Some passions die hard. If you’re old enough to recognize the names Le Duc Tho, Salvador Allende and Anatoly Dobrynin without resorting to Wikipedia, you already know what you think of Henry Kissinger. But younger people have no such preconceptions—and the passage of 35 years is probably long enough to open even most older minds about the man who dominated U.S. diplomacy in the early 1970s.

Alistair Horne, a veteran historian whose more recent works have focused on France, believes we’re now at a point when Kissinger’s record can be seen more objectively. Horne has known Kissinger since 1980, and the former secretary of state approached him in 2004 to write his official life. Horne counter-offered: thus, Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year.

Like other “years” that have recently attracted writers (1848 springs to mind), 1973 was indeed a doozy. Detente with the Soviet Union and China was in full swing. The U.S. and North Vietnam agreed to a treaty that ended direct American involvement in the Vietnam War, leading to a Nobel Peace Prize for Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. Chilean President Allende was overthrown in a military coup. The Yom Kippur War and subsequent oil embargo began a new era in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Overshadowing everything at home was the Watergate crisis, which both empowered and stymied Kissinger. He was promoted from national security advisor to secretary of state at a time when Nixon, a foreign policy strategic master prone to jealousy of his underling, was in political and personal collapse.

As Horne makes clear, Kissinger was a product of the Cold War generation, and he saw literally every issue through the prism of relations with the Soviets. He failed again and again to heed warnings that Egypt was about to attack Israel, and he initially underestimated President Anwar Sadat’s abilities. But he quickly seized the opportunity to push the Soviets out of the Middle East and make the U.S. the key mediator in the conflict, with mixed consequences that persist today.

Vietnam emerges as Kissinger’s worst failure, though only in part through his own actions. Horne argues that Watergate’s most serious foreign policy impact was to limit the U.S. ability to respond to flagrant North Vietnamese treaty violations, as a Congress hostile to Nixon refused military funding.

If a book on foreign affairs can have lighter moments, they come in Horne’s description of Kissinger’s calamitous “Year of Europe” initiative, which ran aground on British pique, French obstructionism and German Ostpolitik. More seriously, the latest evidence described by Horne suggests that the decision by Kissinger and his top colleagues to respond to what they saw as a Soviet provocation in the Middle East with a DEFCON 3 alert of the U.S. military was an overreaction—the most dangerous point in the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Although Horne is an authorized biographer with full access to Kissinger and his voluminous archives, he is not a hagiographer. He scrupulously goes through the arguments of Kissinger’s critics on the left and the right, and examines the evidence, including newly available Soviet records. He comes to a generally favorable conclusion, but provides readers with enough facts and fair analysis to make up their own minds.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
 

The outline of Henry Hudson that emerges in Half Moon—it’s too scant of detail to call it a portrait—is of a man whose primary attribute was pig-headedness. His historical contributions are less clear. Despite agreeing to specific assignments laid out by those who financed his voyages of exploration, Hudson followed his own instincts and charted his own routes. The upshot of that disposition was that on Sept. 2, 1609, Hudson anchored his ship, the "Half Moon" from which the book takes its title, at the entrance of what is now called the Hudson River.

Knowing Hudson’s course would have alarmed his backers in Amsterdam, who had contracted the English captain to find a shortcut to the Orient by sailing over the top of Russia. During the next three weeks, Hudson would sail the Half Moon up the river as far as present-day Albany. Along the way, he made numerous contacts with the native tribes. Most of these encounters were peaceful, but one led to the death of a crew member and two others to the killing of several natives. Upon his return to Europe, the self-serving Hudson anchored in an English port instead of proceeding to Amsterdam to face the consequences of his failure and “pathological” disobedience.

The next year, Hudson returned to the New World as master of the Discovery. It would be the crafty mariner’s last voyage. After spending a horrendous winter locked in by ice in James Bay, Hudson, his son and seven other men were set adrift by a mutinous crew and never seen again. In try after try, Hudson had failed to discover the illusory Northwest Passage, and he never fully recognized the riches of the territory onto which he stumbled.

As author Douglas Hunter points out, nothing is known about Hudson’s life before 1607 and precious little afterward. If he left logs of his travels, they have not been found. Thus, Hunter relies primarily on the sketchy journal of crew member Robert Juet to chronicle the Half Moon’s voyage and to describe Hudson’s role in directing it. With so little original material to go on, Hunter stretches it out with historical and geographical digressions that enable him to speculate on Hudson’s background, political connections, geographical awareness and motivations. It’s a worthy and admirable effort, but it doesn’t demonstrate that Hudson was especially pivotal in opening up America.

