Years of Renewal
Henry KissingerThe eagerly awaited third and final volume of his memoirs completes a major work of contemporary history. It is at once an important historical document and a brilliantly told narrative of almost Shakespearean intensity, full of startling insights, unusual (and often unsparing) candor, and a sweeping sense of history. It begins with the resignation of Richard Nixon -- including Kissinger's final assessment of Nixon's tortured personality and the self-inflicted tragedy that ended his presidency and made Kissinger, for a time, the most powerful man in American government, as well as an intimate and definitive portrait of the man whom Kissinger knew perhaps more closely than anyone -- and then takes the reader through the years of Gerald Ford's administration, in which Kissinger continued to play a decisive role, both as Secretary of State and as the symbol of the continuity of American foreign policy. It shows us a moving and admiring picture of President Ford as a man of decency, shrewd judgment, courage, and decisiveness who led the country through a period of renewal.
Kissinger details the agony of the final U.S. extrication from Vietnam -- with the rise of an increasingly hostile Congress determined to micromanage American foreign policy and the evisceration of the American intelligence community and itsconsequences for American power -- and takes us inside the White House to show our leaders in a time of crisis.
Indeed, crisis is what this book abounds in: the fall of Cambodia and South Vietnam, the "Mayaguez" incident and the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, the origins of the wa