Editors’ note: This obituary was originally prepared in 2007, with interviews conducted with individuals who have since passed away. These instances are noted below in the text.
Henry Kissinger, the most celebrated U.S. diplomat of the late 20th century, died on Nov. 29 at age 100.
Kissinger was the first superstar Secretary of State, the man who perfected “shuttle diplomacy,” helped Richard Nixon open U.S. relations with China, and won a Nobel prize for extricating the United States from a losing war in Vietnam.
Kissinger was also an intensely controversial figure, harshly criticized for policies that contributed to thousands of U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam, genocide in Cambodia, and a coup in Chile that led to two decades of authoritarian rule.
“He was a realpolitician in the German sense of the term,” said Robert Dallek, whose 2007 book, Nixon and Kissinger, chronicled the apex of Kissinger’s career — his partnership with Nixon from 1969-74.
“He was the most influential secretary of State in modern times but not the most constructive or successful,” Dallek added. Those accolades, he said in a 2007 interview, are more aptly bestowed on George Marshall and Dean Acheson, who created institutions such as NATO that preserved Western democracy in Europe after World War Il and ultimately won the Cold War.
Yet Kissinger was more famous. An unabashed publicity hound who came to prominence during the heyday of network news, he dated Hollywood starlets and courted and manipulated reporters and columnists. He remained a fixture on television talk shows and newspaper op-editorial pages well into his 90s.
Democrat and Republican presidents alike sought his counsel as they shaped U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War and the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Companies and governments also paid millions of dollars to his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, coveting his strategic analysis and contacts with those still in power.
Kissinger’s “influence stayed with him after he left office while that of all the others — with the possible exception of James Baker — dissipated,” said Leslie Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and onetime Kissinger protégé, in a 2007 interview. (Gelb died in 2019.)
Kissinger’s drive was that of an immigrant who had escaped Nazi Germany.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger on May 27, 1923, in the Bavarian town of Furth, he was the first son of an Orthodox Jewish schoolteacher, Louis, and Paula Stern, the daughter of a cattle trader.
With Nazism on the rise, the young Kissinger was barred from soccer matches and schools and beaten up by local toughs, according to a 1992 biography by Walter Isaacson. Kissinger’s father was fired, along with other Jewish teachers, from a state school in 1935 and the family fled to New York City in 1938.
Intelligent, industrious, and ambitious, Kissinger worked nights while attending high school and a year at City College, intending to become an accountant. World War Il intervened, however, and Kissinger was drafted into the Army in 1943.
A chance encounter with a fellow refugee from Nazism, a Prussian aristocrat named Fritz Kraemer, led to Kissinger’s transfer from infantryman to translator, administrator of occupied German towns, counter-intelligence expert, and ultimately, professor at Harvard University.
Kraemer told Kissinger, “Gentlemen don’t go to CCNY (City College of New York); they go to Harvard,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, another German refugee who rose to become a top aide to Kissinger at the White House and State Department. (Sonnenfeldt died in 2012).
At Harvard, where he got his BA, master’s, and doctorate, Kissinger dazzled professors. They particularly praised his dissertation, which was ostensibly about early 19th-century Europe but had parallels for containing the contemporary Soviet Union.
Gelb, a former Kissinger student and research assistant, called the dissertation —A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22 — and a subsequent book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, the two most important works on foreign policy in the last half-century. In them, Kissinger expounded his worldview: pragmatic, even ruthless balance-of-power politics, that gave minimal weight to moral issues, such as human rights.
“If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter,” Kissinger once told a colleague, according to Dallek.
Despite his early accomplishments, no one predicted in the 1950s and early 60s that he would become the public figure that he did, Gelb said. At the time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants ran the State Department, and rumpled Jewish professors with foreign accents were confined to academia and Hollywood movies like Dr. Strangelove.
Kissinger broke through in part because of a close association with Nelson Rockefeller, a millionaire adviser to President Eisenhower who became New York governor and a presidential aspirant.
