Why Read Kissinger the Negotiator?

Answers for the Curious, the Skeptical, (and the Hostile)

Jim Sebenius • June 7, 2018

Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level

by James K. Sebenius, R. Nicholas Burns, and Robert H. Mnookin
New York: Harper, published May 8, 2018, available at Amazon or B&N.

Many people have asked me questions, both friendly and pointed, about
this book. I answer six of the most common ones below. Reading all six
answers might be worthwhile, but I expect that most people will focus
only on a few of them. Such selective reading is effortless given the
embedded bookmarks that permit easy jumping around. (To make each answer self-contained,
there is some modest repetition across the answers.)

1. If I were to take a look at only one of your answers below, tell me in a

nutshell why I should read this book. (Answer here.)

2. What led you to write this book and why Henry Kissinger? (Answer here.)

3. In particular, why should I read about Kissinger’s negotiations? What should

I expect to learn? (Answer here.)

4. What surprised you in writing this book? What will likely surprise me?
(Answer here.)

5. Diplomacy interests me, but I face current negotiations in business (or law,
public policy, or the not-for-profit sector). What relevance do Kissinger’s 1970s
negotiations have for my challenges? (Answer here.)

6. To some who recall contentious arguments about Kissinger’s policies in

places such as Cambodia or Chile, the former secretary of state falls on a
spectrum between merely controversial and virtually a “war criminal.” Why
should I read a book that seems to glorify such a figure? (Answer here.)

[Return to jimsebenius.com]

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1. If I were to take a look at only one of your answers, tell me in a nutshell why I
should read this book.
With ever more urgent needs for effective diplomacy and negotiation, who are the true masters of
these arts? With my co-authors, Nick Burns and Bob Mnookin, I’m often asked this question. Complex
and skilled, if controversial, Henry Kissinger clearly merits this distinction. For example, Walter
Isaacson, Kissinger’s sometimes-critical biographer, called him the “foremost American negotiator” of
his time; when recently polled, over 1600 international relations experts—from across the political
spectrum—overwhelmingly rated Kissinger as the most effective secretary of state during the last half-
century. What can we learn from his record about the most effective approaches to public and private
dealmaking?

Kissinger undertook his most crucial negotiations in a national atmosphere of rancorous political and
social antagonisms, especially over the Vietnam War. (Sound familiar?) In this challenging context, the
former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner played central negotiating roles in key U.S.
foreign policy achievements: the opening to China after decades of mutual hostility, détente and the
first nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, the Paris peace accords
with North Vietnam after years of bitter conflict (though the deal collapsed after two years), and
Egyptian and Syrian disengagement deals with Israel following their 1973 war—that have largely
endured to this day. In addition, Kissinger worked out a significant but largely forgotten agreement with
Rhodesia’s Ian Smith to accept black majority rule years before the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Kissinger’s geopolitical insights, foreign policies, and individual negotiations have been extensively
analyzed. Yet perhaps surprisingly, no serious cross-cutting study of his overall approach has
extracted its lessons for current diplomatic and business negotiations. We wrote Kissinger the
Negotiator to fill this gap.

For decades, our careers as academics and practitioners have centrally focused on negotiation. We
have worked closely with and studied dozens of remarkable negotiators, both public and private,
from around the world. In one of our joint projects, we have interviewed seven former U.S.
secretaries of state about their most challenging negotiations (with plans to interview the others
soon). With this backdrop, we undertook Kissinger the Negotiator after lengthy conversations with
him as well as careful study of his writings. We also consulted many others, both critical and
supportive, who have produced books and articles about him.

We sought to create an engaging narrative, focused on Kissinger’s successes and failures, that would
offer useful answers to several questions: How did he approach these negotiations? What strategies
and tactics worked and what failed? Why, how, and under what conditions? What ethical challenges
does this approach present? Though our subject was historical, our driving objective was to produce
effective, forward-looking diagnostic and prescriptive advice for those facing tough negotiation
challenges, in business as well as diplomacy. (For more specifics, see here.)

