Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger surfaces in Kyle’s reading as a touchstone in two distinct registers. In the John Quincy Adams biography (by James Traub), Kissinger is cited as the modern echo of Adams’s Realism — Traub names Adams the “fountainhead” of realist foreign policy, skeptical of America’s capacity to do good abroad, and quotes Kissinger’s observation “that the American people will not accept a ‘realist’ president.” The book frames Adams’s warning against reckless adventure abroad as having “important adherents” and offering “more to the American people today than it ever has.”

In Turnaround, Mitt Romney’s account of his turnaround formula, Kissinger appears in a wholly different vein — quoted on leadership and heroism: “Heroes walk alone, but they become myths when they ennoble the lives and touch the hearts of all of us.”

Context: Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) was a German-American diplomat and scholar who served as U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and a leading exponent of realist (realpolitik) foreign policy.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — cited as the modern echo of Adams’s realism, with the line that Americans “will not accept a ‘realist’ president.”
• Turnaround — quoted by Mitt Romney on heroes who “become myths when they ennoble the lives… of all of us.”