Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100 at his home in Kent, Connecticut, it was confirmed late Wednesday.
He is survived by his wife, Nancy Kissinger, and his children David and Elizabeth.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, a suburb of the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, in what was then known as the Weimar Republic. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother a housewife, and he had a younger brother. The family were German Jews and suffered heavily under the discrimination of the Nazi regime that came to power in 1933.
The Kissinger family fled Germany in 1938, going first to London, then New York City, where they settled in the German Jewish community in Upper Manhattan. Heinz changed his name to Henry, but as a result of his shyness, he never lost his German accent. He attended high school part-time so he could work in a shaving brush factory.
In 1943, Kissinger was drafted in the US Army, during which time he became a naturalized US citizen and served as a German interpreter and in counter-intelligence. He saw combat at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in 1944 and later was assigned to track down Gestapo members in Hanover and to oversee denazification operations in southern Hesse.
US Special Advisor Henry Kissinger (D) with President Richard Nixon in May 1972 in Vienna. (File)
© AFP 2023 / VOTAVA
In 1949, he married his first wife, Ann Fleicher, with whom he had two children: Elizabeth and David. They divorced in 1964.
Kissinger then went to Harvard College after the war, studying political science and graduating summa cum laude in 1950. He continued on at Harvard, getting his Master’s and Phd. by 1954. His doctoral dissertation on the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe introduced the concept of “legitimacy” in international diplomacy, describing an international order accepted by all the major powers. By contrast, one in which at least one of the major power dissents was described by him as “revolutionary,” and hence dangerous.
Entering Public Service
Upon graduating, Kissinger continued to teach at Harvard for several more years and became a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, where he criticized the Eisenhower administration’s plans for massive nuclear retaliation by arguing for the small-scale tactical use of nuclear weapons to win conflicts. Through the 1960s, he served as a consultant on several political campaigns, meeting Richard Nixon in 1967.
Kissinger reportedly called Nixon "the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president,” but cozied up to him after he won the Republican nomination for the 1968 presidential election, and was rewarded with the post of White House national security adviser following Nixon’s victory.
Master Diplomat
Nixon had run his campaign on a promise to end the US war in Vietnam, and Kissinger devised a plan for a negotiated US exit and an end to the conflict. He proposed that North Vietnam withdraw from the South, and that the US-backed South Vietnamese government form a coalition with the communist National Liberation Front. He initially opposed the bombing of Cambodia, but later supported Nixon’s decision, becoming a key director of the bombing campaign.
As national security adviser, Kissinger developed a penchant for secretive “backchannel” negotiations. During the Vietnam peace talks, Kissinger became frustrated with the South Vietnamese delegation’s obstruction, so he spoke with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho separately. The two later were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes in 1973 for ending the war, although both were deeply ambivalent about it and Tho refused the award entirely.
Dr. Henri Kissinger (C), US President Nixon's adviser on national security affairs, signs 13 June 1973 in Paris a ceasefire agreement bringing the Vietnam war to an end. The war ended 31 April 1975 when Saigon surrendered almost without fighting to the Viet Cong communist forces, ending the US's 15-year involvement in Vietnam.
© AFP 2023
Kissinger also initiated backchannel talks with Anatoly Dobyrinin, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States, instead of directly with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, which eventually led to the May 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, a major arms control deal that limited defensive systems able to intercept incoming nuclear missiles.
Three years earlier, in the first year of Nixon’s administration, Kissinger helped negotiate the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation talks with the USSR in Helsinki, Finland, which led to the SALT I treaty being signed the same day as the ABM. That treaty set limitations on the number of different types of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles the US and USSR could possess.
Just two months later in July 1972, Kissinger then made a secret trip into the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union’s rival for leadership of the communist world, to meet with Premier Zhou Enlai. The adventure, which took place in Beijing by way of Pakistan and was nicknamed “Operation Marco Polo,” helped pave the way for Nixon to visit China publicly the following year, and eventually establish formal diplomatic relations in 1979.
