It is a measure of Henry Kissinger’s Years of Renewal (Simon & Schuster, $35) that it is anything but. Unsurprisingly, there are passages that challenge all but the utterly committed, like 48 pages on the Cyprus crisis of 1974. Yet the very comprehensiveness of this account–billed as “the concluding volume” of Kissinger’s three-part memoir of his years serving Ford and Richard Nixon–is part of its appeal. Not that this is just a sourcebook; on the contrary, it has perhaps the clearest expression yet of what Kissinger believed he was doing, and why, during his time as secretary of State. And “Years of Renewal” fairly crackles with incisive character sketches of those who shaped an age. (Compare Kissinger’s descriptions of Mao Zedong, which verge on hero-worship even when the Chinese leader was reduced to speaking in an incoherent dribble, with the ill-disguised contempt he reserves for the dull, unintelligent Russians he met.) Moreover, Kissinger’s book is, on more than one occasion, genuinely moving. All told, this is a stupendous achievement.
The strategic challenges that faced Kissinger and Ford after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 were immense. When Ford spoke of ending a long national nightmare, he referred only to Watergate. But in truth, the United States had lived a nightmare since 1963, a time that had seen (among other horrors) one president assassinated and two forced from office, and a deadly, unpopular war in Vietnam. This fractured, unhappy country faced an apparently powerful adversary in the Soviet Union, secure in its domination of half of Europe, capable of much mischief in the Middle East and advancing its influence, through proxies, in Africa.
As if that were not enough, Kissinger had what might be called a philosophical problem. By his own account, he had rejected Wilsonianism–“foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in… which it is America’s mission to help defeat the evil foes”–in favor of a policy whose bedrock was the defense of American interests through the creation of a balance of power. He was not engaged in a “a quest for absolutes” but “the shaping of reality by means of nuances.” Yet with Vietnam-scarred liberals determined to be righteous, and newly powerful neoconservatives opposed to all accommodation with communism, this was not a nuanced time.
In large measure, Kissinger’s book is a tale of successive attempts to advance his policies in the teeth of domestic skepticism, most powerfully expressed by the post-Watergate Congress. He succeeded more often than he failed, securing the Helsinki Accords, engaging with the white-supremacist regimes of southern Africa, pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Sinai. There was, though, in Kissinger’s eyes one great failure: the abandonment of South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, when Congress failed to supply the funding that Kissinger feels–passionately–the non-communist governments of Southeast Asia deserved. But here, surely, Kissinger’s judgment goes awry; there is scant evidence that any plausible amount of outside intervention would have stopped Indochina’s communists from achieving their destiny. Blaming a liberal, softheaded Congress for that fate makes little sense.
If Congress comes in for Kissinger’s ire, his president escapes it utterly. In a book that is remarkably generous in tone, Ford wins more accolades than anyone. In his short presidency, Kissinger argues, the football star from Michigan showed courage and leadership, and “embodied our nation’s deepest and simplest values.” America, Kissinger concludes, was lucky to have such a president at such a time. History is likely to conclude that the president was no less lucky in his secretary of State.
