servants-and his legacy comes in
for close analysis-and are found badly wanting. Kissinger cut a
brilliant figure for a long while, writes Hanhimaki (History and
Politics/Graduate Institute of International Studies), bringing
analytical skills, a broad range of references, and a pronounced
gift for networking to the service of whoever would listen to him.
(Kissinger appears to have wanted a post in the Kennedy
administration, Hanhimaki hints, but was rebuffed.) Almost alone in
academia in applauding Lyndon Johnson's escalation of the war in
Vietnam, Kissinger was rewarded with a consultancy that involved
backroom negotiations with North Vietnam, "his first touch of
secret diplomacy for which his appetite would later prove
insatiable." Further rewards would come when Kissinger linked his
fortunes to Richard Nixon's, and when he refined his own notions of
"linkage and leverage" to go head to head with the world powers,
playing the Soviets off the Chinese and inventing an elaborate
system of punishments and rewards to gain diplomatic concessions.
The major flaw there, writes Hanhimaki, was that Kissinger had
little or no interest "in the intricacies of the local causes of
conflicts" or in the world outside the superpowers, which drove him
to distraction when the North Vietnamese insisted on going their
own way during the peace talks, and which led to many other
American debacles. Hanhimaki provides breaking news by revealing
Kissinger's efforts throughout the early 1970s to engineer a way of
extracting US forces from Vietnam "without immediate
embarrassment," meaning he was willing to betray South Vietnam:
"While we cannot bring a communist government to power," Kissinger
wrote at the time, "if, as a result of historical evolution it
should happen over a period of time, we ought to be able to accept
it." Hanhimaki writes, by way of faint praise, that Kissinger has
"never even come close to being irrelevant." Still, those who take
the view that Kissinger is a war criminal will find little to
contradict them in this absorbing and rich account. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Henry Kissinger dominated American foreign relations like no other
figure in recent history. He negotiated an end to American
involvement in the Vietnam War, opened relations with Communist
China, and orchestrated detente with the Soviet Union. Yet he is
also the man behind the secret bombing of Cambodia and policies
leading to the overthrow of Chile's President Salvador Allende.
Which is more accurate, the picture of Kissinger the skilled
diplomat or Kissinger the war criminal?
In The Flawed Architect, the first major reassessment of Kissinger
in over a decade, historian Jussi Hanhimaki paints a subtle,
carefully composed portrait of America's most famous and infamous
statesman. Drawing on extensive research from newly declassified
files, the author follows Kissinger from his beginnings in the
Nixon administration up to the current controversy fed by
Christopher Hitchens over whether Kissinger is a war criminal.
Hanhimaki guides the reader through White House power struggles and
debates behind the Cambodia and Laos invasions, the search for a
strategy in Vietnam, the breakthrough with China, and the unfolding
of Soviet-American detente. Here, too, are many other international
crises of the period--the Indo-Pakistani War, the Yom Kippur War,
the Angolan civil war--all set against the backdrop of Watergate.
Along the way, Hanhimaki sheds light on Kissinger's personal
flaws--he was obsessed with secrecy and bureaucratic infighting in
an administration that self-destructed in its abuse of power--as
well as his great strengths as a diplomat. We see Kissinger
negotiating, threatening and joking with virtually all of the key
foreign leaders of the 1970s, from Mao to Brezhnev and Anwar Sadat
to Golda Meir.
This well researched account brings to life the complex nature of
American foreign policymaking during the Kissinger years. It will
be the standard work on Kissinger for years to come."
General
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