In 1969, Kissinger accompanied the newly inaugurated Richard Nixon on a state visit to Paris, where French president Charles de Gaulle straightforwardly challenged the US war in Vietnam and expressed profound skepticism for the multilateral institutions that the US saw as vital to European security. Two months later, de Gaulle resigned, unprompted by political crisis, marking one last mysterious move in a career full of them. De Gaulle first won fame as one of the highest-ranking French officials (undersecretary of defense) to escape the Nazi conquest of France, where he sought to rally a resistance movement from his sanctuary in London. With so many French officers pledging loyalty to the new Nazi-aligned government based in Vichy, Britain recognized de Gaulle as the leader of an army and a government-in-exile, even though he himself did not speak English.

A decorated soldier of World War I, de Gaulle was also a voracious learner with keen strategic insight even as a junior officer. Kissinger states that de Gaulle also possessed tremendous will, and “first as a leader of the Free French during the war, later as founder and president of the Fifth Republic, he conjured up visions that transcended objective reality, in the process persuading his audiences to treat them as fact” (59).