A third and final volume in the best-selling memoirs of one of the century's most influential political thinkers begins with Nixon's resignation and discusses his "shuttle" diplomacy in the Mideast, offering clear-eyed portrayals of figures such as Mao and Brezhnev. 150,000 first printing. Tour.
Amazon.com Review
There is an old joke that Henry Kissinger is so full of himself he once wrote a book called Famous People Who Have Met Me. That strong sense of self is on full display in this third volume of memoirs (the other two are White House Years and Years of Upheaval ). Kissinger, a national security advisor and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, is a foreign-policy maestro fond of describing the difficult subtleties of his job. He is also, at times, generous with his praise--especially with this whopper: "I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America's history, been there to keep us from losing it." Years of Renewal begins during Nixon's final days, and provides a few key insights into the man Kissinger calls "perhaps [the] most complex President of the twentieth century." One eye opener is the revelation that Nixon ordered the bombing of the Damascus airport in 1969 during a hijacking incident "to impress his pals." (It was called off the next morning.) The bulk of the book (and bulk is the right word--there are nearly 1,100 pages of text before the footnotes) focuses on Ford, who comes across as much more statesmanlike than the popular image of him as a bungling caretaker. The portraits of contemporary world leaders are also valuable. Kissinger combines detail and clarity to deliver an important chronicle of American diplomacy during the 1970s. --John Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Having aspired to be a modern-day Metternich, Kissinger has always placed great value on subtlety. Indeed, one of his favorite charges against his many political and bureaucratic adversaries is that they don't understand the nuances of policy, tactics or strategy. Throughout this final volume of his memoirs (after White House Years and Years of Upheaval), he takes painsAoften unsubtle painsAto tell readers how subtle he is. Of the Middle East peace process, he writes: "If foreign policy were as simple as the study of it in academic seminars, Jordan would have been the logical candidate for the next step." The implication, of course, is that foreign policy is not so simple, and Kissinger takes pride in reminding readers that he always kept all the complexities in mind. And yet Kissinger remains so informative that readers will happily permit him this indulgence. The book starts with Nixon's resignation and continues through the two years of the Ford administration. One of the surprises is the high regard in which Kissinger holds Ford: "I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America's history, been there to keep us from losing it." In his portrait of Nixon, Kissinger adopts the interpretation that seems to be hardening into conventional wisdomAthat of a supremely gifted analytical mind tragically undone by paranoia and an existential discomfort with being alive. Ford, by contrast, emerges from these pages as a man whose admitted lack of flair is the flip side of an inner confidence that is, perhaps uniquely among politicians, unimpeded by egotism. As Kissinger explains China policy, Soviet policy, Middle East diplomacy and various crises (in Cyprus, Angola and elsewhere), his insight extends not only to explanations of policy but also to accounts of bureaucratic infighting and turf battlesAas well as to relations between the executive branch and Congress. His account of how, regarding arms control and d?tente, he and Ford tried to determine the national interest while being squeezed between a "McGovernite Congress" and the hard right will give readers a sophisticated political lesson. Kissinger was a shrewd courtier and ferocious infighter, and he takes a deadpan delight in showing readers just how adept he was. At the same time, he's magnanimous toward those with whom he once locked horns, throwing appreciative bouquets to such former adversaries as Senator Scoop Jackson and William Rogers ("I am not proud of the way I participated in Nixon's attempts to marginalize the man," he writes of the man he replaced as Nixon's secretary of state). Even readers predisposed to see Kissinger as a villain may come away from the book with at least grudging admiration for him and with a deeperAand, yes, more subtleAunderstanding of the complexities of foreign policy and its domestic political dimensions. First serial to Time. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The former secretary of state wraps up his memoirs with this third volume. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
...a distinguished and important work.... Kissinger's history of his own time in office is a work whose breadth, clarity of vision and historical scope amply justify its size. It is an event, a likely classic of its genre. -- The New York Times, Richard Bernstein
Years of Renewal is an engrossing book, truly hard to put down, at least for aficionados of U.S. foreign policy. That is one excellent reason for reading it. The second is precisely the 25-year hiatus. Time has improved the product in subtle ways. -- The Wall Street Journal, Josef Joffe
It is, by any standard, a remarkable achievement. -- The New York Times Book Review, John Lewis Gaddis
About the Author
Henry A. Kissinger was sworn in on September 22, 1973, as the fifty-sixth Secretary of State, a position he held until January 20, 1977. He also served as Assistant to President for National Security Affairs from January 20, 1969, until November 3, 1975.
