It is my privilege to have been a friend of Henry Kissinger’s for more than forty years. We have had some ups and downs, but my respect for him as a historian and architect of foreign policy has never wavered, and it is a particular pleasure of the last ten years that our relations have possibly become more cordial than ever. I would have declined to write this review if I could not conscientiously have praised the book. No such problem remotely arose: having, I believe, read all of Kissinger’s books and been impressed by all of them, I think Leadership is one of the best.1 This is a particularly remarkable and inspiriting feat because the author wrote it when he was ninety-seven and ninety-eight years old.
Having, I believe, read all of Kissinger’s books and been impressed by all of them, I think Leadership is one of the best.
It is an unusually organized book assessing leadership techniques on the evidence of six prominent world statesmen of the twentieth century whom the author knew and worked with in several cases. The subjects are presented in order of their principal periods in office: Konrad Adenauer (the West German chancellor, 1949–63), Charles de Gaulle (the president of France, 1959–69), Richard Nixon (the U.S.president, 1969–74), Anwar Sadat (the Egyptian president, 1970–81), Lee Kuan Yew (the prime minister, senior minister, and minister mentor of Singapore, 1959–2011) who spanned all of the others, and Margaret Thatcher (the
