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He was the harshest Secretary of State of the postwar period, whom he celebrated and vilified. His complex legacy still resonates in relations with China, Russia, and the Middle East.
By David E. Sanger
David E. Sanger covers the White House and national security. He interviewed Henry Kissinger many times and traveled to Europe, Asia and the Middle East to examine his upbringing and legacy.
Henry A. Kissinger, the academic-turned-diplomat who organized America’s opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam and used his cunning, ambition, and intelligence to rebuild America’s power relations with the Soviet Union at its peak. A Cold War veteran of the Cold War, trampling on democratic values to do so, died Wednesday at his home in Kent, Connecticut. He was a hundred years old.
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His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm.
Few diplomats have been celebrated and vilified with as much fondness as Mr. Considered the toughest secretary of state of the post-World War II era, alternately hailed as an ultra-realist who reframed international relations to reflect American interests and denounced his abandonment of American values, especially in the realm of human rights, if he thought it served the purposes of the nation.
He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.
At a critical moment in U. S. history and diplomacy, he forcefully sent President Richard M. Nixon. Se joined the Nixon White House in January 1969 as national security adviser and, after his appointment as secretary of state in 1973, retained both titles, which is uncommon. When Nixon resigned, it remained under the government of President Gerald R. Ford.
Kissinger’s secret negotiations with what was then still called Red China led to Nixon’s greatest achievement in foreign policy. Conceived as a decisive Cold War measure to isolate the Soviet Union, they paved the way for the world’s most complex relations between countries that, at the death of Mr. Kissinger, were the world’s largest economy (the United States) and the second largest. largest economy, absolutely intertwined and yet consistently at odds as a new Cold War loomed.
For decades, he remained the country’s top vital voice in managing China’s rise and the demanding economic, military, and technological situations it posed. He was the only American to deal with each and every Chinese leader, from Mao to Xi Jinping. at the age of 100, he met Xi and other Chinese leaders in Beijing, where he was treated like a visiting king even when relations with Washington were contentious.
It dragged the Soviet Union into a discussion known as détente, which led to the first primary nuclear arms control treaties between the two nations. Through his back-and-forth diplomacy, he displaced Moscow from its position as a leading force in the Middle East. however, he failed to negotiate a broader peace in that region.
Over years of meetings in Paris, he negotiated the peace accords that ended U. S. involvement in the Vietnam War, an achievement for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war turned out to be from above, and critics argued that he may have made the same deal years earlier, saving thousands of lives in the process.
Within two years, North Vietnam had invaded the U. S. -backed South. It was the humiliating end to a confrontation in which Kissinger doubted from the start that the United States could ever win.
To his detractors, the Communist victory was the inevitable conclusion of a cynical policy that had been intended to create some space between the American withdrawal from Vietnam and whatever came next. Indeed, in the margins of the notes for his secret trip to China in 1971, Mr. Kissinger scribbled, “We want a decent interval,” suggesting he simply sought to postpone the fall of Saigon.
But by the end of this period, the Americans had abandoned the Vietnamese project, no longer convinced that America’s strategic interests were tied to that country’s destiny.
As was the case with Vietnam, history has judged some of its Cold War realism with a harsher gentleness than was sometimes portrayed at the time. Considering the wonderful rivalry of forces, he was prepared to be tremendously Machiavellian, especially when dealing with smaller nations. which he saw as pawns in the wonderful battle.
He was the architect of the Nixon administration’s efforts to topple Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende.
He was accused of violating foreign law by authorizing the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70, an undeclared war opposed to an impartial nation.
His objective was to root out the pro-Communist Vietcong forces that were operating from bases across the border in Cambodia, but the bombing was indiscriminate: Mr. Kissinger told the military to strike “anything that flies or anything that moves.” At least 50,000 civilians were killed.
When the U. S. -backed Pakistani military waged a genocidal war in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971, he and Nixon not only ignored appeals from the U. S. consulate in East Pakistan to prevent the slaughter, but also approved arms shipments to Pakistan, adding to the likely illegal transfer of 10 fighter-bombers from Jordan.
Mr. Kissinger and Nixon had other priorities: supporting Pakistan’s president, who was serving as a conduit for Kissinger’s then-secret overtures to China. Again, the human cost was horrific: At least 300,000 people were killed in East Pakistan and 10 million refugees were driven into India.
