Power: Choire Sicha

The Devil at the Dinner Party Henry Kissinger's socialite years.

- Choire Sicha

HENRY KISSINGER's long and lucrative third act of dining out in New York City began in January 1977, when he was 53, long after he'd left academia (his first act) and then government (his second), exhausted by years of global jet-setting and his endless aggressive manipulations. He was in debt, he said, upon leaving government, and his evening clothes were in tatters. He promptly signed a book contract with Little, Brown and Company with a $2 million advance just for the hardcover rights, keeping all the other rights for himself. He spent the weekends in Westchester with the Rockefellers and began to write.

Even by the time he came here, in all the world there were fewer names more hated than his. This did not slow anyone down. For years, he was the darling of the dinner party, beloved by a now mostly dead army of regal, wealthy socialites. "Manhattan social life is more generous than Washington political life," Kissinger noted. "It's not a blood sport."

The avatar and architect of the United States' desire to control the world left a softer legacy of an entire generation raised to view geopolitics as a clash between America, China, and Russia, with all those other pesky countries and entire continents as opportunities for our strategic wins and losses. His harder legacy is dead children and the mass displacement of humans from Bangladesh to Chile. "Every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world," he wrote in 1950.