JANUARY-OCTOBER 1999

Years of Renewal Reviews

(in order of appearance)

<table><tr><td>First Things</td><td>October 1999</td></tr><tr><td>Orbis, David Eisenhower</td><td>Fall 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Sunday Times, Robert Sam Anson</td><td>June 20, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Daily Telegraph, Andrew Roberts</td><td>June 19, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>London Times, John Weston</td><td>June 24, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Herald (Glasgow), Kenneth Harris</td><td>June 24, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Jerusalem Post, Shimshon Arad</td><td>June 25, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The National Interest, Walter A. McDougall</td><td>Summer 1999</td></tr><tr><td>Literary Review, Paul Johnson</td><td>June 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Sunday Telegraph, Raymond Seitz</td><td>June 13, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>National Review, John O'Sullivan</td><td>May 17, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Economist</td><td>May 15, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The New Republic, Robert Kagan</td><td>June 21, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>National Post, Alexander Rose</td><td>May 22, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The Wall Street Journal, Josef Joffe</td><td>March 18, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>The New York Times, Richard Bernstein</td><td>March 17, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld</td><td>May 1999</td></tr><tr><td>Los Angeles Times, Benjamin Schwarz</td><td>May 16, 1999</td></tr><tr><td>Foreign Affairs, Phillip Zelikow</td><td>May/June 1999</td></tr><tr><td>Business Week, Stan Crock</td><td>April 12, 1999</td></tr></table>

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>Philadelphia Enquirer, Craig Eisendrath</td>
    <td>March 28, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Newsday, Timothy M. Phelps</td>
    <td>March 28, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Newsweek, Michael Elliott</td>
    <td>March 29, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Barnes and Noble, Advertisement</td>
    <td>1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>New York Times Book Review, John Lewis Gaddis</td>
    <td>March 21, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Nigel Farndale</td>
    <td>January 31, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Boston Magazine, Tom Blanton</td>
    <td>March 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>barnesandnoble.com</td>
    <td>March 15, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>The Washington Post</td>
    <td>March 8, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Time, Walter Isaacson</td>
    <td>March 15, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Kirkus Review</td>
    <td>March 1, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Publishers Weekly</td>
    <td>February 15, 1999</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>The Washington Post, Robert G. Kaiser</td>
    <td>March 21, 1999</td>
  </tr>
</table>

OCTOBER 1999

79

good friend of Joe's," said Hume. "I had stayed with him in Chicago. I couldn't understand that."

Cardinal Hume was, as the British say, a wet, and it may be that his accommodating manner was what was needed for the last two decades of the quiet insinuation of Catholicism as the largest (in terms of actual practice) communion in Britain. In the view of the Niall Fergusons, it seems, it's simply not fair for popery to return in such nonthreatening guise. As for Cardinal Hume, while we wish he had understood America and some of its other cardinals better, *requiescat in pace*.

FT

## THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HENRY KISSINGER

People write memoirs for many reasons, some more noble than others: to set the record straight, to settle scores, to discharge a duty to history, to justify one's actions, to bid for public approval, to indulge the pleasures of nostalgia, to instruct the successor generation, or simply to try to make sense of one's life and the world of which it is part. All these reasons are evident in Henry Kissinger's *Years of Renewal* (Simon & Schuster, 1,151 pp., $35), the third and concluding volume in the account of his service as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Together with *White House Years* and *Years of Upheaval*, this project surely vies for the title of the century's most comprehensive, instructive, and readable record of major league diplomacy. For anyone seriously interested in foreign affairs and, more particularly, the place and prospects of America in the world, it is essential reading.

*Years of Renewal* covers the time from the swearing in of Gerald Ford, after the August 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, to the inauguration of Jimmy Carter in January 1977. Of course, to make the story coherent, Kissinger must frequently cut back and forth in time, displaying both the sources and later consequences of the problems with which he dealt. One of the great merits of a book such as this is that it rescues us from the flurry of daily headlines, the events, alarums, and crises both real and fake that once seemed of such enormous moment. If one result is a stronger appreciation of how ephemeral are many of our news-generated anxieties, another is

an understanding of how the crises of the moment are, more often than not, symptoms of perduring dilemmas. Consider but a few of the dizzying array of excitements recounted in this volume that kept Kissinger and his colleagues up late at night, shuttling to and fro, jockeying for advantage, threatening and cajoling, promising and seducing, tasting intermittent exultations amid recurring tedium and occasional despair: Turks, Greeks, and Cyprus; détente and nuclear disarmament; civil war in Lebanon; Israel and the “Peace Process”; apartheid in South Africa; civil war in Angola; Marxist insurgencies in Latin America; and on and on.

But the most interesting and most wrenching part of this very big book is about the U.S. and Indochina. For those of us who were caught up in the turbulent disputes over the Vietnam War, and also for those born later, Kissinger's account makes for gripping reading. This is his telling of the much told story, and he tells it with an intense mix of sadness, disillusionment, resentment, and outrage—while striving to maintain a modicum of professorial detachment. Anyone who cares about that story, which continues to shape our domestic politics and foreign policy in sometimes convoluted ways, will want to attend to Kissinger's telling.

Kissinger does not go so far as some who say that the war was effectively won, but he believes there was a very reasonable chance that South Vietnam could have maintained its freedom and independence if the U.S. had continued its modest support after the withdrawal of its troops. The support required was much less than what has been committed to South Korea, which has maintained its independence almost forty years since the aggression from the North. But after Walter Cronkite and the herd of independent minds in the media had misrepresented the Tet Offensive of 1968 as a great defeat, domestic support for continued assistance to Saigon was shattered. Of course Kissinger blames political figures such as George McGovern and William Fulbright, but his harshest and saddest words are reserved for Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, who represented himself as something of a conservative and realist in foreign policy but was, in Kissinger's view, as guilty as McGovern in leaving South Vietnam to the tender mercies of Hanoi.

His judgment on the war's outcome is severe:

> The United States devoted two decades of blood and treasure to help a group of newly independent, fledgling societies avoid conquest by their merciless and militarily more powerful Communist neighbor in