Henry Kissinger is Dead. Who is Henry Kissinger?

Kissinger was an American statesman who served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon and continued as Secretary of State under Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford. With the death of George Shultz in February 2021, Kissinger became the last surviving member of the Nixon cabinet.

Henry A. Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State, a respected American scholar and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who helped shape the post-World War II world order and helped steer American foreign policy through some of its most complex challenges.

With his sharp intellect, voluminous writings, and belief in the peacemaking power of realpolitik, Dr. Kissinger was one of the most influential foreign policy and national security practitioners of the post-World War II era and was active in national security for more than 70 years. From the age of 20, when he joined the US Army, until his death, Dr. Kissinger continued to travel to Washington to testify on US national security strategy.

His English and German were characterized as eccentric, with a distinctive accent. This was attributed to the fact that he was born in Weimar Germany to a Jewish family under the name Heinz. This family origin and background led Kissinger to have an accent that was considered 'different' by native German and English speakers alike, both in his native German and in English when speaking English, the language of the United States, where the Kissingers fled Nazi Germany and sought refuge after becoming Henry.

As National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Dr. Kissinger was a key player in some of their most important and sometimes controversial policies. In fact, Kissinger became a more prominent figure than the presidents.

After serving in the US Army during World War II, Kissinger decided to become an academic and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. By all accounts, his doctoral dissertation was the longest ever presented at Harvard University. Before taking a government position, Dr. Kissinger served as a faculty member at Harvard University. Perhaps his most passionate endeavor at Harvard, and the formative precursor to his career as an international diplomat, was the International Seminar series, which he founded in 1952 and continued until 1969. Each summer, the Seminar brought together some 40 foreign statesmen for lectures, conferences and, most importantly, networking sessions. Thanks to the Seminar, Dr. Kissinger had a broad base of foreign contacts with whom he could conduct direct diplomacy, including contacts in China, Europe and Latin America, even before he entered government service.

Although successful in academia, Dr. Kissinger also wanted to have a direct influence on politics. He therefore sought to enter the political arena while at Harvard. He served as senior foreign policy advisor to Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaigns in 1960, 1964 and 1968. When Rockefeller lost the Republican nomination in 1968, Dr. Kissinger joined the campaign of the party's candidate, Richard Nixon, albeit reluctantly at first. Following Nixon's victory, Dr. Kissinger was appointed Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and then National Security Advisor. In this capacity, and ultimately as Secretary of State, Dr. Kissinger skillfully guided Washington's policies on many of the most difficult national security challenges in US history.

As Secretary of State, he was instrumental in opening China to the Western world and became one of the best-known figures in diplomacy, respected around the world as the principal spokesman for the détente with the Soviet Union that de-escalated tensions during the Cold War, reflecting his belief in the balance of power as a principle of global order. As the architect of an era of lasting peace, stability, prosperity and global order, he has had a significant impact on generations of citizens from the United States to Europe to China.

Kissinger believed in the power of triangulation as a tool of diplomacy, and this was successfully reflected in his almost simultaneous negotiations with China and the Soviet Union on behalf of the United States, linking the three superpowers of the world at the time. This triangular relationship, Kissinger would later say, "in itself put a kind of pressure on each of them and carefully maneuvered them towards being closer to each other than they were to each other."

As part of America's chess game with the Soviets during the Cold War, Kissinger, as secretary of state and national security advisor to US Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was a staunch supporter and, at least in the case of Chile, complicit in the coups and military dictatorships that spread across South America in the 1970s. Tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed in secret camps, their bodies thrown from airplanes into rivers, their children stolen and given away under false identities. Kissinger's policies, while very effective in advancing American foreign policy interests, were also suggestive of a profound indifference to the fate of civilians, to values and often to simple common sense.

Henry Kissinger lived a life as a truly controversial figure. Indeed, the British author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011, argued convincingly in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger that Kissinger deserved to be tried for "war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping and torture".

Henry Kissinger was a practitioner of Realpolitik. Henry Kissinger invited the North Vietnamese delegation to a peace conference in Paris to explain his plan for peace in Vietnam. As the delegations gathered around the peace table, American planes bombarded North Vietnam. This was Kissinger's logic, aiming to get what he wanted through a simultaneous show of force at the diplomatic table. This approach is exemplified by Kissinger's reflection of American policy towards North Vietnam. 

Kissinger was often seen as the foremost face of the so-called realpolitik concept, which describes a way of conducting foreign policy based purely on interests, as opposed to foreign policy based on a specific set of values and norms (e.g. human rights, democracy, etc.).

Kissinger saw realpolitik as a political system based not on beliefs, doctrines, ethics or morality, but rather on realistic, practical ideas. For this reason, he argued to those within the US who criticized his contacts with the Soviets and the Chinese that no matter how bad the person or regime was, contacts should be made and American policy should be shaped accordingly. 

Kissinger used Realpolitik as an excuse to propose closer relations with Communist China. Mao Zedong was a Communist dictator ruling China at the time. Mao was still leading a so-called "Cultural Revolution", a Chinese revolution in which anyone who opposed Mao could be fired from his job, exiled to the countryside, beaten and even killed by gangs of thugs called Red Guards. It was estimated that 100 million people suffered and hundreds of thousands may have died as a result of the Cultural Revolution. Yet instead of opposing this monster in word and deed, Kissinger gave Mao exactly what he needed, a promise that the United States would not oppose him and international recognition of the international legitimacy of Mao's rule.

Kissinger also proposed a program of what he called "détente" with the Soviet Union, even though it was known that the Soviet Union had violently suppressed revolts in Hungary, Prague and Poland and executed the Hungarian leader Nagy for the crime of declaring free elections. Nevertheless, Kissinger sought closer relations with the Soviet Union. This doctrine once again demonstrated to the world that the United States was flexible enough to cooperate with totalitarian regimes rather than oppose them.

Another bad example for Kissinger (from a humanitarian point of view) is his role in the 1971 war between Pakistan and present-day Bangladesh, then part of Pakistan. It should be remembered that Kissinger was also responsible for one of the greatest political achievements of the Nixon administration, the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and the United States. Pakistan was an important partner of China and the US needed Pakistan to mediate negotiations with China. For the sake of establishing relations with China, Kissinger kept quiet about the hard power policies of the Pakistani government to prevent Bangladesh from seceding. Thus, at the cost of paving the way for the US-China relationship, he was held responsible for the US complicity, or at least bystander, in the actions that today's Bangladeshis remember him with hatred.

In short, this centenarian sycamore was not only a highly skilled politician by all accounts, but also a statesman who was often known to be completely devoid of morality when it came to advancing his own position or that of the American government. To this end, he was willing to do whatever it took, often leaking information to the press if necessary (he is alleged to have stabbed his boss Richard Nixon in the back), to advance his policies both at home and abroad.

Dr. Kissinger is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions. In 1945 he was awarded the Bronze Star by the US Army for distinguished service. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the same year he was voted the most admired person in the world among Americans in a Gallup Poll. He was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1977 and the Medal of Freedom, a one-time award given to ten foreign-born American leaders in 1986.

On November 30, 2023, Kissinger said goodbye to this world and will undoubtedly continue to be one of the most talked about people even after his death, as he undoubtedly was at the end of his life.