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Henry Kissinger's Memoirs #3
YEARS OF RENEWAL.
Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American diplomatist of this century, a major figure in world history, the first Jewish Secretary of State, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and arguably one of the most brilliant minds ever placed at the service of American foreign policy, as well as one of the shrewdest, best-informed and most articulate figures ever to occupy a position of power in Washington. This third and final volume of memoirs completes a major work of contemporary history and a brilliantly told narrative full of startling insights, candour and a sweeping sense of history. It begins with the resignation of Nixon – including Kissinger’s final assessment of Nixon’s tortured personality and the self-inflicted tragedy that ended his presidency, making Kissinger, for a time, the most powerful man in American government. This book abounds in crisis – Vietnam, Watergate, the Cold War. Here are brilliant scenes, as only an insider could write them, of the high-level meetings that shaped American foreign policy, the famous ‘shuttle’ diplomacy by which Kissinger succeeded in bringing a reluctant and wary Rabin and anxious Sadat together to begin to return of the Sinai to Egypt and the SALT talks with the Soviet Union that began the process of nuclear limitation. Here also are intimate and profound portraits of world leaders from Mao, teasing Kissinger while displaying a poetic wisdom, to Brezhnev at the Vladivostock summit, confused, ill-prepared, unwell, desperately to conceal the Soviet Union’s difficulties with a screen of blustering bravado. A work of scholarship, wisdom and history by the man who made much of the history of which he writes and perhaps more than any other helped form the post-Cold War world in which we live.
Hardcover
First published September 28, 1998
About the author
Henry Kissinger
289 books2,007 followersHenry Alfred Kissinger (born Heinz Alfred Kissinger) was a German-born American bureaucrat, diplomat, and 1973 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the Richard Nixon administration. Kissinger emerged unscathed from the Watergate scandal, and maintained his powerful position when Gerald Ford became President.
A proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a dominant role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente.
During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations he cut a flamboyant figure, appearing at social occasions with many celebrities. His foreign policy record made him a nemesis to the anti-war left and the anti-communist right alike.
A proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a dominant role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. During this period, he pioneered the policy of détente.
During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations he cut a flamboyant figure, appearing at social occasions with many celebrities. His foreign policy record made him a nemesis to the anti-war left and the anti-communist right alike.
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March 27, 2026
Henry Kissinger's politics and prose suffer gravely in this third volume of his White House memoirs. He is forced to defend the worst two stains on his record---the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis---and fails miserably. Nor does the writing ever rise above the White House memorandum level. Nevertheless, there is some gold amid the dross. Henry the K insists that in a time of upheaval, such as America in the Sixties, a minority, no matter how small, can exert enormous influence. He thinks that towards the end of the decade, the U.S. was already in "a pre-revolutionary situation", evinced by young people turning on the Vietnam War and expressing sympathy for the Weathermen and Black Panthers; a rare burst of intellectual honesty from a major ruling class figure. These numerically tiny groups posed a serious threat to national security by spearheading a much larger anti-government feeling in the land; Nixon's "silent majority" counted for little against them. On the flip side, the neoconservatives of the Seventies comprised only a few hundred New York intellectuals. Still, they had the power to sway the Republican Party against Kissinger's policy of detente. Kissinger doesn't have much use for democracy, so it's no wonder he's constantly "stymied", his word, by the left and right. Don't worry: Nothing can stop Super K. He's constantly jetting off to Egypt, Syria, and Israel to establish new borders after the 1973 War, flying to South Africa to stop the Cubans from taking over Angola, and taking a detour to Latin America, next door but "for me more remote than Moscow or Berlin". High-level talks with Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina and the Brazilian military produced "an improvement in the human rights situation" but K. regrets this issue became an obsession with Jimmy Carter. Who is his enemy during all this? The Russians? The Chinese? Nope. It's "the McGovernite Congress elected in 1974 after Watergate", which forced the U.S. to stop funding South Vietnam and linked detente to Soviet progress on Jewish emigration. Those damn Democrats!
As befits a man who strode the world like a colossus, Kissinger makes solid points about U.S. foreign policy that are still worth considering. U.S.-China relations stand on the platform he and Nixon built in 1972, regardless of which party or President holds office in Washington. Both countries commit themselves to settling the most contentious issue dividing them, Taiwan, by peaceful means, and secretly pledge to contain Russia, communist or not. U.S. strategy in the Middle East is to divide and subdivide states. Kissinger takes credit for separating Egypt from the rest of the Arab world after the 1973 War by offering Sadat the Sinai in slow and small stages. In Iraq, the U.S. and the Shah of Iran backed the Kurds against Saddam Hussein, until the Shah made his peace with Baghdad and Kissinger pulled the plug on American aid. Latin America matters only to the degree that Cuba is troublesome to its neighbors, and Africa, in the post-Apartheid era, counts not at all. Kissinger reiterates the wish of all U.S. presidents that foreign policy be immune from domestic politics, and sighs that lobbying groups for different causes, on Israel, Cyprus, and other hot spots, no longer make this feasible. He longs for a return of the days when foreign policy was a bipartisan effort, typified by the Truman administration and "my favorite Secretary of State, Dean Acheson".
Like any man who writes an apologia pro vita sua, Kissinger does take the time to answer critics of his actions. Opponents of the Vietnam War might have had good motives, but they "betrayed the 58,000 Americans who had already died there" by stabbing South Vietnam in the back in 1975. That those 58,000 never wanted to be sent there in the first place does not occur to Henry. Those on the right who railed against detente with the Soviet Union, Reagan among them, failed to see how in the long-run the Soviet regime would suffer economic defeat and collapse if engaged with the U.S. in slowing down the arms race. Kissinger is careful not to make the same argument with regards to China. Mao was a faithful ally of the United States against the Russians, and a stable Chinese regime is vital to the U.S. in East Asia. Kissinger's greatest retort to his critics is the tu quoque, or "you're one too" attack. Did Brazil, Argentina, and Chile violate human rights under pro-US regimes? Yes, but so did the leftist military government in Peru, "without arousing any protest". If the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, tortured dissidents, the same thing goes for Khomeini and the mullahs. Yes, the U.S. double-crossed the Kurds, but "they misunderstood our material commitment to their cause"; they were supposed to tie down Saddam's troops, not overthrow him. When you set out to do nothing less than restructure the world, it makes sense to accuse your critics of double standards and lack of intelligence.
Kissinger's portraits of great contemporaries is fascinating for what it says about them and him. The gray eminence that hangs over all three volumes is, of course, Richard Nixon. In WHITE HOUSE YEARS and YEARS OF UPHEAVAL Kissinger made the case for Nixon the statesman, who developed a vision of ending the Cold War through negotiations rather than confrontation, except for that nasty unfinished business in Vietnam. Nixon's unquiet exile after resigning the presidency, during which he took pot shots at Kissinger, implying he had been soft on the Communists in Hanoi, along with new revelations about his anti-semitism and mental instability, forced Henry to alter the portrait of his former boss. The first thirty pages of this book depict Nixon the loose cannon, giving orders to bomb Assad in Syria and Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia during his sojourn in China. Fortunately, K. was there to make sure these injunctions were ignored. The White House staff should have done the same thing during Watergate! Kissinger is sorry about the Watergate mess, not because he and Nixon got caught doing illegal things, such as tapping their own aides, but because it soured the smooth relations between the president, Congress, and the media that are essential for a successful foreign policy. Nixon's successor Gerald Ford is painted as a decent man who restored civility to government, but also out of his depth in foreign affairs. Kissinger reproduces taped conversations between him and Good Guy Jerry where Ford simply utters "uh-huh" after each Kissinger suggestion. Mao is an aging titan who can no longer command his own body, much less China. He presses Kissinger to get tougher on the Russians in Asia, Africa and the Middle East by forming a China-U.S. international anti-Soviet alliance, advice that Kissinger accepts philosophically but rejects in practice. Zhou En Lai glitters in these pages, but he was dying of cancer and losing Mao's allegiance to his wife and the Gang of Four. Brezhnev is a doddering fool, a point Kissinger took advantage of in securing favorable terms during nuclear arms negotiations.
Dare we call Kissinger great? The world he and Nixon built after Vietnam, of great powers kept out of war and each other's way lies in tatters. Like his idol, and subject of his dissertation, Metternich, Kissinger saw the world, the world of the global North, the rest does not count, bound by mutual interests; more properly self-interest leading to the preservation of peace. Great nations have more to gain if they are joined to each other not by treaties, Kissinger agrees with Hobbes that "covenants, without swords, are mere words", but interlocking goals. He wagered, correctly it turned out, that the Soviets valued detente, offering arms reduction and trade with the West, with the United States over expansion into the Middle East and Africa, and that China benefited from a de facto U.S. pledge of protection against the Soviet Union in return for ignoring its nominal Vietnamese allies and foregoing an invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. could thus offer something to both its rivals without appeasement or war. This is the opposite of the sphere influence foreign policy pursued by America, Russia and China today (2026). After leaving office, Kissinger fought against this ominous trend in his books, lectures and conversations with the greats in Washington, Moscow and Beijing, but to no avail. Yet, Kissinger himself must take his share of the blame for the current global chaos. His system of interlocking interests assumed the three great powers would be frozen into place for an indefinite time. However, post-Communist Russia has superpower ambitions even while lacking the economic base to fulfill them. The opposite is true of China. Beijing is happy to command much of the world economy while remaining a second-rate military power---for the moment. Kissinger's triangular world, to use his felicitous phrase, made no room for a regional powers to emerge to challenge the big boys. In the Middle East, Iran and Israel both aspire to that goal, and who is to say Japan or South Korea won't do the same in East Asia? YEARS OF RENEWAL is the swan song of a man who restored U.S.hegemony after Vietnam, when no one thought it possible, including Kissinger himself, who in the Seventies quoted Spengler on "the decline of the West", and also, intentionally or not, revealing of the limitations of one man's, and one nation's power.