Among the awards Dr. Kissinger has received have been the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the nation's highest civilian award) in 1977, and the Medal of Liberty in 1986.
Dr. Kissinger was born in Fuerth, Germany, came to the United States in 1938, and was naturalized a United States citizen in 1943. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946. He graduated suma cum laude from Harvard College in 1950 and received M.A. and Ph.D degrees from Harvard University in 1952 and 1954.
From 1954 until 1969 he was a member of the faculty of Harvard University, in both the Department of Government and the Center International Affairs. He was Director of the Harvard International Seminar from 1952 to 1969.
At present, Dr. Kissinger is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.
Gerald Rudolph Ford was an uncomplicated man tapped by destiny for some of the most complicated tasks in the nation's history. The first nonelected President, he was called to heal the nation's wounds after a decade in which the Vietnam War and Watergate had produced the most severe divisions since the Civil War. As different as possible from the driven personalities who typically propel themselves into the highest office, Gerald Ford restored calm and confidence to a nation surfeited with upheavals, overcame a series of international crises, and ushered in a period of renewal for American society.
A year before his inauguration, it would not have occurred to Ford that he was about to be thrust into the presidency. The highest office to which he had ever aspired was that of Speaker of the House of Representatives, and that had appeared out of reach because of the Democratic Party's apparently invulnerable majority in Congress. Ford had, in fact, decided to retire after the next election in November 1974. Suddenly, in October 1973, Richard Nixon appointed him Vice President in the wake of Spiro Agnew's resignation. "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln," Ford said modestly when he assumed that responsibility on December 6, 1973.
Having never felt obliged to participate in the obsessive calculations of normal presidential candidates, Ford was at peace with himself. To a world concerned lest America's domestic torment impair its indispensable leadership during what was still the height of the Cold War, he provided a sense of restored purpose. On his own people, Ford's matter-of-fact serenity bestowed the precious gift of enabling the generations that followed to remain blissfully unaware of how close to disaster their country had come in a decade of tearing itself apart.
The ever-accelerating pace of history threatens to consume memory. Even those of us who experienced firsthand the disintegration of the Nixon Administration find ourselves struggling to reconstruct the sense of despair that suffused the collapsing presidency and the sinking feeling evoked by seemingly endless revelations of misconduct, by the passionate hostility of the media, and by the open warfare between the executive and legislative branches of our government.
In my dual role of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, my constant nightmare as Watergate accelerated was that, sooner or later, some foreign adversary might be tempted to test what remained of Nixon's authority and discover that the emperor had no clothes. Probably the greatest service rendered by the Nixon Administration in those strange and turbulent final months was to have prevented any such overt challenge. For even as it approached dissolution, the Nixon Administration managed to navigate the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, diminish the Soviet position in the Middle East by sponsoring two disengagement agreements, and conduct successfully a complicated triangular diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing.
The disintegration of executive authority in the democratic superpower did not lead to a collapse of our international position as any standard textbook on world politics would have predicted, partly because the sheer magnitude of the disintegration of presidential authority was unimaginable to friend and adversary alike. Together with the prestige Nixon had accumulated over five years of foreign policy successes, we were able to sustain what came close to a policy of bluff. In October 1973 at the end of the Middle East War, it even saw us through an alert of our military forces, including of the nuclear arsenal. But with every passing month, the sleight of hand grew more difficult. We were living on borrowed time.
