Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut after blowing out 100 candles last May. Author of the famous phrase “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” the Machiavellian statesman’s legacy continues to be debated between those who consider him a diplomatic genius and those who consider him an evil genius. A shrewd manipulator and influential until his final days, for the former fifteen-year-old Jew who fled Europe on the eve of World War II, the world was a gigantic puzzle in which each piece played an important and distinct role toward a single goal: that The USA as an international superpower, even at the price of realpolitik interventions on the world stage that are viewed by many as brutal and illegitimate, such as the bombing and invasion of Cambodia and the support of Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Salvador Allende repressed.
In the last few weeks since the war broke out in Gaza, Kissinger has never intervened, despite being one of the protagonists of the Yom Kippur conflict in which Israel was victorious in 1973. Among his most recent public engagements was a meeting at the ambassador’s residence in Washington, Italy, Mariangela Zappia, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni last July. For the political scientist Robert Kaplan, Kissinger was the greatest Bismarckian statesman of the 20th century. With a keen eye also on Italy, whose role Kissinger, a close friend of Gianni Agnelli, valued in the Atlantic Pact, even though he had the most powerful Communist Party in the West. On the occasion of his centenary in the Washington Post, his son David, marveling at the extraordinary physical and mental vitality of a man who, despite a diet based on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, buried admirers and critics, identified the recipe with inexhaustible paternal curiosity existential challenges of the present: from the threat of atomic bombs in the 1950s to artificial intelligence, about which he wrote the penultimate book “The Age of AI: and Our Human Future” two years ago, which was followed by “Leadership: Six” studies on World Strategy”.
As a child, it was said, he was too shy to speak in public. A stranger in his new home after escaping Germany in 1938, Heinz became Henry and learned to express himself in perfect English, always retaining his German accent. He made his way first to Harvard, then to Washington, until, thanks to Nelson Rockefeller, he reached the roof of the world in the service of two presidents: Richard Nixon and, after Watergate, Gerald Ford. Kissinger concentrated all the negotiations in his hands and did the work of the diplomatic one Network superfluous: from the first detente with the USSR to the thaw with China, which culminated in Nixon’s trip to Beijing. The Paris agreements on the ceasefire in Vietnam after almost 60,000 US deaths earned him the controversial Nobel Peace Prize: two jurors resigned in protest. In fact, Kissinger was a shadow president, even if the Oval Office desk always remained an impossible mirage for him because he was not born in the United States. Ford’s defeat and the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter marked the end of his public career, rather than his foreign policy involvement through groups like the Trilateral. After leaving government in 1977, Kissinger founded the renowned consulting firm Kissinger Associates, through whose revolving door of ministers and undersecretaries they rotated and whose clients included large and small governments around the world. And it was his studio that spread the news of his death.