As befits a man who strode the world like a colossus, Kissinger makes solid points about U.S. foreign policy that are still worth considering. U.S.-China relations stand on the platform he and Nixon built in 1972, regardless of which party or President holds office in Washington. Both countries commit themselves to settling the most contentious issue dividing them, Taiwan, by peaceful means, and secretly pledge to contain Russia, communist or not. U.S. strategy in the Middle East is to divide and subdivide states. Kissinger takes credit for separating Egypt from the rest of the Arab world after the 1973 War by offering Sadat the Sinai in slow and small stages. In Iraq, the U.S. and the Shah of Iran backed the Kurds against Saddam Hussein, until the Shah made his peace with Baghdad and Kissinger pulled the plug on American aid. Latin America matters only to the degree that Cuba is troublesome to its neighbors, and Africa, in the post-Apartheid era, counts not at all. Kissinger reiterates the wish of all U.S. presidents that foreign policy be immune from domestic politics, and sighs that lobbying groups for different causes, on Israel, Cyprus, and other hot spots, no longer make this feasible. He longs for a return of the days when foreign policy was a bipartisan effort, typified by the Truman administration and "my favorite Secretary of State, Dean Acheson".
Like any man who writes an apologia pro vita sua, Kissinger does take the time to answer critics of his actions. Opponents of the Vietnam War might have had good motives, but they "betrayed the 58,000 Americans who had already died there" by stabbing South Vietnam in the back in 1975. That those 58,000 never wanted to be sent there in the first place does not occur to Henry. Those on the right who railed against detente with the Soviet Union, Reagan among them, failed to see how in the long-run the Soviet regime would suffer economic defeat and collapse if engaged with the U.S. in slowing down the arms race. Kissinger is careful not to make the same argument with regards to China. Mao was a faithful ally of the United States against the Russians, and a stable Chinese regime is vital to the U.S. in East Asia. Kissinger's greatest retort to his critics is the tu quoque, or "you're one too" attack. Did Brazil, Argentina, and Chile violate human rights under pro-US regimes? Yes, but so did the leftist military government in Peru, "without arousing any protest". If the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, tortured dissidents, the same thing goes for Khomeini and the mullahs. Yes, the U.S. double-crossed the Kurds, but "they misunderstood our material commitment to their cause"; they were supposed to tie down Saddam's troops, not overthrow him. When you set out to do nothing less than restructure the world, it makes sense to accuse your critics of double standards and lack of intelligence.
Kissinger's portraits of great contemporaries is fascinating for what it says about them and him. The gray eminence that hangs over all three volumes is, of course, Richard Nixon. In WHITE HOUSE YEARS and YEARS OF UPHEAVAL Kissinger made the case for Nixon the statesman, who developed a vision of ending the Cold War through negotiations rather than confrontation, except for that nasty unfinished business in Vietnam. Nixon's unquiet exile after resigning the presidency, during which he took pot shots at Kissinger, implying he had been soft on the Communists in Hanoi, along with new revelations about his anti-semitism and mental instability, forced Henry to alter the portrait of his former boss. The first thirty pages of this book depict Nixon the loose cannon, giving orders to bomb Assad in Syria and Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia during his sojourn in China. Fortunately, K. was there to make sure these injunctions were ignored. The White House staff should have done the same thing during Watergate! Kissinger is sorry about the Watergate mess, not because he and Nixon got caught doing illegal things, such as tapping their own aides, but because it soured the smooth relations between the president, Congress, and the media that are essential for a successful foreign policy. Nixon's successor Gerald Ford is painted as a decent man who restored civility to government, but also out of his depth in foreign affairs. Kissinger reproduces taped conversations between him and Good Guy Jerry where Ford simply utters "uh-huh" after each Kissinger suggestion. Mao is an aging titan who can no longer command his own body, much less China. He presses Kissinger to get tougher on the Russians in Asia, Africa and the Middle East by forming a China-U.S. international anti-Soviet alliance, advice that Kissinger accepts philosophically but rejects in practice. Zhou En Lai glitters in these pages, but he was dying of cancer and losing Mao's allegiance to his wife and the Gang of Four. Brezhnev is a doddering fool, a point Kissinger took advantage of in securing favorable terms during nuclear arms negotiations.
Dare we call Kissinger great? The world he and Nixon built after Vietnam, of great powers kept out of war and each other's way lies in tatters. Like his idol, and subject of his dissertation, Metternich, Kissinger saw the world, the world of the global North, the rest does not count, bound by mutual interests; more properly self-interest leading to the preservation of peace. Great nations have more to gain if they are joined to each other not by treaties, Kissinger agrees with Hobbes that "covenants, without swords, are mere words", but interlocking goals. He wagered, correctly it turned out, that the Soviets valued detente, offering arms reduction and trade with the West, with the United States over expansion into the Middle East and Africa, and that China benefited from a de facto U.S. pledge of protection against the Soviet Union in return for ignoring its nominal Vietnamese allies and foregoing an invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. could thus offer something to both its rivals without appeasement or war. This is the opposite of the sphere influence foreign policy pursued by America, Russia and China today (2026). After leaving office, Kissinger fought against this ominous trend in his books, lectures and conversations with the greats in Washington, Moscow and Beijing, but to no avail. Yet, Kissinger himself must take his share of the blame for the current global chaos. His system of interlocking interests assumed the three great powers would be frozen into place for an indefinite time. However, post-Communist Russia has superpower ambitions even while lacking the economic base to fulfill them. The opposite is true of China. Beijing is happy to command much of the world economy while remaining a second-rate military power---for the moment. Kissinger's triangular world, to use his felicitous phrase, made no room for a regional powers to emerge to challenge the big boys. In the Middle East, Iran and Israel both aspire to that goal, and who is to say Japan or South Korea won't do the same in East Asia? YEARS OF RENEWAL is the swan song of a man who restored U.S.hegemony after Vietnam, when no one thought it possible, including Kissinger himself, who in the Seventies quoted Spengler on "the decline of the West", and also, intentionally or not, revealing of the limitations of one man's, and one nation's power.
December 8, 2014
A lengthy memoir book by Henry Kissinger, a well-known and, to many, controversial Secretary of State of the USA. It mostly covers his tenure in the last days of Nixon's presidency and focuses on work with the president Gerald Ford in the 1970s.
Kissinger's style struck me as highly articulate and intelligent. His knowledge and understanding of history as well as interconnections between various events are very revealing. Above all, I enjoyed reading about Kissinger's clear goals and strategy in the foreign affairs - while all the rest were simply tactics to achieve that. To maximise national security and to win the Cold War over the Communist block - these were two main objectives - and all Kissinger's actions methodically followed these (and eventually, those have been achieved). It reminded me that if one has clear objectives and strategy which shows the seeds of success, good team around and reliable allies, it is worthwhile to stick to this strategy, however difficult it might be at times.
Kissinger impressed me with his understanding of human psychology as well - which he displayed in describing the process of diplomatic negotiations with the leaders of China, the Soviet Union, Western European allies, African states, Egypt, Israel, and so on. One can learn a lot about the recent history and internal dynamics of many states all across the world (since Kissinger as a Minister of Foreign Affairs of the influential state had to deal with all of them). In particular, it was interesting to read about the impressive wisdom of the Chinese leaders in the 1970s - who started the turn-around of the Chinese economy and society.
The only parts which did not interest me that much were lengthy descriptions of internal dynamics in the American national politics. At times, these seemed somewhat apologetic too ("I was good, but not the others!").
All in all, it is not an easy piece of cake to chew (above 1100 pages), but one can learn quite a lot about strategy-based leadership and the recent world history.
Kissinger's style struck me as highly articulate and intelligent. His knowledge and understanding of history as well as interconnections between various events are very revealing. Above all, I enjoyed reading about Kissinger's clear goals and strategy in the foreign affairs - while all the rest were simply tactics to achieve that. To maximise national security and to win the Cold War over the Communist block - these were two main objectives - and all Kissinger's actions methodically followed these (and eventually, those have been achieved). It reminded me that if one has clear objectives and strategy which shows the seeds of success, good team around and reliable allies, it is worthwhile to stick to this strategy, however difficult it might be at times.
Kissinger impressed me with his understanding of human psychology as well - which he displayed in describing the process of diplomatic negotiations with the leaders of China, the Soviet Union, Western European allies, African states, Egypt, Israel, and so on. One can learn a lot about the recent history and internal dynamics of many states all across the world (since Kissinger as a Minister of Foreign Affairs of the influential state had to deal with all of them). In particular, it was interesting to read about the impressive wisdom of the Chinese leaders in the 1970s - who started the turn-around of the Chinese economy and society.