As the impeachment proceedings gathered momentum, Nixon's personal conduct began to mirror his political decline. He kept fully abreast of the various foreign policy issues and at no point failed to make the key decisions. But, as time went on, Watergate absorbed more and more of Nixon's intellectual and emotional capital. As day-to-day business became trivialized by the increasingly apparent inevitability of his downfall, I felt enormous sympathy for this tormented man whose suffering was compounded by his knowledge that his tragedy was largely self-inflicted. Yet by early July 1974, I, like the other few survivors of Nixon's entourage, was so drained by the emotional roller coaster that I was half hoping for some merciful end to it all.
The brutal process of attrition seemed both endless and incapable of being ended. Even when, on July 24, the Supreme Court ordered the White House tapes to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was so inured to daily crises that I doubted anything conclusive would emerge. On July 25, I escorted the new German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to the summer White House at San Clemente for a meeting with the President. After an hour with a ravaged-looking Richard Nixon the next day, Genscher asked the question tormenting me as well: "How long can this go on?"
On July 31, Al Haig, then Nixon's chief of staff, requested an urgent meeting during which he informed me that one of the tapes the Supreme Court had ordered to be turned over to the special prosecutor was indeed the long-sought "smoking gun" -- the conclusive proof of Nixon's participation in the cover-up. Haig would not divulge the contents.
Even at the edge of the precipice, the surreal aspect of Watergate continued. The White House decided to release the tape on August 5 in order to be able to put its own "spin" on it. The day before, my friend Diane Sawyer -- at the time, assistant to Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and now a national television personality -- came to my office to check some public relations detail on an unrelated foreign policy matter. She had not heard the tape, she said, but she was beginning to believe that a climax would never come and that we were doomed to bleed to death slowly. "As likely as not," she said, "the tape will be drowned out by the background noise."
Clever, beautiful Diane turned out to be wrong. On the tape, Nixon was clearly heard instructing his chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, to use the CIA to thwart an FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary. This proof of an attempted obstruction of justice provided the catharsis for the Watergate affair. I have elsewhere described in detail the outburst that followed its release -- the Cabinet revolt, the decision of senior Republicans to abandon the President, and my meetings with Nixon, including the melancholy encounter in the Lincoln Sitting Room on his next-to-last night in the White House -- all of it culminating in Nixon's decision forty-eight hours later to resign, effective at noon on August 9. In these pages, I will confine myself to my interaction with the President-to-Be, Gerald R. Ford.
On the morning of the tape's release, Nixon telephoned with a bizarre request: would I call the Vice President and ask him to invite key southern members of Congress to a briefing by me on foreign policy? Nixon did not explain his purpose, but obviously he thought it might persuade these representatives to vote against impeachment.
I had first met Gerald Ford some ten years before when, as a Harvard professor, I invited him to address a seminar on defense policy I was conducting under the joint auspices of the Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Public Administration (now the John F. Kennedy School of Government). Ford discussed congressional control of the defense budget, a subject he knew well from his service as the ranking Republican on the Defense Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations. Although (and perhaps because) his presentation was delivered in the unassuming style of Grand Rapids rather than the convoluted jargon of the academi
A third and final volume in the best-selling memoirs of one of the century's most influential political thinkers begins with Nixon's resignation and discusses his "shuttle" diplomacy in the Mideast, offering clear-eyed portrayals of figures such as Mao and Brezhnev. 150,000 first printing. Tour.