Latin American Coups
On September 21, 1973, Kissinger was appointed as Nixon’s new Secretary of State - a role he retained when Nixon resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford. Just 10 days earlier, he had helped orchestrate the military overthrow of Chile’s vibrant democracy, part of a three-year effort to undermine the socialist President Salvador Allende.
View of pictures of late former US President Richard Nixon and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger displayed at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights during "Secrets of State: the Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship" exhibition in Santiago on October 24, 2017. The exhibition presents the history of the Chilean dictatorship through a series of declassified documents curated by Peter Kornbluh -- National Security Archive senior analyst who has played a fundamental role in the campaign to declassify 23,000 archives of the CIA, NSC, FBI, White House and the State Department of Defence.
Martin BERNETTI / AFP
© AFP 2023 / MARTIN BERNETTI
Fearing a "well-functioning socialist experiment" in the region and a potential new friend to Cuba and the Soviet Union, Kissinger and Nixon authorized the CIA to destabilize the country through a mixture of bribery, terrorism, and planting of rumors and fake news.
Nixon told the CIA to “make the economy scream,” bringing Chile into a crisis in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power, implementing a 20-year reign of terror that killed thousands. He took a similar line on Argentina three years later, supporting the military overthrow of the elected government of Isabel Perón and the launching of the Dirty War against leftist critics.
Kissinger was also accused of backing Operation Condor, a hemisphere-wide effort by the Chilean junta and other US-backed right-wing dictatorships in South America to silence critics, including through kidnapping and assassination of at least 50,000 people, most of them in the Dirty War.
‘As Long as I am Here, I Will Not Let Israel be Abandoned’
Two weeks after becoming Secretary of State, Egypt and Syria launched a sneak attack on Israel on the Yom Kippur holiday in an attempt to reverse the losses of territory and honor in the 1967 Six-Day War. Kissinger was caught off-guard by news of the attack, having underestimated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, but still had intelligence indicating the attack was likely. He advised Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir not to conduct a preemptive attack, since it would further tarnish Israel’s image.
As the Arab offensive drove deeper into Israeli territory, Kissinger switched from his hands-off position to supporting covertly sending Israel weapons, fearing that if the Israelis believed their existence was threatened, they would resort to using nuclear weapons. Internal memos published by the Israel State Archive revealed Kissinger’s close relationship with Meir and other Israeli leaders, who called him Naphtali, his Hebrew name.
“As long as I am here, I will not let Israel be abandoned,” Kissinger told Israel’s ambassador to the US, Simcha Dinitz, who was pleading for weapons. However, the “secret” rearmament was revealed to the world when Israel’s situation worsened and the Americans switched from using Israeli airliners to disguise the shipments to simply flying US Air Force cargo planes in. The Arab powers retaliated with a petroleum embargo, termed in history as the Oil Shock, which plunged the West into economic crisis.
Kissinger was also involved in numerous other crises of the time, including Pakistan’s attempted suppression of the Bengali uprising that gave birth to Bangladesh, the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and the seizure of Western Sahara by Morocco.
In 1974, Kissinger also remarried, taking Nancy Maginnes as his second wife, with whom he was still married when he died.
After Office
Kissinger left office in January 1977 alongside the rest of the Ford administration. He was offered an endowed chair at Columbia University, but student protests forced the school to cancel the offer, so he taught at Georgetown instead. He founded the Kissinger Associates consulting firm and became an investor in companies from Hollinger International to Gulfstream Aerospace.
He also became a commentator and adviser on a variety of political issues, ranging from the response to the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests to analysis of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
US President Ronald Reagan talks with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, Sept. 25, 1984 in Washington.
© AP Photo / Barry Thumma
Kissinger also became increasingly critical of US foreign policy, disapproving of its insertion into the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, the US’ counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, and attempts to get Ukraine to join NATO. He recently attracted ire for warning against provoking a new cold war or actual war with Russia or China, for saying that NATO should accept that Crimea is part of Russia, and that Ukraine should be made into a neutral state.