I started reading Crisis by Henry Kissinger as Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK. It seemed… appropriate, given that it’s a record of a group of people trying to respond to a situation that is changing on a daily basis with limited information.

Crisis covers the Yom Kippur war and the last days of the Vietnam war. Most of the book is dedicated to the Yom Kippur war in 1973. It is largely transcripts of phone calls between Henry Kissinger and the various other actors involved. It is fascinating to read actual transcripts because people don’t speak in proper sentences, context (which we don’t have in this book) is what makes everything make sense and simply from the words on the page it is impossible to know what is going on. Not really. You get the impression that differences in opinion in the US government – between the executive, the various committees, Congress and the Senate – mean that stuff isn’t getting done. Kissinger finds himself making promises that others don’t fulfill. Then people don’t tell the truth, or change their minds, or are relaying the best information they have but it’s just wrong.

Kissinger calls out that some of his colleagues found it hard to let go of the belief that the Israeli army was so superior to the Egyptian army that the war would be over in a couple of days, even when the evidence clearly showed the two armies quite evenly matched. He notes how assumptions impeded decision-making. Although it’s also clear, especially in the section on the Vietnam war, that he doesn’t examine his own assumptions. Trying to work out what’s going on – especially as it’s a long time since I read anything about that war – without any context is challenging: however, lacking the context meant I was more focused on the content of the verbal communication. It is really amazing how randomly we speak and yet manage to understand each other. And really clear how easy it is to misunderstand.

The section on the Vietnam war is shorter and has more commentary around the transcripts. It focuses on the last days of the war when the US is trying to get people (US military, US civilians and Vietnamese people who had worked with the Americans) out of South Vietnam before the North Vietnamese arrive. Kissinger allows himself to show much more emotion in this section about the responsibility the US had to get people to safety and his frustration with the US government failing to agree sufficient budget.

Crisis is an interesting book, both for what is intentionally revealed and what is unintentionally revealed.