The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations
Autor Tom Wellsen Limba Engleză Hardback – 2 iun 2026
A richly detailed collection of transcripts of Henry Kissinger's secretly recorded phone conversations from his time in the Nixon administration that touch on every important issue of Kissinger's day and provide a sweeping view of his era. Henry Kissinger is unquestionably one of the most consequential foreign policy makers in American history. A remarkably influential academic during his long tenure at Harvard, Kissinger became Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973. Like Nixon, Kissinger left a trail of secretly recorded evidence in his wake. Kissinger began taping in 1969, two years before Nixon did in 1971, and he continued taping for over three years after Nixon's recording system was dismantled in 1973. In The Kissinger Tapes, Tom Wells draws on his expertise in the Nixon era to provide carefully selected, edited, and annotated transcripts of Kissinger's phone conversations, which chronologically highlight the most momentous crises and controversies of the era. They not only provide context and many revelations on Kissinger's role in numerous events but also throw his personality, character, and checkered record into sharp relief. The conversations cover a wide range of issues, including the Vietnam War, the India-Pakistan conflict, the opening to China, the Middle East, the Greek coup in Cyprus, the Nixon administration's illegal wiretapping, and the Watergate scandal. The transcripts reveal Kissinger's opinions and attitudes on important policy matters and his complex relationship with President Nixon, as well as the many battles he fought with other administration officials and his subtle manipulations of well-known journalists.A richly detailed collection of Kissinger's transcripts and commentary, this book provides a novel window into the Nixon administration and offers a genuinely unique perspective on one of the most important figures in modern American history.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 0190933348
Pagini: 640
Dimensiuni: 166 x 238 x 41 mm
Greutate: 1 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States
Recenzii
The Kissinger Tapes is an essential document for anyone wishing to understand how power works in the world. Wells ably guides the reader through the air-conditioned jungle of the Nixon White House.
Under one cover, Tom Wells has assembled perhaps the most unique, candid, and revealing collection of formerly secret conversations ever to be declassified. The Kissinger Tapes provides an incomparable compilation of Henry Kissinger in his own words—and a verdict of history on his controversial foreign policies.
Tom Wells' The Kissinger Tapes is a fascinating look at the political class's self-surveillance, and of the consuming distrust and paranoia that comes from waging illegal wars and coups across multiple continents. Now, if we only had a recording of Kissinger's psyche...
Wells provides unparalleled insight into the premier American diplomat of the twentieth century...
Since Kissinger did not intend his transcripts to be public, the collection is a window both into him as a person and into the operations of the U.S. national security state... For Kissinger, lies weren't a strategic tool limited to selective uses in international statecraft. They appear to have been part of his personal makeup...Throughout the transcripts, he deceives his foreign counterparts, his colleagues, and the media...He lied to obtain strategic advantage; he lied to shift blame; he lied to protect his reputation and status...Reading these conversations, one can't help but wonder whether a country that abandons its morals for potential security will preserve neither its morals nor its security, while strengthening the greatest threat to both: the state's unchecked power.
Wells provides unparalleled insight into the premier American diplomat of the twentieth century as well as minute-by minute accounts of U.S. foreign policy decision-making in a momentous era, including during the Vietnam War, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Nixon's opening with China, the Watergate scandal, various Cold War crises, and much more.
Not merely a documentary collection but a destabilizing counter-archive of American diplomacy.... If Wells's tone occasionally veers toward prosecutorial zeal, the underlying archival achievement remains formidable. By assembling and contextualizing these conversations, he provides historians with an unusually intimate record of power in action. The result is a book that reads at times like a political thriller and at others like a forensic investigation of statecraft itself. For readers willing to confront its uncomfortable implications, The Kissinger Tapes offers something rarer than scandal or vindication: a raw, unsettling glimpse into the moral psychology of modern diplomacy.
Tom Wells' newly published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations offers a revelatory glimpse into this era…. In reading Wells' book, one realises that Kissinger was both brilliant and morally flawed, terrifying and indispensable.... The Kissinger tapes remind us, with unsparing clarity, of what we have lost: the art of the back channel, the subtlety of influence, the moral ambiguity of statecraft wielded with skill.... Wells' book, with its chronological transcripts, illuminates a world in which the exercise of power was deliberate, cold, and guided by ruthless logic.
An essential history-as told in Kissinger's own words-of his tenure as national security advisor and secretary of state during the Nixon years...providing hundreds of pages of revealing evidence into his policies, strategies, personality and the rampant abuses of power that defined his stewardship of U.S. foreign policy.
Will be widely discussed and serve as a source for other books, articles, analyses, and research in many countries.
I read (savored, to be honest) the book, to understand how Kissinger...maintained his stature as one of the most consequential diplomats-if not the most consequential... Kissinger was brilliant at many things. But his greatest genius was at spinning, shaping every conversation, with the president and everyone else, to meet his always self-referential requirements. What that meant was a masterful skill at dissembling, misrepresentation, flattering, gossiping, and what seemed to be self-deprecating humorous asides, but was actually a tactical device to engage a critical interlocutor.
The tapes reveal an Oval Office where lying was ubiquitous and most human lives were irrelevant except in terms of how many dead bodies it might take to get an adversarial government to submit to Washington's desires... Callousness toward human life is revealed in conversation after conversation where the U.S. war in Vietnam was the topic... Kissinger lied and otherwise manipulated the press, the records and whatever else he could in order to maintain the image he had of himself... As The Kissinger Tapes makes abundantly clear, when it comes to US foreign policy, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Kissinger had secretaries furtively transcribe all his calls for his personal records and, 50 years later, they emerge from the archives, edited by Tom Wells, as a stark, quotidian chronicle of power during the Nixon administration... It is Nixon who bursts from the page, the novel-worthy figure of power, fickleness and insecurity, at points acting the mob boss, at others grumbling down the phone from the Oval Office like a cartoon bulldog, all jowl and froth. He directs the war with wild fury...The Kissinger Tapes underscores the enduring fraternity between Kissinger and Nixon that was engendered by the surreal world they inhabited, their moments of insecurity and intimacy now trapped in the hours of recordings for us to replay.
The Kissinger tapes are particularly useful in capturing the messy processes by which Kissinger worked his way to decisions... Tom Wells has edited them and provided helpful explanatory notes that put brief and informal exchanges into context... One can see, in retrospect, that Kissinger was making brutal calculations... He saw violence and diplomacy as two sides of the same coin.... Kissinger is often heard manoeuvring for advantage, cultivating allies and undermining rivals. Sometimes conversations have a vulgarity that puts one in mind of the school swot trying to ingratiate himself with the playground bullies-'pansy' was one of Kissinger's favourite terms of abuse for liberals.
Notă biografică
Tom Wells is the author of three previous books: The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, and (with Richard A. Leo) The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four. He has also contributed articles to books on the Vietnam War and the 1960s. He has received fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley.