Henry Kissinger

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before. He had grown up in Fürth, Bavaria, watched Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his friends in the streets, and seen his father dismissed from a teaching job because of Nazi racial laws. He sometimes snuck past security guards into soccer stadiums just to watch a match, taking beatings when he was caught. Nothing in those experiences suggested that this boy would one day hold more concentrated power over American foreign policy than almost any diplomat in the twentieth century.

  By the time he left government in 1977, Kissinger had served as both national security advisor and secretary of state, brokered a secret opening to China after two decades of silence, negotiated a Nobel Prize-winning ceasefire in Vietnam that he later tried to return, and left behind a record that his admirers called visionary and his critics called criminal. He died on the 29th of November, 2023, at the age of one hundred. The questions his life raises have never been resolved: what does effective diplomacy actually require, and what does it cost?

• 2. The Refugee and the Soldier

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  Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on the 27th of May, 1923, in Fürth, Bavaria, the son of a schoolteacher named Louis and a homemaker named Paula, who came from Leutershausen. His family's surname traced back to 1817, when his great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb adopted it from the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen. As a boy, Kissinger played for the youth team of SpVgg Fürth, one of the best clubs in Germany at the time.

  In a 2022 BBC interview, Kissinger recalled being nine years old in 1933 when he learned of Adolf Hitler's election as Chancellor. The years that followed brought beatings from Hitler Youth gangs, exclusion from secondary school, and his father's forced removal from his job. On the 20th of August, 1938, the family fled. They stopped briefly in London before landing in New York City.

  Kissinger spent his high-school years in the German-Jewish community in Washington Heights, Manhattan. He finished school at night while working in a shaving brush factory during the day. He never lost his German accent, attributing it to childhood shyness that made him hesitant to speak. He began studying accounting at City College of New York, but in early 1943 he was drafted.

  The army sent him first to Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he became a naturalized U.S. citizen on the 19th of June, 1943. A fellow immigrant named Fritz Kraemer recognized Kissinger's German fluency and intelligence and arranged his transfer to military intelligence. He saw combat during the Battle of the Bulge and on the 10th of April, 1945, participated in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp, a subcamp of Neuengamme. He wrote in his journal at the time: "I had never seen people degraded to the level that people were in Ahlem. They barely looked human. They were skeletons."

  After the liberation, Kissinger's language skills made him indispensable in ways that outran his rank. Though only a private, he was placed in charge of administering the city of Krefeld, establishing a civilian government within eight days. He was then assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, given a team in Hanover tasked with tracking down Gestapo officers, and awarded the Bronze Star. His list of Gestapo personnel in the Bergstraße region led to a series of arrests; in October 1948, four of those caught were executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison after being found guilty of killing two American prisoners of war. Kissinger later said the army "made me feel like an American".

• 3. Harvard and the Architecture of Power

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  Kissinger earned his Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in political science from Harvard College in 1950, studying under William Yandell Elliott. His undergraduate thesis ran over 400 pages and directly provoked the university's cap on undergraduate thesis length, set thereafter at 35,000 words. He earned his master's and doctorate in 1951 and 1954, respectively.

  His doctoral dissertation, later published in 1957 as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, introduced a concept of "legitimacy" that would shape his entire career. Kissinger defined legitimacy not as justice, but as "an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy." An order accepted by all major powers was legitimate; one rejected by any great power was dangerous. Questions of public opinion and morality were, in his framework, simply irrelevant to statecraft. The dissertation won him the Senator Charles Sumner Prize.

  At Harvard he directed the International Seminar from 1951 to 1971, teaching students including Joseph Nye. In 1955 and 1956 he worked as study director on nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He released Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957, a book that caused significant controversy by proposing the regular use of tactical nuclear weapons to win wars and by criticizing the Eisenhower administration's doctrine of massive retaliation.

  Outside the classroom he served as a consultant to the Operations Research Office, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Department of State, and the RAND Corporation. He became foreign policy advisor to Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaigns in 1960, 1964, and 1968. He first met Richard Nixon at a party hosted by Clare Boothe Luce in 1967, finding him more "thoughtful" than expected. Yet as recently as July 1968, Kissinger was calling Nixon "the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president." When Nixon won the nomination, Kissinger contacted campaign aide Richard Allen and volunteered to do anything to help him win.

• 4. Nixon, Secrecy, and Détente

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  Historian David Rothkopf described Nixon and Kissinger as "a fascinating pair" who "complemented each other perfectly." Kissinger was, in Rothkopf's words, "the charming and worldly Mr. Outside who provided the grace and intellectual-establishment respectability that Nixon lacked, disdained and aspired to." Both were, Rothkopf argued, driven as much by their need for approval and their neuroses as by their strengths.

