David E. Sanger, New York Times, “Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped Nation’s Cold War History“
Henry A. Kissinger, the scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so, died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 100.
His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm.
Few diplomats have been both celebrated and reviled with such passion as Mr. Kissinger. Considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era, he was by turns hailed as an ultrarealist who reshaped diplomacy to reflect American interests and denounced as having abandoned American values, particularly in the arena of human rights, if he thought it served the nation’s purposes.
He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.
At a critical moment in American history and diplomacy, he was second in power only to President Richard M. Nixon. He joined the Nixon White House in January 1969 as national security adviser and, after his appointment as secretary of state in 1973, kept both titles, a rarity. When Nixon resigned, he stayed on under President Gerald R. Ford.
Mr. Kissinger’s secret negotiations with what was then still called Red China led to Nixon’s most famous foreign policy accomplishment. Intended as a decisive Cold War move to isolate the Soviet Union, it carved a pathway for the most complex relationship on the globe, between countries that at Mr. Kissinger’s death were the world’s largest (the United States) and second-largest economies, completely intertwined and yet constantly at odds as a new Cold War loomed.
For decades he remained the country’s most important voice on managing China’s rise, and the economic, military and technological challenges it posed. He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. In July, at age 100, he met Mr. Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like visiting royalty even as relations with Washington had turned adversarial.
He drew the Soviet Union into a dialogue that became known as détente, leading to the first major nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. With his shuttle diplomacy, he edged Moscow out of its standing as a major power in the Middle East, but failed to broker a broader peace in that region.
Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war proved far from over, and critics argued that he could have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives.
Thomas W. Lippman, Washington Post, “Henry Kissinger, who shaped world affairs under two presidents, dies at 100“
Henry A. Kissinger, a scholar, statesman and celebrity diplomat who wielded unparalleled power over U.S. foreign policy throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, and who for decades afterward, as a consultant and writer, proffered opinions that shaped global politics and business, died Nov. 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100.
His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm, which did not give a cause.
As a Jewish immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger spoke little English when he arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1938. But he harnessed a keen intellect, a mastery of history and his skill as a writer to rise quickly from Harvard undergraduate to Harvard faculty member before establishing himself in Washington.
As the only person ever to be White House national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time, he exercised a control over U.S. foreign policy that has rarely been equaled by anyone who was not president.
He and Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the secret negotiations that produced the 1973 Paris agreement and ended U.S. military participation in the Vietnam War. His famous “shuttle diplomacy” after the 1973 Middle East war helped stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
As the impresario of Nixon’s historic opening to China and as the theoretician of détente with the Soviet Union, Dr. Kissinger earned much of the credit for seismic policy shifts that redirected the course of world affairs.
Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal, “Henry Kissinger, Who Helped Forge U.S. Foreign Policy During Vietnam and Cold Wars, Dies at 100“
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.
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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.
The Economist, “Henry Kissinger never quite belonged where he wanted to be“
Early in June 1970, soon after America had invaded Cambodia, Henry Kissinger secretly visited Brian McDonnell, a 27-year-old peacenik he had spotted in Lafayette Park opposite the White House. It was one of his many efforts that year to persuade his younger critics that they should give war a chance.
As with so many others, he failed with Brian, but they stayed in touch. While Richard Nixon sulked in the West Wing, his national security adviser and the long-haired activist would meet from time to time to talk about the war and the philosophy of Kant, struggling, Mr Kissinger wrote, “to fashion at least a temporary bridge across the mutual incomprehension”. He never lost the belief that he could win over his critics. And not just the movers and shakers, but also those far from the cover of Time and out of range of the Oval Office microphones. By arguing and arguing some more, he was asserting that he belonged and that he counted.
He had started as an outcast, growing up in pre-war Germany among people who despised and rejected him for being a Jew. The Nazis sacked his father from the public high school in Fürth, near Nuremberg. His mother was the first to grasp that the “Hitler State” held no future for her children. In 1938, 15-year-old Heinz, as he was then, fled to America with his family. He never shed the accent; his voice, like gravel in a goldfish-bowl, added deeply to his seriousness. But his younger brother Walter learned to speak like a regular American, claiming later to be “the Kissinger who listens”.
Even his detractors admitted he had a brilliant mind. His undergraduate thesis was so profuse, at 383 pages, that it supposedly led Harvard to introduce the “Kissinger rule”, limiting students to less than half that length. His doctorate examined how diplomacy sustained stability in Europe for the best part of a century after Napoleon’s defeat. When he entered Nixon’s administration 15 years later, the insights he had gained from studying Castlereagh and Metternich would help him grapple with the roiling ambitions of the United States and the Soviet Union.
His style was to work outside the official machinery of the State Department and the foreign service, which he thought had sapped American diplomacy of its vigour and creativity. “Back-channels” with the Russians, the Chinese and just about everyone else suited Nixon’s taste for conspiracy. And they suited his own yearning to be at the centre of the action, pulling the strings.
Of course, deception played a useful part, in big matters as well as small. When his team grumbled that they had no dining privileges at the White House, he let them think it was all the chief of staff’s fault. In fact, it was his own idea. He didn’t want his people forging links over lunch with useful contacts outside the National Security Council. Although he was too clever to lie outright, he led people astray. Shimon Peres, an Israeli sparring partner, admiringly called him “the most devious man I have ever met”.
Never did he fall into Castlereagh’s trap of losing his self-belief. He cut ties for a while with Walter Isaacson over his wretched book, with its psychologising and its cheap gibe that Dr K surely felt that even his own three-volume autobiography did not quite do justice to his achievements.
Plenty of aides may have left his service, but many stayed loyal because on the most important questions of the day he was not only penetrating, but he also let them have their say. And nowhere did he face more questions than the realignment of American foreign policy amid the ruins of the Vietnam war.
