Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Morris was one of that group of extraordinarily able young National Security Council staffers recruited by Henry Kissinger early in the Nixon administration. His portrait of Kissinger, however colored by their falling out, is a vivid picture of ruthlessness and deception mixed with rare political and diplomatic skills. The story is based on first-hand contacts up to the time of Cambodia and thereafter on an outsider's impressions. Morris himself is a victim of Kissinger's unfulfilled promises that staff papers would be rapidly translated into policy and that the young men who prepared them were far superior to State Department personnel. But Kissinger himself emerges as a tormented and tragic figure consumed by ambition, indecisive (Nixon was the initiator of the new China policy), and given to moods of self-deception. Curious then that he should be judged one of our great secretaries of state." Reviewed by Robert Jackson, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)