Hefty 'Years' records '70s politics

Years of Renewal

Simon & Schuster

Books make plenty of different first impressions on different people, and they do it in many different ways. The vast majority of the people who pick up "Years of Renewal," however, are likely to have the same initial reaction: their arm hurts.

That's because this book is heavy enough to frighten small children. Not only does it cover an astonishing 1,100-plus pages, one quickly discovers that Henry Kissinger intends it as the third and final volume in a memoir of his public and diplomatic career.

That makes this the capstone of a project essentially unrivaled in scope among modern autobiography. The curious thing about "Years of Renewal" is that it arrives a full 17 years after the first two volumes, which have long since disappeared from the shelves of Borders. What makes this interesting is that this volume begins in 1974, with the disgrace and resignation of Kissinger's boss, President Richard Nixon, and continues through Kissinger's tenure as Secretary of State for Nixon's successor Gerald Ford.

What that turns out to mean is that whereas the first two volumes dealt with Kissinger's service in the Nixon administration, during which time he ascended in rank (from national security adviser to Secretary of State) and public stature, the new book covers a period of time when Kissinger withered in influence and became a target for ever greater criticism, probably in backlash against the Nixon administration of which he was the most prominent remaining symbol.

So it is perhaps with understandable hesitation that Kissinger has finished the course he began by writing this book, and the pensive, bordering-on-grim tone of the author reflects that. Nonetheless, Kissinger should be admired for so forthrightly acknowledging the very recession of his prestige that he experienced during these years. It is a facet unfamiliar to most memoirs, which are commonly associated with the sugarcoating and self-interested refraction of the truth.

But there, as they say, is the rub. It is impossible for Kissinger to refute the charges, which will occur to many of those who once criticized his policies (or continue to), that his thorough detailing of his misfortunes with the public is a smokescreen. The possibility looms large that Kissinger's true goal is precisely to ameliorate his reputation by misrepresenting his diplomatic activities behind closed doors, because there is no way to verify the truth of these accounts (which are most of the meat of the book). Historians have no access to the sources and government records that Kissinger, as a former public official, ostensibly used for his research.

Perhaps someday these records will be publicly available. Kissinger will likely be dead by then, but then scholars will be able to verify his version of events like the covert and bloody efforts of the CIA to remove popularly supported, albeit Marxist, governments in Chile and Angola. Kissinger is by no means juvenile enough to supply simple interpretations of these doings, but he seems to feel he was hamstrung by congressional concern for public image and the dense jungle of internal CIA operation, for which he took most of the blame. At no point does he seem to feel regret that the U.S. executive branch considered the governments of these small, underdeveloped nations so vitally important to global politics and American welfare.

This is not the proper place to enter into an intellectual showdown with Henry Kissinger. That's because there is no such place, any more than there is a good way to challenge Mark McGwire to an arm-wrestling match. It is simply noteworthy that the context of Kissinger's project places his account of history conveniently beyond practical reproach.

With this objection duly noted, it should be recognized that Kissinger does much to engage the reader with his biting portraits of world figures and occasionally glistening prose. Kissinger is by no means a natural wordsmith, and in such a glut of pages there are bound to be intervals of drought for the reader. But the author has worked hard, and his work often bears visible fruit in what will be an important part of the historical record.

That is, once it really is a part of the record, as opposed to the whole shooting match.

- Jeff Druchniak

04-19-99