To this day, the mere mention of Henry Kissinger can evoke strong reactions about some of the
policies with which he is associated. Acknowledging this, we point interested readers to sources that
reflect conflicting assessments of Kissinger’s record, but do not weigh in on this debate. We neither

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aim to judge Kissinger nor to set the historical record straight. Rather, by plumbing a career of
extraordinary effectiveness, we sought to learn as much as possible, extracting useful insights into
the art and science of negotiation from Kissinger’s dealmaking at the highest level.

This is my effort at a “nutshell” case for reading this book; you may find the views of others to be
informative; see the comments immediately below. My answers to the other five questions
elaborate these and related points in greater detail. (Return to questions or jimsebenius.com)

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2. What led you to write this book and why Henry Kissinger?
Over my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with, advising, observing, and drawing lessons
from many of the world’s most remarkable negotiators. Apart from writing dozens of HBS case
studies on the kinds of business and financial deals that often confront senior executives, I’ve had
the privilege since 2001 of chairing Harvard’s annual Great Negotiator Award program and co-
chairing an initiative to interview almost all the living former U.S. secretaries of state. (My co-chairs
of the latter project are also my co-authors on this book: Nick Burns, longtime senior diplomat
turned Kennedy School professor, and Harvard Law School professor Bob Mnookin. A note at the
end of these questions briefly describes these programs, whom we’ve honored, and why.)

Typically, after extensive preparation on our end, the awardees come to campus where we
videotape lengthy conversations with them, probing their most challenging negotiations for insights
that will improve practice. These interviews are unscripted and we welcome skeptical as well as
supportive audience members. During these intensive events, many of the men and women whom
we honor from around the world have deeply impressed me and taught me a great deal about my
chosen subject. My colleagues and I often draw upon this unparalleled set of interviews in creating
course materials, articles, books, and interactive video presentations.

To prepare for Henry Kissinger’s Harvard visit in late 2014 as part of our program on former
secretaries of state, I read almost 6000 pages of his writings as well as much of what others have
written about him. Having been a college student during the last years of the profoundly divisive
Vietnam War, I approached this particular preparation with some residual ambivalence; more on the
various controversies surrounding Kissinger as secretary of state in my answer to another question.
In his books, however, I found a kind of sophistication about dealmaking and dispute resolution that I
had simply not encountered elsewhere.

Our initial conversations with Henry Kissinger, which marked his first time in a Harvard classroom in
forty-five years, proved intellectually engaging and represented a deeply emotional “homecoming”
for the former Harvard student and professor. As we interviewed him in depth about his most
important negotiations, the unexpected subtlety of his answers intrigued me along with some of my
most deal-savvy colleagues. Kissinger turned out, in the words of Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s
president, to be a ninety-two-year-old “rock star” in the eyes of the three hundred or so students in
attendance, who asked very tough questions of the former secretary of state.

Having been struck by the broader potential value of Kissinger’s strategies and tactics, yet finding
myself unable to fully articulate their underlying basis, I sought insight from others. Countless books
analyze Kissinger’s geopolitics, policies, and individual negotiations. Despite looking widely, I was
quite surprised that I could not find a serious cross-cutting analysis of Kissinger’s overall negotiation
record, let alone its potentially valuable implications for diplomacy and other endeavors. This struck
me as gap worth filling.

Trying to understand and crystallize the key elements of his distinctive negotiation approach led me
to undertake Kissinger the Negotiator with my two co-authors. We resolved to distill its powerful
lessons, both positive and negative, so they would be genuinely useful to others who confront

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today’s negotiation challenges in business and law as well as in diplomacy. (For more specifics, see
here.) As the publication process neared completion, perhaps given that I teach at the case-study
driven Harvard Business School, I began to think of this book almost as the “ultimate negotiation
case study.” (Return to questions or jimsebenius.com)

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3. In particular, why should I read about Kissinger’s negotiations? What should I
expect to learn?

