A look at the consequential and controversial legacy of Henry Kissinger

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• Geoff Bennett:

  Henry Kissinger, America's most consequential and controversial secretary of state, died last night at the age of 100. He reached the peak of his power in the 1970s.

  And, as Nick Schifrin reports, he remained highly influential until the very end.

• Nick Schifrin:

  He was a titan of American foreign policy, an American immigrant who became an American original.

  Henry Kissinger, Former U.S. Secretary of State: America has never been true to itself unless it meant something beyond itself.

• Nick Schifrin:

  From China…

• Henry Kissinger:

  The closest cooperation between China and the United States is essential.

• Nick Schifrin:

  … to Chile, from Vietnam to the Middle East.

• Henry Kissinger:

  The United States is committed to bring about a just and lasting peace.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Kissinger's impact on American policy is measured in decades, to his supporters, a hero.

  Winston Lord, Former U.S. Ambassador to China: I think Henry will stand out as one of the most important international figures in the last 100 years.

• Nick Schifrin:

  To his detractors, a villain.

  Greg Grandin, Author, "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman": I think it would be hard to find somebody else as comparable as Henry Kissinger in terms of the damage that they have done.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923 to a Jewish family. When he was 15, they fled Nazi Germany for New York. He was drafted into the American military, and deployed to his home country to help with denazification.

  He taught at Harvard, giving him access to elite foreign policy circles, until President Richard Nixon named him national security adviser and later, simultaneously, secretary of state.

• Henry Kissinger:

  There is no country in the world where it is conceivable that a man of my origins could be standing here next to the president of the United States.

• Nick Schifrin:

  The moment that would make him famous led to what Nixon called the week that changed the world, a secret 1971 trip to Beijing, ending more than two decades of mutual hostility.

  The next year, Nixon made his own trip, setting a path to U.S.-China normalization. In that room that day, Kissinger aide and later Ambassador to China Winston Lord.

• Winston Lord:

  Maybe it would have happened at some point, but it was still a very courageous and controversial move in the early 1970s. This meeting set the stage for the subsequent discussions and the opening up the relationship, which had a major impact immediately by improving relations with the Soviets.

  It helped us end the Vietnam War. It restored morale in the United States that we were an able diplomatic actor, despite all our problems. It restored American credibility around the world.

• Nick Schifrin:

  But before he could end the Vietnam War, Kissinger had expanded it. Beginning in 1969, the U.S. secretly bombed Cambodia to try and disrupt North Vietnamese supply routes. The campaign is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

• Greg Grandin:

  He had a remarkable indifference to human suffering.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale and author of the book "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman."

  He argues Kissinger and Nixon unnecessarily extended the Vietnam War by four years.

• Greg Grandin:

  How many thousands of U.S. soldiers died as a result of that? How many thousands of Vietnamese soldiers died of that? His secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia resulted in 100,000 civilian deaths. But, more than that, it radicalized what had been a small nucleus of extremely militant communists.

  That brought Pol Pot to power. And that led to the killing fields and the millions dead. I think he does have an inordinate amount of blood on his hands.

• Nick Schifrin:

  By 1973, Kissinger and his team negotiated an end to the Vietnam War in Paris, where Winston Lord was again at his side.

• Winston Lord:

  Henry and I went out in the garden and we shook hands, and he looked me in the eye and said: "We've done it."

  And this had particular poignancy, because I'd almost quit over our Cambodia-related policy to Vietnam a couple of years earlier on that very subject. And so, after all we have been through, this was a major moment.

• Nick Schifrin:

  The moment allowed Kissinger to share the Nobel Peace Prize with his North Vietnamese counterpart. But, two years later, the U.S. fled Saigon, and North Vietnam and Vietcong troops conquered U.S.-ally South Vietnam.

• Henry Kissinger:

  The withdrawal from Vietnam was an American tragedy.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Kissinger never expressed regret over Vietnam or any decision. In 2003, he told Jim Lehrer the priority was to put Vietnam aside so he could focus elsewhere.

• Henry Kissinger:

  All you could do is try to preserve a minimum of dignity and save as many lives as you could.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Kissinger's peace efforts extended to the Middle East. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. Kissinger held so many regional meetings, he helped create the term shuttle diplomacy.

  It helped lead to Israeli-Egypt negotiations and edged the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. Kissinger's concern over communism and his realpolitik peaked in Chile. In 1973, the U.S. helped the military overthrow the democratically elected socialist government and install General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet's military dictatorship caused the death, disappearance, and torture of more than 40,000 Chileans.

  But Kissinger's priority was preventing communist dominoes from falling, as he told the "NewsHour"'s Elizabeth Farnsworth in 2001.

• Henry Kissinger:

  First of all, human rights were not an international issue at the time, the way they have become since. We believed that the establishment of a Castroite regime in Chile would create a sequence of events in all of at least the southern cone of Latin America that would be extremely inimical to the national interests of the United States, at a time when the Cold War was at its height.

• Nick Schifrin:

  Kissinger's Cold War strategy called for detente with the Soviet Union. In 1972, President Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed SALT, the first limits on Soviet and U.S. ballistic missiles and ballistic missile defense. It opened decades of arms control agreements.

• Henry Kissinger:

  The benefits that accrue to the United States are the benefit that will accrue to all participants in the international system from an improvement in the prospects of peace.

• Nick Schifrin:

  By then, Kissinger had reached his popular and policy peak. He was charming, funny, craved proximity to power, and was, in his supporters' eyes, a steady steward of American interests.

  After Nixon's resignation, he remained President Ford's secretary of state.

• Winston Lord:

  I think his most significant achievement was holding together America and its foreign policy in the wake of Watergate and the ending of the Vietnam War. Kissinger remained untainted by the scandals, pursued remarkable diplomacy under the circumstances, and maintained America's position in the world, as well as restoring some morale in the United States itself. It was a remarkable achievement.

• Nick Schifrin:

  But, to his critics, Kissinger symbolized the pursuit of order over justice and the kind of preemptive action that paved the way for continuous war.

• Greg Grandin:

  I think he was absolutely indispensable in creating a sense of keeping the United States on a permanent war footing, this war without end, in which everything is self-defense, every drone attack can be justified.

• Nick Schifrin:

  His influence endured to the end, dozens of books, hundreds of speeches, consultations or advice to 12 presidents. Perhaps no single individual before or since has exercised so much control over U.S. policy.

  Henry Kissinger was 100 years old.

  For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Nick Schifrin.

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