The only parts which did not interest me that much were lengthy descriptions of internal dynamics in the American national politics. At times, these seemed somewhat apologetic too ("I was good, but not the others!").
All in all, it is not an easy piece of cake to chew (above 1100 pages), but one can learn quite a lot about strategy-based leadership and the recent world history.
February 1, 2017
The final (and, at 1,079 pages, the shortest) volume of Kissinger's memoirs as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. This volume covers the Ford years, from Nixon's resignation in August 1974 to the transition after Jimmy Carter's election as President in 1976. Due in large to Nixon's growing weakness thanks to Watergate, and then Ford becoming the first non-elected President in history, Kissinger became a much more powerful Secretary of State than he would have otherwise.
One of the things that Kissinger does extremely well here is that he compartmentalizes different areas of foreign policy: giving each region its own part in the book while also being able to juxtapose the region under discussion against the other crises and issues occurring at the same time. This gives the reader a better sense of the rapid-fire nature of the problems that Kissinger and Ford were facing. Different problems occurred at overlapping times and there was seldom enough time to devote the amount of time to each one that he thought necessary. Foreign policy issues do not happen in a vacuum, and are also not unaffected by American domestic concerns. This is one of the main themes of all three volumes, but it really comes into play here in the wake of Watergate and the declining power of the presidency.
Kissinger spends approximately the first 10% of the book talking about the end of the Nixon presidency, what it was like working for Nixon vs working for Ford, and how he really had to act as a sort of co-president while Nixon's presidency disintegrated and Ford got up to speed. Much of this was covered in the prior volume, Years of Upheaval. While Kissinger does provide some penetrating analysis on Nixon's character and what he was like as a boss, most of this could have been left out and the quality of the book would not been have been affected.
One thing that clearly stands out in this volume is the basic human decency and kindness of Gerald Ford. Time and again, Kissinger describes how Ford rarely put politics ahead of making what he thought was the right decision. This goes from the pardoning of Nixon to the beginnings of the negotiation over a treaty to transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama (here was one of the few concessions to the electoral calendar that Ford ultimately did make, putting the brakes on talks for most of 1976). It is clear that, after the turmoil of the Nixon years, Kissinger relished Ford's simplicity in human relations and his honesty and support in dealing with him.
Kissinger does not miss any chance to fillet Congress and the media as being short-sighted and obtuse in their views of America's role and responsibilities in the world. This is especially acute when writes about the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, and how Congress, with a large boost from an extremely skeptical media, cut funding and basically cut Ford and Kissinger's legs out from under them, rendering them helpless as they watched Saigon be overtaken by the North Vietnamese communists. Kissinger's main beef is that the U.S. was basically leaving its longtime ally, South Vietnam, hung out to dry and the regime of President Thieu be destroyed. He does have a point, and one must take into consideration his experience and all of the months that he devoted to finding an acceptable settlement to the Vietnam War. His first volume, White House Years, describes the intense and maddening negotiations that he underwent with Le Duc Tho from North Vietnam, and how he had to constantly endure Tho's arrogance and condescension. So, his being angry at Congress in effect taking decisions out of his hands and letting his work go down the drain is more than understandable.
However, when would the U.S. have completely gotten out of South Vietnam? Did Kissinger really think that, after all of the upheaval of the late 1960s, and all of the protests, and all of the troops who died there, that the American public would accept a return of armed forces to South Vietnam? Did he think that Congress, in the wake of Watergate, in the wake of the lies told by Johnson and Nixon, with the economy turning sour due to inflation and the energy crisis, would recommit America to once again defending a weak regime in South Vietnam? North Vietnam had one distinct advantage over the United States (and France before it), and that was that - at some point - the U.S. would go home. Troops would not be kept there indefinitely. Kissinger does not discuss the impact that these aspects had on Congress' decision to end all funding to Vietnam.
Later in the book, Kissinger discusses Latin America. This was an area of the world where he admitted that he had little expertise in - as his primary interest and background was in Cold War diplomacy, and a focus on American relationships with Western Europe. Kissinger also admits that he knew that Latin America was important, and that he wished he had had more time to devote to the region, but other priorities and crises usually intervened and served to divert his attention elsewhere. When looking at what was going on in the world while Kissinger was in office, this is definitely an accurate description of U.S.-Latin American affairs. However, Kissinger once again goes out of his way to distance himself - and the CIA - from the bloody coup that took place in Chile in 1973. There are many sources that one can read that show that Kissinger was far more involved than he admits in removing Salvador Allende and thus paving the way for Augusto Pinochet.
Towards the end of the book, Kissinger devotes significant time to discussing issues with majority rule in southern Africa. Any discussion of African politics was completely absent from the first two volumes, and after slogging through chapter after chapter about arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, it was a pleasure to read about a completely different area of the world for a change. Kissinger's work in this area came late in his tenure, and was once again hampered by a recalcitrant Congress determined to prevent any type of military or financial endeavors in a distant part of the globe. This causes Kissinger to somewhat contradict himself here as on page 999 he talks about warning Rhodesian "Prime Minister" Ian Smith (Smith was basically self-appointed to that position, but Kissinger recognized him as such anyways to help smooth negotiations) that he needs to follow the American and British plans for majority rule, but then two pages later he is forced to admit the considerable limits placed on the U.S. by Congress if Kissinger advocated for any economic aid, let alone military assistance.
Despite his proclivity to write in such detail, there are some things that Kissinger is somewhat tight-lipped about (including the Chile coup as previously mentioned): Ford's decision to remove him as National Security Adviser in late 1975, the removal of Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 Republican ticket, and the machinations of a young Donald Rumsfeld first as Chief of Staff and then as Secretary of Defense. Kissinger includes almost no personal references in these volumes, other than occasional references to his emigrating to the U.S. from Germany as a boy. Indeed, on only the second to last page does he mention that he has a brother! He also plays somewhat coy about wanting to stay on in office. Early in the book, he quotes directly from Ford that Ford planned to retain as Secretary of State had he been elected in 1976. Yet, during the African portion of the memoir, he writes that he planned to resign even if Ford had been reelected.
Overall, this volume is a satisfying conclusion to Kissinger's many travels and adventures over eight years of significant change in American history. For anyone interested in American diplomatic history, the opening to China, U.S.-Russian Cold War relations, or the Nixon and/or Ford presidencies, these books are highly valuable. But, for the general or casual reader, you might wish to look elsewhere unless you would like to devote a few months' worth of reading time to these massive tomes.
Grade: B-
One of the things that Kissinger does extremely well here is that he compartmentalizes different areas of foreign policy: giving each region its own part in the book while also being able to juxtapose the region under discussion against the other crises and issues occurring at the same time. This gives the reader a better sense of the rapid-fire nature of the problems that Kissinger and Ford were facing. Different problems occurred at overlapping times and there was seldom enough time to devote the amount of time to each one that he thought necessary. Foreign policy issues do not happen in a vacuum, and are also not unaffected by American domestic concerns. This is one of the main themes of all three volumes, but it really comes into play here in the wake of Watergate and the declining power of the presidency.
Kissinger spends approximately the first 10% of the book talking about the end of the Nixon presidency, what it was like working for Nixon vs working for Ford, and how he really had to act as a sort of co-president while Nixon's presidency disintegrated and Ford got up to speed. Much of this was covered in the prior volume, Years of Upheaval. While Kissinger does provide some penetrating analysis on Nixon's character and what he was like as a boss, most of this could have been left out and the quality of the book would not been have been affected.
One thing that clearly stands out in this volume is the basic human decency and kindness of Gerald Ford. Time and again, Kissinger describes how Ford rarely put politics ahead of making what he thought was the right decision. This goes from the pardoning of Nixon to the beginnings of the negotiation over a treaty to transfer control of the Panama Canal to Panama (here was one of the few concessions to the electoral calendar that Ford ultimately did make, putting the brakes on talks for most of 1976). It is clear that, after the turmoil of the Nixon years, Kissinger relished Ford's simplicity in human relations and his honesty and support in dealing with him.
Kissinger does not miss any chance to fillet Congress and the media as being short-sighted and obtuse in their views of America's role and responsibilities in the world. This is especially acute when writes about the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, and how Congress, with a large boost from an extremely skeptical media, cut funding and basically cut Ford and Kissinger's legs out from under them, rendering them helpless as they watched Saigon be overtaken by the North Vietnamese communists. Kissinger's main beef is that the U.S. was basically leaving its longtime ally, South Vietnam, hung out to dry and the regime of President Thieu be destroyed. He does have a point, and one must take into consideration his experience and all of the months that he devoted to finding an acceptable settlement to the Vietnam War. His first volume, White House Years, describes the intense and maddening negotiations that he underwent with Le Duc Tho from North Vietnam, and how he had to constantly endure Tho's arrogance and condescension. So, his being angry at Congress in effect taking decisions out of his hands and letting his work go down the drain is more than understandable.
However, when would the U.S. have completely gotten out of South Vietnam? Did Kissinger really think that, after all of the upheaval of the late 1960s, and all of the protests, and all of the troops who died there, that the American public would accept a return of armed forces to South Vietnam? Did he think that Congress, in the wake of Watergate, in the wake of the lies told by Johnson and Nixon, with the economy turning sour due to inflation and the energy crisis, would recommit America to once again defending a weak regime in South Vietnam? North Vietnam had one distinct advantage over the United States (and France before it), and that was that - at some point - the U.S. would go home. Troops would not be kept there indefinitely. Kissinger does not discuss the impact that these aspects had on Congress' decision to end all funding to Vietnam.
