Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman Hardcover – August 25, 2015

If you read one book about American history in the mid to late 20th Century, consider this one for the short list. If you lived through it, then all the better. Those times and people all belong to history now, or as in Kissinger’s mind, history is only the product of the questions we ask it, and statesmen should not pay it too much attention or they will fail to act decisively enough and quickly enough.This book delves into Kissinger’s mind and behavior as a result of his beliefs rather than just reciting his actions and statements, which makes it a good book and more informative than just a reciting of dates and things that happened.Kissinger was a German metaphysician shaped by Oswald Spengler and the Holocaust. He believed that statesmen made history by their actions and did not have to seriously consider it to take those actions properly. He abhorred the statisticians, analysts, and strategists who collected as much data as possible and shaped their decisions with it. From this book it is probably more likely he abhorred them because they competed with him and would apply that data and analysis to him and the Presidents he served, most notably Richard Nixon.His go-to answer for dealing with the Russians, and anybody else for that matter, was the “Mad Man” theory that the US should act brutally, quickly, and without guilt in attacking the USSR’s surrogates or any other country challenging America. For years he ran the Cambodian bombing personally from the Nixon Whitehouse basement. Whenever he served another President he always went back to that strategy of bomb and attack, civilians be dammed.He was incredibly manipulative and exchanged one set of twisted truth and political position for another in order to keep himself on the inside of every administration from Nixon, to Ford, to Reagan and Bush I and the neoconservatives who hated him at the beginning of the Reagan years. He morphed and manipulated himself into them so they all eventually let him and Kissinger Associates into their inner sanctum, right through the George W. Bush Administration. Most recently he has had meeting with Donald Trump according to press reports.In the telling of this author it appears that Kissinger was very much like the Nazis who had tried to kill him in the end. People were only a means to an end for him, especially people in other weaker and poorer nations.The only issue I have with the book is that the first part through the Nixon years was very tight and objective. In the latter half the author’s opinion shows through more and some readers who are blinded by the left-right culture war climate of the Trump years will scream “liberal!” and stop reading. You have to read things from all sides and all kinds of writers, otherwise your own thoughts and beliefs become ossified and limited. That said, this book is worth a read by anyone interested in recent American history from any viewpoint. It is history and everything the author says is supported by historical facts and data, which of course, Kissinger would hate.

Thomas Schelling was a Harvard economist and future Nobel Lauerate who, by 1970, had turned against the Vietnam War. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in May of that year prompted him and eleven other prominent Harvard professors to travel to Washington to meet with their former colleague , Henry Kissinger, and register their objections. They did not know that Nixon and Kissinger had been bombing Cambodia and Laos for over a year.Today in the United States there is a shared and largely unqualified assumption, irrespective of political affiliation, which holds that Washington has the right to use military force against terrorists or potential terrorists even if they are found in sovereign countries we are not at war with. This reasoning was not widely held in 1970 and Schelling’s Harvard delegation rejected Kissinger’s attempt to justify the invasion by citing the need to destroy Communist sanctuaries. Kissinger asked if someone could tell him what mistakes the administration had made. At that point Schelling said:” You look out of your window and you say “look, there’s a monster.” The guy next to you doesn’t see a monster at all. How do you explain to him there really is a monster?” Schelling continued, “As I see it there are two possibilities - One, the president didn’t realize when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country, or Two, he did understand it. We don’t know which is scarier.”It can be seen just how much our standards have shifted that what Thomas Schelling and his Harvard colleagues considered wrong nearly fifty years ago - that the United States has the right to use the potential threat of terrorism to justify military action against a sovereign country it wasn’t at war with - has now become a self-evident moral right. Today exactly such reasoning is used to sanction the U.S.military’s involvement in at least 74 global conflicts; the journalist Nick Turse (author of “Kill Anything That Moves) claims that we are operating in 134 countries. No one played a more key role in shifting those standards than Henry Kissinger.“Far from disappearing into oblivion,” says Greg Grandin, “he endures. And after Kissinger himself is gone, one imagines Kissingerism (Kissinger’s Shadow) will endure as well.”

As a student in the sixties, I remember well the protests & riots against the Viet Nam war. I also remember Henry K, receiving the Noble Peace Prize..Many of the events written about in this book I recall reading fleetingly.... as headlines only . My life then was busy with things other than world politics.What an eye-opener this book.. an excellent " read '...very well researched - great annotated bibliography & footnotes. If someone were to ask me to describe the face of evil...I would have to think of Kissinger....much has been made of his pursuit of Real Politic...Miriam Webster defines that as : politics based on practical and material factors rather than on theoretical or ethical objectives. The term seems a misnomer when applied to Kissinger....although morals or ethics never did enter into any of Kissinger's decisions, but then neither did real and / or valid practical & material factors.Talk about alternate facts ! Talk about dissemination of Fake News !! In the absence of hard facts, he simply created & wished them into being.....his belief in intuition & hunches supposedly a result of Spengler's influence. There is much in this book about Spengler's influence on Kissinger..Poor Spengler, the whipping boy for a monster like Kissinger..Personally I think Henry Kissinger's fall-back on Spengler is Kissinger's attempt to create a gravitas - projecting construct of himself to demonstrate that he acts in accordance with an " academic philosophy ." This is a man who has influenced every president since Nixon and who to this day is unapologetic for the misery he inflicted upon millions around the globe...a man who still does not admit to the horrors he created in Cambodia, just to cite one example.. A statesman for all seasons and reasons....

Libro che percorre la vita di Kissinger come figura controversa, realista e necessariamente legata al suo ruolo di Segretario di Stato degli Stati Uniti, prima con Nixon poi con Ford.Grandin percorre le varie guerre , a partire dal Vietnam fino all'Iraq attuale, secondo i ruoli giocati da Kissinger in termini di influenza, di potere e decisionale; tuttavia la maniera critica, ovvia fin dall'inizio, non puo' piacere a tutti.Consigliato.

Really Interesting and well written but not necessarily accessible.I have done a lot of reading previously on Vietnam so i found the parts of this book about that time frame fascinating and a very good starting point for learning about Kissinger. The author uses Mr. Kissinger's student papers as a framework for all his future actions. While this may or may not be a fair way to judge the man, it does make for excellent reading and the worldview presented is both shocking and engrossing.I did however get a little lost during the later part of the books out of vietnam. Like most things middle-east related I'm woefullly uneducated and this book is not written to shed light on that subject. It is a complete focus on Kissinger and his beliefs and the way he chose to deal with the world at the given times. If you are unfamiliar with those time frames and can be hard to grasp the bigger picture.That being said, it is still very well written and I finished the book quite quickly. I plan to revisit the latter half should i ever get a deeper understanding of U.S. politics post Nixon.3.5/5 for me.

Greg Grandin has come up with a marvelous, well written and well researched biography of one of the most controversial political figures of the twentieth century. The book is fascinating and really worth reading

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