Henry Kissinger’s Diplomatic Weapons Were Charm, Brilliance, and Ruthlessness

Henry Kissinger—revered and reviled—savored the hot soup of conflict.

Yet in his century of celebrated and criticized years of orchestrating foreign policy to contain Russia and what he avidly argued were America’s other belligerents, Kissinger’s first face-to-face with absolute power perhaps best illustrates his guarantee that “it’s not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”

“It’s true,” Kissinger laughed through his thick Bavarian accent, recalling his summer 1961 maiden appearance in the White House, where he’d traveled from Harvard to discuss the Berlin Crisis with President John F. Kennedy and his cabinet. “Kennedy didn’t serve me any clam chowder.”