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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

He only spent eight years of his long life in public service, and that was nearly half a century ago.

Yet as he nears his hundredth birthday, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, remains one of the most iconic, impactful, and controversial diplomats in American history.

I sat down with him this week to discuss his life, career, the world today, and his new book, Leadership.

And just one note for you, Axe Files listeners, we're going to take a few weeks off, but we'll be offering some great alternative programming here.

We hope you'll enjoy. We'll see you after Labor Day. And now, my conversation with Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Dr. Kissinger, you've written a book, Leadership, Six Studies, and World Strategy. And I want to ask you about the lessons learned in that book.

But this is your sixteenth book, as you approach your hundredth birthday, and there's plenty of you learn from your remarkable life and story as well.

So if it's okay with you, I'd like to start there. And ask you about your childhood. You grew up in Germany.

And you grew up in the years leading up to World War II, your dad, your dad was an Orthodox Jew.

And your family fled in 1935 after the Nuremberg laws were passed targeting Jews. You emigrated.

I know that you've spoken in the past about how that experience didn't exactly shape your life. But looking back at that period, what gives rise to that kind of blood and soil, ethno, nationalism that sees Germany then?

That, at least, a virtue, said my father was an Orthodox Jew, and that I was a truly accurate. He was, but he was also, he thought at a gymnasium, a school of the German distant, not that was the way integrated.

And that for a truth was quite an achievement to be taken into the regular civil driven still that meant a lot to him. And as soon as it let him into power, he dismissed all Jewish over the deflux.

And that was the terrible thought of my father in that period Jews really didn't have any civil rights. And they had the Nuremberg laws which made that a visit. And they couldn't associate with none to which people.

So my parents, largely my mother decided to emigrate. And in 1938, we came to the United States. It was Labor Day when we arrived. It was September 5th, so my first view we got off the boat was on our holiday.

Oh, it looked like we're treated reliably. People seem deadly, critically, very good time. I knew so little about it that I thought the fire escapes, which I never see before. We're pulganic. So I thought every outside pulgan it, people said this was a New York.

I want to ask you more about your experience when you came, but I just want to ask you again, what conditions give rise to this kind of ethno nationalism that Hitler represent. I ask you that because we're seeing it around the world now.

We just had an episode where Orbán of Hungary came and spoke at the CPAC convention here in the United States. It was like a union of pro Trump supporters and Orbán supporters. And it was very much steeped in that kind of ethno nationalism. What is giving rise to that? And are there analogies to some of the things that went on in the 1930s?

Actually, no comparison between what goes on here and what went on in Germany in the 1930s. Because here it is the act of individuals or of group that are distinct. There is no governmental action that supported and public opinion doesn't support it. In Germany, it was an action which was organized by the government in Dunoa.

And it produced a deliberate breaking up into ethnic unit that were totally separated. It was what one reads about what the sounds might have been here for Black people before it reforms that have passed and that haven't been fully achieved there of triggers yet.

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