WASHINGTON, Nov 30 (Portal) – Henry Kissinger, the most powerful U.S. diplomat of the Cold War era who helped Washington open up to China, forge arms control deals with the Soviet Union and end the Vietnam War, but who was reviled by critics was about human rights, died at the age of 100.
Kissinger, a German-born Jewish refugee whose career took him from academia to diplomacy and who remained an active voice in foreign policy into his later years, died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his geopolitical consulting firm Kissinger Associates said.
Kissinger was at the height of his power in the 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, when he served as national security adviser and secretary of state under Republican President Richard Nixon.
After Nixon’s resignation in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal, he remained a diplomatic force as secretary of state under Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford.
Kissinger was the architect of the U.S. diplomatic opening to China, the groundbreaking arms control talks between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the expansion of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the Paris Peace Agreement with North Vietnam.
While many praised Kissinger for his brilliance and statesmanship, others branded him a war criminal for his support of anti-communist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America. In his final years, his travels were restricted by attempts by some countries to arrest him or question him about past U.S. foreign policy.
Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden waited nearly 24 hours after Kissinger’s death was announced to issue a statement saying that while they often disagreed completely, Kissinger’s “fierce intellect and deep strategic focus were evident.”
Earlier, Biden’s national security spokesman, John Kirby, said of Kissinger: “Whether you agreed with him on every issue, there is no question that he shaped foreign policy decisions for decades, and he certainly had an impact on America’s role.” in the world.”
Kissinger won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, but it was one of the most controversial ever. Two members of the Nobel Committee resigned over the selection as questions arose about the secret US bombings of Cambodia. North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho, who was chosen to share the award, declined it.
As tributes poured in from around the world, Beijing called him a “good old friend of the Chinese people” who made historic contributions to normalizing relations between the two countries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Kissinger as a “wise and far-sighted statesman,” while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his meetings with Kissinger were “a master class in statesmanship.”
However, Bangladesh Foreign Minister Abdul Momen recalled Kissinger’s role in the bloody war between West and East Pakistan in 1971, which eventually led to East Pakistan becoming an independent Bangladesh.
“Henry Kissinger was an iconic diplomat… but unfortunately in 1971 he was completely against the people of what was then East Pakistan,” Momen told WION News. “It is very sad that such a smart man does such inhumane things… He should have apologized to the people of Bangladesh for what he did.”
With his distinctive German-accented voice, Kissinger was never afraid to express his opinions. Ford called him a “super-secretary of state” but also noted his irritability and self-confidence, saying, “In his mind, Henry never made a mistake.”
“He had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew,” Ford told an interviewer shortly before his death in 2006.
Current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “Few people have been better students of history – and even fewer people have contributed more to history – than Henry Kissinger,” while Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called him a “rare scholar-turned-strategist.”
HARVARD FACULTY
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923 in Fürth, Germany and moved to the United States with his family in 1938 before the Nazis began the extermination of European Jewry.
Kissinger anglicized his name to Henry, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943, served in the Army in Europe during World War II, and attended Harvard University on a scholarship, where he received his doctorate in 1954 and remained on the faculty for the next 17 years.
During much of this period, Kissinger served as a consultant to government agencies, including in 1967, when he served as an intermediary for the State Department in North Vietnam. He used his connections in the Democratic administration of President Lyndon Johnson to pass information about peace negotiations to the Nixon camp.
[1/5]Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger arrives at a memorial service for the late Social Democratic leader Egon Bahr at St. Mary’s Church in Berlin, Germany, September 17, 2015. Portal/Fabrizio Bensch/File Photo ACKNOWLEDGE RIGHTS
When Nixon’s promise to end the Vietnam War helped him win the 1968 presidential election, he hired Kissinger as national security adviser.
But the process of “Vietnamization”—the shifting of the burden of war from U.S. forces to the South Vietnamese—was long and bloody, punctuated by massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of the North’s ports, and the bombing of Cambodia.
Kissinger declared in 1972 that “peace was near” in Vietnam, but the Paris Peace Accords signed in January 1973 were little more than a prelude to the final communist takeover of the South two years later.
In addition to his role as national security adviser, Kissinger was named secretary of state in 1973, giving him unchallenged authority in foreign affairs.
A worsening Arab-Israeli conflict led Kissinger to undertake his first “shuttle” mission, the kind of highly personal, high-pressure diplomacy for which he became famous.
Thirty-two days of commuting between Jerusalem and Damascus helped Kissinger forge a permanent disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
To reduce Soviet influence, Kissinger turned to his main communist rival, China, and made two trips there, including a secret one to meet with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai. The result was Nixon’s historic 1972 summit in Beijing with Chairman Mao Zedong and the eventual formalization of relations between the two countries.
Former U.S. Ambassador to China Winston Lord, who served as Kissinger’s special assistant, called his former boss a “tireless champion of peace” and said, “America has lost a preeminent champion of the national interest.”
Strategic Arms Agreement
As foreign minister, Kissinger traveled with Ford to Vladivostok in the Soviet Union in 1974, where the president met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and agreed on a basic framework for a strategic arms pact. The agreement crowned Kissinger’s groundbreaking détente efforts, which led to an easing of US-Soviet tensions.
But Kissinger’s diplomatic skills had their limits. In 1975, he was accused of failing to persuade Israel and Egypt to agree to a second-stage disengagement in Sinai.
And in the India-Pakistan War of 1971, Nixon and Kissinger received heavy criticism for their embrace of Pakistan. Kissinger called the Indians “bastards” – a remark he later regretted.
Like Nixon, he feared the spread of left-wing ideas in the Western Hemisphere, and his actions in response led to deep distrust of Washington among many Latin Americans in the coming years.
In 1970, he plotted with the CIA how best to overthrow the Marxist, democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, and in a memo after the 1976 coup in Argentina he said that military dictators should be encouraged.
When Ford lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger’s days in government were largely over. The next Republican in the White House, Ronald Reagan, distanced himself from Kissinger, viewing him as out of step with his conservative constituency.
After leaving government, Kissinger founded a high-priced, high-performance consulting firm in New York that advised the world’s business elite. He served on corporate boards and in various foreign policy and security forums, wrote books, and became a regular media commentator on international affairs.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Kissinger to head an investigative committee. But outcry from Democrats, who saw a conflict of interest with many of his consulting firm’s clients, forced Kissinger to resign.
He remained active into old age, attending White House meetings, publishing a book on leadership and testifying before a Senate committee about the North Korean nuclear threat. In July 2023, he made a surprise visit to Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.
He was divorced from his first wife, Ann Fleischer, in 1964 and married Nancy Maginnes, an adviser to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in 1974. He had two children with his first wife.
A memorial service will be held in New York and Kissinger will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington, a source familiar with the arrangements said.
Reporting by Steve Holland in Washington and Arshad Mohammed in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Long Beach, Calif. and Don Durfee, Kanishka Singh, David Brunnstrom, Trevor Hunnicutt and Jarrett Renshaw in Washington; Edited by Bill Trott, Diane Craft, Rosalba O’Brien, Tomasz Janowski, Frances Kerry, Jonathan Oatis and Stephen Coates
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