Henry Kissinger, a Nobel Peace laureate and diplomat whose service under two presidents left an indelible mark on American foreign policy, died Wednesday at age 100, Kissinger Associates Inc. said.
He died at his home in Connecticut.
Kissinger, who turned 100 last May, remained active in politics until his final days, attending White House meetings, publishing a book on leadership styles and testifying before a Senate committee about the North Korean nuclear threat. In July 2023, he made a surprise visit to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
In the 1970s, he participated in many of the decade’s most important world events while serving as Secretary of State under Republican President Richard Nixon. Kissinger’s efforts led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, historic arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, expanded ties between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam.
Outgoing President Richard Nixon conference with Vice President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig Jr. in the Oval Office of the White House on October 13, 1973.
Kissinger’s influence as the chief architect of American foreign policy faded after Nixon’s resignation in 1974. However, he remained an influential diplomat during Gerald Ford’s presidency and expressed opinions on world affairs until the end of his life.
Kissinger was admired by many for his brilliance and breadth of experience, while others accused him of war crimes for his support of anti-communist dictatorships, especially in Latin America. In recent years, his travel has been limited by attempts by other countries to arrest him or question him about past U.S. foreign policy.
His 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded jointly with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, who rejected it, was one of the most controversial in history. Two members of the Nobel committee resigned over the election and questions about the secret US bombing of Cambodia.
Ford called Kissinger a “super secretary of state,” but also noted his irritability and self-confidence, which critics called paranoia and selfishness.
With his sullen expression and raspy, German-accented voice, Kissinger had a reputation as a womanizer and courted stars in Washington and New York before he married. Power, he said, was his main aphrodisiac.
A political talker, Kissinger was reserved on personal matters, although he once told a journalist that he saw himself as the hero of a cowboy Western.
Kissinger was born in Germany on May 27, 1923, and moved to the United States with his family in 1938, shortly before the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews began.
Kissinger became a naturalized American citizen in 1943, served in the Army in Europe during World War II, and attended Harvard University on a scholarship, earning a master’s degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1954.
During much of this time, Kissinger served as a consultant to government agencies, including in 1967, when he mediated the State Department’s negotiations over Vietnam. He used his connections with President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to relay information about the peace negotiations to the Nixon camp.
When Nixon’s promise to end the Vietnam War won him the 1968 presidential election, he brought Kissinger to the White House as national security adviser.
But the process of “Vietnamization” – transferring the burden of war from half a million American troops to the South Vietnamese – was long and bloody, and was accompanied by massive bombing of North Vietnam, mining of its ports, and bombing of Cambodia. .
In 1972, Kissinger declared that peace in Vietnam was “on the way,” but the Paris Peace Accords reached in January 1973 were only a prelude to the final communist takeover of the South two years later.
In 1973, in addition to his role as national security advisor, Kissinger was named secretary of state, giving him unchallenged power over foreign policy.
The escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict forced Kissinger to participate in an intense negotiation process.
Thirty-two days of flying between Jerusalem and Damascus helped Kissinger negotiate a long-term agreement between Syria and Israel.
In an attempt to reduce the influence of the Soviet Union, Kissinger turned to his main communist rival, China, and made two visits to Beijing, including a secret one to meet with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. The result was Nixon’s historic summit in Beijing with Chairman Mao Zedong and the subsequent formal establishment of relations between the two countries.
The Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign did not affect Kissinger, who continued to serve as secretary of state when Ford entered the White House in the summer of 1974. But Ford replaced him as national security adviser in an attempt to hear more opinions. on foreign policy.
That same year, Kissinger traveled with Ford to Soviet Vladivostok, where the president met with Leonid Brezhnev and agreed on the basis of a strategic arms pact. The agreement was the pinnacle of Kissinger’s detente efforts, which eased tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In the photo: US President Gerald Ford (second from left), US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (left), General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev (right) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Alexei Kosygin (second from right) during a meeting in Vladivostok. December 23, 1974.
But Kissinger’s diplomatic skills had their limits. In 1975, he was credited with failing to persuade Israel and Egypt to agree to a second phase of peace in the Sinai Peninsula.
And during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971, Nixon and Kissinger were harshly criticized for their unilateral commitment to Pakistani interests.
Like Nixon, he feared the spread of leftist ideas in the Western Hemisphere, and his actions in response to this caused many Latin Americans to resent the United States for many years.
In 1970, he planned an operation with the CIA to destabilize and overthrow Chile’s Marxist but democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and in a memo after Argentina’s bloody 1976 coup, he said military dictators should be supported.
When Ford lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger’s days at the highest levels of government were virtually over. The next Republican in the White House, Ronald Reagan, distanced himself from Kissinger, considering him out of step with his conservative base.