Kissinger begins with the devastating childhood experiences that helped forge Henry Kissinger's political philosophy. In August 1938, after Hitler's government had embarked on a campaign to destroy Germany's Jews, Kissinger's family fled to the United States. Their escape came two months before Kristallnacht and the outbreak of violence that would culminate in the murder of six million Jews (and millions of others), including 13 members of Kissinger's extended family, implanting in Kissinger the durable conviction that power was the prerequisite for liberty.  

As a refugee in New York City, Kissinger worked his way up from a job at a shaving brush factory to a stint as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army ferreting out Nazis in post-war Germany. He returned to earn an advanced degree and professorship at Harvard in government, marking the start of a dazzling career. He became an expert on nuclear weapons policy, eventually securing a position as National Security Advisor for President Richard Nixon at the height of the Cold War. He was an unlikely pick — an awkward academic with a thick accent who hired a staff of ideologically diverse young men, including film interviewees Anthony Lake, Winston Lord, Roger Morris, and Morton Halperin. 

Bedeviled by how to end the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the Nixon administration turned to increasingly audacious interventions to force Hanoi to the bargaining table, first secretly bombing, then invading neighboring Cambodia. Pundits debated whether these escalations were brilliant strokes of tactical genius or unconstitutional attacks on a neutral nation. Several Kissinger staffers resigned, and protests erupted across America. Public morale reached a bloody nadir on May 4, 1970, with the shooting of antiwar demonstrators at Kent State.