Robert K. Brigham

“THE MAIN POINT STEMS from the fact that I’ve always acted alone,” Kissinger told Italian journalist and war correspondent Oriana Fallaci, in a revealing 1972 interview. “Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse…..

Kissinger suggests that “there are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.”

He thought that he could construct such a world from the Nixon White House if the president gave him the power to do so. Kissinger created a small foreign policy empire inside the National Security Council by cutting Defense and State out of most important foreign policy issues. Even in his own office, he concentrated power. His subordinates were denied direct access to the press, to diplomats, and, most important, to the president.”
― Robert K. Brigham, Reckless: Henry Kissinger and The Tragedy of Vietnam