Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises by Henry Kissinger

From the Publisher

By drawing upon hitherto unpublished transcripts of his telephone conversations during the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the last days of the Vietnam War (1975), Henry Kissinger reveals what goes on behind the scenes at the highest levels in a diplomatic crisis.

The two major foreign policy crises in this book, one successfully negotiated, one that ended tragically, were unique in that they moved so fast that much of the work on them had to be handled by telephone.

The longer of the two sections deals in detail with the Yom Kippur War and is full of revelations, as well as great relevancy: In Kissinger's conversations with Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister; Simcha Dinitz, Israeli ambassador to the U.S.; Mohamed el-Zayyat, the Egyptian Foreign Minister; Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S.; Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary General of the U.N.; and a host of others, as well as with President Nixon, many of the main elements of the current problems in the Middle East can be seen.

The section on the end of the Vietnam War is a tragic drama, as Kissinger tries to help his president and a divided nation through the final moments of a lost war. It is full of astonishing material, such as Kissinger's trying to secure the evacuation of a Marine company which, at the very last minute, is discovered to still be in Saigon as the city is about to fall, and his exchanges with Ambassador Martin in Saigon, who is reluctant to leave his embassy.

This is a book that presents perhaps the best record of the inner workings of diplomacy at the superheated pace and tension of real crisis.

The New York Times

What emerges is a vivid portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential statesmen operating at full tilt and in the full glow of his power -- in rapid kaleidoscopic sequence and in various mixtures cajoling, reassuring, flattering, delaying, smoking out and threatening Soviet, Israeli, Egyptian, British and United Nations diplomats, soothing the concerns of senators, parrying bureaucratic intruders, and periodically updating a distracted and detached President Richard M. Nixon embroiled in the constitutional crisis of Watergate … In the end, these transcripts are interesting less for what they reveal about the dynamics of crisis diplomacy than for their insightful detail about one of this country's most complex and controversial diplomats and the times he inhabited. — G. John Ikenberry

Foreign Affairs

Kissinger's two crises are the Arab-Israeli War in October 1973 and the final U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 (he offers more than 400 pages on the October war, 123 on Vietnam). Kissinger has already written detailed accounts of his role in these events (in "Years of Upheaval" and "Ending the Vietnam War"), and what he produces here is neither new information nor second thoughts: it is a chronological listing, with sparse commentary, of the declassified transcripts of his telephone conversations with concerned U.S. and foreign officials. The result is less coherent account than incomplete source book. As such, however, it is a welcome addition to much material that has been recently released, including the declassified U.S. official record, which appears summarized and well noted in a recent online publication by the National Security Archive, "The October War and U.S. Policy." (For the latter's critical appraisal of the Kissinger transcripts, see note 3 at the URL above.)

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Table of Contents