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.
 

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.