Henry Kissinger

As an actor, Ron Silver found it liberating to play Henry Kissinger in "Kissinger and Nixon," TNT's latest original movie premiering Sunday on the cable network. Thanks to a fantastic makeup job and wardrobe, some judicious padding and a perfect accent, the Tony Award-winning actor ("Speed the Plow") bares an uncanny resemblance to the influential national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon.

What began as an innocent lunch between a research-minded actor and his reluctant subject has turned into a head-on clash between one of the world's most prominent statesmen and Turner Network Television. Alarmed by what he viewed as inaccuracies in an upcoming TNT movie, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger fired off a 42-page list of objections and brought his attorney, former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, into the fray.

Henry Kissinger's most recent book, "Diplomacy," is the perfect gift for a rich nation that seems to have everything. Everything, Kissinger argues persuasively, except a foreign policy free of perpetually conflicting ideologies. On one side stand defenders of a nation's right to use its power wisely; on the other, those who view America's primary diplomatic mission to be sowing democracy as widely as possible. A concept called "the balance of power" makes room for both perspectives.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer used to boast that it had "more stars than there are in heaven." Now it has almost as many media stars serving as advisers. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on Tuesday was named a consultant to the boards of both MGM and parent Credit Lyonnais. He joins such luminaries as director Francis Ford Coppola, previously named to MGM's board, and Creative Artists Agency Chairman Michael S.

The man who helped end America's involvement in the Vietnam War autographed his new book for Yorba Linda resident Ted Wells on Wednesday. "I think he's a genius," said Wells, 38, a real estate broker, clutching two signed copies of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's $35 book. "This is a major event and I wouldn't have missed it."

Each new American President chooses those of his predecessors whose portraits he wants to hang in the Cabinet Room. In the Nixon White House, certainly Eisenhower, Nixon's political patron, had to be one of them, but "the President most admired by Nixon," Henry Kissinger tells us in this analysis of European and American diplomacy, "was Woodrow Wilson." Franklin Roosevelt also chose to hang Wilson's portrait in the Cabinet Room.

The only time I ever felt sorry for Henry Kissinger was when an editor offered me his biography to review. The opening sentence of the dust-jacket copy alone is enough to make you want to rethink your faith in democracy: "By the time he was made Secretary of State in 1973, Kissinger had become, according to the Gallup Poll, the most admired person in America." But what strikes you then about this wonderful, entertaining, definitive biography by Walter Isaacson is its unyielding fairness.

Cambodia is not one of the countries that Henry Kissinger knows best. Corporate clients don't seek out his advice on such places, and it's been a long time--20 years next month--since he made his only visit to Phnom Penh. It lasted four hours. Shortly afterward, with a pause to sign the Paris peace accords, Kissinger caused a further 250,000 tons of bombs to be dropped on Cambodians from American B-52s. Twenty years later, places like Cambodia still reap the whirlwind that Kissinger sowed.