  The two men shared a penchant for secrecy. They conducted numerous "backchannel" negotiations that excluded the State Department entirely, routing communications through Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The State Department was regularly left out of major foreign policy developments in a way that paralleled Woodrow Wilson's relationship with Colonel House, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's with Harry Hopkins.

  Kissinger served as national security advisor from 1969 to 1975 and as the 56th secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. The policy he became most associated with was détente: a deliberate relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union, expressed through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, culminating in the SALT I treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty negotiated with Leonid Brezhnev.

  The opening to China, often credited to Kissinger, was driven primarily by Nixon, though Kissinger executed it. In April 1970, both men promised Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, that they would never compromise with Mao Zedong. Despite that pledge, Kissinger made two trips to the People's Republic in July and October 1971, the first conducted entirely in secret, to meet with Premier Zhou Enlai. During those visits the central issue was Taiwan. Kissinger agreed to withdraw two-thirds of American forces from Taiwan when the Vietnam War ended and to pull the remainder as Sino-American relations improved. The talks paved the way for the 1972 summit between Nixon, Zhou, and Mao Zedong, ending 23 years of diplomatic isolation and producing a tacit anti-Soviet strategic alignment between the two countries.

• 5. Vietnam and the Nobel Controversy

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  Kissinger had visited Vietnam once in 1965 and twice in 1966 as a consultant to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the ambassador to Saigon. By those visits he concluded that the United States "knew neither how to win or how to conclude" the war. When he came into office in 1969 he favored a negotiating strategy under which both sides would pull their troops out of South Vietnam and the competing Vietnamese governments would form a coalition.

  In early 1969, Kissinger opposed the bombing of Cambodia, fearing Nixon was acting without any plan for the diplomatic fallout. On the 16th of March, 1969, Nixon announced the bombing would start the next day. Kissinger became more supportive once the president was committed. Scholars have attributed substantial responsibility to Kissinger for the killing of between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilians and for the destabilization that contributed to the Khmer Rouge's rise to power.

  The path to a peace agreement wound through years of secret talks in Paris between Kissinger and North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. On the evening of the 8th of October, 1972, Tho made what Kissinger called "a very realistic and very simple proposal": a ceasefire in exchange for complete American withdrawal and the release of all prisoners of war. Kissinger accepted, telling Nixon that the "mutual withdrawal formula" that had been the American position for years had been "unobtainable through ten years of war."

  South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu refused to sign. Nixon subsequently demanded 69 amendments to the draft treaty and sent Kissinger back to Paris to force Tho to accept them. Kissinger regarded the amendments as "preposterous," knowing Tho would never agree. Tho departed Paris for Hanoi on the 13th of December, 1972. Kissinger, worked up into fury, told Nixon: "They're just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits."

  On the 27th of January, 1973, a peace agreement was signed calling for complete U.S. withdrawal by March in exchange for the return of American prisoners of war. Kissinger and Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the 10th of December, 1973. Tho declined the award, saying peace had not been restored. Kissinger wrote to the Nobel Committee that he accepted "with humility" and donated the entire prize money to the children of American service members killed or missing in Indochina. After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, he attempted to return his prize medal. According to Irwin Abrams in 2001, it was the most controversial Nobel Peace Prize to date; for the first time in the history of the award, two committee members resigned in protest.

• 6. Shuttle Diplomacy and the Yom Kippur War

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  At 6:15 in the morning on the 6th of October, 1973, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs Joseph Sisco informed Kissinger that Egypt and Syria were about to go to war with Israel. Kissinger did not notify President Nixon or White House chief of staff Alexander Haig until between 8:35 and 9:25 that morning; both were at Key Biscayne discussing Spiro Agnew's imminent resignation. Kissinger's first call, at 6:40 am, was to his Soviet counterpart Anatoly Dobrynin.

  Israeli prime minister Golda Meir had requested $850 million worth of American arms and equipment to replace Israel's losses in the fighting. Nixon sent roughly $2 billion worth. The arms shipment enraged King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who placed a total embargo on oil shipments to the United States on the 20th of October, 1973, joined by all Arab oil-producing states except Iraq and Libya.

  Kissinger flew to Riyadh on the 7th of November, 1973, to ask Faisal to end the embargo in exchange for a promise of even-handed treatment in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Faisal refused. The embargo only ended on the 19th of March, 1974, after Sadat reported the United States was being more even-handed and Kissinger promised to sell Saudi Arabia weapons previously denied on the grounds they might be used against Israel.

