PanOpen Letters ReviewIt purports to be a series of profiles in power, the subjects being West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, French President Charles de Gaulle, American President Richard Nixon, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...At such a point, a very heavy sigh would be entirely permissible...99 years old, but still, still pushing out the kind of platitudes that not only can be used to excuse the most evil people in the history of the species but that are designed to do exactly that...This rhetoric-as-strategy is obvious right from this book’s cast of characters...A reader might first wonder what Konrad Adenauer is doing drawn among these heartless hinds, but eyebrows might raise at de Gaulle and even Sadat as well...A moment’s thought reveals the beady-eyed rationale behind this grouping; it’s not to pull down good men, it’s to raise up genuine fire-eyed black-pelted yellow-fanged monsters...Henry Kissinger might not be able to climb a flight of stairs anymore, but he’s still capable of telling a lie before he’s even finished his Table of Contents...As he’s winding up this ghastly, conscienceless book, Kissinger contentedly admits that his subjects weren’t always popular...Not everyone admired them or \'subscribed to their policies\'...Sometimes, in fact, they faced resistance, and their separate memories still sometimes face such resistance...Almost like there might be debate about their legacies, or something...Leadership might very well be Kissinger’s most mandarin-hateful book, even surpassing 2014’s truly odious World Power...It’s his 19th book...Here’s hoping it’s his last.
