It was an exaggeration for Kissinger to say to Horne that he held the whole government together in 1973. He had nothing to do with domestic policy; Alexander Haig and some of the other senior cabinet members, especially Vice President Gerald Ford in the last eight months, were responsible for that.  

There is not the slightest question that Kissinger was a great statesman, brilliant both as historian and executant of foreign policy, and a world-league star with a splendid sense of humour. The complaints of the Left about his treatment of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Chile (where Horne's own experiences are a very interesting bonus) are rubbish. So are most of the countervailing complaints from the far Right. Horne concludes that Kissinger is a great man. And he believes Nixon to have been America's most interesting president. 

Elsewhere, he records Kissinger's bitterness at not being invited back to government by Republican presidents after Ford. Ronald Reagan didn't ask him back, and Nixon, whose advice Reagan took about Alexander Haig and George Shultz, didn't recommend him. George Bush Sr didn't ask him back either. Reagan felt he was too respectful of the status quo and too impressed with the USSR, should not have been tapping subordinates' telephones, and (as he told this reviewer), "wasn't loyal to Dick". 

Cavorting with your president's assassins is one of the few things that are not acceptable in Washington. You can't play Talleyrand and Dean Acheson ("I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss"), at the same time. Kissinger's Metternichian instinct is usually to cling like a limpet to the fluctuating correlation of forces, but Nixon's Washington was not Napoleonic Vienna. 

The post-Watergate and Vietnam America of Jimmy Carter was artificially weak. Ronald Reagan's America, which replaced it, was soon so powerful it didn't have to compromise, as Metternich's ramshackle empire had frequently done. And Nixon has caused the puritanical conscience of America, still formidable after centuries of cynicism and strife, which was mobilised by his enemies to drive him from office, to torment his accusers with the thought that he was unjustly treated. This is ultimately why Nixon is a subject of such widespread interest;   is the rising historical argument skirted by this book, and by Kissinger himself. 

Henry Kissinger got almost everything right, but he, too, was a Watergate casualty. His absence from the Reagan and Bush administrations was a great talent unutilised. Watergate cost Nixon 30 months as president, but it may have denied America 12 years of Kissinger as Secretary of State, not the least of the damage of that self-inflicted exorcism. 

This book, like its author, is amiable and civilised, and benefits from Horne's extensive experience. I must disclose that both the author and his subject are friends of many years (although relations with Henry Kissinger have been inactive for several years). But this is an engaging read from a fine historian about an always interesting subject. It enables us to look fairly impartially into the mouth of a rumbling historical volcano.