In 1975, Kissinger and President Ford secretly approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor through the U. S. -backed Indonesian military. After the loss of Vietnam, it was feared that East Timor’s left-wing government was also communist. .
Kissinger told the Indonesian president that the operation had to succeed temporarily and that “it would be greater if it were carried out after our return” to the United States, according to declassified documents from Mr. Kissinger’s presidential library. More than 100,000 East Timorese were killed or starved to death.
Kissinger dismissed complaints about the measures, saying they did not face a global range of possible bad options like the one he proposed. But his efforts to suppress complaints with sarcastic phrases only inflamed him.
“The illegal we do immediately,” he quipped more than once. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
On at least one potentially catastrophic stance Mr. Kissinger later reversed himself.
Starting in the mid-1950s as a young Harvard professor, he argued for the concept of limited nuclear war — a nuclear exchange that could be contained to a specific region. In office, he worked extensively on nuclear deterrence — convincing an adversary, for instance, that there was no way to launch a nuclear strike without paying an unacceptably high price.
But he later admitted that it might be to prevent a limited nuclear war from escalating. By the end of his life, he had embraced, with reservations, a new effort to phase out all nuclear weapons, and at age 95 he began to warn of the instability brought on by the rise of synthetic intelligence-driven weapons.
“All I can do in the few years left of me is to raise these issues,” he said in 2018. “I don’t pretend to have the answers.”
Kissinger remained influential until the end. His last writings on managing a flourishing China — “On China” (2011), a 600-page e-book of self-respecting history and anecdotes — were on the shelves of West Wing national security aides who followed him.
Fifty years after he joined the Nixon administration, Republican candidates still sought Kissinger’s help and presidents sought his endorsement. Even Donald J. Trump, after chastising the Republican establishment, visited him on his 2016 crusade, hoping that the mere symbol of his pursuit of Kissinger’s recommendation would convey gravitas. (This resulted in a New Yorker cartoon showing Mr. Kissinger with a thought bubble above his head that reads, “I miss Nixon. ”)
Kissinger laughed at the fact that Trump might simply not name, when asked by New York Times reporters, a single new concept or initiative he had pulled out of the meeting. “He’s not the first user I’ve praised who either doesn’t perceive what I’m saying or doesn’t need to perceive it,” he said. Once in office, however, Trump used it as a channel of communication with China’s leaders.
President Barack Obama, who was 7 years old when Kissinger first took office, is less enamored with him. Obama signaled toward the end of his presidency that he had spent much of his term seeking to fix the world in which Obama had spent in the past. Kissinger was gone. He regarded Mr. Kissinger’s mistakes as a warning.
“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”
Obama under pressure that when he was in office he tried to help countries “get rid of the bombs that still explode in the legs of little children. “
“In what way did that strategy promote our interests?” he said.
Few figures in American history have remained as applicable for as long as Kissinger. Until the age of 90, he continued to speak and write, and to collect astronomical fees from clients seeking his geopolitical analysis.
As the number of protesters at his talks decreases, the mere mention of his call can provoke bitter arguments. To his admirers, he is the brilliant architect of the Pax Americana, the chess grandmaster capable of shaking up the chessboard and injecting a certain unpredictability. in U. S. diplomacy.
In the eyes of his detractors (and even some friends and former workers), he’s vain, conspiratorial, arrogant, and angry, a guy capable of extolling the most sensible aide as indispensable while ordering the FBI to do so. Illegally tapping their private phones to see if there were any leaks to the press.
The irony was not lost on two generations of journalists, who knew that if they sought leaks (for their own benefit) Kissinger, a master of the art, was a ready source. administration, I will be the one to do it,” he said. And he did it, prodigiously.
To read Kissinger’s laudatory 1957 e-book analyzing the global order created by Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, who ruled the Austrian empire in the post-Napoleonic era, is also to read a kind of self-description, especially when it comes to the ability of a single leader to bend nations to his will.
“He excelled in manipulation and construction,” Kissinger said of Metternich. “He liked sophisticated maneuvers for frontal attack. “
That style was demonstrated during the Nixon years as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Increasingly isolated, Nixon often turned to Mr. Kissinger, the undiminished star of his administration, for reassurance and a recitation of his greatest achievements.
He would. The Watergate tapes revealed that Kissinger spent humiliating hours listening to the president’s harangues, adding anti-Semitic comments directed at his Jewish secretary of state. Kissinger responded with flattery. Back at his desk, he rolled his eyes as he told his closest colleagues about Nixon’s bizarre behavior.