Amazon.com Review
There is an old joke that Henry Kissinger is so full of himself he once wrote a book called Famous People Who Have Met Me. That strong sense of self is on full display in this third volume of memoirs (the other two are White House Years and Years of Upheaval ). Kissinger, a national security advisor and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, is a foreign-policy maestro fond of describing the difficult subtleties of his job. He is also, at times, generous with his praise--especially with this whopper: "I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America's history, been there to keep us from losing it." Years of Renewal begins during Nixon's final days, and provides a few key insights into the man Kissinger calls "perhaps [the] most complex President of the twentieth century." One eye opener is the revelation that Nixon ordered the bombing of the Damascus airport in 1969 during a hijacking incident "to impress his pals." (It was called off the next morning.) The bulk of the book (and bulk is the right word--there are nearly 1,100 pages of text before the footnotes) focuses on Ford, who comes across as much more statesmanlike than the popular image of him as a bungling caretaker. The portraits of contemporary world leaders are also valuable. Kissinger combines detail and clarity to deliver an important chronicle of American diplomacy during the 1970s. --John Miller
From Publishers Weekly
Having aspired to be a modern-day Metternich, Kissinger has always placed great value on subtlety. Indeed, one of his favorite charges against his many political and bureaucratic adversaries is that they don't understand the nuances of policy, tactics or strategy. Throughout this final volume of his memoirs (after White House Years and Years of Upheaval), he takes painsAoften unsubtle painsAto tell readers how subtle he is. Of the Middle East peace process, he writes: "If foreign policy were as simple as the study of it in academic seminars, Jordan would have been the logical candidate for the next step." The implication, of course, is that foreign policy is not so simple, and Kissinger takes pride in reminding readers that he always kept all the complexities in mind. And yet Kissinger remains so informative that readers will happily permit him this indulgence. The book starts with Nixon's resignation and continues through the two years of the Ford administration. One of the surprises is the high regard in which Kissinger holds Ford: "I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America's history, been there to keep us from losing it." In his portrait of Nixon, Kissinger adopts the interpretation that seems to be hardening into conventional wisdomAthat of a supremely gifted analytical mind tragically undone by paranoia and an existential discomfort with being alive. Ford, by contrast, emerges from these pages as a man whose admitted lack of flair is the flip side of an inner confidence that is, perhaps uniquely among politicians, unimpeded by egotism. As Kissinger explains China policy, Soviet policy, Middle East diplomacy and various crises (in Cyprus, Angola and elsewhere), his insight extends not only to explanations of policy but also to accounts of bureaucratic infighting and turf battlesAas well as to relations between the executive branch and Congress. His account of how, regarding arms control and d?tente, he and Ford tried to determine the national interest while being squeezed between a "McGovernite Congress" and the hard right will give readers a sophisticated political lesson. Kissinger was a shrewd courtier and ferocious infighter, and he takes a deadpan delight in showing readers just how adept he was. At the same time, he's magnanimous toward those with whom he once locked horns, throwing appreciative bouquets to such former adversaries as Senator Scoop Jackson and William Rogers ("I am not proud of the way I participated in Nixon's attempts to marginalize the man," he writes of the man he replaced as Nixon's secretary of state). Even readers predisposed to see Kissinger as a villain may come away from the book with at least grudging admiration for him and with a deeperAand, yes, more subtleAunderstanding of the complexities of foreign policy and its domestic political dimensions. First serial to Time.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The former secretary of state wraps up his memoirs with this third volume.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