By 1972, America was vulnerable: humiliated abroad and divided at home. His answer was to exploit growing antagonism between the Soviet Union and China to create a new equilibrium in which each looked to America to bolster its position. Later, he shuttled between Egypt and Israel to supplant the Soviet Union with America in the Middle East. It was a piece of statecraft worthy of his 19th-century heroes. He had put America back in the driving-seat just when everything was against it.
What thanks did he get? The doubters and intellectuals said he had sacrificed America’s principles and over a million lives. He had fought on in Vietnam and taken the war to Cambodia and Laos for the sake of American “credibility”. He had blessed a Pakistani genocide in what became Bangladesh, because Pakistan was helping him with China. He had plotted coups and assassinations in Chile and an insurgency in Angola, because he thought countries would fall like dominoes to Soviet plots. When he won the Nobel peace prize in 1973, Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist, said he should have been tried for war crimes—and the charge stuck.
Tom Gjelten, NPR, “Henry Kissinger, legendary diplomat and foreign policy scholar, dies at 100“
Henry Kissinger, one of the country’s most important foreign policy thinkers for more than half a century, has died at the age of 100.
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As a secretary of state and national security adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger played the major behind-the-scenes role in building the architecture that enabled more manageable relations with the Soviet Union, China, and major Arab nations. At the same time, he was closely associated with some of the most controversial U.S. foreign policy moves in recent decades, by promoting intensive bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia and repeatedly turning a blind eye to human rights abuses by governments perceived to be supportive of U.S. interests.
Though he never worked directly under a U.S. president again after Ford left office, Kissinger’s achievements were long lasting. U.S. superpower relations to this day still bear his imprint, and he remained a sought-after voice on international affairs to the end of his life.
“Kissinger was the leading scholar-practitioner of the post-World War II era,” said Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There were other great secretaries of state and a long list of impressive historians, but no one who combined the two pursuits as Kissinger did.”
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In America, the young Kissinger worked in a factory during the day and went to school at night, until he was drafted into the U.S. Army.
Sent to Germany, Pvt. Kissinger was among the American soldiers who liberated starving Jewish prisoners at a concentration camp in Ahlem. He met some of them again 60 years later, when he spoke at the screening of a documentary film about Ahlem, with many camp survivors present.
“There’s nothing I’m more proud of than having been one of those who had the honor of liberating the Ahlem concentration camp,” Kissinger said, in an uncharacteristically emotional speech.
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In 1973, Nixon made Kissinger his secretary of state, while keeping him as his national security adviser. When Gerald Ford took over after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, he retained Kissinger as secretary of state, though not as national security adviser.
In fact, Kissinger had already made his mark. The hard-nosed foreign policy approach he advocated was associated more with Kissinger himself than with the presidents under whom he served. Indeed, his promotion of détente with Moscow was later criticized by some conservatives in his own Republican Party.
Kissinger’s guiding principle was that U.S. national interests take precedence over more idealistic aims, like the promotion of democracy and human rights.
“I used to say to my colleagues,” Kissinger told an interviewer in 2007, “we’re a country, not a foundation. We have to conduct foreign policy for America.”
With that unwavering commitment, Kissinger advocated bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position. He was comfortable with the U.S. giving a green light to the “dirty war” in Argentina and to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, because those governments were U.S. allies. Likewise, the U.S. could welcome a coup against Salvador Allende, the elected socialist president in Chile.
Kissinger’s detractors said his identification with such policy decisions meant he was liable for war crimes. At public events, like his 2012 appearance at Harvard, accusations were inevitable.
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Kissinger was accustomed to such questions and regularly encouraged his critics to consider “the big picture.”
“Just study who did what, not people who live off proving their country is evil and their leaders are criminal,” Kissinger told the Harvard questioner. “Start from the assumption that rational people were in government. What led to what decisions?” He urged his critic to go through the minutes of a national security meeting.
“You may not agree with it,” he said, “but you won’t throw around words like war criminal then.”
Kissinger knew something about criminal leaders from his own experience in Nazi Germany, but it did not keep him from engaging with other governments that executed their opponents. It may have been that Kissinger’s own life experience made it easier for him to be dispassionate about tough policy choices.
David Rothkopf, his one-time assistant, thinks Kissinger’s view of the world was in part a result of his childhood experience in Germany and then his service as a young man in the U.S. Army.
“Those are the formative years,” Rothkopf said. “I think to understand Kissinger, you have to understand a man who escaped the Holocaust, a man who went back to fight in this big grand war, a man who saw the United States as the champion against an almost absolute evil.”
Having seen the United States as being on the side of good, Rothkopf suggests, Kissinger may have been more willing to justify questionable U.S. actions around the world.
Readers will have their own view of Kissinger’s policies, now half a century in the past. Having heard him speak many times over the years, I tend to share Rothkopf’s assessment. The essence of Realist foreign policy, or Realpolitik in nod to Kissinger’s heritage, is raison d’état: securing the vital interests of the country is paramount, overriding considerations of morality and even law if the stakes are high enough. Defeating the Communist menace was an existential pursuit that justified quite a lot.
With the advantage of hindsight, much of the mindset of the Cold War was absurd. Vietnam coming under Communist control posed little danger to the United States. Ditto socialism in Chile. But Nixon and Kissinger were hardly the only American statesmen who thought otherwise. Indeed, the Vietnam war was at its height when they took office.
It fascinates me that he’s so reviled by so many yet continued to be consulted by Presidents and Secretaries of State right up through the end. It is perhaps the nation of the pressure cooker of having to make life-and-death decisions that those who have done so become part of a club.
