Volume 23, Number 20 · December 9, 1976
Consistent Kissinger
By Sheldon S. Wolin
The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomacy in the Middle East
by Edward R.F. Sheehan
Reader's Digest Press, distributed by Thomas Y. Crowell, 287 pp., $8.95
Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power
by John G. Stoessinger
Norton, 234 pp., $8.95
On Watch
by Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.
Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 568 pp., $12.50
Henry Kissinger has been something of an enchanter, difficult to describe, impossible to interpret. Instinctively one resorts to superlatives only to discover that they are euphemisms for avoiding something. Kissinger may be, as Vice President Rockefeller recently described him, 'the most brilliant secretary of state in our history,' but the reality is that he has been the most powerful secretary of state in American history, the first to have consistently overshadowed the president without provoking even the semblance of a constitutional controversy. Yet so strong is the impulse to avert our gaze from the realities of American politics that, having acknowledged the unusual power he has acquired, we prefer to discount its long-run significance by pointing to the unusual circumstances that made it possible. There was, we are likely to say, a 'power vacuum' at the top: Kissinger's first president became immobilized by Watergate, his second by native dullness and inexperience.
Review, 6232 words
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