When Rockefeller failed to secure the Republican nomination in 1968, Kissinger shifted to Nixon, offering confidential information about U.S. negotiations with communist North Vietnam that helped Nixon win the election, according to several historians, among them William Bundy, a former assistant secretary of State.
After his victory, Nixon made Kissinger his national security adviser and in 1973, secretary of State as well. Kissinger continued as secretary for Gerald Ford. Ford became president after Nixon resigned in 1974 for his role in the cover-up of the burglary of Democratic headquarters at Washington’s Watergate complex in 1972.
Kissinger might still have achieved high office had Nixon not won the presidency. A registered Democrat who had voted for John Kennedy in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Kissinger had been a part-time adviser to both and had also cozied up to the 1968 Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, Dallek, and Isaacson wrote.
Still, it was the combination of Kissinger and Nixon — both brilliant, insecure, power-hungry men determined to make history — that yielded some of U.S. diplomacy’s most impressive achievements.
Among them:
Breakthrough with China. Nixon, who had spent much of his career bashing so-called “Red China,” came to office having decided to do a 180-degree turn. He had recognized the folly of snubbing a government representing a fifth of the world’s population; he also sought to gain leverage with the Soviet Union and blunt the impact of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. An advocate of such a shift before he met Nixon, Kissinger conducted the secret negotiations that prepared for Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing in 1972.
Détente with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger leveraged improved relations with China to reduce tensions with Moscow and conclude the first major treaty limiting U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals.
Mideast peacemaking. Surprised by the 1973 October war launched by Egypt and Syria against Israel, Kissinger negotiated agreements that led to the separation of Arab and Israeli forces. The negotiations increased U.S. influence with Israel and Arab countries alike, reduced the Soviet role in the Middle East, and laid the groundwork for Israel’s first peace accord with an Arab state, Egypt, after the Republicans left office in 1978.
“These accomplishments were so dazzling that they took the edge off America’s strategic defeat in Indochina and reaffirmed American power in the world,” Gelb told this author in 2007.
There was also a darker side to the Kissinger-Nixon partnership:
Although they came to office acknowledging that a Vietnam victory was unlikely, Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the war, seeking an elusive “peace with honor.” That led to 20,000 more U.S. deaths — and thousands more Asian casualties than if the U.S. had withdrawn in 1969.
Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho for the agreement that led to U.S. withdrawal. Two of the five members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest. The North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam and overthrew the U.S.-backed government there in 1975.
The administration’s decision to bomb Cambodia in 1969 and invade it in 1970 in an effort to destroy Vietnamese communist sanctuaries spread instability that led indirectly to the 1975 takeover by the genocidal Khmer Rouge, responsible for killing more than two million Cambodians.
Transcripts of taped conservations between Nixon and Kissinger and between Kissinger and his staff revealed covert U.S. efforts to prevent the 1970 presidential election of Chilean leftist Salvador Allende and encourage the generals who murdered Allende and thousands of other Chileans in 1973. Besides Chilean democracy, the casualties included two Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. The military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet lasted until 1990.
Despite their close collaboration, Kissinger and Nixon had a stormy, at times dysfunctional relationship. Kissinger fawned over Nixon in person but disparaged him in private, calling him a “madman,” a drunk, and “the meatball mind,” Dallek wrote. Nixon in turn called Kissinger “my Jew boy” and complained that Kissinger was trying to steal the limelight from him.
The policies they advanced drew criticism from human rights supporters and anti-Communists who later became known as neoconservatives for their opposition to détente with the Soviet Union.
Yet Kissinger received largely laudatory press, dazzling State Department reporters who accompanied him on marathon journeys.
Bernard Gwertzman, who covered Kissinger for The New York Times, recalled a month-long Middle East trip after the 1973 war. Eastern Airlines had just inaugurated regular New York to Washington flights. A few minutes after takeoff from Aswan, Egypt, Joseph Sisco, a top Kissinger aide, came to the aisle of Kissinger’s Air Force Boeing 707 and announced: “Welcome aboard the Egyptian-Israeli shuttle.” Thus the term “shuttle diplomacy” was coined.
