The Kissinger Tapes

From the fog of history Tom Wells offers a gift that keeps giving by masterfully assembling a trove of Kissinger's previously secret conversations across virtually every area of his engagement during the Nixon presidency. The book adds much to understanding the personalities, politics, and policies of the era plus illuminates the nuances of Kissinger's pettiness, deceit, and self-adulation. Wells has given us a real historical gem. * Larry Berman, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis, and author of No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam *
The Kissinger Tapes is an essential document for anyone wishing to understand how power works in the world. Wells ably guides the reader through the air-conditioned jungle of the Nixon White House. * Tim Weiner, author of The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century and One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon *
Under one cover, Tom Wells has assembled perhaps the most unique, candid, and revealing collection of formerly secret conversations ever to be declassified. The Kissinger Tapes provides an incomparable compilation of Henry Kissinger in his own words—and a verdict of history on his controversial foreign policies. * Peter Kornbluh, Senior Analyst, The National Security Archive *
Tom Wells' The Kissinger Tapes is a fascinating look at the political class's self-surveillance, and of the consuming distrust and paranoia that comes from waging illegal wars and coups across multiple continents. Now, if we only had a recording of Kissinger's psyche... * Greg Grandin, C.Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University, and the author of Pulitzer winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America *
Wells provides unparalleled insight into the premier American diplomat of the twentieth century... * Foreign Affairs *
Since Kissinger did not intend his transcripts to be public, the collection is a window both into him as a person and into the operations of the U.S. national security state... For Kissinger, lies weren't a strategic tool limited to selective uses in international statecraft. They appear to have been part of his personal makeup...Throughout the transcripts, he deceives his foreign counterparts, his colleagues, and the media...He lied to obtain strategic advantage; he lied to shift blame; he lied to protect his reputation and status...Reading these conversations, one can't help but wonder whether a country that abandons its morals for potential security will preserve neither its morals nor its security, while strengthening the greatest threat to both: the state's unchecked power. * Reason Magazine *
Wells provides unparalleled insight into the premier American diplomat of the twentieth century as well as minute-by minute accounts of U.S. foreign policy decision-making in a momentous era, including during the Vietnam War, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, Nixon's opening with China, the Watergate scandal, various Cold War crises, and much more. * Jessica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs *
Not merely a documentary collection but a destabilizing counter-archive of American diplomacy.... If Wells's tone occasionally veers toward prosecutorial zeal, the underlying archival achievement remains formidable. By assembling and contextualizing these conversations, he provides historians with an unusually intimate record of power in action. The result is a book that reads at times like a political thriller and at others like a forensic investigation of statecraft itself. For readers willing to confront its uncomfortable implications, The Kissinger Tapes offers something rarer than scandal or vindication: a raw, unsettling glimpse into the moral psychology of modern diplomacy. * Sri Lanka Guardian *
Tom Wells' newly published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations offers a revelatory glimpse into this era…. In reading Wells' book, one realises that Kissinger was both brilliant and morally flawed, terrifying and indispensable.... The Kissinger tapes remind us, with unsparing clarity, of what we have lost: the art of the back channel, the subtlety of influence, the moral ambiguity of statecraft wielded with skill.... Wells' book, with its chronological transcripts, illuminates a world in which the exercise of power was deliberate, cold, and guided by ruthless logic. * The Morning (Sri Lanka) *
Unusually dependable as a research tool and unusually gripping as a read: you get the adrenaline of real-time decision-making and the unguarded candor rarely found in memos or memoirs.... Histories tell us what was decided; these tapes show how-the impatience, the performative threats, the tactical feints, and the ever-present calculation about how a move would 'read' in the press.... With The Kissinger Tapes, Wells has assembled a command-center view of U.S. foreign policy at the dawn of the 1970s. Admirers of Kissinger's diplomacy will have to confront the unabashed candor of the record; critics will find their arguments reinforced with hard evidence. Ultimately, the book reshapes the factual foundation for any future debate about Kissinger and his era. * The Cipher Brief *
An essential history-as told in Kissinger's own words-of his tenure as national security advisor and secretary of state during the Nixon years...providing hundreds of pages of revealing evidence into his policies, strategies, personality and the rampant abuses of power that defined his stewardship of U.S. foreign policy. * National Security Archive *