Super K - by Barbara J Keys (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The untold story of how Henry Kissinger spent five decades shaping his legacy--and the institutions that helped him do it.

In the nearly fifty years after he left public office, Henry Kissinger remained one of the most admired--and controversial--figures in American public life. Super K reveals how he manufactured this extraordinary fame. Drawing on previously unseen private correspondence and interviews with journalists and editors he courted and battled, historian Barbara J. Keys exposes the machinery Kissinger used to build and defend his reputation.

From fierce battles over his record in Cambodia and Chile to high-stakes confrontations with television networks and major publishers, Kissinger spent nearly five decades shaping how the world remembered his eight years in power and leveraging those years into continuing influence. In the process, he helped write the playbook for the modern political celebrity.

Super K is not just a portrait of one man's quest to shape history; it is a sweeping account of the media and elite institutions that enabled him, revealing vulnerabilities that still shape public and political life today. Insightful and deeply researched, this is a definitive look at how reputations are manufactured and why they matter.

Review Quotes

"A revealing dissection of the Henry Kissinger self-promotion machine."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

"Super K is downright hilarious. Who would have thought a biography of Henry Kissinger could be so laugh-out-loud revealing about the great pontificator? But Barbara Keys has written an incisive and entertaining intellectual history of Kissinger's quest to shape his reputation." --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY's Graduate Center in New York, and author of American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump

"A morbidly fascinating look at the fragile ego and control freakery that defined an entire era of political commentary."-- "Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"

"In all of U.S. history, no one worked harder to shape and safeguard his reputation than Henry Kissinger. In this fair-minded and deeply researched study, Barbara Keys documents his extraordinary efforts to marginalize critics and rewrite history in his favor, aided by an array of prominent media figures, former government officials, and wealthy patrons. It is both a revealing portrait of a man obsessed with how he would be remembered and an indictment of a corrupt and incestuous elite." -- Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

About the Author

Barbara Keys is a historian of US foreign policy, diplomacy, and human rights. She is Professor of History at Durham University and received her PhD from Harvard University. The author or editor of several prize-winning books, including Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s, she is a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.