Reporters dubbed Kissinger “Henry Hercules” for his stamina, but an insecure Kissinger often deceived reporters to puff up coverage even further, Gwertzman said in a 2007 interview. In 1974, Israel had demanded a list of Israeli prisoners before it would negotiate a separation of forces agreement with Syria. Kissinger announced after meeting then-Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus that he had obtained the list. In fact, Gwertzman later learned, it had been delivered to Kissinger by a Syrian envoy before he left Washington.
Kissinger was as thin-skinned as he was media savvy. He would “call us up at home to kvetch” when a story displeased him, Gwertzman said. “He would say, ‘My father was so upset with your article that he didn’t put it in his scrapbook.’ “
Kissinger had a volcanic temper and sometimes abused subordinates, playing them off against each other and authorizing FBI tapping of their home phones a practice, Isaacson wrote, that foreshadowed “formation of a secret White House unit to bug political opponents” and ultimately, the Watergate break-in. Of 28 assistants hired by Kissinger in 1969, only 7 were still around two years later, Isaacson wrote. Four had resigned to protest the 1970 invasion of Cambodia.
Sonnenfeldt, one of those who stayed, was the Soviet and East bloc specialist on the National Security Council. Yet Kissinger delighted in cutting him — as well as the State Department — out of meetings where policy toward the Soviet Union was discussed.
“There was a degree of secrecy about what he was doing,” Sonnenfeldt said. That included backchannel talks with then Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. “I didn’t get to see Dobrynin except at social functions,” Sonnenfeldt complained.
Because he was conspiratorial and deceitful, Kissinger thought others were too, Gelb said. Shortly after he left office, Kissinger accused Gelb of secretly blackballing him from the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. In fact, Gelb had voted for him.
“He was paranoid as hell,” Gelb said.
Barbara Slavin is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and former journalist.
Kissinger’s Very Mixed Legacy of Brilliance and Brutality
By Barbara Slavin
Diplomacy & Dialogue
Editors’ note: This obituary was originally prepared in 2007, with interviews conducted with individuals who have since passed away. These instances are noted below in the text.
Henry Kissinger, the most celebrated U.S. diplomat of the late 20th century, died on Nov. 29 at age 100.
Kissinger was the first superstar Secretary of State, the man who perfected “shuttle diplomacy,” helped Richard Nixon open U.S. relations with China, and won a Nobel prize for extricating the United States from a losing war in Vietnam.
Kissinger was also an intensely controversial figure, harshly criticized for policies that contributed to thousands of U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam, genocide in Cambodia, and a coup in Chile that led to two decades of authoritarian rule.
“He was a realpolitician in the German sense of the term,” said Robert Dallek, whose 2007 book, Nixon and Kissinger, chronicled the apex of Kissinger’s career — his partnership with Nixon from 1969-74.
“He was the most influential secretary of State in modern times but not the most constructive or successful,” Dallek added. Those accolades, he said in a 2007 interview, are more aptly bestowed on George Marshall and Dean Acheson, who created institutions such as NATO that preserved Western democracy in Europe after World War Il and ultimately won the Cold War.
Yet Kissinger was more famous. An unabashed publicity hound who came to prominence during the heyday of network news, he dated Hollywood starlets and courted and manipulated reporters and columnists. He remained a fixture on television talk shows and newspaper op-editorial pages well into his 90s.
Democrat and Republican presidents alike sought his counsel as they shaped U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War and the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Companies and governments also paid millions of dollars to his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, coveting his strategic analysis and contacts with those still in power.
Kissinger’s “influence stayed with him after he left office while that of all the others — with the possible exception of James Baker — dissipated,” said Leslie Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and onetime Kissinger protégé, in a 2007 interview. (Gelb died in 2019.)
Kissinger’s drive was that of an immigrant who had escaped Nazi Germany.