Mr. Kissinger is not involved in Watergate. However, the raid on the offices of the Democratic National Committee by a team of White House thieves and the administration’s attempts to cover up the crime are the result of a culture of suspicion and secrecy that many claim. helped to foster.
In the spring of 1969, shortly after taking office, he became so enraged by the leak of a Times article about the bombing crusade in Cambodia that he ordered the FBI to tap the phones of more than a dozen White House staffers, adding members of his own staff. The recordings never revealed a culprit.
He was similarly infuriated by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The Times and The Washington Post in 1971. The classified documents chronicled the government’s war policies and planning in Vietnam, and leaking them, in his view, jeopardized his secret face-to-face diplomacy. His complaints helped inspire the creation of the White House burglary team, the leak-plugging Plumbers unit that would later break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate building.
In August 1974, as Nixon decided to choose between impeachment and resignation, it dragged Mr. Kissinger into one of the most lyrical moments in White House history. After telling Mr. Kissinger that he intended to resign, a distraught Nixon asked his secretary of state to kneel with him to pray silently in front of Lincoln Hall.
Yet, as Nixon sank deeper into Watergate, Mr. Kissinger attained a global prominence few of his successors have matched.
His assistants described his concepts as brilliant and his character fierce. They told stories of Mr. Kissinger throwing books at his own with immense rage, and of a manipulative tendency that led even his most loyal members to distrust him.
“In dealing with other people he would forge alliances and conspiratorial bonds by manipulating their antagonisms,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his comprehensive 1992 biography, “Kissinger,” a book its subject despised.
“Attracted to his conflicting parts with a compulsive attraction, he sought their approval through flattery, flattery, and showed it to others,” Isaacson observed. “He feels comfortable in the presence of tough men whose minds he can easily mobilize. ” A son of the Holocaust and a student of the political art of the Napoleonic era, he felt that wonderful men and wonderful forces were shaping the world, and he knew that personality and politics could never be completely dissociated. He got the secret. Naturally for him as a control tool. And he had an instinctive sense of relationships and balances of force, both mental and geostrategic.
In his old age, when the barriers had softened and old rivalries had receded or buried with his former adversaries, Kissinger spoke of the comparative risks of the global order he had formed and the much more disordered world he faced. Successors.
There was something fundamentally simple, if terrifying, in the superpower conflicts he navigated. He never had to deal with terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or a world in which nations use social media to manipulate public opinion and cyberattacks to undermine power grids and communications.
“The Cold War was more dangerous,” Kissinger said in a 2016 appearance at the New-York Historical Society. Both sides were in a position to engage in a full-blown nuclear war, but, he added, “today it is more complex. “
The clash between marvelous forces had radically replaced the bloodless peace he had tried to establish. It is no longer ideological, but purely of force. And what worried him most, he says, was the prospect of a clash with China’s “rising force” as it stood. challenged the strength of the United States.
Russia, in contrast, was “a diminished state,” and no longer “capable of achieving world domination,” he said in a 2016 Times interview in Kent, in northwest Connecticut, where he kept a second home. His primary residence was in Manhattan.
However, he cautioned against underestimating Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader. Referring to Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, he said: “To perceive Putin, one has to read Dostoevsky’s ‘Mein Kampf’. He thinks that Russia has been deceived and that we continue to take advantage of it. “
Kissinger was pleased that Russia posed less of a threat. After all, he had closed the first strategic arms deal with Moscow and led the United States to conform to the Helsinki Accords, the 1975 European Security Pact that guaranteed some right of speech to dissidents from the Soviet bloc. In retrospect, it was one of the drops that turned into a river and swept away Soviet communism.
At the height of his power, Kissinger reached a figure that no diplomat in Washington has matched since. The short, obese Harvard professor, dressed in tacky dark glasses, has been spotted in the Georgetown and Paris community in Washington with stars on his arm. Joking that “power is the greatest aphrodisiac. “
In New York restaurants with actress Jill St. John, he would hold her hand or run his hands through her hair, causing gossip columnists to compete for her money. In fact, as Mrs. St. John told her biographers, the relationship had still been close. platonic.
So do the others. A woman who went out with him and returned to her small rented apartment outside Washington’s Rock Creek Park, with her only bed to sleep in and containing a large amount of dirty laundry, reported that between the clutter and the presence of helpers, “you guys couldn’t do anything romantic in this place, even if you were dying from it.
