Quotes About Kissinger

A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November, President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him - and for his and Kissinger's policies - representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast.

My father left Nazi Germany a year after Dr. Kissinger, and so in my household he was very much an icon. He was a kind of immigrant success story, a refugee success story.

Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.

In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.

A supreme pragmatist, Kissinger was never interested in the art of the impossible - and nor, as a biographer, am I. That is why, having initially been invited to write his entire official biography, I eventually decided to devote myself to writing just one year in his life: 1973.

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

Now we commissioned William Shawcross, a tall, gangly Brit, to review Kissinger's memoirs. Willie's father had been the British chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. After an Eton and Oxford education, Willie, who was just my age, had become an international activist and journalist.

Christmas 1972 was a lonely time for Kissinger, as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginnes, but still very much a bachelor - Washington's most sought-after bachelor.

Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.

On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack - as were the CIA and the rest of the world.

The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a "horror strategy.

Harvard makes mistakes too, you know. Kissinger taught there.

I think Haig will be foolish, but perhaps not quite as foolish as Kissinger was, because Haig doesn't have the education Kissinger had. Haig is a little more dangerous because, I fear, he believes what he says, whereas I never got that impression from Kissinger.

Though Washington had closed down for the holidays, the next day, December 26, a key message from Hanoi brought Kissinger racing back to his office. It was the signal the White House had anxiously been awaiting; it was also the day of one of the biggest raids by the giant B-52s.

Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize.

There is a widespread view among the liberal intelligentsia to the effect that Henry Kissinger, U.S. National Security Advisor from 1969 to 1975 and Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, was a bad man. That may even be an understatement. In this fashionable consensus, he is not just a bad man: he is a war criminal.

Kissinger was now a loxed-out, quivering, drooling gomer in a wheelchair—in the sick hell of eternally end-stage Parkinson's.

Why is it that Alsop is writing such a letter, warning Israel that it stands in danger of destruction and reminding it that it has only one protector? It is because "bad trouble has begun between Israel and America." For one thing, Alsop is shocked by Israel's ingratitude to Secretary of State Kissinger.

Endorsing Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kissinger threw in with America's new militarists, who would jump-start a revived Cold War and drive to retake the Third World.

What Americans can't face is that one of the reasons that the Russians and the Chinese were so impressed with us during the Cold War was the fact that Nixon and Kissinger went on bombing despite public reaction.

If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.

Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.

If you watch the evening news, Dr. Kissinger is very often brought on to sort of be the statesman of his age and to reflect dispassionately on world events. And so a film challenging his legacy, a film that assesses charges that are quite grave against him, is something that is touchy for the media to show.