This is a work of painstaking scholarship and detection, but, ultimately, one must ask, “To what end?”

Edward Morris is a writer in Nashville.
 

Harry Truman liked to drive and once said, “I like roads. I like to move.” So it seemed natural that in the summer of 1953, after serving almost eight years as president (he had been vice president for only 82 days when FDR died), private citizen Truman would drive himself and his wife Bess from their Independence, Missouri, home to New York City and back. Public radio reporter Matthew Algeo retraces their route in Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip.

During their nearly 2,500-mile roundtrip, the Trumans stayed almost exclusively in family-owned motels or with friends, ate in local restaurants and tried to travel incognito. Such a trip would be impossible today; at the time, former presidents did not have Secret Service protection. Though their itinerary was not made public and the president’s popularity was at an all-time low when he left office, well-wishers and reporters often appeared when the couple stopped, asking for photos or autographs.

Algeo interviewed people who met the Trumans and researched accounts of their travels in local newspapers and other sources. At times, he tells of his own experiences retracing their trip, noting, for example, that only one of the mom-and-pop businesses the Trumans are known to have patronized is still in business and owned by the same family. But Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure is more than a travelogue. Algeo adroitly gives us relevant background about Truman’s personal and public life, especially his presidency, and explains the trip within the context of the 1950s—roads were often in poor condition; cars did not have seat belts, air conditioning or air bags—and American history generally. Among many examples of the latter is the story of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

This very readable book takes us back to a country quite different in many ways from today. Readers will almost feel like they’re sitting in the back seat of that 1953 Chrysler, enjoying the trip.

Roger Bishop recently road tripped to New Mexico to visit his grandson.

Journalist and historian Vincent J. Cannato’s American Passage: The History of Ellis Island is about an uncertain chapter in America’s past, one most people might automatically deem unfair or at least depressing. But, as the saying goes: it is what it is. When put into its proper context, as Cannato sure-handedly does, Ellis Island’s desultory existence emerges as a functional, if flawed, reality of its time, when millions of immigrants sought wholesale entry into the U.S.

The huddled masses yearning to be free certainly figure into Cannato’s narrative, but they’re only the pawns in the game. We don’t get to them for a while anyway, as the author first offers an overview of New York Harbor’s island system, plus background on what was formerly known as Gibbet Island, used as a place for hanging pirates in the early 19th century and later as a munitions depot. Immigration was handled loosely back then, but as the influx of Europeans to the Land of Liberty increased heading toward the 20th century, so did point-of-entry corruption and exploitation, not to mention Anglo-Saxon xenophobia and nativist fears about diseased, lunatic, criminal and poverty-stricken aliens infiltrating the shores. (On the other hand, big business was licking its chops at the prospect of cheap labor. Sound familiar?)

Indeed, 12 million immigrants washed through Ellis Island’s portals from 1892 to 1924, and Cannato trenchantly outlines the political, administrative and public policy ideas behind its operation, while also introducing readers to a host of government officials heretofore little-known, such as longtime Ellis Island commissioner William Williams, who was a stickler when it came to “tightening the sieve that would strain out larger numbers of undesirable immigrants.” There are sad stories about Ellis Island, some recounted here. Some folks were sent back from whence they came, some died in detention, sometimes families were split up. But much of the anecdotal reportage only seems to reinforce with some logic the notion that, faced with an onslaught of potential new citizens, any government might want to rightfully process them systematically. (And by the way, Cannato says Ellis Island officials did not change people’s names; they hardly had time enough to deal with all the human bodies and the appropriate settlement issues. Most immigrants who changed their names did so later on of their own accord or at the urging of relatives or friends.)

After World War I, and with immigration on the decline, the U.S. turned to the so-called consulate system for screening newcomers, which rendered Ellis Island generally irrelevant, though it continued to function through the years as a detention center, including during World War II and the Cold War. In the 1950s, it went up for sale. Finding no takers at the government’s asking price, and after a few more decades of federal indecision, it finally was remade into a museum in 1990, now attracting two million visitors a year.

Rather than tug at heartstrings about the great melting pot experience, American Passage focuses instead on delivering a well-written and thoroughly researched text about the workings of a uniquely historical bureaucracy, the development and reform of early immigration law, the sociopolitical impulses that fueled a teeming era—and a strange little island whose place in our history is now only a faraway memory.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.