  In 1973-74, Kissinger flew between Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Damascus in what became known as "shuttle diplomacy," attempting to build a lasting peace out of the armistice. His first meeting with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad lasted six hours and thirty minutes, long enough that the press briefly feared he had been kidnapped. In his memoirs Kissinger described Assad as negotiating "tenaciously and daringly like a riverboat gambler to make sure he had exacted the last sliver of available concessions." The efforts produced two ceasefires between Egypt and Israel: Sinai I in January 1974 and Sinai II in September 1975.

• 7. Coups, Dirty Wars, and the Contested Legacy

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  The governments Kissinger helped topple or support form a long list. In Bolivia, after a left-wing nationalist general named Juan José Torres took power in October 1970, Kissinger and Nixon discussed the possibility of backing a coup on the 11th of June, 1971. In July, the administration's 40 Committee approved covert funding to Torres's opposition. Torres was overthrown by Hugo Banzer's Nationalist Popular Front on the 21st of August, 1971.

  In Chile, Kissinger's role began before the 1973 coup. When Socialist Party candidate Salvador Allende was elected in 1970, the Nixon administration, with Kissinger's input, authorized the CIA to encourage a coup to prevent Allende's inauguration. Prior to the election, Kissinger had said: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people." Allende died on the 11th of September, 1973, during an army assault on the presidential palace led by Augusto Pinochet.

  In Argentina, a June 1976 meeting at the Hotel Carrera in Santiago produced what an October 1987 investigative report in The Nation described as Kissinger giving the Argentine military junta a "green light" for clandestine repression. Thousands of people were held in more than 400 secret concentration camps before being executed. Kissinger urged foreign minister César Augusto Guzzetti to "get back to normal procedures" before the U.S. Congress could consider sanctions. His own aide Harry W. Shlaudeman later confirmed that Ambassador Robert C. Hill had sent back-channel communications reporting that Guzzetti had gloated to Hill that Kissinger had said nothing about human rights. Kissinger also attended the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina as Videla's personal guest and publicly praised the regime.

  In December 1975, Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian president Suharto in Jakarta. Both made clear the United States would not object to Indonesia's planned annexation of the recently independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor, requesting only that it happen quickly and after they had returned to Washington. Indonesian forces invaded on the 7th of December, 1975. According to Ben Kiernan, the invasion and occupation resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter of the Timorese population between 1975 and 1981.

  In Bangladesh, Kissinger dismissed those who "bleed" for "the dying Bengalis" and ignored the cable from U.S. consul general Archer K. Blood and 20 of his staff describing what Blood called "a selective genocide" by West Pakistan. Kissinger and Nixon ended Blood's tenure as consul general for sending the telegram. Kissinger later called Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi a "bitch" and a "witch" in private conversations with Nixon, and expressed regret for the comments in later years. His official biographer Niall Ferguson described him by 1969 as arguably "one of the most important theorists about foreign policy ever to be produced by the United States."

• 8. Life After Power

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  After Nixon resigned in August 1974, Kissinger retained both positions he held under the Ford administration until the "Halloween Massacre" cabinet reshuffle of November 1975, when Brent Scowcroft replaced him as national security advisor. Ford later explained that when Kissinger held both positions there was "not an independent evaluation of proposals," and he had never liked that arrangement. Kissinger left government entirely when Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in 1976.

  He was offered an endowed chair at Columbia University but declined it in the face of student opposition. He instead taught at Georgetown University's Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service through the late 1970s. In 1982, with a loan from the banking firm of E.M. Warburg, Pincus and Company, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm he ran until his death.

  In March 1989, he established China Ventures, Inc., a joint venture with China International Trust and Investment Corporation involving a US$75 million investment. When ABC's Peter Jennings asked him to comment the morning after the 4th of June 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, Kissinger did not disclose his financial interest in U.S.-China relations and expressed positions generally supportive of Deng Xiaoping's decision to use the military.

  In November 2002, President George W. Bush appointed him to chair the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, established to investigate September 11. Kissinger stepped down on the 13th of December, 2002, rather than reveal his business client list when asked about potential conflicts of interest. In January 2007, he delivered a eulogy for Gerald Ford at Ford's state funeral in Washington National Cathedral. Along with William Perry, Sam Nunn, and George Shultz, he called publicly for a world free of nuclear weapons in a series of op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, and the four created the Nuclear Threat Initiative to advance that goal. He served as chancellor of the College of William and Mary from 2000 to 2005, preceded by Margaret Thatcher and succeeded by Sandra Day O'Connor, a sequence that itself suggests something about the circles in which he moved until the very end.