Henry Kissinger: An Intimate Portrait of the Master of Realpolitik

by Jérémie Gallon

The first translation into English of Jérémie Gallon's prize-winning contemporary biography, Kissinger, the European draws lessons from Kissinger's life and actions and discusses how they might be used to create a more coherent and stronger foreign policy.

This new English edition includes an additional chapter to the French edition, detailing the author's meeting with Kissinger in Connecticut ten days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chapters address themes, moments, and figures that shaped Kissinger's legacy, including subjects as diverse as Jewishness, football, his years at Harvard, and his close relationships with figures such as Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, and Zhou Enlai.

Gallon is as interested in the statesman as he is in the man himself, and the text reads more like a novel than an academic biography, including the most glamorous and intimate aspects of his like and making no secret of Kissinger's faults and the accusations levelled against him.

240 pages, Hardcover

Published August 26, 2025

Reviews

[Salwa]

I think the book achieves the argument it’s trying to make- that Kissinger was a master of realpolitik. while I adamantly disagree with the premise and dislike realpolitik- the book also paints an intimate portrait of the peculiar character of Henry Kissinger which cannot be argued with. I do agree that Europe needs a decisive leader but I don’t think realpolitik and Kissinger/nixon era policies is the answer….. also casually mentioning his war crimes as a bad lapses of judgement rather than strategic parts of the foreign service…. these things just can’t be separated

[History Today]

Upon arriving at Harvard in 1953, Zbigniew Brzezinski faced a crucial choice. Should he place himself under the tutelage of the celebrated, self-made Tennessean William Yandell Elliott at the Department of Government, or his rival, German émigré Carl Friedrich? As fate would have it, Elliott had to dash to Washington and redirected the newcomer to his assistant, a ‘youngish, somewhat rotund’ scholar ‘with a strong German accent’, as Brzezinski later recalled. Listening to him expound on high-flown European theory made the decision clear: ‘I rather impolitely rose and left.’ Thus ended his first encounter with Henry Kissinger, the man he would trail for the next half-century.

The similarities between them, and their even greater differences, have long fascinated commentators, including the authors of these two biographies, as contrasting as their protagonists. Journalist Edward Luce’s cradle-to-grave doorstopper is intended to be the definitive Brzezinski biography, and it succeeds in spades. The other, by former EU diplomat Jérémie Gallon, is a slim, thematic volume, cleverly arranged to offer a portrait of Kissinger as a model for present-day Europeans ‘not resigned to slouching off the stage of history’ through ‘morals and idealism … which serves only to isolate and diminish us’. Their subjects were both immigrants who became national security advisers. Kissinger’s journey was harder, arriving in New York in 1938 as the 15-year-old son of a penniless family and returning to Germany as a US army sergeant before joining Harvard. A few years later, Brzezinski, the son of privilege, would drive down to the leafy New England campus from Montreal, where his father served as Poland’s consul general. Kissinger’s path, however, went further, from the White House to Foggy Bottom as America’s first Jewish secretary of state.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Hazem Kandil is Professor of Historical and Political Sociology at the University of Cambridge.