The Kissinger Transcripts

The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow

A “fascinating trove” (The New York Review of Books) of transcripts of some of Kissinger’s most secret conversations with world leaders

“A welcome trespass on terrain that the former Secretary of State still treats as his private preserve. [The Kissinger Transcripts] properly reclaim at least a portion of the record that should have long since become public property.” —Max Frankel, New York Times Book Review

Considered “among the most important Cold War records to emerge thus far” by the former Beijing bureau chief of the New York Times, The Kissinger Transcripts gives us the unvarnished record of Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy during the Nixon years. Here are the transcripts, formerly classified “Top Secret/Sensitive,” of Kissinger's talks with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko, and others. The Kissinger Transcripts lets readers make up their own minds about the most controversial Secretary of State in modern U.S. history.

The National Security Archive is a nonprofit research library of declassified U.S. Government Documents in Washington, D.C. A project of the Fund for Peace, the Archive obtains and disseminates the U.S. government documents that are indispensable for informed public debate.

Praise

“An absorbing book [full of] remarkable material on both Mao Zedong and Brezhnev.”
—Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books (cover review)
“New information [and] lighter moments in superpower diplomacy.”
Los Angeles Times
“Graphic. [The Kissinger Transcripts] shows that President Richard Nixon's triangular diplomacy . . . involved a much higher level of U.S. strategic assistance to China than has been acknowledged officially.”
International Herald Tribune
“Conversations that may have changed history.”
—Associated Press

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