Kissinger’s Apologia

In the first pages of the first volume of his memoirs, Henry Kissinger remarks with some bitterness about the way he was treated by McGeorge Bundy, his dean at Harvard and a predecessor as National Security Adviser to the President. It was “with a combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively personal style.” By any standards, Kissinger’s book is also exotic and excessively, if understandably, personal. It is numbingly long and stupefyingly detailed. It runs on and on for almost 1,500 pages; it needs over 400 pages to get through the first year of his service in 1969 alone. It is largely a chronicle...