Henry Kissinger: Diplomatic powerhouse who shaped US foreign policy

Henry Kissinger, a controver­sial Nobel Peace Prize winner and diplomatic powerhouse whose service under two Presidents left an indelible mark on US foreign policy, died at his home in Connect­icut on Wednesday at age 100, Kissinger Associates Inc said.

Kissinger was known for his disdain for India’s leadership in the 1970s, but he had been advocating strong ties with India after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014.

When Modi was in Washington on an official state visit in June this year, despite not keeping good health Kissinger travelled to listen to Modi’s address at the luncheon at the State Department jointly hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

 

During the luncheon, the elderly American statesman patiently listened to the speech of the prime minister and had an interaction with him.

His ties with India in the 1970s when he was in the administration both as the national security advisor and secretary of state had soured, but before he turned to China, his first preference was India. It was at his advice that the US Chambers of Commerce in the 70s established the US India Business Council.

According to archival diplomatic conversations, as early as 1972 he had advocated for India and Japan to be the permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Historians say that both Kissinger and President Richard Nixon could not have a healthy relationship with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and they turned their attention to China.

After the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of India as a strong power in the last 10 decades, his views on India had changed and for success­ive administrations, Kissinger has been advocating strong ties with India.

Kissinger had been active past his centenary, attending meetings in the White House, publishing a book on leadership styles, and testifying before a Senate committee about the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. In July 2023 he made a surprise visit to Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In the 1970s, he had a hand in many of the epoch-changing global events of the decade while serving as secretary of state under the Repub­lican Nixon. The German-born Jewish refugee’s efforts led to the diplomatic opening of China, landmark US-Soviet arms control talks, expanded ties between Israel and its Arab neighbours, and the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam.

Kissinger’s reign as the prime architect of US foreign policy waned with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Still, he continued to be a diplomatic force under President Gerald Ford and to offer strong opinions throughout the rest of his life.

While many hailed Kissinger for his brilliance and broad experience, others branded him a war criminal for his support for anti-communist dicta­torships, especially in Latin America.

In his latter years, his travels were circumscribed by efforts by other nations to arrest or question him about past US.

His 1973 Peace Prize — awarded jointly to North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, who would decline it — was one of the most controversial ever. Two members of the Nobel committee resigned over the selection and questions arose about the US secret bombing of Cambodia.

Ford called Kissinger a “super secretary of state” but also noted his prickliness and self-assurance, which critics were more likely to call paranoia and egotism. Even Ford said, “Henry in his mind never made a mistake.”

“He had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew,” Ford said in an interview shortly before his death in 2006.

With his dour expression and gravelly, German-accented voice, Kissinger was hardly a rock star but had an image as a ladies’ man, squiring starlets around Washington and New York in his bachelor days. Power, he said, was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Voluble on policy, Kissinger was reticent on personal matters, although he once told a journalist he saw himself as a cowboy hero, riding off alone.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in 0, Germany, on May 27, 1923, and moved to the United States with his family in 1938 before the Nazi camp­aign to exterminate European Jews.

Anglicising his name to Henry, Kissinger became a naturalised US citizen in 1943, served in the Army in Europe in World War Two, and went to Harvard University on scholarship, earning a master’s degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1954. He was on Harvard’s faculty for the next 17 years.

During much of that time, Kissinger served as a consultant to government agencies, including in 1967 when he acted as an intermediary for the State Department in Vietnam. He used his connections with President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to pass on information about peace negotiations to the Nixon camp.

When Nixon’s pledge 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 “Vietnamisation”— shifting the bur­den of the war from the half-million US forces to the South Vietnamese — was long and bloody, punctuated by mass­ive US bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of the North’s harbours, and the bombing of Cambodia.

Kissinger declared in 1972 that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam but the Paris Peace Accords reached in January 1973 were little more than a prelude to the final Communist takeover of the South two years later. In 1973, in addition to his role as national security adviser, Kissinger was named secretary of state — giving him uncha­llenged authority in foreign affairs.

Divorced from his first wife, Ann Fleischer, in 1964, he married Nancy Maginnes, an aide to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, in 1974. He had two children by his first wife.