Chair: Professor Niall Barr, Head of Defence Studies Department and Dean of Academic Studies

Speaker: Professor Thomas Schwartz, Distinguished Professor of History at Vanderbilt University 

Henry Kissinger was one of the most powerful and influential American diplomats of the 20th century.  His name remains associated with some of the most important American foreign issues of the era, including relations with the Soviet Union, the opening to China, the end of the war in Vietnam, and the beginnings of peace in the Middle East.  However, the lessons of Henry Kissinger remain hotly contested within American public life, and this talk will explore the controversial issues surrounding his legacy.

Bio 

Thomas A Schwartz is the Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Political Science and European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Educated at Columbia, Oxford and Harvard Universities, he is the author of the books Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (2020).,Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam(2003), and America’s Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany (1991). Along with Matthias Schulz, he produced the edited volume, The Strained Alliance: US-European Relations in the 1970s, (2009).

He has received fellowships from the German Historical Institute, the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Social Science Research Center. He served on the Historical Advisory Committee of the Department of State and was the President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. While teaching at Vanderbilt, he has received the Madison Sarratt Teaching prize (2013) and the Alumni Education Award (2008).

"I first met Saki and Mike when they visited Harvard University in the late 1980s. From the very beginning I greatly enjoyed our conversations and collaborations, as our common interests in postwar US foreign policy found us at many of the same conferences and academic meetings. I did not see Saki as often in the years before her death, but wrote to tell her how moved I was by her Christian baptism and decision to join the Church of England. Her untimely death deprived our academic community of a thoughtful and highly productive scholar as well as a true gem of a human being, and I can only imagine how hard it was for Mike to continue without her. I am incredibly honored to deliver a lecture named after these two distinguished scholars."