Top US diplomat dies at 100
‘Most influential secretary of state in modern times’
Henry Kissinger, a diplomat who shaped U.S. foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century and won a Nobel Prize for brokering an end to the Vietnam War, has died.
His death was confirmed in a statement from his consulting firm. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger was the most celebrated U.S. statesman in modern times, helping establish U.S. relations with China, negotiating the 1973 ceasefire with North Vietnam, reaching Cold War détente and arms agreements with the Soviet Union and conducting “shuttle diplomacy” to defuse Middle East tension.
He was hailed as a brilliant thinker who wielded power with pragmatic conservatism, sometimes described as “realpolitik,” or hard-nosed political realism.
“He had the most strategic mind of anyone I’ve ever came across,” said veteran national security official Brent Scowcroft, who served as Kissinger’s deputy from 1973 to 1975.
“He was the most influential secretary of state in modern times – but not the most constructive or successful,” historian Robert Dallek said in a 2007 interview.
At the same time, Kissinger was an intensely controversial figure and a lightning rod for critics of Nixon’s foreign policy, particularly in the conduct of the Vietnam War and its expansion into Cambodia. Kissinger’s critics accused him of playing a role in the fall of Chile’s democratically elected, Marxist president Salvador Allende.
They also pointed to recordings from former President Richard Nixon’s White House as evidence that he worked internally to delay an end to the bloody and divisive war in Vietnam until after Nixon’s 1972 re-election, a period that saw thousands of U.S. combat deaths and civilian casualties.
Still, Democrat and Republican presidents alike sought his counsel as they shaped foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War and 9/11. Companies and governments paid his consulting firm millions for his strategic analysis and contacts.
Kissinger’s “influence stayed with him after he left office, while that of all the others – with the possible exception of James Baker – dissipated,” said Leslie Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and onetime Kissinger protégé.
From Nazi refugee to the height of influence
The future leader was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Bavaria on May 27, 1923, the first son of an Orthodox Jewish school teacher. With Nazism on the rise, the young Kissinger was barred from soccer matches and schools and beaten up by local toughs, according to a 1992 biography by Walter Isaacson. The family fled to New York City in 1938.
Intelligent, industrious and ambitious, Kissinger worked nights while attending high school and a year of City College, intending to become an accountant. He became a citizen in 1943 and was drafted into the U.S. Army, moving into military intelligence. After the war he enrolled at Harvard, where he earned undergraduate, masters and doctorate degrees in its government department, then became a professor.
Gelb, a former Kissinger student and research assistant, called Kissinger’s dissertation and a subsequent book the most important works on foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century. In them, Kissinger presented his world view: pragmatic, even ruthless balanceof-power politics that gave minimal weight to moral issues such as human rights.
“If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter,” Kissinger told a colleague, according to Dallek.
When Nixon won the Republican nomination in 1968, Kissinger offered him confidential information about U.S. negotiations with communist North Vietnam that helped Nixon win the election, according to several historians.
Even before Kissinger became secretary of state in 1973, he had taken the lead on important foreign policy issues as Nixon’s national security adviser. He continued in the post under former President Gerald Ford.
However, not all his actions were equally praised. When Kissinger cowon the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho for the agreement that led to U.S. withdrawal, two of five Nobel committee members resigned in protest.
Nixon’s decisions to bomb and invade Cambodia spread instability that led to the 1975 takeover by the genocidal Khmer Rouge, responsible for killing more than 2 million Cambodians. And taped conversations revealed covert U.S. efforts to prevent the 1970 presidential election of Allende and to encourage the generals who may have killed Allende and thousands of others.
An intemperate personality
During the prime of his public career, Kissinger was an outsize figure on the public stage. An unabashed publicity hound, he dated Hollywood starlets and both courted and manipulated Washington columnists and journalists. He remained a fixture of television talk shows well into his 80s.
However, he had a volcanic temper. Kissinger fawned over Nixon in public but disparaged him in private, calling him a “madman” and “the meatball mind,” Dallek wrote. Nixon in turn called Kissinger “my Jew boy” and complained that Kissinger tried to steal the limelight.
Kissinger was as thin-skinned as he was media-savvy, said Bernard Gwertzman, who covered Kissinger for The New York Times. He sometimes abused subordinates, playing them off against each other and authorizing FBI tapping of their home phones – a practice, Isaacson wrote, that foreshadowed the Watergate break-in.