Henry Kissinger, White House Years
Liked it a lot. He's a great writer in his own way, and segments his high analysis neatly. What depressed me was how much of the volume is consumed by his Vietnam negotiations.
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
Like most presidential memoirs (eg Clinton), the book is fabulous until he becomes president, and then it gets unduly boring.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950
Carefully written and well presented, much like the man.
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department
Like Nixon's, best prior to his top position as SECSTATE. Best part is his amazingly mischievous sense of humor. He has numerous laugh-out-loud bits.
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
One of the best American period histories I've ever read. Balances the organizational with the narrative and the macro analytical with the micro historical detail. I took the better parts of two days to read, I found it that good.
Four to go. Then on to the last three years of the blog, which is a couple thousand pages.
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Comments (1)
Hi Tom,
I've read four of the five here.
RN is more interesting than almost any other presidential memoir. It's also better than Six Crises. Reading RN is complemented by Kissinger's memoirs of course but I'd also suggest The Haldeman Diaries and From The President, edited by Bruce Oudes to fill in lots of context and get a real "sense" of the Nixon WH. Anyone who reads Nixon as a topic quickly realizes that Vietnam, China, Detente and Watergate were each consuming enough to have totally dominated Nixon's time and he juggled them all. It's frankly amazing to me that the man did not have a complete nervous breakdown.
Kennan's memoirs along with his Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin should be read by any student of history who wants to get an idea of how a statesman's mind gets shaped by his environment to become a strategic thinker and then the environment by the statesman. He was an idiosyncratic and elitist intellect in the negative as well as positive senses.
Acheson is marvelous. Best diplo memoir by an American ever. A window into the lost world of the Eastern Establishment at the zenith of their power and the postwar world they helped make.
Posted by zenpundit
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January 23, 2008 9:19 PM