A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency

An authoritative historical assessment of american foreign policy in a crucial postwar decade.

William Bundy's magisterial book focuses on the controversial record of Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's often overpraised foreign policy of 1969 to 1973, an era that has rightly been described as the hinge on which the last half of the century turned. Bundy's principled, clear-eyed assessment in effect pulls together all the major issues and events of the thirty-year span from the 1940s to the end of the Vietnam War, and makes it clear just how dangerous the consequences of Nixon and Kissinger's deceptive modus operandi were.

William Bundy held key positions in the Defense and State Departments from 1951 to 1969 and in the Central Intelligence Agency, and served as the editor of Foreign Affairs from 1972 to 1984. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.