There is no doubt that Niall Ferguson’s Kissinger is a brilliant book by an outstanding historian about a great and durably interesting statesman, who is also a distinguished historian and gifted strategic thinker.1 Niall Ferguson has produced the first volume of a commissioned work that is intended by the subject and the author to be definitive. The author has done the necessary to establish his impartiality and has made very extensive use of the immense archives that Henry Kissinger has opened to him. And the author has gone to admirable lengths (even by his always meticulous professional standards) to read very widely in background areas relevant to Henry Kissinger’s Jewish and German origins and has interviewed in depth a great many of the subject’s acquaintances in the forty-four formative years before he ascended to great offices of state.

There have been a number of other talented secretaries of state, including James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, William H. Seward, John Hay, Henry L. Stimson, General Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Shultz, and James Baker. And there have been many extremely prominent Americans whose careers included, but did not reach their peak of success, in that office, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, James G. Blaine, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes, Colin Powell, and Hillary Clinton. But none of them have attracted as much or as intense an interest for their strategic precepts, historical and strategic writings, or foreign policy execution as