One reason is compelling to me: though perhaps less familiar to potential readers in the second
decade of the 21st century, Kissinger has almost universally been hailed as a remarkably effective
negotiator, not just for one notable agreement, but for several important deals across the globe.
According to a June 1974 Harris poll, an astonishing 85 percent of Americans judged that Kissinger
was doing a “splendid” job, while 88 percent considered him to be a “highly skilled negotiator.” This
represented “the highest approval rating for anyone in government since the polls were begun.”

Decades later, in 2014, despite the many controversies surrounding Kissinger’s actions in
government, a survey of 1,615 international relations scholars at 1,375 colleges and universities
overwhelmingly ranked him as the most effective U.S. secretary of state of the last fifty years. This
top ranking held whether the expert respondents were liberal, middle-of-the-road, or conservative;
male or female; and so on. Even Walter Isaacson, Kissinger’s often critical biographer, judged him to
have been “the foremost American negotiator of [the twentieth] century.”

Today’s urgent need for effective diplomacy and negotiation underscores the value of closely
analyzing Kissinger’s approach. How did he do these deals and resolve these conflicts? What
strategies tactics worked and what failed? Why, how, and under what conditions? What ethical
challenges does this approach present? Kissinger the Negotiator offers our detailed, actionable
answers to these questions. Though our subject was historical, our driving objective was effective,
forward-looking diagnosis and prescription for those facing tough negotiation challenges. (Some of
the specific strategic and tactical negotiation insights are detailed in the next question.)

Kissinger undertook his most crucial negotiations in a national atmosphere of rancorous political and
social antagonisms, especially over the bloody Vietnam War. (Does such polarization sound familiar?)
In this challenging context, the former secretary of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner played central
negotiating roles in U.S. foreign policy achievements: the opening to China after decades of mutual
hostility, détente and the first nuclear arms control treaty with the Soviets at the height of the Cold
War, the Paris peace accords with North Vietnam after years of bitter conflict (though the deal
collapsed after two years), and Egyptian and Syrian disengagement deals with Israel following their
1973 war—that have largely endured to this day. In addition, Kissinger worked out a significant but
largely forgotten agreement with Rhodesia’s Ian Smith to accept black majority rule many years
before the end of apartheid in South Africa.

It is one thing to have grand geopolitical designs and foreign policy conceptions. It is something else
entirely, requiring effective negotiation, to have transformed such visions into reality. Yet how many
secretaries of state have, among other accomplishments, negotiated fundamental improvements in
U.S. relations with Russia (then the USSR) and with China, ended a Middle East war on stable terms
that sharply reduced Soviet influence in the region for almost 40 years, and extricated the United
States from a brutal Asian conflict? Not only did these actions advance many U.S. interests, they
meaningfully reduced the likelihood of nuclear war when the vast arsenals of the Cold War
antagonists were on hair trigger alert.

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These are fascinating, world-shaping episodes, populated by provocative figures from Mao Zedong
and Zhou Enlai, to Anwar Sadat and Golda Meir, to Julius Nyerere and Ian Smith, to Anatoly Dobrynin
and Leonid Brezhnev, as well as to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger himself. Yet beyond any
intrinsic interest in these people and past events, we undertook this analysis for its future
implications.

Of course, unlike the nation-state-dominated landscape of the 1970s, today’s global negotiators
must contend with fundamentally changed conditions. These include a densely wired world with
widely decentralized information sources, omnipresent social media, the rise of non-state actors
(e.g., multinational corporations, global criminal enterprises, jihadi networks, NGOs), as well as
transborder phenomena (e.g., cyberthreats, climate change, disease vectors).

As our analysis took shape, we became persuaded that, taking these changes into account, the
dealmaking and dispute resolution insights we were distilling would be genuinely helpful for
addressing challenges such as those posed by North Korea, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
—as well as in private sector negotiations. By analogy, when adapted to his context, Kissinger found
great practical value in his close study of Metternich and Bismarck, whose 18th and 19th century
settings were devoid of air travel, radio and television, instantaneous global communications,
nuclear weapons, and other core features of Kissinger’s world. Essential elements of negotiation
endure. (Return to questions or jimsebenius.com)

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4. What surprised you in writing this book? What will likely surprise readers?

