Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Over seven decades in public life, Henry Kissinger observed six leaders of world-historical importance at close range: Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, Charles de Gaulle of France, Richard Nixon of the United States, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and Margaret Thatcher of Britain. Each confronted a different kind of challenge. Each succeeded. And in their very different strategies of leadership, Kissinger finds a set of lessons that illuminate the demands of statesmanship in any era.

Leadership is Kissinger’s final book — finished in his late nineties and published shortly before his death — and it represents the fullest expression of a lifetime spent thinking about power, strategy, and the relationship between character and circumstance. His profiles combine the intimacy of a direct observer with the analytical depth of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential strategic thinkers.

Whether you admire or criticise Kissinger’s own record, this is an indispensable document: one of the great practitioners of statecraft reflecting, at the end of a long life, on what leadership actually requires. Published by Penguin.