With this volume Kissinger concludes what may be the greatest memoir ever written by an American statesman (White House Years, 1979; Years of Upheaval, 1982). It is a tribute to the quality of his narrative that the reader is often entranced by the personalities and diplomatic maneuverings of the Ford administration, a quarter of a century ago. Of course, Kissinger does not always resist the temptation to be more prescient than he was at the time. Thus the statesman, who discerned in 1977 that we faced the stark reality that the [communist] challenge is unending, reports on going to Moscow several years earlier that one could not but gain the impression that the whole elaborately constructed stage set was precarious and might collapse at any moment. Not surprisingly, we also see more of the good Henry, charitable in his judgments, even of bureaucratic enemies, and open in his methods, than the bad Henry (Trust does not come to me spontaneously). But the performance is always a bravura one: there is hardly a page without a wise observation or maxim of statecraft, or a characterization full of insight, including masterful sketches of Nixon, Ford, Mao, Helmut Schmidt, and a host of other leaders. There is just one point at which the tone, wise, avuncular, witty, and epigrammatic changes dramatically, and that is on the withdrawal of the US from Vietnam. Kissinger argues with anguished passion that those in Congress who called for US withdrawal welshed on their commitment to provide aid to the South Vietnamese when the US left; that the US abandonment was shameful; that it led to genocide and tragedy in Vietnam and Cambodia; and that it deeply injured the reputation and the interests of the US throughout the world. Enough time may now have elapsed for the truth of these observations to be more widely acknowledged. A brilliant, masterly, even seminal book. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
...a distinguished and important work.... Kissinger's history of his own time in office is a work whose breadth, clarity of vision and historical scope amply justify its size. It is an event, a likely classic of its genre. -- The New York Times , Richard Bernstein
Years of Renewal is an engrossing book, truly hard to put down, at least for aficionados of U.S. foreign policy. That is one excellent reason for reading it. The second is precisely the 25-year hiatus. Time has improved the product in subtle ways. -- The Wall Street Journal , Josef Joffe
It is, by any standard, a remarkable achievement. -- The New York Times Book Review , John Lewis Gaddis
About the Author
Henry A. Kissinger was sworn in on September 22, 1973, as the fifty-sixth Secretary of State, a position he held until January 20, 1977. He also served as Assistant to President for National Security Affairs from January 20, 1969, until November 3, 1975.
Among the awards Dr. Kissinger has received have been the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the nation's highest civilian award) in 1977, and the Medal of Liberty in 1986.
Dr. Kissinger was born in Fuerth, Germany, came to the United States in 1938, and was naturalized a United States citizen in 1943. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946. He graduated suma cum laude from Harvard College in 1950 and received M.A. and Ph.D degrees from Harvard University in 1952 and 1954.
From 1954 until 1969 he was a member of the faculty of Harvard University, in both the Department of Government and the Center International Affairs. He was Director of the Harvard International Seminar from 1952 to 1969.
At present, Dr. Kissinger is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1: A Ford, Not a Lincoln
The Changing of the Guard
Gerald Rudolph Ford was an uncomplicated man tapped by destiny for some of the most complicated tasks in the nation's history. The first nonelected President, he was called to heal the nation's wounds after a decade in which the Vietnam War and Watergate had produced the most severe divisions since the Civil War. As different as possible from the driven personalities who typically propel themselves into the highest office, Gerald Ford restored calm and confidence to a nation surfeited with upheavals, overcame a series of international crises, and ushered in a period of renewal for American society.
A year before his inauguration, it would not have occurred to Ford that he was about to be thrust into the presidency. The highest office to which he had ever aspired was that of Speaker of the House of Representatives, and that had appeared out of reach because of the Democratic Party's apparently invulnerable majority in Congress. Ford had, in fact, decided to retire after the next election in November 1974. Suddenly, in October 1973, Richard Nixon appointed him Vice President in the wake of Spiro Agnew's resignation. "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln," Ford said modestly when he assumed that responsibility on December 6, 1973.
Having never felt obliged to participate in the obsessive calculations of normal presidential candidates, Ford was at peace with himself. To a world concerned lest America's domestic torment impair its indispensable leadership during what was still the height of the Cold War, he provided a sense of restored purpose. On his own people, Ford's matter-of-fact serenity bestowed the precious gift of enabling the generations that followed to remain blissfully unaware of how close to disaster their country had come in a decade of tearing itself apart.
The ever-accelerating pace of history threatens to consume memory. Even those of us who experienced firsthand the disintegration of the Nixon Administration find ourselves struggling to reconstruct the sense of despair that suffused the collapsing presidency and the sinking feeling evoked by seemingly endless revelations of misconduct, by the passionate hostility of the media, and by the open warfare between the executive and legislative branches of our government.
