THE INEVITABILITY OF TRAGEDY

HENRY KISSINGER AND HIS WORLD

BARRY GEWEN

Norton, 448pp, £22.99

It used to be said of the relationship between President Nixon and his Secretary of State that Kissinger had better not die because then Nixon would become president. ‘It’s legitimate, then, to ask about the origins of his world view,’ wrote Roger Boyes in the Times, but Boyes didn’t think that this book by former editor of the New York Times Book

Review, has come up with the answers. ‘Was Kissinger just a very clever chancer, lucky not to be dragged down by the Watergate scandal that consumed so many of the Nixon crew? Did he always serve, as he claims, the national interest? Did he fundamentally change the course of history? Gewen’s book misses many targets, but he does at least remind us of a very interesting and complex personality... If we want the evidence for and against him to be properly weighed, I fear that we will have to wait until Niall Ferguson has turned in the next volume of his epic biography.’

Lloyd Green, in the Guardian, was a little more charitable. Gewen ‘treats Weimar’s collapse as the formative event in Kissinger’s life.

‘Gewen’s prose is mellifluous even if his judgement of Kissinger remains debatable’

The book’s central premises are that democracies do not necessarily hold and that nations may be forced to choose from menus that offer only rancid dishes... Gewen’s prose is mellifluous even if his judgement of Kissinger remains debatable. The reader is drawn into the book’s telling, regardless of possible disagreement. More often than not, the author gives Kissinger the benefit of the doubt – even as the bodies pile up.’