The joke in Washington is that Kissinger flaunts his personal life to hide what he does in the office.
There was a lot to hide, including the secret meetings in Beijing that opened Nixon’s opening to China. When the turn toward China nevertheless became public, it altered the strategic calculus of U. S. international relations and surprised its allies.
“It’s almost impossible to imagine what the American relationship with the world’s most important rising power would look like today without Henry,” Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who once worked for Mr. Kissinger, said in an interview in 2016.
Kissinger’s other efforts produced combined results. Through tireless international relations at the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Kissinger managed to persuade Egypt to initiate direct talks with Israel, paving the way for an upcoming peace agreement between the two nations.
But perhaps Kissinger’s most important diplomatic contribution was his marginalization of Moscow in the Middle East for four decades, until Kissinger. Putin ordered his air force to participate in the Syrian civil war in 2015.
Mr. Kissinger’s greatest mistakes have occurred in his obvious indifference to the democratic struggles of small nations. Interestingly, a man expelled from his country as a child due to the rise of the Nazis did not seem fazed by the enormous rights abuses perpetrated by governments. in Africa, Latin America, Indonesia and elsewhere. Nixon’s Oval Office records showed that Kissinger was more involved in keeping his allies in the anti-communist camp than in how they treated their own people.
For decades, he has unconvincingly fought accusations that he has turned a blind eye to human rights violations. Perhaps the most egregious episode was the signals sent to Pakistan that it was flexible in treating the Bengalis of East Pakistan as it saw fit.
In “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide” (2013), the Princeton scholar Gary J. Bass depicts Mr. Kissinger ignoring warnings of an impending genocide, including those from the American consul general in East Pakistan, Archer Blood, whom he punished as disloyal.
In the Oval Office tapes, “Kissinger sneered at people who ‘bleed’ for ‘the dying Bengalis,’” Professor Bass wrote.
Divorced in 1964 after 15 years of marriage to Ann Fleischer, Mr. Kissinger married Nancy Maginnes in 1974 and moved into her home in Manhattan. At that time, Ms. Maginnes ran for Nelson A. Rockefeller, former governor of New York and friend and best friend of Mr. Kissinger.
Kissinger never returned to coaching after leaving public service, but he continued to write at a speed that embarrassed his former educational colleagues for his relative slowness.
He produced three volumes of memoirs filling 3,800 pages: “The White House Years,” which focused on Nixon’s first term, 1969-73; “Years of Upheaval,” which dealt with the next two years; and finally “Years of Renewal,” which covered the Ford presidency. “World Order,” published in 2014, was something of a valedictory assessment of geopolitics in the second decade of the 21st century. In it, he expressed worry about America’s capacity for leadership.
“After withdrawing from three wars in two generations — each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma — America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles,” he wrote.
He continued to exert influence on global affairs and, through his firm Kissinger Associates, questioned corporations and executives about foreign trends and impending difficulties. When Disney tried to convince Chinese leaders to build a $5. 5 billion park in Shanghai, Mr. Kissinger got the call. .
“Henry is certainly one of the most complex characters in recent American history,” said David Rothkopf, a former managing director of Mr. Kissinger’s consulting firm. “And he is someone who has, I think, justifiably been in the spotlight both for extraordinary brilliance and competence and, at the same time, clear defects.”
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923, in the Bavarian town of Fürth. A year later, his parents, Louis Kissinger, a high school teacher, and Paula (Stern) Kissinger, the daughter of a prosperous cattle trader, had another son, Walter.
Clearly, the young Heinz was withdrawn and fond of books, but passionate about football, to the point that he risked confrontations with hard-line Nazis to attend matches, even after symptoms appeared in a stadium that read “Juden Verboten”.
His parents raised him to be a faithful member of the orthodox Fürth synagogue, though in writing to them as a young adult he virtually rejected all religious practice.
Louis lost his task when the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935; As a Jew, he was forbidden to train in a public school. For the next three years, Paula Kissinger took the initiative to get her family out of the country by writing to a cousin in New York about immigration.
In the fall of 1938, with war still a year away, the Nazi authorities permitted them to leave Germany. With little furniture and a single trunk, the Kissingers embarked for New York aboard the French ocean liner Ile de France. Heinz was 15.
