Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravely voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died Wednesday, his consulting firm said. He was 100.
\nWith his gruff yet commanding presence and behind-the-scenes manipulation of power, Kissinger exerted uncommon influence on global affairs under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, earning both vilification and the Nobel Peace Prize. Decades later, his name still provoked impassioned debate over foreign policy landmarks long past.
\nKissinger\u2019s power grew during the turmoil of Watergate, when the politically attuned diplomat assumed a role akin to co-president to the weakened Nixon.
\n\u201cNo doubt my vanity was piqued,\u201d Kissinger later wrote of his expanding influence. \u201cBut the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrophe.\u201d
\nA Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family in his teens, Kissinger in his later years cultivated the reputation of respected statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to Republicans and Democrats alike and managing a global consulting business. He turned up in President Donald Trump\u2019s White House on multiple occasions. But Nixon-era documents and tapes, as they trickled out over the years, brought revelations \u2014 many in Kissinger\u2019s own words \u2014 that sometimes cast him in a harsh light.
\nNever without his detractors, Kissinger after he left government was dogged by critics who argued that he should be called to account for his policies on Southeast Asia and support of repressive regimes in Latin America.
\nFor eight restless years \u2014 first as national security adviser, later as secretary of state, and for a time in the middle holding both titles \u2014 Kissinger ranged across the breadth of major foreign policy issues. He conducted the first \u201cshuttle diplomacy\u201d in the quest for Middle East peace. He used secret channels to pursue ties between the United States and China, ending decades of isolation and mutual hostility.
\nHe initiated the Paris negotiations that ultimately provided a face-saving means \u2014 a \u201cdecent interval,\u201d he called it \u2014 to get the United States out of a costly war in Vietnam. Two years later, Saigon fell to the communists.
\nAnd he pursued a policy of detente with the Soviet Union that led to arms control agreements and raised the possibility that the tensions of the Cold War and its nuclear threat did not have to last forever.
\nAt age 99, he was still out on tour for his book on leadership. Asked in July 2022 interview with ABC whether he wished he could take back any of his decisions, Kissinger demurred, saying: \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about these problems all my life. It\u2019s my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.\u201d
\nEven then, he had mixed thoughts on Nixon\u2019s record, saying \u201chis foreign policy has held up and he was quite effective in domestic policy\u201d while allowing that the disgraced president had \u201cpermitted himself to be involved in a number of steps that were inappropriate for a president.\u201d
\nAs Kissinger turned 100 in May 2023, his son David wrote in The Washington Post that his father\u2019s centenary \u201cmight have an air of inevitability for anyone familiar with his force of character and love of historical symbolism. Not only has he outlived most of his peers, eminent detractors and students, but he has also remained indefatigably active throughout his 90s.\u201d
\nAsked during a CBS interview in the leadup to his 100th birthday about those who view his conduct of foreign policy over the years as a kind of \u201ccriminality,\u201d Kissinger was nothing but dismissive.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s a reflection of their ignorance,\u201d Kissinger said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t conceived that way. It wasn\u2019t conducted that way.\u201d
\nKissinger was a practitioner of realpolitik \u2014 using diplomacy to achieve practical objectives rather than advance lofty ideals. Supporters said his pragmatic bent served US interests; critics saw a Machiavellian approach that ran counter to democratic ideals.
\nHe was castigated for authorizing telephone wiretaps of reporters and his own National Security Council staff to plug news leaks in Nixon\u2019s White House. He was denounced on college campuses for the bombing and allied invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, intended to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam.
\nThat \u201cincursion,\u201d as Nixon and Kissinger called it, was blamed by some for contributing to Cambodia\u2019s fall into the hands of Khmer Rouge insurgents who later slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians.
\nKissinger, for his part, made it his mission to debunk what he referred to in 2007 as a \u201cprevalent myth\u201d \u2014 that he and Nixon had settled in 1972 for peace terms that had been available in 1969 and thus had needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives.
\nHe insisted that the only way to speed up the withdrawal would have been to agree to Hanoi\u2019s demands that the US overthrow the South Vietnamese government and replace it with communist-dominated leadership.
\nPudgy and messy, Kissinger incongruously acquired a reputation as a ladies\u2019 man in the staid Nixon administration. Kissinger, who had divorced his first wife in 1964, called women \u201ca diversion, a hobby.\u201d Jill St. John was a frequent companion. But it turned out his real love interest was Nancy Maginnes, a researcher for Nelson Rockefeller whom he married in 1974.
\nIn a 1972 poll of Playboy Club Bunnies, the man dubbed \u201cSuper-K\u201d by Newsweek finished first as \u201cthe man I would most like to go out on a date with.\u201d
\nKissinger\u2019s explanation: \u201cPower is the ultimate aphrodisiac.\u201d
\nYet Kissinger was reviled by many Americans for his conduct of wartime diplomacy. He was still a lightning rod decades later: In 2015, an appearance by the 91-year-old Kissinger before the Senate Armed Services Committee was disrupted by protesters demanding his arrest for war crimes and calling out his actions in Southeast Asia, Chile and beyond.
\nHeinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the Bavarian city of Fuerth on May 27, 1923, the son of a schoolteacher. His family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in Manhattan, where Heinz changed his name to Henry.
\nKissinger had two children, Elizabeth and David, from his first marriage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravely voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died Wednesday, his consulting firm said. He was 100. With his gruff yet commanding presence and behind-the-scenes manipulation of power, Kissinger exerted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":151,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headline","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alnasnews.com.jo\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}