Given years of exposure to remarkable negotiators, I did not expect to be too surprised by
Kissinger’s approach. Yet though aspects of his strategies and tactics really stood out, my greatest
surprise involved his fascinating negotiations to end white minority rule in what was then Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe). At the outset, I knew practically nothing about these talks. Yet they turned out to
serve as an ideal, if unexpected, vehicle in the first part of our book to introduce and illustrate the
main features of Kissinger’s approach to negotiation, which later chapters developed in more detail
with examples from a number of different episodes.

Kissinger himself described the Rhodesia negotiations as the “most complex” he’d ever undertaken.
Widely heralded around the world as a “dazzling” success at the time, these talks are now almost
forgotten. As the book’s only full case study, our analysis clarifies the unusual strategy and tactics by
which Kissinger helped enable black majority rule in Rhodesia--some seventeen years before Nelson
Mandela and F.W. de Klerk ended apartheid in South Africa. (Piecing together this story involved
some serious detective work, ably spearheaded by Alex Green, going back to long neglected
memoranda of conversations, WikiLeaks disclosures, and so on.)

Without getting into the strategy, here’s the essence of what happened: toward the end of the Ford
administration, major Cuban and Soviet incursions into Angola threatened to open up a new front in
the Cold War, amidst widespread predictions of a coming “race war” in white-ruled Rhodesia and
South Africa. In return for moderate and radical black African states agreeing to keep out any foreign
troops, Kissinger embarked on a complex series of intertwined negotiations—with no military
involvement and little money. Ultimately, he induced a most reluctant Ian Smith, then leader of
Rhodesia’s white minority government, to accept the principle of black majority rule within two
years. This same Ian Smith—who had defied a decade of high-level British diplomacy aimed at this
result—had flatly declared a mere four months before his dramatic reversal that “I don't believe in
black majority rule ever in Rhodesia, not in a thousand years.”

More surprising was how Kissinger had engineered Smith’s turnabout—despite passionate U.S.
domestic opposition as Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination
(accusing Ford’s secretary of state of “preparing a bloodbath in Rhodesia”). By building an uneasy
coalition among moderate and radical black African states that were suspicious of American
motives, Kissinger persuaded South Africa—that “citadel of apartheid”—to apply decisive pressure
on neighboring Rhodesia to abandon its policy of white minority rule. Against the predictions of
most observers, South Africa agreed to bring this pressure despite the plain fact that, if Rhodesia
capitulated, anti-apartheid forces would—and later did—shift their main energies toward South
Africa, the major remaining white-ruled state in the region.

This victory for democratic principle—lauded at the time from a cover story in Time magazine to
press accounts worldwide—ultimately soured with Robert Mugabe’s election and disastrous
dictatorial rule over Zimbabwe. In any case, I’m getting carried away in the telling, but this merely
indicates how unexpectedly intriguing I found this story. (Return to questions or jimsebenius.com)

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5. Diplomacy interests me, but I face current negotiations in business (or law,
public policy, or the not-for-profit sector). What relevance do Kissinger’s 1970s
negotiations have for my challenges?

Nick, Bob, and I have carried out, observed, studied, taught, and written books about negotiations in
many domains beyond diplomacy. We consciously analyzed Kissinger’s record not only for its
diplomatic implications but also for its insights into complex dealmaking in other areas. The themes
we uncover and explore apply to challenging negotiations across the board. Such insights include:

 what it actually means to act “strategically” in negotiation;

