Examining the legacy of the enduring, polarizing Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, who died Wednesday at age 100, was an American original. And like many who merit that description, he was not born in the United States.

Barely months before the 1938 Nazi Kristallnacht, when synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned and vandalized and Jews jailed and sent to camps in Germany and Austria, Kissinger’s family departed their Bavarian home. The teenage Heinz Alfred Kissinger arrived with his parents and younger brother to the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside, beginning to burgeon with German Jews fortunate to escape Hitler.

Thirty years later, incoming president Richard Nixon named Kissinger, a Harvard professor and author of books on European and nuclear diplomacy, to head the National Security Council, and four years after that to simultaneously serve as Secretary of State. He was the first Jew to run a department plagued with a reputation for anti-Semitism in its Ivy League and prep school ranks.

In his eight years at the forefront of U.S foreign policy under Nixon and then president Gerald Ford, Kissinger became a living symbol of American diplomacy, thrusting himself into the middle of critical world events and developing policies that reshaped the post-war global landscape. Anyone of which would have made him a storied figure in the annals of American diplomacy and a source of political and historical controversy.

Kissinger negotiates with 1st Premier of China, Zhou Enlai in Peking in 1972.

• The 1971-72 opening to China, ending U.S. isolation from the communist regime ruling the world’s most populous nation. Kissinger still regards the transformation the China opening created in international relations as his major legacy . He grew dismayed as China’s increasingly assertive policies moved the U.S. and other nations away from cooperation to talk of great power competition and even a New Cold War in later years.
• The Vietnam Accords. Like the original outreach to China, the diplomacy to bring an end to the decade long U.S. war in Vietnam began in secret. A deal concluded and signed in Paris in early 1973 brought the withdrawal of American troops, from a conflict that caused 58,000 US combat deaths, left millions of Vietnamese dead and fractured American society. The accords briefly ended overt efforts by communist North Vietnam to remove the American-backed government of South Vietnam. Kissinger and his Vietnamese interlocutor were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vietnamese negotiator turned down the honor and by spring 1975, North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops conquered the south and unified the country under Leninist rule. Arguments endure whether the same deal could have been reached early in the Nixon administration at much less human cost. But Kissinger denied assertions that the accords were but a fig leaf for the American withdrawal. He blamed Congress for ignoring a last minute request for military aid to save the South Vietnamese government.
• The American withdrawal from all of Indochina had the most dreadful consequences for Cambodia, opening the last barrier to a takeover by the radical Khmer Rouge. Already destabilized by a 1970 military coup that ousted its neutralist government and by an American invasion and carpet bombing campaign engineered by Kissinger and ordered by Nixon, the country was easy prey. The four-year Khmer Rouge rule became a holocaust that killed as many as two million Cambodians or a quarter of that small nation’s nearly eight million people. In later years, Kissinger rejected criticism of the bombings in Cambodia, many of which had targeted civilian centers, claiming that U.S. drone attacks have killed more people globally since.
• Detente with the Soviet Union. As they were helping create a Chinese communist counterweight to Moscow, Kissinger and Nixon employed that new leverage in tricky triangular diplomacy to negotiate an easing of Cold War tensions; tensions that at earlier moments threatened nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union. A series of summits between the Soviet leaders and Presidents Nixon and Ford led to arms control accords that reduced both countries’ nuclear arsenals by the thousands. But detente, even its foreign sounding name, became a mobilizing issue in 1976 for Ronald Reagan and the GOP conservative wing. They pushed the Republican party to a harder line in internal party battles and the movement contributed to a nearly successful challenge to Ford’s nomination. Yet, President Reagan eventually reached an even broader detente with a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union and Cold War came to an end during the White House term of Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush.
• The Middle East Shuttle. After Israel was caught by surprise in an October, 1973 attack by Egypt and Syria, it fell to the Americans both to supply Israel with enough new weaponry to stand off the attacks and then disengage the warring forces from the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. For nearly two years, Kissinger was on virtually non- stop flights between Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus, a diplomatic effort that took on the name Shuttle Diplomacy. The chilly cease fire between Egypt and Israel eventually evolved into a cool, but full peace and diplomatic relations during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
• A coup in Chile. The most controversial element of Kissinger’s tenure remains the 1973 overthrow of the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and his replacement by a military dictatorship that brought the deaths, disappearances and torture of as many as 40,000 Chileans. The direct role of Kissinger and the Central Intelligence Agency in carrying out the Chile coup remain contested but the removal of Allende and subsequent atrocities by the military regime have fueled passionate calls to label Kissinger a war criminal.

