The Long History of Leading From Behind

Nixon and Kissinger’s effort to fix an overextended foreign policy was more like Obama’s than you might think.

- Stephen Sestanovich

No matter how many books are written about Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, there’s always room on the shelf for more. Our fascination with these two larger-than-life characters hardly needs explaining. There’s the doomed and moody president, manic when he wasn’t melancholic, and his super-brainy, super-vain, Nobel Prize–winning adviser—a pair of shape-shifting personalities who took control of American foreign policy at its lowest moment of the Cold War. They combined ambitious statesmanship with jaw-dropping weirdness, sparked controversies that continue to this day, and—while pretending otherwise—were obsessively desirous of our good opinion. How could we not be just as interested in them?

It’s not only the pull of great charac­ters, of course, that keeps the Nixon and Kissinger books coming. There’s plenty of fresh material, too. The many titles of the past year draw on reams of declassified documents; the final batch of Oval Office tapes; first ­ever access to some personal papers; extensive inter­ views with friends, family members, and staffers; and much more. It’s a mea­sure of the abundant information avail­ able that one author can pay tribute to another scholar by calling him the only person to have read the “millions of pa­pers at the Nixon Library.” These new books come by their juice and color the old­fashioned way—through tedious, time­consuming research.

The torrent of information has not, alas, given us the unified picture of Nixon and Kissinger that we might have hoped for. The clash of views is sharper than ever. The journalist Evan Thomas (Being Nixon: A Man Divided) and the historian Niall Ferguson (volume one of whose Kissinger biography is arrestingly subtitled The Idealist