 how to realistically assess whether an agreement potentially exists;
 how a “wide-angle lens” and game-changing moves away from the negotiating table can
create space for a deal and enable favorable outcomes at the table;
 how careful sequencing, coalition building, and handling those who would block a deal are
keys to multiparty effectiveness;
 the importance and means for truly understanding, reading, and building rapport with your
counterparts;
 how assertiveness and empathy can be productively combined;
 how to act opportunistically as circumstances shift while maintaining a strategic perspective;
 how dogged persistence rather than blinding insights is often the essential ingredient for
success; as well as
 effective (and ineffective) ways to make proposals, frame concessions, build credibility,
utilize “constructive ambiguity,” embark on “shuttles” among the parties rather than deal
with them together, and when to opt for an open versus a secret process.
Beyond these specifics, we believe that readers who do not envision themselves in diplomatic roles
will see the value--in their own worlds--of cultivating an unusual but powerful aspect of Kissinger’s
negotiation practice: how he consistently integrates the strategic with the interpersonal. A common
image depicts Kissinger as a geopolitical grandmaster, dispassionately moving pieces on a global
chessboard As became increasingly evident to us in writing this book, he would indeed “zoom out”
to the strategic but also would “zoom in” to the interpersonal. This was not a two-step process of
first envisioning the deal at a strategic level, then executing it interpersonally. Rather it was a highly
iterative approach, constantly maintaining both macro and micro perspectives, while seeking to
bring the two into alignment via productive agreements.

Though we are confident that these negotiating insights can be applied beyond the world of
diplomacy, it is not necessary to, take our word for it. Steve Schwarzman, co-founder, Chairman,
and CEO of Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, found our book “exciting to
read,” and said that those “who spend their lives negotiating important matters will as well. [It
should be] required reading for those interested in affecting the world of affairs.” John Chambers is
a notable technology executive who, as Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, piloted his firm from

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$1.2 billion to over $50 billion in sales. He observed that this book was able “to get to the root of
[Kissinger’s] tactics and success and share practical insights for readers.” Further, Chambers would
“highly recommend Kissinger the Negotiator for anyone facing challenging negotiations in business
or diplomacy.” Former Secretary of State James Baker, who was an apolitical oil and gas lawyer in
Houston until he was 40, found that the book “offers keen insight for anyone interested or involved
in negotiations at any level.” [And though his judgment is hardly disinterested, Henry Kissinger—
whose lengthy post-government career, since 1977, has heavily consisted of advising corporate
clients—wrote that “Every CEO, diplomat, and dealmaker facing complex negotiation challenges will
benefit from reading this book.”] (Return to questions or jimsebenius.com)

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6. To some who recall contentious arguments about Kissinger’s policies in places
such as Cambodia or Chile, the former secretary of state falls on a spectrum
between merely controversial and virtually a “war criminal.” Why should I read
a book that seems to glorify such a figure?

Even if one takes exception to some of the policies with which Kissinger is closely associated, his
record contains valuable lessons for anyone who negotiates. Our purpose in writing Kissinger the
Negotiator was to extract and elucidate such lessons, not to add to the considerable—and often
clashing—literature weighing his legacy.
Still, we acknowledge that to this day, merely mentioning Kissinger risks evoking strong feelings
around sensitive issues such as human rights, support for authoritarian regimes, as well as U.S.
actions in Southeast Asia, Chile, Bangladesh, East Timor, and elsewhere. As a recent example,
almost four decades after he left public office, an “intense confrontation” over Kissinger’s record
erupted during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary debates. Hillary Clinton’s praise of
Kissinger’s acumen was swiftly followed by Bernie Sanders’s sharp condemnation. This exchange
sparked a clash of columnists in the New York Times under the headline “Henry Kissinger: Sage or
Pariah?” Many other publications ran similar stories.
We are quite familiar with books and articles that range from merely criticizing Kissinger to harshly
condemning him; their authors include figures such as William Shawcross, Seymour Hersh,
Christopher Hitchens, and Greg Grandin. Other analysts, though hardly uncritical, come out much
more favorably; this group would include figures such as Robert D. Kaplan, Josef Joffe, Alistair
Horne, and Niall Ferguson. Delving deeply into these contrasting views reveals much greater
complexity on each side that the black and white caricatures of Kissinger sometimes suggest.
While our footnotes and bibliography offer interested readers a large number of sources on both
sides of this debate, we do not see our comparative advantage as weighing in on this lively
argument. We do not try to evaluate whether Henry Kissinger was a saint or a sinner. Rather, by
plumbing a career of extraordinary effectiveness, we seek to learn as much as possible, extracting
useful insights into the art and science of negotiation from Kissinger’s dealmaking at the highest
level. (More detail on what we believe can be learned is here and here.)
Moreover, while we remain deeply impressed by Kissinger’s negotiating strategies and tactics overall
—and their value well beyond 1970s diplomacy—we did not write this book as a kind of tribute.
Indeed, we take important positions with which Kissinger strongly disagreed, both in discussions
with us and in print. We seriously question his Cold War assumptions in notable cases and raise
ethical issues throughout. To enhance understanding, we also dissect a number of his negotiating
failures that helpfully contrast with his successes.
In our view, it would be a bad misreading of our intentions or analysis to characterize this book as
glorifying the former secretary of state. Rather, at a time when faith in the power diplomacy and
negotiation has waned in many quarters, we see even greater urgency in seeking enduring lessons
from the approach of one of its most successful practitioners. (Return to questions or
jimsebenius.com)