An equally passionate debate erupted almost simultaneously, though it was confined to Washington. The Watergate era produced revelations that Kissinger had authorized wiretaps of close aides and friendly journalists as part of the Nixon administration’s obsession with plugging leaks. It was among the many controversies that rose alongside Kissinger’s own rising national and international celebrity status – a sharp contrast to the obscurity consigned to most of his predecessors and successors. From politicians on the Democratic left and Republican right, as well as scholars and pundits, Kissinger came under assault, and some of those controversies endure. A memorably cutting commentary came from the popular historian Barbara Tuchman who questioned whether Kissinger, whose early academic work focused on European diplomats and leaders rather than the U.S, colonial diplomats such as Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, really understood America.

Kissinger’s vault to celebrity started with his first trip to China in 1971, a secret plane ride from a mountain air base in Pakistan to Beijing. The negotiations were known to as few as a couple dozen people in the entire world, and even barely a small handful in the U.S.government. When President Nixon divulged the details in a speech, Kissinger entered a status usually reserved for international movie stars – and he was soon seen escorting some of the more glamorous of them. He was later credited with the aphorism that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. He would soon after marry to type, to Nancy Maginnes, a foreign policy researcher with his primary mentor, Nelson Rockefeller. She survives him as do two children from his first marriage that ended in divorce.

Kissinger’s celebrity extended far beyond Washington. Photo by Frank Edwards/Fotos International/Getty Images

What sustained the celebrity, the controversies and the diplomacy was a personality of many parts, a more than formidable intellect and intense and much favorable coverage from U.S. and international media which he assiduously courted and manipulated. In diplomatic and personal encounters, he employed, behind the German accent that never left him, a capacity to charm and flatter, often with self-deprecating humor. When the going got rough, so could he. His volatile bouts of temper and harsh outbursts were confined mostly to his staff but sometimes employed as negotiating tactics. His upward ascent and growing control of U.S. policy reflected lessons learned in academic politics and skirmishing as he consistently came out on top in internal bureaucratic battles within the Nixon and Ford administrations. Only two officials who had mastered infighting as members of Congress, defense secretaries Melvin Laird and Donald Rumseld, were able to out maneuver him and win policy battles. No single individual since Kissinger has exercised such control over the sprawling apparatus of institutions, agencies and interests that create U.S. policy.

Nixon and Kissinger converse in the White House in November, 1972. Photo by White House via CNP/Getty Images

Most intriguing still and for future generations of historians and psychiatrists is Kissinger’s relationship with the even more psychologically complex President Nixon. In his astute and analytical Kissinger biography, Walter Isaacson explored the interactions that ranged from shared knowledge of the world and shrewdness to jealousy and mutual deception. With Gerald Ford, a far less complex and easier-going president, relations were smoother, though Ford eventually removed Kissinger from his post as National Security Advisor while keeping him at the State Department.

Four years after Ford’s 1976 election defeat, Kissinger attempted to create a co-presidency between Reagan and Ford with Kissinger to play a key role. Frantic negotiations went on behind the scenes at the 1980 Republican National Convention, but ultimately it was an ill-fated attempt to return to power.

That was as close as Kissinger came to returning to public office. He went home to New York in 1977, creating the firm Kissinger Associates, a multimillion-dollar enterprise based on advising companies and governments. He insisted he was not a door opener, though a quick call to a foreign leader could undo a snafu in a bureaucracy that was thwarting a business deal. Kissinger’s foray into a combination of private and public enterprise was the first of a procession of former high ranking Democratic and Republican officials as well as military commanders to create consultancies that traded on their contacts and knowledge with foreign corporations and governments.

But Kissinger’s influence endured to the end. He consulted with and advised presidents and administrations from Carter through Trump, even developing a relationship with Trump son- in- law Jared Kushner. He was active into his final years, drawing audiences on the international speaking circuit and was often interviewed on network television including numerous times on the NewsHour. He wrote in publications worldwide, and produced two volumes of memoirs and weighty books on China and diplomacy.

To the end, the man who had arrived in America as a refugee, craved proximity to power in his adopted country and around the world, including Germany, the land his family had to flee. While a fierce debate over the man and his record likely will go on for decades, at the moment the news of his death has been greeted with tributes pouring in from governments and leaders just about everywhere, along with comments calling him a war criminal.