Volume 29, Number 7 · April 29, 1982
The Return of Henry Kissinger
By Stanley Hoffmann
Years of Upheaval
by Henry Kissinger
Little, Brown, 1,283 pp., $24.95
Less than two and a half years after the publication of his first volume of memoirs, Henry Kissinger has given us an equally dense and hefty sequel. White House Years covered the first term of Richard Nixon and ended with the Paris peace agreement on Vietnam in January 1973; Years of Upheaval is his account of the stormy period that began in February 1973 with his first visit to Hanoi, and ended in August 1974 with Nixon's resignation. The first book dealt with fifty months in 1,500 pages; the second volume tells about eighteen months in nearly 1,300 pages—almost three pages per day. If the third volume, which will describe the Ford years, is as long, Kissinger will have set something of a record. Since, in the two and a half years during which he wrote Years of Upheaval, he also did a lot of public speaking, traveling, advising, and political maneuvering, the reader can only be impressed, once more, by the powers of concentration, the mental energy, the argumentative skills, and the apparent fierce desire for total recall evident in this book.
Review, 8412 words
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