[In following review, Zelikow presents a positive review of Kissinger's Years of Renewal and discusses the memoir as a means by which Kissinger attempts to refute negative criticism of his foreign policy.]

Autobiographies are not biographies, which is one of the reasons why they can be so interesting. Henry Kissinger goes one step further. Like Winston Churchill, he sidesteps simple autobiography, choosing instead to impose his view of his role in history by acting as his own historian. Years of Renewal, which covers the 30 months of the Ford administration, completes Mr Kissinger's three-volume account of his eight years of high office. This book is an apologia—not an apology but a defence in depth against his critics. Mr Kissinger continues to turn the tables on those who criticised his continuation of the Vietnam war for seven years by charging that the critics' final success in cutting off increased funding for the South Vietnamese government in 1975 was the real betrayal of American ideals. Mr Kissinger, appealing to what he asserts were such “unfashionable concepts” as “honour” and “moral obligation”, argued against “simply jettisoning an entire people to which we were allied.”

Here his notion of morality overcomes his realism. While Mr Kissinger is certain that increased American aid would have staved off the South Vietnamese collapse during 1975, he is unable to assert or to find any intelligence estimate suggesting that, with any level of American aid short of combat involvement, the south could have ultimately prevailed. Indeed, it defies common sense to imagine that a government, both corrupt and ineffectual, could have accomplished without American troops what it did not achieve with more than 500,000 American soldiers at hand. Mr Kissinger's position might have prolonged the war, perhaps until after the 1976 presidential election, but the price would have been further loss of Vietnamese lives and greater devastation without any change in outcome.

Mr Kissinger regards the need to define the relationship between the pragmatic and the moral as the key task of American foreign policy, something with which Madeleine Albright might well agree. He quotes a moving letter his father wrote him in 1946, when he thought he might die: “a human being must always fulfil his moral obligations.”

Having set himself the task, Mr Kissinger makes a valiant attempt at being faithful, reliable and selfless. The self-portrait is that of a highly moral man of gravitas, but his actual morality is quite peculiar. The reader of this volume would not understand why a top historian, John Lewis Gaddis, could conclude that “it is becoming clear that Mr Kissinger relied unusually heavily upon bending the truth, not just in his dealings with foreign statesmen but also with his own friends, associates, and at times even presidents for whom he worked.” Yet he remains convinced he was right. To this day, Mr Kissinger has not apologised to his colleagues or their families for his complicity in the wiretaps placed on their home telephones.

A reviewer of another of Mr Kissinger's works once remarked that whether or not he was a great writer, anyone who finished was a great reader. The comment is tempting but unfair. The arguments over Henry Kissinger's character and accomplishments will intrigue generations of historians. But his thoroughness, even if occasionally tedious, is a service to history. He often writes with pithy elegance, and the intellectual force displayed in his memoirs should place them among the few current foreign-affairs books which will be noteworthy 50 years hence.