A review of Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the American Century
Mention the name Henry Kissinger and the responses, depending on the audience, will range from admiration to anger. As national security adviser to President Richard Nixon and secretary of state under Nixon and President Gerald Ford, Kissinger was intimately involved in setting — even revolutionizing, in some instances — American foreign policy. He was and remains a politically polarizing figure. Whatever one’s reaction, however, few would question his importance in decisively reshaping America’s relationship to much of the world.
Jeremi Suri, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, assesses Kissinger’s political life in his ambitious new study, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century.” Although attentive to Kissinger’s personal life, particularly his early years, the book is “not a traditional biography” or “standard history,” Suri insists. Rather, it is a “narrative of global change, a study of how social and political transformations across multiple societies created our contemporary world,” changes to which Kissinger “was directly connected.” The result is an often-engaging but uneven study that says more about the shaping of Kissinger’s worldview than it does about Kissinger’s reshaping the world.