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger on May 27, 1923, in the Bavarian town of Furth, he was the first son of an Orthodox Jewish schoolteacher, Louis, and Paula Stern, the daughter of a cattle trader.
With Nazism on the rise, the young Kissinger was barred from soccer matches and schools and beaten up by local toughs, according to a 1992 biography by Walter Isaacson. Kissinger’s father was fired, along with other Jewish teachers, from a state school in 1935 and the family fled to New York City in 1938.
Intelligent, industrious, and ambitious, Kissinger worked nights while attending high school and a year at City College, intending to become an accountant. World War Il intervened, however, and Kissinger was drafted into the Army in 1943.
A chance encounter with a fellow refugee from Nazism, a Prussian aristocrat named Fritz Kraemer, led to Kissinger’s transfer from infantryman to translator, administrator of occupied German towns, counter-intelligence expert, and ultimately, professor at Harvard University.
Kraemer told Kissinger, “Gentlemen don’t go to CCNY (City College of New York); they go to Harvard,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, another German refugee who rose to become a top aide to Kissinger at the White House and State Department. (Sonnenfeldt died in 2012).
At Harvard, where he got his BA, master’s, and doctorate, Kissinger dazzled professors. They particularly praised his dissertation, which was ostensibly about early 19th-century Europe but had parallels for containing the contemporary Soviet Union.
Gelb, a former Kissinger student and research assistant, called the dissertation —A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22 — and a subsequent book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, the two most important works on foreign policy in the last half-century. In them, Kissinger expounded his worldview: pragmatic, even ruthless balance-of-power politics, that gave minimal weight to moral issues, such as human rights.
“If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter,” Kissinger once told a colleague, according to Dallek.
Despite his early accomplishments, no one predicted in the 1950s and early 60s that he would become the public figure that he did, Gelb said. At the time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants ran the State Department, and rumpled Jewish professors with foreign accents were confined to academia and Hollywood movies like Dr. Strangelove.
Kissinger broke through in part because of a close association with Nelson Rockefeller, a millionaire adviser to President Eisenhower who became New York governor and a presidential aspirant.
When Rockefeller failed to secure the Republican nomination in 1968, Kissinger shifted to Nixon, offering confidential information about U.S. negotiations with communist North Vietnam that helped Nixon win the election, according to several historians, among them William Bundy, a former assistant secretary of State.
After his victory, Nixon made Kissinger his national security adviser and in 1973, secretary of State as well. Kissinger continued as secretary for Gerald Ford. Ford became president after Nixon resigned in 1974 for his role in the cover-up of the burglary of Democratic headquarters at Washington’s Watergate complex in 1972.
Kissinger might still have achieved high office had Nixon not won the presidency. A registered Democrat who had voted for John Kennedy in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Kissinger had been a part-time adviser to both and had also cozied up to the 1968 Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, Dallek, and Isaacson wrote.
Still, it was the combination of Kissinger and Nixon — both brilliant, insecure, power-hungry men determined to make history — that yielded some of U.S. diplomacy’s most impressive achievements.
Among them:
Breakthrough with China. Nixon, who had spent much of his career bashing so-called “Red China,” came to office having decided to do a 180-degree turn. He had recognized the folly of snubbing a government representing a fifth of the world’s population; he also sought to gain leverage with the Soviet Union and blunt the impact of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. An advocate of such a shift before he met Nixon, Kissinger conducted the secret negotiations that prepared for Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing in 1972.
Détente with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger leveraged improved relations with China to reduce tensions with Moscow and conclude the first major treaty limiting U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals.
Mideast peacemaking. Surprised by the 1973 October war launched by Egypt and Syria against Israel, Kissinger negotiated agreements that led to the separation of Arab and Israeli forces. The negotiations increased U.S. influence with Israel and Arab countries alike, reduced the Soviet role in the Middle East, and laid the groundwork for Israel’s first peace accord with an Arab state, Egypt, after the Republicans left office in 1978.
“These accomplishments were so dazzling that they took the edge off America’s strategic defeat in Indochina and reaffirmed American power in the world,” Gelb told this author in 2007.
