Henry Kissinger, Who Helped Forge U.S. Foreign Policy During Vietnam and Cold Wars, Dies at 100
German-born academic was a hero to war-weary Americans, but many blamed him for brutalities abroad
WSJ
Former presidential adviser Henry Kissinger has died, according to a statement posted on his website, bringing to a close one of the most polarizing and influential diplomatic lives in U.S. history.
He died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, said a statement by his consulting firm. He was 100 years old.
The German-born academic was the only American official ever to concurrently serve as secretary of state and White House national security adviser, giving him immense power during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford presidencies. That helped him end the U.S. war in Vietnam and to shape American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.
Kissinger’s diplomatic coups made him a hero to war-weary Americans fearing nuclear armageddon. But he drew the ire of both the American left, which held him responsible for brutalities committed abroad, and the right, which regarded him with suspicion for advocating detente with Communist regimes.
Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, along with the Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, for pursuing secret diplomatic talks that forged the Paris Peace Accords, ending the U.S. military campaign in Southeast Asia.
Le Duc Tho refused his award, saying that peace wasn’t achieved. Kissinger accepted his prize “with humility,” and offered to return it after the fall of South Vietnam two years later.
Kissinger still won gratitude for helping to extricate the U.S. from the war with its power mostly intact. In 1974, he was featured as a diplomatic superman on the cover of Newsweek, clad in tights, a cape, and a “Super K” emblazoned on his chest.
“Henry Kissinger…literally wrote the book on diplomacy,” John Kerry, who was then secretary of state, said at a ceremony in 2014. Kissinger “gave us the vocabulary of modern diplomacy, the very words ‘shuttle diplomacy’ and ‘strategic patience.’”
In half a century, Kissinger never lost his love of the public spotlight and global politicking. He parlayed his contacts to foreign governments and global business leaders into a lucrative consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which he established in 1982.
He maintained an ambitious writing career into his 90s, publishing books on history, strategic policy and his own diplomatic activities. In the book “World Order,” which came out in 2014, Kissinger brought his views to bear on a world grown both more divided and interdependent.
In 2022, when he was in his late 90s, he published “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” in which he profiled post-World War II leaders whom he called visionary.
Among his lasting achievements was overseeing the Nixon administration’s clandestine outreach in the early 1970s to the People’s Republic of China, resulting in the restoration of full diplomatic relations between Washington and Beijing.
That successful execution of the “China card” was credited with helping to tip the global balance against the Soviet Union and accelerating Beijing’s integration into the international economy.
China’s leader Xi Jinping sent condolences to President Biden, while Chinese officials and news outlets eulogized Kissinger as an “old friend” who had gone on to visit China more than 100 times in his lifetime.
“Both China and the U.S. should inherit and carry forward Dr. Kissinger’s strategic vision, political courage and diplomatic wisdom,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular press briefing, citing Kissinger’s argument that the relationship between Washington and Beijing is central to global prosperity.
Kissinger, as secretary of state, met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong during an official visit to Beijing in 1973.
Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai served Kissinger food during a state banquet in 1971 at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
Kissinger “was extraordinarily generous with his wisdom, with his advice,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Thursday while visiting Israel. “Few people were better students of history—even fewer people did more to shape history—than Henry Kissinger.”
He also negotiated an end to the 1973 Yom Kippur War that was sparked by Egypt’s and Syria’s joint attacks on Israel. The cease-fire followed the dramatic U.S. airlift of weapons to the Jewish state that proved crucial to warding off the initial advances of the Arab armies. He and other U.S. officials worried the conflict could escalate into the first direct military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the chief patron of Cairo and Damascus.
For his eight years of government service, which ran from 1969 through 1977, Ford awarded Kissinger the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A one-time Harvard University professor, Kissinger earned as many critics as he did admirers during his academic, diplomatic and business careers.
Kissinger was the practitioner of a form of international statecraft called realpolitik, which his critics say placed the goal of balancing the interests of world powers above the pursuits of democracy and human rights. While facing criticism at times for pursuing detente with the Soviets, Kissinger also oversaw fierce anticommunist campaigns in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Kissinger supported military coups against democratically elected governments in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, fearful their politicians were growing too close to Moscow, according to declassified White House documents. Kissinger tacitly supported the Indonesian military’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony in Asia, spooked by fears its government was tilting toward Communism, according to these documents.
Human-rights campaigners long argued that Kissinger should have been charged with war crimes for his role in overseeing the Nixon administration’s secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos during the height of the Vietnam War. The American military operations killed thousands of Cambodians and Laotians, experts on Southeast Asia estimate, and inadvertently helped bring the radical Khmer Rouge movement to power in Phnom Penh.
“The bombing campaign began as it was to go on—with full knowledge of its effect on civilians, and with flagrant deceit by Kissinger in this precise respect,” the historian Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 2001 book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.”
The historian Niall Ferguson, a biographer of Kissinger, said the diplomat encountered two waves of criticism—one after the downfall of Nixon, and the other after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the dangers of nuclear annihilation receded.
Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in 1923 to a family of German Jews in Bavaria under the post-World War I government, known as the Weimar Republic.