It was not a moment too soon: At least 13 of the family’s close relatives perished in the Nazi gas chambers or concentration camps. Paula Kissinger recalled years later, “In my heart, I knew they would have burned us with the others if we had stayed.”
Mr. Kissinger played down the impact of those years on his worldview. He told an interviewer in 1971: “I was not consciously unhappy. I was not acutely aware of what was going on.” But in a Times interview several years ago he did relate painful memories — of the intimidation he felt in stepping into the street to avoid the Hitler Youth, and of the sadness of having to say goodbye to relatives, particularly his grandfather, whom he knew he would never see again.
Many of Mr. Kissinger’s acquaintances said his experiences in Nazi Germany had influenced him more than he acknowledged, or perhaps even knew.
“During the formative years of his youth, he faced the horror of his world collapsing, of the father he enjoyed being turned into a helpless mouse,” said Fritz Kraemer, a non-Jewish German immigrant who would be the first in M. Kissinger. intellectual mentor. ” This led him to seek order and crave acceptance, even if it meant seeking to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors. “
Some have argued that Kissinger’s rejection of a moralistic technique in international relations in favor of realpolitik was due to the fact that he had witnessed a civilized Germany embracing Hitler. Kissinger quoted an aphorism of Goethe, saying that if he were given the choice between order and justice, he would prefer, like the novelist and the poet, order.
The Kissingers settled in Upper Manhattan, Washington Heights, then a safe haven for German Jews. His discouraged father got a job as an accountant, but fell into a depression and never fully adapted to the country he followed. Paula Kissinger kept the circle of relatives together, hosting small parties and receptions.
Heinz has become Henry at the best school. He switched to night school when he accepted a job at a company that manufactured badgers. In 1940, he enrolled at City College (tuition was practically free) and earned A’s in almost all of his courses. He looked like he was about to fit into a position. counter.
Then, in 1943, he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana.
It was there that Mr. Kraemer, a patrician intellectual and Prussian refugee, arrived one day to give a talk about the “moral and political stakes of the war,” as Mr. Kissinger recalled. The private returned to his barracks and wrote Mr. Kraemer a note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you in any way?”
This letter replaced the course of his life. Taking him under his wing, Kraemer arranged for Private Kissinger to be reassigned to Germany to serve as a translator. As German towns and villages fell in the final months of the war, Kissinger was one of the first to arrive on the scene, interrogating those captured. Gestapo officers and reading their mail.
In April 1945, with Allied victory in sight, he and his comrades carried out raids on the homes of Gestapo members suspected of planning sabotage campaigns opposed to the arrival of American forces. For his efforts, he received a bronze star.
But before returning to the United States, he visited Fürth, his hometown, and discovered that only 37 Jews remained. In a letter known through Niall Ferguson, his biographer, Kissinger wrote at age 23 that his encounters with concentration camp survivors had taught him a key lesson about human nature.
“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance,” the letter said. The survivors he met “had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.”
Kissinger remained in Germany after the war, fearing, he later said, that the United States would succumb to a democracy’s temptation to withdraw its tired forces too temporarily and miss the chance to consolidate victory.
He took on the task of civilian instructor, training U. S. officials on how to unmask former Nazi officials, a task that allowed him to enter the country. He expressed alarm over what he saw as communist subversion of Germany and warned that the U. S. deserves to monitor German phone conversations and letters. It was his first glimpse of the Cold War he would shape.
He returned to the United States in 1947, intending to resume his undergraduate studies, but was rejected by several elite universities. Harvard was the exception.
Kissinger entered Harvard as a sophomore member of the class of 1950. It was the beginning of his two decades on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, where he would rise to prominence as a professor before clashing so sharply with his colleagues over Vietnam. He would swear never to return.
He arrived on campus with his cocker spaniel, Smoky, who hid his supervisors in Claverly Hall, where dogs were banned. Later, his friends said that Smoky’s presence in the bedroom had been revealing: Mr. Kissinger had once felt like a friendless immigrant. “Harvard was then a new globality for me,” he writes, searching the past, “its mysteries hidden behind a studied informality. “
But the stranger now had an address, and he found a mentor in William Yandell Elliott, who ran the ministry. Professor Elliott guided Mr. Kissinger into political theory, though he privately wrote that his student’s brain “lacks grace and is Teutonic in form. “systematic rigor. “
Under Professor Elliott’s supervision, Kissinger wrote a senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” focusing on Immanuel Kant, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee. At 383 pages, he lays out what is informally known at Harvard as the “Kissinger Rule,” which limits the length of a high-level thesis.
