The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations
"Few are aware of the stunning fact that, when Henry Kissinger served as the United States' national security adviser between 1969 and 1975 and secretary of state between 1973 and 1977, he secretly had his phone calls transcribed and, later, taped…. Wells has performed a major service in editing the 20,000 pages of Kissinger's transcripts—selecting important calls, organizing them by subject and date, and explaining their context. Together, the recordings bolster Kissinger's reputation for brilliance, wit, and strategic thinking. They also reveal his proclivity to backstab and battle nonstop with senior colleagues; his manipulation of and lying to journalists; his mistrustful relationship with Nixon, an equally facile liar; his self-described preference for "brutal" behavior; and his intention to "browbeat" to get his way. 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."
—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…. The transcripts also reveal Kissinger's contempt for those government institutions that he viewed as hindering his ability to achieve his preferred policies. … 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
"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
"Not merely a documentary collection but a destabilizing counter-archive of American diplomacy. Where the official record often presents foreign policy as strategic deliberation, the tapes reveal something far messier: a world of improvisation, deception, calculation, and personal rivalry in which the moral vocabulary of statecraft frequently dissolves into profanity and tactical cynicism…. Perhaps the book's most damaging contribution to the historical record lies in its documentation of deception. The transcripts repeatedly show Kissinger navigating leaks, congressional investigations, and press scrutiny with a mixture of evasion and calculated dishonesty…. He appears as a complicated operator—brilliant, manipulative, ambitious, and frequently ruthless…. 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
"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…. Kissinger himself emerges as a study in contradictions: brilliant, witty, possessed of boundless stamina and sharp bureaucratic instincts—yet also arrogant, controlling, a habitual and easy liar, and stunningly callous toward the deaths wrought by his Vietnam policies. His fraught relationship with Nixon—with whom he logged more phone hours than anyone else—is rendered in unsettling detail; they never fully trusted each other…. 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
"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, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability
"The tapes reveal an Oval Office where lying was ubiquitous and most human lives were irrelevant except in terms of how many dead bodies it might take to get an adversarial government to submit to Washington's desires…. Callousness toward human life is revealed in conversation after conversation where the U.S. war in Vietnam was the topic…. Kissinger lied and otherwise manipulated the press, the records and whatever else he could in order to maintain the image he had of himself…. As The Kissinger Tapes makes abundantly clear, when it comes to US foreign policy, the more things change the more they stay the same."
—CounterPunch
"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
"Will be widely discussed and serve as a source for other books, articles, analyses, and research in many countries."
—Philenews (Cyprus)
"Tom Wells' newly published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations offers a revelatory glimpse into this era. The book demonstrates that Kissinger understood the messy machinery of power and the peril of transparency in a world that does not reward discretion…. In reading Wells' book, one realises that Kissinger was both brilliant and morally flawed, terrifying and indispensable…. He knew that the pursuit of national interest is rarely moral, often horrifying, and always human. His secrecy, his calculations, his manipulation of perception, his ability to operate two steps ahead, made the United States formidable even in the darkest of crises. 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)
"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.
"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 at Yale University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America