Later in the book, Kissinger discusses Latin America. This was an area of the world where he admitted that he had little expertise in - as his primary interest and background was in Cold War diplomacy, and a focus on American relationships with Western Europe. Kissinger also admits that he knew that Latin America was important, and that he wished he had had more time to devote to the region, but other priorities and crises usually intervened and served to divert his attention elsewhere. When looking at what was going on in the world while Kissinger was in office, this is definitely an accurate description of U.S.-Latin American affairs. However, Kissinger once again goes out of his way to distance himself - and the CIA - from the bloody coup that took place in Chile in 1973. There are many sources that one can read that show that Kissinger was far more involved than he admits in removing Salvador Allende and thus paving the way for Augusto Pinochet.
Towards the end of the book, Kissinger devotes significant time to discussing issues with majority rule in southern Africa. Any discussion of African politics was completely absent from the first two volumes, and after slogging through chapter after chapter about arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, it was a pleasure to read about a completely different area of the world for a change. Kissinger's work in this area came late in his tenure, and was once again hampered by a recalcitrant Congress determined to prevent any type of military or financial endeavors in a distant part of the globe. This causes Kissinger to somewhat contradict himself here as on page 999 he talks about warning Rhodesian "Prime Minister" Ian Smith (Smith was basically self-appointed to that position, but Kissinger recognized him as such anyways to help smooth negotiations) that he needs to follow the American and British plans for majority rule, but then two pages later he is forced to admit the considerable limits placed on the U.S. by Congress if Kissinger advocated for any economic aid, let alone military assistance.
Despite his proclivity to write in such detail, there are some things that Kissinger is somewhat tight-lipped about (including the Chile coup as previously mentioned): Ford's decision to remove him as National Security Adviser in late 1975, the removal of Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 Republican ticket, and the machinations of a young Donald Rumsfeld first as Chief of Staff and then as Secretary of Defense. Kissinger includes almost no personal references in these volumes, other than occasional references to his emigrating to the U.S. from Germany as a boy. Indeed, on only the second to last page does he mention that he has a brother! He also plays somewhat coy about wanting to stay on in office. Early in the book, he quotes directly from Ford that Ford planned to retain as Secretary of State had he been elected in 1976. Yet, during the African portion of the memoir, he writes that he planned to resign even if Ford had been reelected.
Overall, this volume is a satisfying conclusion to Kissinger's many travels and adventures over eight years of significant change in American history. For anyone interested in American diplomatic history, the opening to China, U.S.-Russian Cold War relations, or the Nixon and/or Ford presidencies, these books are highly valuable. But, for the general or casual reader, you might wish to look elsewhere unless you would like to devote a few months' worth of reading time to these massive tomes.
Grade: B-
March 27, 2017
نظرا لضخامة حجم الكتاب، ولقلة بضاعتي السياسية ، فإني لم أتحمس لقراءته كاملا ولكني أطلعت على الجزء الرابع المتعلق بالشرق الأوسط.
لست أدري، لكن المترجم يقول أن هذه المذكرات هي ملخص ما كتبه كسينجر في مذكراته السابقة والمطبوعة في جزأين. والذي يظهر لي أنها مكملة لها لا ملخصة لها، لأن حديثه في هذا الكتاب عن مرحلة الرئيس الامريكي فورد.
لست بحاجة كبيرة للتعريف بهذا العملاق السياسي في القرن العشرين، والذي اكتسب شهرة كبيرة لدى السياسيين نظرا لزايارته الكثيرة وآرائه السياسية المؤثرة العميقة المبنية على دراسة أكاديمية وتخصصية وليست خبرة وتجربة فقط.
مع كثير من التفاصيل التي يمكن ان تكون مملة، يسرد كسينجر أحداثا وحوارات دارت خلف كواليس المطابخ السياسية، مع جرأة في طرح الأفكار وسرد ما هو مهم ومالية مهم.
أرجو لمن سيقرأه متعة ونفعا
لست أدري، لكن المترجم يقول أن هذه المذكرات هي ملخص ما كتبه كسينجر في مذكراته السابقة والمطبوعة في جزأين. والذي يظهر لي أنها مكملة لها لا ملخصة لها، لأن حديثه في هذا الكتاب عن مرحلة الرئيس الامريكي فورد.
لست بحاجة كبيرة للتعريف بهذا العملاق السياسي في القرن العشرين، والذي اكتسب شهرة كبيرة لدى السياسيين نظرا لزايارته الكثيرة وآرائه السياسية المؤثرة العميقة المبنية على دراسة أكاديمية وتخصصية وليست خبرة وتجربة فقط.
مع كثير من التفاصيل التي يمكن ان تكون مملة، يسرد كسينجر أحداثا وحوارات دارت خلف كواليس المطابخ السياسية، مع جرأة في طرح الأفكار وسرد ما هو مهم ومالية مهم.
أرجو لمن سيقرأه متعة ونفعا
December 8, 2025
هنري كيسنجر ثرثار كبير، ولكن ثرثرته مفيدة.
هذا الكتاب رافقني فترة طويلة امتدت لما يقرب من أربعين يوما، وذلك لأنني كنت استمع إليه صوتيا وأنا أمارس رياضتي اليومية ألا وهي المشي.
ومن خلال تسجيل صوتي ٥٧ ساعة لعدد صفحات اكبر من ألف صفحة نجد كيسنجر يتكلم عن أحداث ثلاث سنوات فقط تقريبا!
ولكن في ثلاثة السنوات هذه ستطوف العالم أجمع، وستتعلم عن السياسة الأمريكية التي تعد ولا تفي والتي تثبت في كل مواقفها أن (المتغطي بها عريان).
ستتعلم كيف تبنى التحالفات وتتغير وتنقلب وكيف يدار الصراع بين قوتين نوويتين امريكا وروسيا من خلال اتفاقيات عن التدمير المتبادل المؤكد وعن تقنين وتنظيم صناعة الأسلحة ونشرها.
كيسنجر كأي مسؤول أمريكي يرى في أمريكا أنها شرطي العالم وأنها المسؤولة عن إرساء الأمن والنظام في العالم بالدبلوماسية وبالقوة.
ما يميز كيسنجر وهو يتكلم أنه يمتعك باستراتجيات التفاوض والخداع وكيف تعقد الصفقات، فهو يعلمك كيف تدار الحياة لا السياسة فقط، أو ربما صدق من قال أن الحياة سياسة أصلا.
على كل حال أطمح لقراءة سائر مذكراته والتي ترجمتها دور نشر متفرقة فهي لا تخلو من متعة وفائدة ومعرفة.
هذا الكتاب رافقني فترة طويلة امتدت لما يقرب من أربعين يوما، وذلك لأنني كنت استمع إليه صوتيا وأنا أمارس رياضتي اليومية ألا وهي المشي.
ومن خلال تسجيل صوتي ٥٧ ساعة لعدد صفحات اكبر من ألف صفحة نجد كيسنجر يتكلم عن أحداث ثلاث سنوات فقط تقريبا!
ولكن في ثلاثة السنوات هذه ستطوف العالم أجمع، وستتعلم عن السياسة الأمريكية التي تعد ولا تفي والتي تثبت في كل مواقفها أن (المتغطي بها عريان).
ستتعلم كيف تبنى التحالفات وتتغير وتنقلب وكيف يدار الصراع بين قوتين نوويتين امريكا وروسيا من خلال اتفاقيات عن التدمير المتبادل المؤكد وعن تقنين وتنظيم صناعة الأسلحة ونشرها.
كيسنجر كأي مسؤول أمريكي يرى في أمريكا أنها شرطي العالم وأنها المسؤولة عن إرساء الأمن والنظام في العالم بالدبلوماسية وبالقوة.
ما يميز كيسنجر وهو يتكلم أنه يمتعك باستراتجيات التفاوض والخداع وكيف تعقد الصفقات، فهو يعلمك كيف تدار الحياة لا السياسة فقط، أو ربما صدق من قال أن الحياة سياسة أصلا.
على كل حال أطمح لقراءة سائر مذكراته والتي ترجمتها دور نشر متفرقة فهي لا تخلو من متعة وفائدة ومعرفة.
January 24, 2014
“Years of Renewal” is the conclusion of Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, this volume dealing primarily with the Ford years. The chapters are organized by topics: the transition, the Nixon legacy, the Ford Team, East-West relations, the Middle East, Indochina, Europe, Latin America, Communists, Southern Africa and, at the end, another transition.
The author makes the point that he assumed duties beyond those of a routine Secretary of State because of Nixon’s increasing pre-occupation with political problems and Ford’s inexperience in foreign affairs. As the new president put it: ” Henry, I need you. The country needs you. I want you to stay.”
This book reminds the reader about the rapid fire crises with which Ford and his team had to deal. Without the period between election and inauguration, Ford had to pick up where Nixon left off. He had to build on Nixon’s relationships with the Soviet Union and China while managing eruptions in Cyprus, perennial turmoil in the Middle East, and an immediate election season that returned a “McGovernite” Congress, only two years after McGovern had been soundly defeated.