Mr. Kissinger graduated, summa cum laude, in 1950. Days later, the Korean War broke out, with the newly created People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union backing North Korea’s Communist forces. He soon accepted some modest consulting work for the government that took him to Japan and South Korea.
Returning to Harvard for a Ph. D. , he and Professor Elliott introduced Harvard International Seminar, an assignment that attracted foreign political figures, civil servants, journalists, and the occasional poet to the university.
The seminar placed Kissinger in the middle of a network that would produce several global affairs leaders, including Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who would become president of France; Yasuhiro Nakasone, Prime Minister of Japan; Bulent Ecevit, later Prime Minister of Turkey; and Mahathir Mohamad, the future father of elegant Malaysia.
With Ford Foundation support, the seminar kept his family eating as Mr. Kissinger worked on his dissertation on the diplomacy of Metternich of Austria and Robert Stewart Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, after the Napoleonic wars. The dissertation, which became his first book, both shaped and reflected his view of the modern world.
The e-book “A World Restored” can be read as a reflection of M’s later fascination. Kissinger for the balance of forces between states and his distrust of revolutions. Metternich and Castlereagh sought stability in Europe and largely succeeded. through the containment of a competitive revolutionary France through a balance of forces.
Kissinger saw parallels with the struggle of his time: to contain Stalin’s Soviet Union.
“His was a quest for a realpolitik devoid of moral homilies,” Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard colleague who later split with Mr. Kissinger, said in 2015.
Kissinger earned his Ph. D. in 1954 and still got no offer for an assistant professorship. Some Harvard professors complained that he had not invested in his paintings as a professor. They saw him as too preoccupied with the disorders of the world. In fact, it was just ahead of its time: the room from Boston to Washington would soon be filled with government-consulting academics or lobbyists.
Harvard’s rejection embittered Mr. Kissinger. Nixon’s tapes later caught him telling the president that the challenge with the academy was that “you are completely dependent on the personal advice of an egoist. “
With the help of McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard colleague, Kissinger was placed in an elite research organization at the Council on Foreign Relations, which at the time was a stuffy all-male enclave in New York. His project was to examine the impact of nuclear weapons on foreign policy.
Kissinger arrived in New York with a lot of attitude. He believed that the Eisenhower administration was, wrongly, reluctant to reconsider U. S. strategic policy in light of Moscow’s growing ability to strike the U. S. with overwhelming nuclear force.
“Henry managed to convey that no one had thought intelligently about nuclear weapons and foreign policy until he came along to do it himself,” Paul Nitze, perhaps the country’s leading nuclear strategist at the time, later told Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton.
Kissinger seized on a question Nitze had begun to discuss: whether the U. S. risk of engaging in all-out nuclear war against the Soviet Union is no longer credible given the traditional wisdom. that such a clash would only invite “mutual and certain destruction. “Nitze asked whether it would not be wiser to expand weapons to combat a limited regional nuclear war.
Mr. Kissinger that “a limited nuclear war is our most effective strategy. “
What was intended to be a Council publication became an e-book thanks to Kissinger and his first bestseller, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. “The timing, 1957, perfect: it fueled national concern for a developing Soviet power.
And your message is timely: If an American president is paralyzed by concerns of escalation, Mr. Kissinger, the concept of nuclear deterrence would fail. If the U. S. simply couldn’t credibly threaten the use of small tactical weapons, he said, “it would be tantamount to giving a blank check to the Soviet leadership. “In short, it is better to say that one is willing to fight a small nuclear war than to threaten a primary war.
To his critics, it was Mr. Kissinger at the height of the Cold War, weaving the argument that a nuclear exchange is possible. Many scholars have criticized the book, believing that its 34-year-old edition overvalues the nation’s ability. to restrict restricted wars. But for the public, it was a breakthrough in nuclear thinking. To this day, it is considered a seminal work, which scholars now refer to when looking for lessons to apply to cyber warfare.
The unlikely good fortune of the e-book caused Kissinger to return to Harvard as a professor. Two years later, Ann gave birth to their first daughter, Elizabeth; in 1961 their son, David, was born.
