Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
By Henry Kissinger
Penguin Press, 2022

Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, the latest book from 99-year-old Henry Kissinger, arrives from Penguin Press as a stately tome covered in virginal white. It purports to be a series of profiles in power, the subjects being West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, French President Charles de Gaulle, American President Richard Nixon, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 

“All six could be bold,” Kissinger writes. “They acted decisively on matters of overriding national importance even when conditions – domestic or international – appeared decidedly unfavorable.”

At such a point, a very heavy sigh would be entirely permissible. 99 years old, but still, still pushing out the kind of platitudes that not only can be used to excuse the most evil people in the history of the species but that are designed to do exactly that. 

This rhetoric-as-strategy is obvious right from this book’s cast of characters. A reader might first wonder what Konrad Adenauer is doing drawn among these heartless hinds, but eyebrows might raise at de Gaulle and even Sadat as well. A moment’s thought reveals the beady-eyed rationale behind this grouping; it’s not to pull down good men, it’s to raise up genuine fire-eyed black-pelted yellow-fanged monsters. Henry Kissinger might not be able to climb a flight of stairs anymore, but he’s still capable of telling a lie before he’s even finished his Table of Contents. 

So they could be bold. They could act decisively even when, in the exquisite evil of the phrase, “domestic or international conditions appeared unfavorable.” They might betray their oath of office; they might use their power to brutalize the poor and vulnerable; they might authorize the thuggish lawbreaking of their flunkies; they might commit war crimes, but at least they didn’t dither. 

All eyes will turn to the particular monster Kissinger knew best, the one he so industriously enabled, President Nixon. And what’s the gist of what those readers will learn? That no matter what else he had on his plate, Nixon was always nice to Kissinger:

Even when he was under great pressure, his conduct toward me was invariably courteous. This consistent graciousness was all the more remarkable because, side by side with the decisive and thoughtful Nixon described in these pages, there was another Nixon – insecure about his image, uncertain of his authority and plagued by nagging self-doubt.

Note that list of attributes for the alternate Nixon: insecure, uncertain, plagued by self-doubt. Poor little tyke! No hint of evil, no hint of slope-browed brutish self-absorption (no hint of actual truth either; there are plenty of eyewitness accounts of Nixon treating our esteemed author every bit as rudely as he treated everybody else). It would be comical if malice-laundering were ever comical.

Likewise Margaret Thatcher, who is, as we’re told, remembered outside of Britain as “a commanding presence on the international scene” but who’s remembered in her own country “primarily as a domestic reformer.” Yes indeed, that well-known domestic reformer, Maggie Thatcher. And since reforming a society disastrously for the worse is technically still reforming it, well …

Naturally there’s no way to bring up Thatcher, even hagiographically, without at least mentioning the economy she gutted. Kissinger knows this, and he’s ready with yet more skin-crawling neutralities. “Measured against the exacting standards of Hayekian theory, Thatcher’s economic program was perhaps slow and half-complete,” he writes, and you can practically hear the wicked, subdued chuckling (“perhaps slow and half-complete” - the jaw just gapes). “Viewed within the context of electoral politics, however, her approach was decisive, usually amenable to experimentation and ultimately history-making.”

As he’s winding up this ghastly, conscienceless book, Kissinger contentedly admits that his subjects weren’t always popular. Not everyone admired them or “subscribed to their policies.” Sometimes, in fact, they faced resistance, and their separate memories still sometimes face such resistance. Almost like there might be debate about their legacies, or something. “Such is the price of making history,” Kissinger writes complacently, fingers interlaced over his belly, wistful eyes gazing into the middle distance, all disgraces forgotten, all graves unmarked, all survivors lacking a Penguin Press book contract. 

“Leadership” might very well be Kissinger’s most mandarin-hateful book, even surpassing 2014’s truly odious World Power. It’s his 19th book. Here’s hoping it’s his last. 

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.