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Note on the Great Negotiator and Secretaries of State Projects. The “Great Negotiator” award program honors
men and women from around the world who have overcome significant barriers to reaching agreements that have
achieved worthy purposes. It is sponsored by the Program on Negotiation--an active consortium of Harvard, MIT,
and Tufts—and Harvard’s Program on the Future of Diplomacy. Negotiation-oriented faculty from these
universities do substantial advance research and casewriting, bring the honoree to campus for at least a day of
intensive, videotaped interviews on his or her most challenging negotiations, then extract their most valuable
lessons in articles, course materials, and interactive video presentations. Since 2001, this program has honored the
following people:

Senator George Mitchell with special emphasis his work in Northern Ireland leading to the Good Friday Accords;

Bruce Wasserstein for his decades of financial dealmaking with a special focus on his role at Lazard LLC;

Special Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, in particular for her negotiations with China over intellectual
property rights;

Lakhdar Brahimi, Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General, with special emphasis on his work to forge
a post-conflict government in Afghanistan after 9/11;

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke for his negotiations leading to the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian war
as well as his multiparty efforts to deal with unpaid U.S. dues to the United Nations;

The Honorable Stuart Eizenstat for his negotiations over restitution of Holocaust-era assets in Switzerland and
other European countries;

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata for her quiet negotiations on behalf of refugees and internally
displaced persons in regions from Iraq to the Balkans to Rwanda;

The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude for their negotiations to erect massive, controversial installations from the
Running Fence in California to the Gates in Central Park, New York, as well as wrapping Paris’s Pont Neuf and the
German Reichstag;

Former Finnish President and Nobel Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari in particular for his negotiation efforts leading
to Kosovo’s independence and the resolution of a decades-long, bloody conflict between the government of
Indonesia and the province of Aceh;

Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker for his negotiations leading to the reunification of Germany within
NATO, actions to forge the Gulf War coalition to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and diplomacy paving the road
to the Madrid Conference; and

Singapore's Ambassador Tommy Koh for his work chairing the Law of the Sea Negotiations, the Rio Earth Summit,
the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, and a number of other initiatives.

Colombian President Juan Santos for his tireless negotiations to bring an end to the 50 year war between the
government and the FARC guerrilla group.

An offshoot of the Great Negotiator Awards is the American Secretaries of State Program, a joint effort between
the Program on Negotiation and the Program on the Future of Diplomacy. This program is co-chaired by Professors
Nicholas Burns (Harvard Kennedy School), Robert Mnookin (Harvard Law School, and James K. Sebenius (Harvard
Business School). By a similar process to that of the Great Negotiator program, lengthy videotaped interviews have
been conducted with Secretaries James Baker, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell,
Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton. (We look forward to the participation of John Kerry in 2018). (Return to
questions or jimsebenius.com)

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