There was also a darker side to the Kissinger-Nixon partnership:
Although they came to office acknowledging that a Vietnam victory was unlikely, Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the war, seeking an elusive “peace with honor.” That led to 20,000 more U.S. deaths — and thousands more Asian casualties than if the U.S. had withdrawn in 1969.
Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho for the agreement that led to U.S. withdrawal. Two of the five members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest. The North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam and overthrew the U.S.-backed government there in 1975.
The administration’s decision to bomb Cambodia in 1969 and invade it in 1970 in an effort to destroy Vietnamese communist sanctuaries spread instability that led indirectly to the 1975 takeover by the genocidal Khmer Rouge, responsible for killing more than two million Cambodians.
Transcripts of taped conservations between Nixon and Kissinger and between Kissinger and his staff revealed covert U.S. efforts to prevent the 1970 presidential election of Chilean leftist Salvador Allende and encourage the generals who murdered Allende and thousands of other Chileans in 1973. Besides Chilean democracy, the casualties included two Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. The military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet lasted until 1990.
Despite their close collaboration, Kissinger and Nixon had a stormy, at times dysfunctional relationship. Kissinger fawned over Nixon in person but disparaged him in private, calling him a “madman,” a drunk, and “the meatball mind,” Dallek wrote. Nixon in turn called Kissinger “my Jew boy” and complained that Kissinger was trying to steal the limelight from him.
The policies they advanced drew criticism from human rights supporters and anti-Communists who later became known as neoconservatives for their opposition to détente with the Soviet Union.
Yet Kissinger received largely laudatory press, dazzling State Department reporters who accompanied him on marathon journeys.
Bernard Gwertzman, who covered Kissinger for The New York Times, recalled a month-long Middle East trip after the 1973 war. Eastern Airlines had just inaugurated regular New York to Washington flights. A few minutes after takeoff from Aswan, Egypt, Joseph Sisco, a top Kissinger aide, came to the aisle of Kissinger’s Air Force Boeing 707 and announced: “Welcome aboard the Egyptian-Israeli shuttle.” Thus the term “shuttle diplomacy” was coined.
Reporters dubbed Kissinger “Henry Hercules” for his stamina, but an insecure Kissinger often deceived reporters to puff up coverage even further, Gwertzman said in a 2007 interview. In 1974, Israel had demanded a list of Israeli prisoners before it would negotiate a separation of forces agreement with Syria. Kissinger announced after meeting then-Syrian President Hafez Assad in Damascus that he had obtained the list. In fact, Gwertzman later learned, it had been delivered to Kissinger by a Syrian envoy before he left Washington.
Kissinger was as thin-skinned as he was media savvy. He would “call us up at home to kvetch” when a story displeased him, Gwertzman said. “He would say, ‘My father was so upset with your article that he didn’t put it in his scrapbook.’ “
Kissinger had a volcanic temper and sometimes abused subordinates, playing them off against each other and authorizing FBI tapping of their home phones a practice, Isaacson wrote, that foreshadowed “formation of a secret White House unit to bug political opponents” and ultimately, the Watergate break-in. Of 28 assistants hired by Kissinger in 1969, only 7 were still around two years later, Isaacson wrote. Four had resigned to protest the 1970 invasion of Cambodia.
Sonnenfeldt, one of those who stayed, was the Soviet and East bloc specialist on the National Security Council. Yet Kissinger delighted in cutting him — as well as the State Department — out of meetings where policy toward the Soviet Union was discussed.
“There was a degree of secrecy about what he was doing,” Sonnenfeldt said. That included backchannel talks with then Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. “I didn’t get to see Dobrynin except at social functions,” Sonnenfeldt complained.
Because he was conspiratorial and deceitful, Kissinger thought others were too, Gelb said. Shortly after he left office, Kissinger accused Gelb of secretly blackballing him from the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. In fact, Gelb had voted for him.
“He was paranoid as hell,” Gelb said.
Barbara Slavin is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and former journalist.
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