Now we have the unvarnished record of Henry Kissinger's high-stakes diplomacy during the Nixon years. Here are the transcripts, formerly classified "Top/Secret/Sensitive/Exclusive Eyes Only," of Kissinger's talks with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, Leonid Brezhnev, Andrei Gromyko, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George Bush, and others.

When Henry Kissinger left the State Department in January 1977, he took with him "personal papers" as well as copies of government papers that he had worked on and reviewed, and attempted to close off all access to them until five years after his death. However, transcripts of some of his most important conversations found their way into other files, where National Security Archive staffers tracked them down.

The Kissinger Transcripts offers an unparalleled view of American diplomacy as conducted by one of the most controversial Secretaries of State in modern U.S. history. With the record unmediated by Kissinger's spin, readers can begin to make up their own minds about the merits or flaws of a major effort to transform U.S. Cold War strategy.