As is evident from the subtitle, Six Studies in World Strategy, Kissinger, the geopolitical guru, is most interested in how leaders act on the world stage rather than, say, if they lie to their parliaments or transgress their own laws...At the heart of his political outlook is the notion of strategy, and that in turn is informed by a concept of national interest and power relations that hasn’t changed much since the mid-17th century and the Westphalian settlement...As such, his portrait of Nixon is predictably sympathetic, while not hiding some of the man’s notable character flaws...Unsurprisingly, he hails his efforts in foreign policy, which were all but indistinguishable from Kissinger’s own...The world, viewed through Kissinger’s eyes, is not so very different from the kinds of inter-house machinations dramatised in Game of Thrones, and you could picture him as the Hand of the King, forever whispering fiendish plots and dark truths to a paranoid master...The most finely drawn portrait of the six is of De Gaulle...If a vital aspect of leadership is self-belief, then few leaders have ever displayed more of it in less auspicious circumstances...You sense that Kissinger, who has never undersold himself, admires De Gaulle’s gall, but it’s his statecraft that most commands his respect: 'On every major strategic question facing France and Europe over no fewer than three decades, and against an overwhelming consensus, De Gaulle judged correctly'...That’s a large claim, but then Kissinger prides himself on being able to see the grand sweep of history, undistracted by minor diversions.

It 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.

Someone looking for a summer read with heroes and villains, far-sighted titans and dastardly domestic subversives could do worse than Henry Kissinger’s new book, Leadership, which could just as easily be titled 'How Henry and His Friends Made History and Why We Should All Be Very, Very Grateful'...The heroes of the story are six of the most important leaders of the second half of the 20th century, all of whom Kissinger, now 99, met and most of whom he worked and socialised with...The leaders all share certain similarities that Kissinger emphasises and which, though it’s not stated, could be said to be shared by Kissinger himself...If you choose to make this story of good and bad, realists and idealists one of your summer selections, you will be rewarded with heroes and villains...Ultimately the purpose is clear...Enjoy your holidays, relax with your silly ideas, but please, please, don’t disturb the great work of brilliant statesmen like Henry and his chums, all of whom know what is good for you better than you could ever understand.

I have come not to bury Henry Kissinger—war criminal or statesman, you decide—but to praise him as an uncommonly elegant writer. To say no U.S. secretary of state has been better with words is not as faint a compliment as you might think; Present at the Creation, by Dean Acheson, is a perceptive and memorable chronicle of the tumultuous Truman years ... But most books by others who have held the office quickly make it to the remainder bin ... shows Kissinger at his best, since he focuses not on doctrine but on five men and one woman who by dint of their personality changed the world in which they found themselves. He has always had an eye for detail and motive, and as we know from the White House tape recordings of his conversations with Richard Nixon, he is blessed with an intuitive understanding of how to play to a person’s vanity...Or, to put it less kindly, Kissinger is a first-class suck-up ... The fact that Kissinger happened to know the six he profiles is not name-dropping at its most egotistical, since it is his intimate observations that give the book its power ... As befits a man who just turned 99 talking about a man dead since 1994 who made him famous, Kissinger is measured and surprisingly wise about Nixon, brilliantly placing him in the context of the turmoil he both inherited and stirred up.

The 99-year-old Kissinger has written what purports to be a handbook for the leaders of today and tomorrow ... It is a nice conceit and the juxtaposition of those six intriguing and world-shaping politicians is instructive. Kissinger knew them all and enlivens his text with accounts of his own interactions with the leaders and those around them ... Details from within the rooms where the second half of the 20th century was shaped are plentiful ... There is, however, an asymmetry at the heart of the book that undermines its stated purpose. One does not have to agree with, like or even respect Adenauer, De Gaulle, Sadat, Lee or Thatcher – though at points Kissinger does convince on their remarkable qualities – to acknowledge them as leaders of stature. The same does not apply to Nixon, who simply does not belong alongside them ... Kissinger makes an energetic case for his former boss’s inclusion. He whitewashes the appalling costs of Nixon’s thuggish foreign policies in Chile, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Indonesia and overstates the visionary quality of Nixon’s China trip...And his defence of Watergate is staggeringly weak, amounting to the argument that the president’s underlings had misunderstood him ... The high point of his audacity is a section in which the author briefly contemplates the long-term rise in political polarisation and divisive culture wars in American politics ... Kissinger’s assessment of Nixon – the longest of the six – compromises the book ... reads as a bid to burnish Nixon by association with the likes of Adenauer and Lee, and by secondary association to burnish too the legacy of the architect of the foreign policies that it claims earns him his place in such illustrious company: one H Kissinger ... It fundamentally fails in that goal. The informed and authoritative nature of Kissinger’s other portraits only serves to illustrate the gulf between their subjects and the thuggish, crooked Nixon.

One of America’s most legendary diplomats finds the soul in statecraft in these enlightening sketches of world leaders ... Many readers will disagree with that interpretation and others, but Kissinger’s portraits of politicians spinning weakness and defeat into renewed strength are captivating. This is a vital study of power in action.