In my dual role of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, my constant nightmare as Watergate accelerated was that, sooner or later, some foreign adversary might be tempted to test what remained of Nixon's authority and discover that the emperor had no clothes. Probably the greatest service rendered by the Nixon Administration in those strange and turbulent final months was to have prevented any such overt challenge. For even as it approached dissolution, the Nixon Administration managed to navigate the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, diminish the Soviet position in the Middle East by sponsoring two disengagement agreements, and conduct successfully a complicated triangular diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing.
The disintegration of executive authority in the democratic superpower did not lead to a collapse of our international position as any standard textbook on world politics would have predicted, partly because the sheer magnitude of the disintegration of presidential authority was unimaginable to friend and adversary alike. Together with the prestige Nixon had accumulated over five years of foreign policy successes, we were able to sustain what came close to a policy of bluff. In October 1973 at the end of the Middle East War, it even saw us through an alert of our military forces, including of the nuclear arsenal. But with every passing month, the sleight of hand grew more difficult. We were living on borrowed time.
As the impeachment proceedings gathered momentum, Nixon's personal conduct began to mirror his political decline. He kept fully abreast of the various foreign policy issues and at no point failed to make the key decisions. But, as time went on, Watergate absorbed more and more of Nixon's intellectual and emotional capital. As day-to-day business became trivialized by the increasingly apparent inevitability of his downfall, I felt enormous sympathy for this tormented man whose suffering was compounded by his knowledge that his tragedy was largely self-inflicted. Yet by early July 1974, I, like the other few survivors of Nixon's entourage, was so drained by the emotional roller coaster that I was half hoping for some merciful end to it all.
The brutal process of attrition seemed both endless and incapable of being ended. Even when, on July 24, the Supreme Court ordered the White House tapes to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was so inured to daily crises that I doubted anything conclusive would emerge. On July 25, I escorted the new German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to the summer White House at San Clemente for a meeting with the President. After an hour with a ravaged-looking Richard Nixon the next day, Genscher asked the question tormenting me as well: "How long can this go on?"
On July 31, Al Haig, then Nixon's chief of staff, requested an urgent meeting during which he informed me that one of the tapes the Supreme Court had ordered to be turned over to the special prosecutor was indeed the long-sought "smoking gun" -- the conclusive proof of Nixon's participation in the cover-up. Haig would not divulge the contents.
Even at the edge of the precipice, the surreal aspect of Watergate continued. The White House decided to release the tape on August 5 in order to be able to put its own "spin" on it. The day before, my friend Diane Sawyer -- at the time, assistant to Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and now a national television personality -- came to my office to check some public relations detail on an unrelated foreign policy matter. She had not heard the tape, she said, but she was beginning to believe that a climax would never come and that we were doomed to bleed to death slowly. "As likely as not," she said, "the tape will be drowned out by the background noise."
Clever, beautiful Diane turned out to be wrong. On the tape, Nixon was clearly heard instructing his chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, to use the CIA to thwart an FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary. This proof of an attempted obstruction of justice provided the catharsis for the Watergate affair. I have elsewhere described in detail the outburst that followed its release -- the Cabinet revolt, the decision of senior Republicans to abandon the President, and my meetings with Nixon, including the melancholy encounter in the Lincoln Sitting Room on his next-to-last night in the White House -- all of it culminating in Nixon's decision forty-eight hours later to resign, effective at noon on August 9. In these pages, I will confine myself to my interaction with the President-to-Be, Gerald R. Ford.
On the morning of the tape's release, Nixon telephoned with a bizarre request: would I call the Vice President and ask him to invite key southern members of Congress to a briefing by me on foreign policy? Nixon did not explain his purpose, but obviously he thought it might persuade these representatives to vote against impeachment.
I had first met Gerald Ford some ten years before when, as a Harvard professor, I invited him to address a seminar on defense policy I was conducting under the joint auspices of the Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Public Administration (now the John F. Kennedy School of Government). Ford discussed congressional control of the defense budget, a subject he knew well from his service as the ranking Republican on the Defense Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations. Although (and perhaps because) his presentation was delivered in the unassuming style of Grand Rapids rather than the convoluted jargon of the academi