One of the gravest crises to face Ford was the collapse in Indochina. Kissinger gives an insider’s view of the analysis and efforts of the administration to obtain approval to restore aid to South Vietnam, as provided for in the Peace Accords, when the North made its final push to unify the country. After Ford conceded that the Vietnam War was over for the United States Cambodia provided a chance for America to send a message when it captured the Mayaguez. Kissinger makes the case that the Helsinki accords, though unpopular at the time, were an important step leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Toward the end Kissinger was involved in the breakthroughs leading to majority rule in Rhodesia, Southwest Africa and set in motion the process that brought it to South Africa.
On these pages Kissinger tells his story and defends the administration. It is obvious that he respects Ford and resented the interference from the McGovernite Congress. He specifically highlighted congressional cutting of funds for Vietnam and Angola which left Kissinger with nothing to threaten or offer during his diplomatic negotiations.
The tome is lengthy but the writing is superb. The reader is treated to a detailed journey through the foreign policy challenges of the Ford years. Kissinger provides his impressions of those with whom he worked with and against. Ford is shown as a calm leader under attack from both right and left who, while cognizant of political considerations never sacrificed the national welfare on the altar of political expediency. His impressions are not always flattering but always respectful and bare no secrets. “Years of Renewal” is a valuable contribution to the historical record of the Ford administration and should be read by anyone wanting to understand it or just remember the headlines of that era
The author makes the point that he assumed duties beyond those of a routine Secretary of State because of Nixon’s increasing pre-occupation with political problems and Ford’s inexperience in foreign affairs. As the new president put it: ” Henry, I need you. The country needs you. I want you to stay.”
This book reminds the reader about the rapid fire crises with which Ford and his team had to deal. Without the period between election and inauguration, Ford had to pick up where Nixon left off. He had to build on Nixon’s relationships with the Soviet Union and China while managing eruptions in Cyprus, perennial turmoil in the Middle East, and an immediate election season that returned a “McGovernite” Congress, only two years after McGovern had been soundly defeated.
One of the gravest crises to face Ford was the collapse in Indochina. Kissinger gives an insider’s view of the analysis and efforts of the administration to obtain approval to restore aid to South Vietnam, as provided for in the Peace Accords, when the North made its final push to unify the country. After Ford conceded that the Vietnam War was over for the United States Cambodia provided a chance for America to send a message when it captured the Mayaguez. Kissinger makes the case that the Helsinki accords, though unpopular at the time, were an important step leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Toward the end Kissinger was involved in the breakthroughs leading to majority rule in Rhodesia, Southwest Africa and set in motion the process that brought it to South Africa.
On these pages Kissinger tells his story and defends the administration. It is obvious that he respects Ford and resented the interference from the McGovernite Congress. He specifically highlighted congressional cutting of funds for Vietnam and Angola which left Kissinger with nothing to threaten or offer during his diplomatic negotiations.
The tome is lengthy but the writing is superb. The reader is treated to a detailed journey through the foreign policy challenges of the Ford years. Kissinger provides his impressions of those with whom he worked with and against. Ford is shown as a calm leader under attack from both right and left who, while cognizant of political considerations never sacrificed the national welfare on the altar of political expediency. His impressions are not always flattering but always respectful and bare no secrets. “Years of Renewal” is a valuable contribution to the historical record of the Ford administration and should be read by anyone wanting to understand it or just remember the headlines of that era
December 4, 2022
how were you a nobel peace prize laureate when you murdered millions?
January 19, 2026
Years of Renewal By Henry Kissinger (1999)
Henry Kissinger's Years of Renewal completes his memoir trilogy covering the final years of the Nixon administration and the Ford presidency from 1974 to 1977. This massive volume combines insider chronicle, policy justification, and character study to defend the controversial foreign policies Kissinger championed during America's most tumultuous postwar decade. Written with the retrospective wisdom of two decades and the unapologetic confidence of a man convinced history will vindicate him, the book offers invaluable insight into high-level diplomacy while revealing the author's fundamental inability to acknowledge that his critics might have had legitimate moral concerns rather than mere political spite.
The Nixon Tragedy
Kissinger opens with an extended psychological portrait of Richard Nixon that reads like Greek tragedy filtered through the sensibility of a European realist uncomfortable with American moralism. Nixon "combined intelligence, patriotism, and courage with self-destructive flaws," a man who "understood foreign policy better than almost any other practicing political figure of his era" yet remained on "a hopeless quest to elicit the adulation of those he identified as the eastern establishment."
The portrait contains genuine insight. Nixon was "obsessively incapable of overruling an interlocutor or even disagreeing with him" face to face. His "emotional resistance to having to disappoint a supplicant was so great that there was always the danger of being saddled with some unfulfilled promise." Yet "in China, Nixon conducted the American side of the dialogue thoughtfully, analytically and eloquently without any notes." He "was at his best in written policy memoranda."
Kissinger notes with clinical precision that Nixon "could not hold even a small quantity of alcohol. Two glasses of wine were enough to make him boisterous; one more made him grow bellicose with slurred speech." The president had "travelled many roads, but he never managed to discover where he really belonged."
This psychological acuity serves Kissinger's larger purpose: to separate Nixon's policy achievements from his personal catastrophe. "By the summer of 1974 when Gerald Ford took over, Nixon's foreign policy had become nearly as controversial as his personality." Yet Kissinger insists the policies themselves were sound, undermined only by Watergate and domestic opposition he characterizes as fundamentally illegitimate.
The Indictment of American Liberalism
The book's most revealing passages concern not foreign policy but Kissinger's contempt for his domestic critics. This contempt runs deep and is expressed with sustained vehemence.
The "veterans of the Vietnam protest movement" were "committed to the proposition that foreign policy was a morality play." Wilsonianism represented "the unprecedented theory that wars are caused not so much by struggles for power as that these struggles reflect domestic moral failings." After Vietnam, "isolationism took the form of the proposition that we were too depraved to participate in international politics."
The "radical protesters preferred humiliation to honor, or more precisely equated humiliation with honor." They "considered the very terms honor and credibility abominations." Liberal critics "wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia."
Kissinger argues that liberals who had "advocated greater East-West contacts, arms control and increased trade for at least a decade" opposed these same policies under Nixon purely from partisan spite. "Under the leadership of any president other than Nixon they probably would have eventually endorsed the policies, but Nixon had been anathema to the liberal community for more than two decades. The blood feud ran too deep."
Kissinger cannot conceive that opposition to his policies might stem from genuine moral conviction rather than partisan calculation or psychological inadequacy. The possibility that reasonable people might object to supporting dictatorships, conducting secret wars, or prioritizing geopolitical advantage over human rights simply does not register as legitimate disagreement.
The Vindication of Gerald Ford
Ford emerges as Kissinger's ideal leader: competent, decisive, uncomplicated. "With Ford what one saw was what one got." He "never lost his temper." His Grand Rapids staff "lacked the energy and surely the malice of their counterparts in the Nixon White House." Unlike Nixon's obsessive insecurity, Ford projected straightforward competence.
Yet even this praise contains condescension. Modern leaders are "far more concerned with what to say than with what to think." They "too frequently fail to fulfill the role for which they are needed most: to provide emotional analysis when experience is being challenged by ever accelerating change." Emulating Kennedy, being articulate "is not the same as having analytical skill."
Kissinger's portrait of Ford's team proves more interesting than his treatment of Ford himself. Donald Rumsfeld was "a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly." He "had the makings of a strong president, but somewhere along the way this talented political leader abandoned his quest for power."
Nelson Rockefeller represented "the last generation of politician who emphasized substance over electoral technique." He thought "higher office had to be earned by advancing the best program. He had never heard of focus groups." Rockefeller believed that "presidents are overwhelmed with problems. Your obligation is to help them find solutions."
James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense proved more problematic. Ford concluded that "Schlesinger just thinks I am stupid and he believes Kissinger is running me. This conflict will not end until I either fire Jim or make him believe he is running me. A few months later Ford chose the first option."
The State Department Problem
Kissinger's treatment of the State Department reveals the bureaucratic infighting that characterized his tenure. William Rogers "was not sufficiently well versed in foreign policy to be the principal negotiator and he was too prominent a figure to be merely the principal spokesman with Congress and the media." Once State Department officials "caught on to what Nixon and Kissinger did in China, it became apparent that hell hath no fury like a bypassed negotiator."
The critique cuts both ways. Kissinger complains that "from Nixon's point of view, once the president had rejected the State Department position, the debate should have ended. Instead it was moved by leaks into the media and Congress." Yet he simultaneously acknowledges that "diplomats are more likely to be told what to say than why they should say it. Tactics and domestic politics substitute for strategy."
His more general observation proves accurate: "In the absence of an impetus from a determined Secretary of State or from the White House, the State Department is better at dealing with day-to-day problems than at developing long-range designs." And regarding Washington generally: "The typical Washington internal debate is rarely if ever finally settled."
The Congressional Rebellion
Kissinger devotes extensive attention to what he characterizes as congressional usurpation of executive prerogatives. The pattern began with "Jackson-Vanik and the Stevenson amendments severely restricting trade and credits to the Soviet Union, the cut-off of aid to Indochina, the prohibition against assistance to Angola, and a host of restrictions on various other activities."
