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Overview
An authoritative historical assessment of american foreign policy in a crucial postwar decade.William Bundy's magisterial book focuses on the controversial record of Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's often overpraised foreign policy of 1969 to 1973, an era that has rightly been described as the hinge on which the last half of the century turned. But Bundy's principled, clear-eyed assessment in effect pulls together all the major issues and events of the thirty-year span from the 1940s to the end of the Vietnam War, and makes it clear just how dangerous the consequences of Nixon and Kissinger's deceptive modus operandi were.
Editorials
James G. Hershberg
A major critique . . . Bundy has made a strong case-a stimulating reconsideration of the gauzy nostalgia [for] Nixon's foreign policy. -- The Washington Post Book WorldTony Judt
Carefully written and painstakingly researched . . . nothing of importance is left out . . . a devastating, and within its limits definitive, dismantling of a certain myth . . . [A Tangled Web] anticipates what one must hope will be the considered judgment of history. -- The New York Review of BooksWilliam Pfaff
An exemplary and fascinating story, and rather frightening. -- Los Angeles TimesPublishers Weekly
Bundy, a former adviser at the State and Defense Departments as well as the CIA under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and editor of Foreign Affairs from 1972 to 1984, here recaps U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon era. He has a lot to say, some of it negative, about the role of Henry Kissinger as Nixon's special assistant for national security affairs, then as secretary of state. Bundy credits Nixon as a brilliant strategist who was undone by his tendency to exclude the public and Congress from his deliberations. He is less charitable to Kissinger, whom he describes as obsessed with control and often making errors of judgment when refusing to consult professionals at the State Department and failing to bring Congress into his confidence. Bundy takes a jaundiced view of the memoirs of both men in their respective depictions of what transpired in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as what he describes as their self-serving accounts of the opening to China and relations with the Soviet Union. He does credit the Nixon Administration with successful policies in the Middle East, many negotiated by Kissinger, to defuse Arab-Israeli conflicts, and concedes that Nixon was a skillful maneuverer and an experienced analyst. He maintains that Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments were undone less by Watergate than by the president's obsession with secrecy and his practice of deception. Photos not seen by PW. (May)Booknews
His diverse career as editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, and in intelligence and foreign policy positions under several administrations positions Bundy in a unique vantage point to challenge Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy "successes" in regard to establishing relations with China, initiating detente with the USSR, and ending US participation in the Vietnam War. He faults patterns focusing on short-term domestic gains and deceptive tactics many perceived only in a Watergate context. Includes several b&w photographs and maps. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.NY Times Book Review
A fair-minded and dispassionate assessment that gives Nixon higher marks for shrewdness and manipulation than for statesmanship.Book Details
Published
May 1, 1998
Publisher
New York : Hill and Wang, 1998.
Pages
647
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780809091515