“Basically I am with the whites in Southern Africa. I think that it is no better for the majority to oppress the minority than vice versa. But in my [public] comments I will support majority rule in Rhodesia … [and] say the same about South Africa, but softer.” So said U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to President Ford in 1976, while he was busily combating Soviet and Cuban influence in the region and attempting (in competition with the Soviets and Cubans) to join with South African Prime Minister B. Johannes Vorster, Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, and Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere in steering outlaw and white-ruled Rhodesia toward black rule.1
Outing Kissinger is among the revelations of this book’s exemplary mining of the U.S. State Department records, now that they are available for the 1970s. Scarnecchia also dug deeply into the British Foreign and Commonwealth documentary record, employed private...