His specific examples reveal genuine absurdity. "Congressional micromanagement went so far that Congress voted anti-aircraft missiles for Jordan only on the condition that they be in fixed positions. Refusal to provide wheels was more humiliating than meaningful because King Hussein had no problem acquiring such wheels in the markets of the Arab world."
Yet Kissinger cannot acknowledge that congressional assertiveness followed precisely from executive deception and overreach. "During Vietnam, Congress had been reluctant to legislate specific courses of action and instead issued 'sense of Congress' resolutions expressing Congress's point of view without assuming responsibility. As Watergate gained momentum, Congress shed these restraints."
On Angola, Senator Joseph Biden "put forward with disarming frankness an explanation for why senators objected in December to what they had approved in July." In other words, "senators would have acquiesced in the program so long as the public did not know. They would run for cover once it became public and they were needed to defend their previous positions."
This reveals congressional cowardice but also the fundamental problem with Kissinger's approach: foreign policy conducted through deception and secrecy cannot sustain democratic accountability. America "abdicated on Angola on December 19, 1975 when the Senate passed the Tunney amendment banning any use of funds for Angola unless specifically appropriated." Cuban troops "remained in Angola for another 15 years and spread into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Yemen in the Carter administration."
The Intelligence Debacle
Kissinger's treatment of CIA Director William Colby reveals the tensions between security and accountability in the post-Watergate era. Before Colby became director, "leaks from the CIA had never been a major problem." Colby proved "either unable or unwilling to stem leaks from his agency." After a major leak, Colby "formally absolved his subordinates of the secrecy oaths they had sworn upon entering the service, making the disclosure of national secrets depend almost entirely on the judgment of individual CIA employees."
This made Colby a "runaway CIA director." On organizational charts "the CIA director is clearly and directly subordinate to the president, but when the president decides he can't fire the director, the organizational chart becomes purely academic."
The Church Committee investigation suffered from "the natural affinity of senators for publicity." Senator Church "claimed the CIA was a rogue elephant out of control," though "the facts exonerated the CIA, which has never assassinated a foreign leader, although in the case of Castro not for lack of trying or presidential orders." In March 1979, Senator Patrick Moynihan claimed "there is no intelligence agency of any consequence left within the United States government."
Kissinger's outrage at congressional overreach proves justified in specifics while missing the larger point: covert operations on the scale of Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, Laos, and Kurdistan "differed from classical covert intelligence operations in that they were not really secret." Democratic oversight had collapsed, requiring correction even at cost to operational effectiveness.
The Vietnam Endgame
On Vietnam, Kissinger remains utterly unrepentant. "Our predecessors had launched the United States in an enterprise in a distant region for worthy causes but without adequately assessing the national interest and the likely cost." Nixon's team "found no plans for withdrawal nor White House-approved negotiating strategy. Yet as soon as they left office, the very people who had saddled the Nixon administration with these tragic dilemmas either acted as if they were innocent bystanders or, more frequently, began harassing the next administration for failing to achieve in four months what they had never endeavored to accomplish in four years."
By 1972, "Nixon had withdrawn over 500,000 troops and reduced casualties from 14,600 in 1968 to 300 in 1972. Yet Nixon was accused of killing Americans needlessly." The "smug and disastrously wrong theme that nothing could be worse for the Cambodian people than a continuation of American military aid was pervasive." The assumption "that a cut-off of arms aid would end the suffering was treated as self-evident."
This ignores the fundamental question: whether the war's continuation served any achievable American interest, and if not, how to extract the U.S. without destroying its international credibility. The anti-war movement's "basic theme that American power itself was a source of evil in the world."
The Mayaguez Incident
The May 1975 seizure of the merchant ship Mayaguez by Cambodia provides Kissinger a case study in Ford's decisiveness. When Colby provided intelligence, "the information we received was meticulously precise. Some confusion was expected, but totally inaccurate precision was harder to explain."
Ford declared: "I can assure you that irrespective of the Congress we will move." Kissinger interprets this as "the beginning of the Defense Department's position that it would not take any position that could later be criticized as had happened in Vietnam." The incident demonstrated Ford's willingness to act decisively in ways that foreshadowed Reagan's approach to executive power.
Arms Control and Détente
Kissinger provides extensive detail on SALT negotiations and the Vladivostok meeting with the Soviets. In 1962, "McNamara adopted the strategy of mutual assured destruction, this essentially academic concept supposed unlimited willingness to threaten civilian casualties. This professorial strategy calculated everything except the willingness to resort to it."
The Nixon administration "achieved some leverage by means of the ironic fact that Soviet leaders turned out to have more confidence in American technology than did our domestic critics." Yet "liberal frustrations with Nixon merged with the conservative distrust of any deal with the Soviet Union."
Senator Scoop Jackson worked the problem of Soviet Jewish emigration, raising numbers "from 400 in 1968 to 35,000 in 1972." Gromyko "agreed to a target of perhaps 45,000 but added the Soviet government would stop short of forcing its citizens to emigrate to please the American Congress."
The governing triumvirate in Moscow "resembled a cluster of semi-extinct volcanoes. Brezhnev's blustering joviality was never sufficient to obscure his latent insecurity. Kosygin was a sardonic bureaucratic manipulator and Podgorny was uninterested in foreign policy." After détente collapsed, "Brezhnev, by then increasingly debilitated by a series of strokes, began to project Soviet military capacity into Africa, South Yemen and Afghanistan."
Gorbachev's later "insoluble quandary was that the Soviet system could not survive without reform yet had become too arteriosclerotic to survive the reform process itself."
Character Studies
Kissinger's portraits reveal his values through both praise and criticism. Senator Hubert Humphrey possessed "an eloquence that seemed to have no natural limit. It was said of him that he once spoke at a tree planting ceremony and by the time he was finished he was standing in its shade. He was as intelligent as he was loquacious."
J. William Fulbright restrained "his customary harassment to the absolute minimum needed to maintain his liberal standing." Jacob Javits took "a trip to Cuba in violation of existing government policy. I did not mind his going. What bothered me was that he came back."
Scoop Jackson "viewed a retreat from the outrageous to the impossible as a great concession." A Dutch pacifist visiting the White House "had obviously been briefed to avoid being provocative, a feat he never quite managed."
Prime Minister Heath "was the only British leader I encountered who not only failed to cultivate the special relationship but actually sought to downgrade it." Tom Enders suffered from a problem where "humility was not one of his distinguishing characteristics." Eagleburger said "Tom was the only 6-foot-7-inch man who suffered from a Napoleonic complex."
Latin America and Human Rights
Kissinger's treatment of Pinochet IS revealing. "The European left's venomous hatred of Pinochet was not matched by any comparable condemnation of Castro or of the truly brutal regime in Vietnam."
Senator Ted Kennedy "stressed that the trade embargo on Cuba had been a mistake and called for the United States to normalize relations with Cuba." Castro "despised the advocates of détente in the Kremlin for having sacrificed ideology to expediency."
The Bureaucratic Reality
The book's most valuable contributions concern the mechanics of government. "In a large bureaucracy, the danger of being submerged in detail, of emphasizing the urgent over the important, is ever present." When "the State Department bureaucracy chooses not to oppose frontally a policy with which it disagrees, it deploys its masterful skills in evasion."
"It is axiomatic that those who have not participated in the give and take of the diplomatic process become the heroes of retrospective analysis." The "capacity to conduct foreign policy in Washington and to be effective abroad does not depend on organization charts alone or even primarily. It is largely a question of who is perceived to enjoy the confidence of the president."
"The Washington bureaucratic process thrives on adversarial procedures. The president can operate at best if he takes a middle position between conflicting points of view."
Critical Assessment
Years of Renewal succeeds as insider history but fails as self-justification. Kissinger's access to deliberations, his portraits of leaders, and his analysis of diplomatic mechanics provide information available nowhere else. His observations about bureaucratic process, congressional grandstanding, and media superficiality contain uncomfortable truths.
Kissinger genuinely cannot comprehend that his critics might be right. His dismissal of human rights concerns as mere moralism, his contempt for democratic accountability, and his conviction that only he and his allies understood genuine statecraft reveal his true philosophy.
The comparison with Reagan proves particularly revealing. Kissinger acknowledges that Reagan "proved to have better instinct for America's emotions by justifying his course in the name of American idealism. Nixon attempted to teach the virtues of national interest. Reagan understood better that the American people are more moved by purpose than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic Wilsonianism based upon democratic virtue."
This passage inadvertently concedes that Reagan succeeded where Kissinger failed precisely by taking seriously the moral dimension Kissinger dismisses. The Cold War was won not through Kissingerian balance-of-power calculations but through Reagan's willingness to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and mean it.
Kissinger observes that "no foreign policy is stronger than its domestic base." As we have seen, however,
Henry Kissinger's Years of Renewal completes his memoir trilogy covering the final years of the Nixon administration and the Ford presidency from 1974 to 1977. This massive volume combines insider chronicle, policy justification, and character study to defend the controversial foreign policies Kissinger championed during America's most tumultuous postwar decade. Written with the retrospective wisdom of two decades and the unapologetic confidence of a man convinced history will vindicate him, the book offers invaluable insight into high-level diplomacy while revealing the author's fundamental inability to acknowledge that his critics might have had legitimate moral concerns rather than mere political spite.