Kissinger’s reputation had been catapulted beyond academia; those who had never heard of Metternich sought out Mr. Kissinger concerned with the struggle against the strategic risk of the time. He called a convention organized through Mr. Rockefeller, then assistant to President Dwight D. Eisenhower for Foreign Affairs. The patrician WASP and the Jewish immigrant formed an unlikely friendship, but one that gave Kissinger a backer with the resources of one of America’s largest family fortunes, and Rockefeller someone who would make it more credible on the global stage.
Mr. Kissinger said of Mr. Rockefeller, a future New York governor and vice president: “He has a second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition” about people and politics. “I have a first-rate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.”
Back at Harvard, their catepassries were popular and the more they interviewed M. Kissinger on television, the more he became a star on campus. But he soon found himself immersed in the education policy he so despised, and his quest for tenure did not go smoothly. He and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would go on to be President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, were rivals until Mr. Carter’s departure.
David Riesman, the sociologist and co-author of a seminal work on the American character, “The Lonely Crowd,” suggested that dinner with Mr. Kissinger was a chore. “He would not spend time chatting at the table,” Mr. Riesman said. “He presided.”
Leslie H. Gelb, then a doctoral student and later a Pentagon official and columnist for The Times, called him “devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”
However, tenure came in 1959, an appointment announced by M. Bundy, who, at age 34, was the youngest dean of Harvard’s faculty. Kissinger later wrote that Mr. Bundy had treated him “with the mixture of courtesy and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people, by New England standards, of exotic origins and an extremely intense private style. “
By 1961 Mr. Bundy was national security adviser to the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, and Mr. Kissinger was swept up in the Harvard rush to the White House. But he was denied a senior job. He made end runs to see the president, but after a few sessions Kennedy himself cut them off. Mr. Kissinger said later, “I consumed my energies offering unwanted advice.”
At Harvard, he began organizing meetings on the emerging crisis of the day, Vietnam. He explored the link between military actions on the ground and the chances of success through diplomacy, seemingly convinced, even then, that the war could be ended only through negotiations.
After a long trip to Saigon and the front, he wrote that the U. S. task was to “build a country in a divided society in the midst of a civil war,” defining a challenge that would affect Washington not only in South Asia. East but also in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He also renewed his relationship with Mr. Rockefeller, a moderate Republican who would be a smart candidate in the 1968 presidential election. And he met a tall, 30-year-old Rockefeller junior assistant, Mrs. Maginnes, whom he would marry years later. after. .
Kissinger began writing speeches for Rockefeller and denouncing his likely Republican top rival for the White House, Richard M. Nixon, describing him as a crisis who may never be elected. But when Rockefeller’s star fell and Nixon won the nomination, he was invited to sign up for Nixon’s foreign policy council. He kept his advisory role discreet, but it still led to one of the first primary public conflicts involving Mr. Kissinger and accusations of double-dealing.
While Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House was engaged in peace talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Kissinger allegedly used his contacts on his own trips to Paris to pass internal data to Nixon. “Henry was the only user outside of government with whom we were allowed to talk about negotiations,” Richard C told Isaacson. Holbrooke, who held key positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations, in his biography of Kissinger. “We trusted him. It is no exaggeration to say that Nixon’s crusade had a secret source inside the U. S. negotiating team. »
Nixon himself referred in his memoirs to his “very data channel. “For many who have since defended this version, the devious tactic was evidence that Kissinger would gain strength if Nixon were elected. While there is no evidence that he provided classified data to the Nixon campaign, there have long been accusations that Nixon used exactly this to give the South Vietnamese the assurance that they would get a better deal from him than from Johnson, and that we don’t have to settle for anything before the election.
Ferguson and other historians have refuted this claim; One of Nixon’s biographers has discovered notes through H. R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s closest collaborators, in which the presidential candidate ordered his team to “demolish” the peace talks.
Whatever the truth, Mr. Kissinger was on Nixon’s radar. And after the election, a new president who had often expressed his disdain for Jews and Harvard academics chose, as his national security adviser, a man who was both.
Nixon ordered Mr. Kissinger to secretly manage national security matters from the White House, so the State Department and Nixon’s Secretary of State, William P. Nixon, they discovered their man, a “precious possession,” whom he would later call Mr. Kissinger.
While the position of National Security Advisor has gained prominence since Harry S. Truman created this position, Kissinger took it to new heights. He recruited bright youngsters for his team, which he nearly doubled. He sidelined Rogers and fought the bellicose Secretary of Defense, Melvin R. Laird, thus transferring greater decision-making power to the White House.
