The statesman who championed stability over human rights
Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
As architect of a U.S. foreign policy strategy that endured for decades, Henry Kissinger put American interests above everything else. A German-born refugee turned academic, he served as national security adviser and then secretary of state to two presidents and counseled nearly every subsequent president. While in office, he finessed a détente with the Soviet Union based on arms control, engineered the opening of relations with China, and brokered peace between Egypt and Israel. Yet not all of Kissinger’s Cold War maneuvering succeeded—particularly in Vietnam, even though he won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end that war. As his celebrity status grew, so did his notoriety, and in later years detractors accused him of war crimes for greenlighting such acts as the bombing of Cambodia and the 1973 coup in Chile. Kissinger remained unapologetic about valuing stability over human rights. “If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand,” he often said, paraphrasing Goethe, “and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”
Born in Bavaria, Heinz Alfred Kissinger was the son of middle-class Jews who considered themselves “entirely German,” said The Washington Post, until the rise of Hitler forced them to flee to the U.S. in 1938. Drafted at 19, Kissinger worked in counterintelligence and got a Bronze Star for tracking down Gestapo members. After his discharge, he earned a Ph.D. at Harvard and joined “the world of foreign policy heavyweights.” His 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which argued the U.S. should signal willingness to engage in limited nuclear warfare, “improbably hit the best-seller list,” said Foreign Policy, and helped spread his realpolitik views.
Named President Richard Nixon’s security adviser, Kissinger “transformed almost every global relationship he touched,” said The New York Times. He enlisted Pakistan’s military ruler Yahya Khan as a go-between to China, enabling Nixon to make a landmark visit. His “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East created the conditions for the 1978 Camp David Accords. The press lionized him, and he became an unlikely playboy, stepping out with Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen, and Jill St. John. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” he said.
But his successes came at the expense of countless human lives, said Vox. He authorized the 1969–73 bombing of neutral Cambodia during Vietnam, which killed 50,000 people and “provided valuable propaganda” to fuel the rise of mass murderer Pol Pot. He backed Indonesia in its bloody invasion of East Timor, and Pakistan in the Bangladesh genocide. And he routinely wiretapped journalists and even his own underlings. That’s because he was “as vain, furtive, manipulative, duplicitous, and paranoid” as his boss Nixon, said The Times (U.K.). Though he escaped the taint of Watergate, his fortunes began to wane, and after Gerald Ford lost re-election, Kissinger never served in government again.
Instead, he exerted global influence through Kissinger Associates, a $10 million–a-year corporate consulting firm he founded in 1982, said Bloomberg. He developed extensive and lucrative links to the Chinese government, and to the end of his life argued that pragmatic engagement with the world’s largest country was the only survivable option. “America and China are now drifting increasingly toward confrontation,” Kissinger warned in 2020, saying that such a conflict would be “a catastrophe.”