The Nixon Tragedy
Kissinger opens with an extended psychological portrait of Richard Nixon that reads like Greek tragedy filtered through the sensibility of a European realist uncomfortable with American moralism. Nixon "combined intelligence, patriotism, and courage with self-destructive flaws," a man who "understood foreign policy better than almost any other practicing political figure of his era" yet remained on "a hopeless quest to elicit the adulation of those he identified as the eastern establishment."
The portrait contains genuine insight. Nixon was "obsessively incapable of overruling an interlocutor or even disagreeing with him" face to face. His "emotional resistance to having to disappoint a supplicant was so great that there was always the danger of being saddled with some unfulfilled promise." Yet "in China, Nixon conducted the American side of the dialogue thoughtfully, analytically and eloquently without any notes." He "was at his best in written policy memoranda."
Kissinger notes with clinical precision that Nixon "could not hold even a small quantity of alcohol. Two glasses of wine were enough to make him boisterous; one more made him grow bellicose with slurred speech." The president had "travelled many roads, but he never managed to discover where he really belonged."
This psychological acuity serves Kissinger's larger purpose: to separate Nixon's policy achievements from his personal catastrophe. "By the summer of 1974 when Gerald Ford took over, Nixon's foreign policy had become nearly as controversial as his personality." Yet Kissinger insists the policies themselves were sound, undermined only by Watergate and domestic opposition he characterizes as fundamentally illegitimate.
The Indictment of American Liberalism
The book's most revealing passages concern not foreign policy but Kissinger's contempt for his domestic critics. This contempt runs deep and is expressed with sustained vehemence.
The "veterans of the Vietnam protest movement" were "committed to the proposition that foreign policy was a morality play." Wilsonianism represented "the unprecedented theory that wars are caused not so much by struggles for power as that these struggles reflect domestic moral failings." After Vietnam, "isolationism took the form of the proposition that we were too depraved to participate in international politics."
The "radical protesters preferred humiliation to honor, or more precisely equated humiliation with honor." They "considered the very terms honor and credibility abominations." Liberal critics "wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia."
Kissinger argues that liberals who had "advocated greater East-West contacts, arms control and increased trade for at least a decade" opposed these same policies under Nixon purely from partisan spite. "Under the leadership of any president other than Nixon they probably would have eventually endorsed the policies, but Nixon had been anathema to the liberal community for more than two decades. The blood feud ran too deep."
Kissinger cannot conceive that opposition to his policies might stem from genuine moral conviction rather than partisan calculation or psychological inadequacy. The possibility that reasonable people might object to supporting dictatorships, conducting secret wars, or prioritizing geopolitical advantage over human rights simply does not register as legitimate disagreement.
The Vindication of Gerald Ford
Ford emerges as Kissinger's ideal leader: competent, decisive, uncomplicated. "With Ford what one saw was what one got." He "never lost his temper." His Grand Rapids staff "lacked the energy and surely the malice of their counterparts in the Nixon White House." Unlike Nixon's obsessive insecurity, Ford projected straightforward competence.
Yet even this praise contains condescension. Modern leaders are "far more concerned with what to say than with what to think." They "too frequently fail to fulfill the role for which they are needed most: to provide emotional analysis when experience is being challenged by ever accelerating change." Emulating Kennedy, being articulate "is not the same as having analytical skill."
Kissinger's portrait of Ford's team proves more interesting than his treatment of Ford himself. Donald Rumsfeld was "a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly." He "had the makings of a strong president, but somewhere along the way this talented political leader abandoned his quest for power."
Nelson Rockefeller represented "the last generation of politician who emphasized substance over electoral technique." He thought "higher office had to be earned by advancing the best program. He had never heard of focus groups." Rockefeller believed that "presidents are overwhelmed with problems. Your obligation is to help them find solutions."
James Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense proved more problematic. Ford concluded that "Schlesinger just thinks I am stupid and he believes Kissinger is running me. This conflict will not end until I either fire Jim or make him believe he is running me. A few months later Ford chose the first option."
The State Department Problem
Kissinger's treatment of the State Department reveals the bureaucratic infighting that characterized his tenure. William Rogers "was not sufficiently well versed in foreign policy to be the principal negotiator and he was too prominent a figure to be merely the principal spokesman with Congress and the media." Once State Department officials "caught on to what Nixon and Kissinger did in China, it became apparent that hell hath no fury like a bypassed negotiator."
The critique cuts both ways. Kissinger complains that "from Nixon's point of view, once the president had rejected the State Department position, the debate should have ended. Instead it was moved by leaks into the media and Congress." Yet he simultaneously acknowledges that "diplomats are more likely to be told what to say than why they should say it. Tactics and domestic politics substitute for strategy."
His more general observation proves accurate: "In the absence of an impetus from a determined Secretary of State or from the White House, the State Department is better at dealing with day-to-day problems than at developing long-range designs." And regarding Washington generally: "The typical Washington internal debate is rarely if ever finally settled."
The Congressional Rebellion
Kissinger devotes extensive attention to what he characterizes as congressional usurpation of executive prerogatives. The pattern began with "Jackson-Vanik and the Stevenson amendments severely restricting trade and credits to the Soviet Union, the cut-off of aid to Indochina, the prohibition against assistance to Angola, and a host of restrictions on various other activities."
His specific examples reveal genuine absurdity. "Congressional micromanagement went so far that Congress voted anti-aircraft missiles for Jordan only on the condition that they be in fixed positions. Refusal to provide wheels was more humiliating than meaningful because King Hussein had no problem acquiring such wheels in the markets of the Arab world."
Yet Kissinger cannot acknowledge that congressional assertiveness followed precisely from executive deception and overreach. "During Vietnam, Congress had been reluctant to legislate specific courses of action and instead issued 'sense of Congress' resolutions expressing Congress's point of view without assuming responsibility. As Watergate gained momentum, Congress shed these restraints."
On Angola, Senator Joseph Biden "put forward with disarming frankness an explanation for why senators objected in December to what they had approved in July." In other words, "senators would have acquiesced in the program so long as the public did not know. They would run for cover once it became public and they were needed to defend their previous positions."
This reveals congressional cowardice but also the fundamental problem with Kissinger's approach: foreign policy conducted through deception and secrecy cannot sustain democratic accountability. America "abdicated on Angola on December 19, 1975 when the Senate passed the Tunney amendment banning any use of funds for Angola unless specifically appropriated." Cuban troops "remained in Angola for another 15 years and spread into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Yemen in the Carter administration."
The Intelligence Debacle
Kissinger's treatment of CIA Director William Colby reveals the tensions between security and accountability in the post-Watergate era. Before Colby became director, "leaks from the CIA had never been a major problem." Colby proved "either unable or unwilling to stem leaks from his agency." After a major leak, Colby "formally absolved his subordinates of the secrecy oaths they had sworn upon entering the service, making the disclosure of national secrets depend almost entirely on the judgment of individual CIA employees."
This made Colby a "runaway CIA director." On organizational charts "the CIA director is clearly and directly subordinate to the president, but when the president decides he can't fire the director, the organizational chart becomes purely academic."
The Church Committee investigation suffered from "the natural affinity of senators for publicity." Senator Church "claimed the CIA was a rogue elephant out of control," though "the facts exonerated the CIA, which has never assassinated a foreign leader, although in the case of Castro not for lack of trying or presidential orders." In March 1979, Senator Patrick Moynihan claimed "there is no intelligence agency of any consequence left within the United States government."
Kissinger's outrage at congressional overreach proves justified in specifics while missing the larger point: covert operations on the scale of Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, Laos, and Kurdistan "differed from classical covert intelligence operations in that they were not really secret." Democratic oversight had collapsed, requiring correction even at cost to operational effectiveness.
The Vietnam Endgame
On Vietnam, Kissinger remains utterly unrepentant. "Our predecessors had launched the United States in an enterprise in a distant region for worthy causes but without adequately assessing the national interest and the likely cost." Nixon's team "found no plans for withdrawal nor White House-approved negotiating strategy. Yet as soon as they left office, the very people who had saddled the Nixon administration with these tragic dilemmas either acted as if they were innocent bystanders or, more frequently, began harassing the next administration for failing to achieve in four months what they had never endeavored to accomplish in four years."
By 1972, "Nixon had withdrawn over 500,000 troops and reduced casualties from 14,600 in 1968 to 300 in 1972. Yet Nixon was accused of killing Americans needlessly." The "smug and disastrously wrong theme that nothing could be worse for the Cambodian people than a continuation of American military aid was pervasive." The assumption "that a cut-off of arms aid would end the suffering was treated as self-evident."
This ignores the fundamental question: whether the war's continuation served any achievable American interest, and if not, how to extract the U.S. without destroying its international credibility. The anti-war movement's "basic theme that American power itself was a source of evil in the world."
The Mayaguez Incident
The May 1975 seizure of the merchant ship Mayaguez by Cambodia provides Kissinger a case study in Ford's decisiveness. When Colby provided intelligence, "the information we received was meticulously precise. Some confusion was expected, but totally inaccurate precision was harder to explain."
Ford declared: "I can assure you that irrespective of the Congress we will move." Kissinger interprets this as "the beginning of the Defense Department's position that it would not take any position that could later be criticized as had happened in Vietnam." The incident demonstrated Ford's willingness to act decisively in ways that foreshadowed Reagan's approach to executive power.
