Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power

Hardcover
from $0.00

Author: Robert Dallek

ISBN-10: 0060722304

ISBN-13: 9780060722302

Category: Ambassadors & Diplomats - Political Biography

Search in google:

From one of our most distinguished historians comes an epic biography of two unlikely leaders who came together to dominate American and world affairs. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were two of the most compelling, contradictory, and important leaders in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Both were largely self-made men, brimming with ambition and often ruthless in pursuit of their goals. Tapping into recently disclosed documents and tapes, Robert Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger's tumultuous personal relationship -- their collaboration and rivalry -- and the extent to which they struggled to outdo each other in the reach of foreign policy achievements. He also brilliantly analyzes their dealings with power brokers at home and abroad, including the nightmare of Vietnam, the brilliant opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the disastrous overthrow of Allende in Chile, and growing tensions between India and Pakistan, while recognizing how both men were continually plotting to distract the American public s attention away from the growing scandal of Watergate. Authoritative, illuminating, and deeply engrossing, Nixon and Kissinger gives us a new understanding of just how important and consequential these two men were in affecting world history. The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani What Mr. Dallek has done, and done remarkably deftly, in this volume is focus on the relationship between the two men, and the ways in which their personal traits their drive, their paranoia and their hunger for power and control affected their performance in office and informed their foreign policy decisions. Each was given to impugning the other s emotional stability: President Nixon would ask his aide John Ehrlichman to talk to Mr. Kissinger about getting therapy, while Mr. Kissinger would frequently refer to his boss as that madman, our drunken friend and the meatball mind.