Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Kissinger picks six twentieth-century figures — Adenauer, de Gaulle, Nixon, Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, Thatcher — as case studies in strategic method rather than full biography, distilling each into a governing style (Adenauer's humility, de Gaulle's willed grandeur, Nixon's balance-of-power realism). The book's value is as a practitioner's taxonomy of statecraft from someone who sat across the table from several of these leaders. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic have pushed back on the selectivity: the Nixon chapter in particular treats Watergate and the Cambodia bombing as footnotes rather than the defining ruptures most historians consider them, which makes the "study" read at times like advocacy for a worldview Kissinger already holds.