Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravelly voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died on Wednesday.
With his gruff yet commanding presence and behind-the-scenes manipulation of power, Kissinger exerted uncommon influence on global affairs under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
His work earned him both vilification and the Nobel Peace Prize, and his name provoked impassioned debate over foreign policy landmarks long after he left office.
Born in Fürth, then in the Weimar Republic, in 1923 Kissinger and his family fled Germany when he was 15 to escape Nazi persecution.
He joined the German-Jewish immigrant community in Washington Heights and while he soon assimilated into American life, he never quite lost his pronounced German accent.
Kissinger served in military intelligence during World War 2 and was awarded a Bronze Star for leading a team hunting down Gestapo officers.
He then earned a BA in political science from Harvard College and went on to earn a doctorate from Harvard University were he specialised in foreign policy,
The keen scholar supported presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller in 1968 and dubbed contender Richard Nixon “the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president.”
He soon changed his tune and offered to join Nixon’s campaign once he won the nomination, a move for which he was rewarded with the role of National Security Advisor.
For eight restless years — during which he also became Secretary of State — Kissinger played a dominant role in foreign policy.
He conducted the first “shuttle diplomacy” in the quest for Middle East peace. He used secret negotiations to restore ties between the United States and China.
The former Secretary of State initiated the Paris talks that ultimately provided a face-saving means to get the United States out of war in Vietnam. And he pursued detente with the Soviet Union that led to arms-control agreements.
Kissinger’s power grew during the turmoil of the Watergate scandal, when the politically attuned diplomat took on a role akin to co-president to the weakened Nixon.
He later wrote: “No doubt my vanity was piqued. But the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrophe.”
Kissinger told colleagues at the White House that he was the one person who kept Nixon, “that drunken lunatic,” from doing things that would “blow up the world,” according to Walter Isaacson, who wrote the 1992 biography “Kissinger.”
For decades, he battled the notion that he and Nixon had settled in 1972 for peace terms in Vietnam that had been available in 1969 and thus had needlessly prolonged the war at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives.
He was castigated for authorizing telephone wiretaps of reporters and his own National Security Council staff to plug news leaks in Nixon’s White House.
And he was denounced on college campuses for the bombing and allied invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, intended to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam.
In his later years, Kissinger cultivated the reputation of a respected elder statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to Republican and Democratic presidents alike and managing a lucrative global consulting business as he travelled the world.
Asked in July 2022 interview with ABC whether he wished he could take back any of his decisions, Kissinger demurred, saying: “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life.
“It’s my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”
