In The White House Years, Henry Kissinger is, as ever, faithful to the conservative view of international relations he has espoused since his early study of Metternich. Yet, unlike Metternich, he is writing in a liberal democracy and must justify the survivalist ethic of balance- of-power Realpolitik in terms that give it what he calls at one point a "moral compass." What that consists in is not explicitly enunciated, but presumably it is related to the "idealism...humanity...and the embodiment of men's hopes" that in an eloquent passage he describes as his image of America when he was a boy suffering persecution in Nazi Germany.