Arms Control and Détente
Kissinger provides extensive detail on SALT negotiations and the Vladivostok meeting with the Soviets. In 1962, "McNamara adopted the strategy of mutual assured destruction, this essentially academic concept supposed unlimited willingness to threaten civilian casualties. This professorial strategy calculated everything except the willingness to resort to it."
The Nixon administration "achieved some leverage by means of the ironic fact that Soviet leaders turned out to have more confidence in American technology than did our domestic critics." Yet "liberal frustrations with Nixon merged with the conservative distrust of any deal with the Soviet Union."
Senator Scoop Jackson worked the problem of Soviet Jewish emigration, raising numbers "from 400 in 1968 to 35,000 in 1972." Gromyko "agreed to a target of perhaps 45,000 but added the Soviet government would stop short of forcing its citizens to emigrate to please the American Congress."
The governing triumvirate in Moscow "resembled a cluster of semi-extinct volcanoes. Brezhnev's blustering joviality was never sufficient to obscure his latent insecurity. Kosygin was a sardonic bureaucratic manipulator and Podgorny was uninterested in foreign policy." After détente collapsed, "Brezhnev, by then increasingly debilitated by a series of strokes, began to project Soviet military capacity into Africa, South Yemen and Afghanistan."
Gorbachev's later "insoluble quandary was that the Soviet system could not survive without reform yet had become too arteriosclerotic to survive the reform process itself."
Character Studies
Kissinger's portraits reveal his values through both praise and criticism. Senator Hubert Humphrey possessed "an eloquence that seemed to have no natural limit. It was said of him that he once spoke at a tree planting ceremony and by the time he was finished he was standing in its shade. He was as intelligent as he was loquacious."
J. William Fulbright restrained "his customary harassment to the absolute minimum needed to maintain his liberal standing." Jacob Javits took "a trip to Cuba in violation of existing government policy. I did not mind his going. What bothered me was that he came back."
Scoop Jackson "viewed a retreat from the outrageous to the impossible as a great concession." A Dutch pacifist visiting the White House "had obviously been briefed to avoid being provocative, a feat he never quite managed."
Prime Minister Heath "was the only British leader I encountered who not only failed to cultivate the special relationship but actually sought to downgrade it." Tom Enders suffered from a problem where "humility was not one of his distinguishing characteristics." Eagleburger said "Tom was the only 6-foot-7-inch man who suffered from a Napoleonic complex."
Latin America and Human Rights
Kissinger's treatment of Pinochet IS revealing. "The European left's venomous hatred of Pinochet was not matched by any comparable condemnation of Castro or of the truly brutal regime in Vietnam."
Senator Ted Kennedy "stressed that the trade embargo on Cuba had been a mistake and called for the United States to normalize relations with Cuba." Castro "despised the advocates of détente in the Kremlin for having sacrificed ideology to expediency."
The Bureaucratic Reality
The book's most valuable contributions concern the mechanics of government. "In a large bureaucracy, the danger of being submerged in detail, of emphasizing the urgent over the important, is ever present." When "the State Department bureaucracy chooses not to oppose frontally a policy with which it disagrees, it deploys its masterful skills in evasion."
"It is axiomatic that those who have not participated in the give and take of the diplomatic process become the heroes of retrospective analysis." The "capacity to conduct foreign policy in Washington and to be effective abroad does not depend on organization charts alone or even primarily. It is largely a question of who is perceived to enjoy the confidence of the president."
"The Washington bureaucratic process thrives on adversarial procedures. The president can operate at best if he takes a middle position between conflicting points of view."
Critical Assessment
Years of Renewal succeeds as insider history but fails as self-justification. Kissinger's access to deliberations, his portraits of leaders, and his analysis of diplomatic mechanics provide information available nowhere else. His observations about bureaucratic process, congressional grandstanding, and media superficiality contain uncomfortable truths.
Kissinger genuinely cannot comprehend that his critics might be right. His dismissal of human rights concerns as mere moralism, his contempt for democratic accountability, and his conviction that only he and his allies understood genuine statecraft reveal his true philosophy.
The comparison with Reagan proves particularly revealing. Kissinger acknowledges that Reagan "proved to have better instinct for America's emotions by justifying his course in the name of American idealism. Nixon attempted to teach the virtues of national interest. Reagan understood better that the American people are more moved by purpose than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic Wilsonianism based upon democratic virtue."
This passage inadvertently concedes that Reagan succeeded where Kissinger failed precisely by taking seriously the moral dimension Kissinger dismisses. The Cold War was won not through Kissingerian balance-of-power calculations but through Reagan's willingness to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and mean it.
Kissinger observes that "no foreign policy is stronger than its domestic base." As we have seen, however,
November 28, 2019
كذب سياسي وامريكا هي هي لا تتغير تريد أن تصلح العالم عن طريق تدميره الوحيد الذي يستحق الشكر هو المترجم
ما #حبيت
ما #حبيت
February 26, 2018
مذكرات فيها الكثير من الملاحظات الهامة، ولكن اسلوب روايتها يبعث على الملل الشديد، ولكن قمنا بإلغاء كافة التفاصيل الغير هامة، كالحديث عن شجاعة (إجرام) الصهاينة في حروبهم او حبهم لإسرائيل وتفانيهم في القتال فداء لها، او الحديث عن ركوب السيارات والطائرات وغيرها من التفاصيل التي يمكن إختصارها او حصرها، لوفرت علينا المثير من الصفحات ولربما بلغت المذكرات خمسمئة صفحة فقط.
هناك الكثير من المعلومات الفريدة والجميلة، خاصة عن حرب فيتنام والمفاوضات العربية الصهيونية، طريقة حديثه عن الصهاينة تدل على انحيازه التام لهم وعمله الدؤوب لدعم الصهاينة في المفاوضات حتى انه كان يغضب الادارة الامريكية، والاطلاع على المذكرات يرشدك الىالدور الهام الذي تلعبه شخصية الرئيس الامريكي في حسم القضايا السياسية الشائكة في العالم. وستدرك حينها كيف ان نيكسون كان صلبا في فيتنام رغم صعوبتها وتواجد الجيش الامريكي فيها وخسائرة الاسبوعية بالمئات، في حين ان فورد كان ضعيفا وغير قادرا على اتخاذ خطوات ديبلوماسية حاسمة في المفاوضات العربية الإسرائيلية.
هناك الكثير من المعلومات الفريدة والجميلة، خاصة عن حرب فيتنام والمفاوضات العربية الصهيونية، طريقة حديثه عن الصهاينة تدل على انحيازه التام لهم وعمله الدؤوب لدعم الصهاينة في المفاوضات حتى انه كان يغضب الادارة الامريكية، والاطلاع على المذكرات يرشدك الىالدور الهام الذي تلعبه شخصية الرئيس الامريكي في حسم القضايا السياسية الشائكة في العالم. وستدرك حينها كيف ان نيكسون كان صلبا في فيتنام رغم صعوبتها وتواجد الجيش الامريكي فيها وخسائرة الاسبوعية بالمئات، في حين ان فورد كان ضعيفا وغير قادرا على اتخاذ خطوات ديبلوماسية حاسمة في المفاوضات العربية الإسرائيلية.
Currently Reading
February 1, 2007This is currently my bathroom book. I've not read much of it yet, but I'm hoping it's as good as Diplomacy.
Want to Read
June 13, 2009King Hussein is portrayed very well.
Slow read.
If I ever finish this there will be fireworks going off over my house.
Slow read.
If I ever finish this there will be fireworks going off over my house.
December 29, 2014
Brilliant ....bastard
November 4, 2018
I have to admit, the bastard can write. It's frankly a gift that we have such a clear-sighted and readable account of what went on in the mind of one of the most consequential (for good and for very bad) statesmen of the 20th century. While it didn't make me come out on Kissinger's side, it did bring home that he was very often the voice of reason in a truly scary White House. That the roots of Reagan/Bush-style neoconservatism were already present in the Nixon and Ford administrations is very clear in this volume, even if Kissinger doesn't quite address it.
May 31, 2023
جائزة أضخم كتاب في حياتي تذهب إلى ذا، بس والله صعب فهمه (بديت اشك ان المشكلة فيني ) خصوصًا وهو صوتي، معلومات اسرائيل وكيف ان امريكا كانت تفكر بالتخلي عنها صراحة كانت صادمة ، اخر شي جاء ببالي سؤال ان كانت السياسة الامريكية ممكن تتغير بناءً عالادارة اللي ماسكتها فوش قيمة القرارات مع الدول الاخرى ان كان يمديها تتراجع عنها بعدين، مثلًا سالفة تايوان وان امريكا لن تعترف بها حاليًا امريكا تحاول تستفز الصين بذا الموضوع فوش قيمة قرار انها مارح تعترف فيها (هالكلام بالسبعينات ) بحاليًا ، ايش اللي يخلي الدول ما زالت تتحالف مع امريكا ان كانت ممكن تتراجع بقراراتها يبيله بحث
January 9, 2022
A bore from a deep state shill.
December 24, 2022
“Years of Renewal” by Henry Kissinger is the final volume of his memoir. Whereas the first two volumes had climaxes that colored their pages, this volume, though the shortest, was hardest to finish due to its rather colorless recounting of foreign policy in the two years of Ford.
August 11, 2012
good plitical man
February 14, 2015
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