His parents fled to New York in 1938 following the rise of the Nazi party and the wide-scale persecution of the country’s Jewish community. The Kissingers settled in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, where Henry Kissinger quickly assimilated through his achievements in academics and sports, according to his biographers. Drafted into the Army in 1943 at the age of 20, he saw combat in France and Germany as a private in the 84th Infantry Division. After the war, he studied and taught political science at Harvard University, earning his Ph.D. in 1954.
Kissinger’s escape from Germany and the Holocaust greatly shaped his scholarship and statecraft. The diplomat and academic placed the pursuit of global stability above lofty ideological goals.
Much of Kissinger’s work at Harvard focused on studying the statesmanship of the European strategists Klemens von Metternich and Robert Stewart, the Viscount of Castlereagh. Metternich was renowned for his diplomatic efforts to redraw Europe’s borders following the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte’s French empire.
Kissinger used his platform at Harvard to transition into Washington political circles. He found a patron in this pursuit in the millionaire businessman and Republican politician Nelson Rockefeller, whom Kissinger advised during several unsuccessful runs for the presidency. After Nixon became president in 1969, he asked Kissinger to serve as his national security adviser.
Nixon and Kissinger emerged as an odd power couple in the White House. While Nixon was ill at ease in public and wary of the press, Kissinger reveled in his celebrity status and was known for one-liners and a quick wit, despite maintaining a thick German accent throughout his life.
Ferguson, his biographer, wrote that Kissinger “has more wisecracks to his name than most professional comedians.” On domestic politics Kissinger observed that “Ninety percent of the politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation.” On overconfidence: “To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.” On decision-making: “Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.”
On gender relations: “Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There’s just too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
Kissinger, a divorcee during most of his service in the Nixon White House, was a regular on the Georgetown cocktail circuit, at times appearing with Hollywood starlets on his arm. He once famously called himself a “secret swinger” and told a reporter that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Some romps in the limelight prompted blowback. In a 1972 interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, he called his interest in women a mere sideline that didn’t interfere with his work. “For me, women are only a diversion, a hobby,” he said. “Nobody spends too much time with his hobbies.”
Nixon was enraged by the interview, first published in an Italian magazine and later reprinted in U.S. publications, in which Kissinger compared himself to a lone cowboy, appearing to take credit for running U.S. foreign policy. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else,” he said in the interview.
In his memoirs, Kissinger wrote that Fallaci had likely put some words in his mouth with some “skillful editing.” He called the interview “without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press” and that he agreed to the interview “largely out of vanity.”
Friends of Kissinger said his image as a ladies’ man was in fact a front. After his divorce from his first wife in 1964 he was in a carefully hidden long-term relationship with the woman who eventually became his second wife, Nancy Maginnes.
Kissinger’s two children were still young at the time of his divorce, so he wanted to keep the relationship out of the press until shortly before his second marriage 10 years later, said Ferguson, his biographer.
Nixon and Kissinger shared a fondness for secrecy and viewed the battle with the Soviet Union as a global chess match. Nixon’s historic 1972 summit with China’s Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong, was brokered by Kissinger during two secret visits to Beijing in the preceding months. He threw off the scent of foreign intelligence services and the media by transiting to China via Pakistan, where he flew to Beijing on a Pakistani military aircraft.
Kissinger continued to advise White Houses and congresses into his 90s but remarked in his later life that he didn’t know if his brand of diplomacy could survive in the digital age. The advent of mobile phones, digital cameras and social media limits the ability to maintain the secrecy required for major diplomatic breakthroughs, he said.
He worried that the internet was having a corrosive effect on the popular intellect and that modernity was a poor incubator for insightful leaders. “Reading a complex book carefully and engaging with it critically has become as countercultural an act as was memorizing an epic poem in the earlier print-based age,” he wrote in his book published in 2022.
Kissinger said that China represents a monumental challenge for the U.S., which has never had to face a competitor of equal might and resources. Worrying about the deepening chill in relations, he told The Wall Street Journal last year that the U.S. needs to refrain from being heedlessly adversarial toward Beijing and pursue dialogue instead.
Chinese leaders gave him a warm reception in Beijing when he visited in July 2023, after he turned 100, and held meetings with Xi, as well as China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, and Li Shangfu, who was the country’s defense minister.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Kissinger sounded warnings about the need to make peace with Russia, regardless of differences over fundamental values.
He said it was a mistake for the West to dangle before Ukraine the possibility of joining NATO, arguing that it provoked Moscow. But, he said, Russia’s invasion made it incumbent for the West to help defend Ukraine and, after a negotiated peace, treat it as a member of the alliance.
“We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2022.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel last month, Kissinger said Israel had to impose a penalty in response, and that a quick cease-fire was impossible. Peace talks “are not conceivable to me” if “terrorists can appear openly and take hostages and kill people,” he said in an interview with Axel Springer Chief Executive Mathias Dopfner for Germany’s Welt TV.
Asked how he felt about Palestinian supporters celebrating Hamas’s attack on the streets of Berlin by distributing sweets, Kissinger said he bore no grievance against the German people, but said they had let too many foreigners into the country.
“It was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion and concepts, because it creates a pressure group inside each country that does that,” he said.
