Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger dominated American foreign relations like no other figure in recent history. He negotiated an end to American involvement in the Vietnam War, opened relations with Communist China, and orchestrated detente with the Soviet Union. Yet he is also the man behind the secret bombing of Cambodia and policies leading to the overthrow of Chile's President Salvador Allende. Which is more accurate, the picture of Kissinger the skilled diplomat or Kissinger the war criminal? In The Flawed Architect, the first major reassessment of Kissinger in over a decade, historian Jussi Hanhimaki paints a subtle, carefully composed portrait of America's most famous and infamous statesman. Drawing on extensive research from newly declassified files, the author follows Kissinger from his beginnings in the Nixon administration up to the current controversy fed by Christopher Hitchens over whether Kissinger is a war criminal. Hanhimaki guides the reader through White House power struggles and debates behind the Cambodia and Laos invasions, the search for a strategy in Vietnam, the breakthrough with China, and the unfolding of Soviet-American detente. Here, too, are many other international crises of the period--the Indo-Pakistani War, the Yom Kippur War, the Angolan civil war--all set against the backdrop of Watergate. Along the way, Hanhimaki sheds light on Kissinger's personal flaws--he was obsessed with secrecy and bureaucratic infighting in an administration that self-destructed in its abuse of power--as well as his great strengths as a diplomat. We see Kissinger negotiating, threatening and joking with virtually all of the key foreign leaders of the 1970s, from Mao to Brezhnev and Anwar Sadat to Golda Meir. This well researched account brings to life the complex nature of American foreign policymaking during the Kissinger years. It will be the standard work on Kissinger for years to come.

For reasons of national security, official public records surrounding Americas involvement in the Arab-Israeli negotiations remain unavailable. Heroic Diplomacy provides an unequalled insight into the internal divisions and untold stories of the peace process. Covering an extraordinary range of first-hand accounts from over eighty bureaucrats, diplomats and military leaders who participated in Arab-Israeli peace talks from 1973 to 1978 the book charts the complex and often contradictory goals of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, the US and the USSR.

What happens when presidential advisors, in Machiavellian terms, think more of themselves than of the prince and seek their own profit more than the goals of the president or the "good of the realm"? In Games Advisors Play, Jean A. Garrison examines case studies of foreign policy in the Nixon and Carter administrations and addresses how and why advisors manipulate the group process, under what conditions advisors engage in power games, and in what situations they are most effective in influencing presidential policy choices.

Given the high stakes, policy advocates employ various tactics to manipulate the advisory process and decision outcome. Three types of tactics are used: structural maneuvers, procedural maneuvers, and interpersonal maneuvers. Although these tools are important to the success of an advisor, the advisory process is a dynamic group process, and advisors must recognize that others have potential influence as well. The effectiveness of advisors therefore also depends on their power and authority, their manipulative skills, their interpersonal communication skills, and the relationships among members of the inner circle.

Using the internal policy debate over arms control to trace the influence advisors have on specific decisions, Garrison compares the power games in Nixon's hierarchical system to Carter's more open advisory system. The disparate advisory systems provided advisors with different opportunities to influence the president and overall policy making.

As a contribution to the decision-making literature in foreign policy, Games Advisors Play challenges static conceptions of the advisory process. Foreign-policy scholars, presidential scholars, and politicalpsychologists will find this an exciting and thought-provoking study.

This volume -- an indispensable contribution to an understanding of contemporary Arab history -- comprises twenty-seven important studies by the eminent Lebanese historian Marwan R Buheiry, who died in London in 1986. In the course of his distinguished career at the American University of Beirut, he published many studies on the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of the modern Arab world, in particular of Lebanon and the Arab East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The studies published in this volume revolve around four main themes: European Perceptions of the Orient; The Superpowers and the Arab World; The Economic History of the Middle East; Middle Eastern Intellectual and Artistic History. Many of these studies were first published in French or Arabic translation, this volume publishes the original English text and includes much previously unpublished material. The final chapter includes a selection of 49 photographs from Buheiry's photograph collection.