During his years as President Nixon’s and President Ford’s most influential foreign policy adviser, 1969-77, Kissinger put these ideas to work. He participated in marathon haggling sessions with some of the most battle-hardened figures of the 20th century, including Zhou Enlai, Leonid Brezhnev, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, Hafez al-Assad and Ian Smith. Kissinger appeared to succeed in many of these negotiations — opening relations with China, forging a détente with the Soviet Union, bringing a precarious peace to the Middle East, and speeding the end of white rule in Rhodesia. He became the wise man of American foreign policy — a ubiquitous advocate for strategic compromises to secure stability for the United States. Now a 95-year-old private citizen, he continues to negotiate on behalf of wealthy clients and elected leaders who seek influence in foreign lands.

How does he do it? The authors of “Kissinger the Negotiator,” James K. Sebenius, R. Nicholas Burns and Robert H. Mnookin, are an all-star trio of experts on negotiation in business, law and diplomacy. They have focused on Kissinger because he is unsurpassed for the range and intensity of his negotiations as national security adviser and secretary of state. He has also left a long documentary trail, including thousands of pages that he has written recounting what he did when seated across from so many adversaries and other interlocutors. The authors spent many hours interviewing Kissinger, and he has written a short preface blessing their analysis as a whole.

Kissinger appears in this account as a quick learner, a bold strategist and a relentless pursuer. In Rhodesia, he orchestrated a series of pressures on Ian Smith from multiple directions to push the stubborn defender of white rule to accept a two-year transition to majority governance. In the Middle East, he tirelessly traveled between capitals to knit together compromises among antagonistic leaders. In China, probably his most famous triumph, Kissinger probed a series of neglected routes to establish communication and avoid recurring controversies, particularly the future status of Taiwan.

The authors provide play-by-plays for many of the negotiations, but they have little new to say about them, and they leave out a lot. The historical sections are written almost exclusively from the American side of the negotiating table, and the loudest voice is always Kissinger’s own from his memoirs, interviews and the contemporary documentary record. The authors have read many critical accounts challenging Kissinger’s negotiating efficacy, and the consequences of his choices, but these accounts are mostly relegated to footnotes and textual asides. The one partial exception is their discussion of the Vietnam War, in which the authors posit that Kissinger’s negotiations may have prolonged a failing American military strategy and increased the death toll. Yet they praise his efforts to negotiate the Paris Accords that led to the delayed American withdrawal in 1975.