‘Surely no statesman in modern times, and certainly no American secretary of state, has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s monumental biography, the first volume of which takes the story from Kissinger’s birth until his appointment as national-security adviser by President-elect Richard Nixon in 1968.
Surely Ferguson is right. Once upon a time — in 1974, to be exact — Kissinger was depicted on the cover of Newsweek as a cartoon figure dubbed “Super K.” Time called him “the world’s indispensable man,” and he even became an improbable sex symbol. More recently he has been denounced as a war criminal and held responsible for massacres from Bangladesh to Cambodia.
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