He met constantly with Nixon, often eschewing the practice of having staff members present when discussing their areas of expertise. He went in alone, unwilling to share either the glory or the intimacy of such occasions.
His tantrums were legendary. When he slaps his foot angrily, everything is fine, a former assistant told M. When either foot takes off the ground, the aide says, you’re in trouble. When Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a personal assistant to Kissinger and later shortly Secretary of State, collapsed from overwork and rushed into an ambulance, Mr. Kissinger came out of his office shouting, “But I need it!
Staff turnover is high, but many of those who stayed came to appreciate him for his intelligence and growing list of accomplishments. Still, they were stunned by his secret. ” He’s able to give a conspiratorial air to even the smallest things. “Mr. Eagleburger, who cherished him, before his death in 2011.
Poking fun at himself in a way that some saw as disingenuous, he often told visiting diplomats that “I have not faced such a distinguished audience since dining alone in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”
Nixon had built much of his crusade around a promise to end the war on honorable terms. Mr. Kissinger’s task was to turn that promise into reality, and he made clear in a Foreign Affairs article, published as Nixon was ready to take office, that the United States would not win the war “within a time frame or with degrees of “force” politically appropriate for the American people.
In the 2018 interview, he said the U. S. had misinterpreted the combat from the start as “an extension of the Cold War in Europe. “
“I made the same mistake,” he said. “The Cold War was really about saving democratic countries from invasion.” Vietnam was different, a civil war. “What we did not understand at the beginning of the war in Vietnam,” he went on, “is how hard it is to end these civil wars, and how hard it is to get a conclusive agreement in which everyone shares the objective.”
By the time he and Nixon took office, he argued, it was too late to leave. “If you go into government and find out that 550,000 of your foot soldiers are involved in battle, how do you end up?” he asked. He and Nixon needed a way out, he said, that didn’t discredit “the 50,000 dead” or “the other people who had trusted America’s word. “
Mr. Kissinger’s pursuit of two goals that were seen as at odds with each other — winding down the war and maintaining American prestige — led him down roads that made him a hypocrite to some and a war criminal to others. He had come to office hoping for a fast breakthrough: “Give us six months,” he told a Quaker group, “and if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence.”
But six months later, there were already signs that the strategy to end the war would be expanded or prolonged. He was convinced that the North Vietnamese would engage in serious negotiations only under pressure from the army. Thus, while resuming secret peace talks in Paris, he and Nixon intensified and expanded the war.
“I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Mr. Kissinger told his staff.
Kissinger called it a “war for peace. ” Still, the result was carnage. Kissinger had the opportunity to end peace and war talks early in Nixon’s presidency, on terms as smart as those he eventually accepted. However, he refused, and thousands of Americans died because he was convinced he could do better.
As Kissinger sat with his big yellow notebooks in his White House office, scribbling notes that have now been largely declassified, he devised a three-part plan. It was about a ceasefire that would also surround Laos and Cambodia, which were dragged into the fight; simultaneous withdrawals of Americans and North Vietnamese from South Vietnam; and a peace treaty that returned all prisoners of war.
His notes and taped conversations with Nixon are littered with confident statements that the next escalation of bombing and a covert incursion into Cambodia would break the North Vietnamese and force them into genuine negotiations. But he also reacted, he later wrote, to a Vietcong. and the North Vietnamese offensive early in Nixon’s presidency that had killed some 2,000 Americans and “humiliated the new president. “
Kissinger then constructed a narrative that emphasized the goals of the strategy, but notes and phone conversations suggest that he had systematically overestimated his negotiating talents and underestimated his opponents’ ability to wait for the Americans to come out.
It was the bombing crusade in Cambodia – dubbed “Operation Menu”, with stages labelled “Breakfast”, “Lunch” and “Dinner” – that outraged M’s critics. Kissinger and nurtured books, documentaries, and symposia that explored whether the United States had violated foreign law by extending the conflict to a country not party to the war. Kissinger’s reasoning that the North had created source lines through Cambodia to fuel the war in the South.
Inevitably, data about the bombing was leaked; It’s too vital an operation to hire. Nixon was certain that the fugitives were liberals and Democrats whom Mr. Kissinger had recruited from academia. Thus began M. Kissinger’s relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, the tough director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The two men began to review the conversations of M’s staff members. Kissinger.
As internal wars raged in the White House, Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator, dug in. He rejected Kissinger’s call for a mutual withdrawal of forces; rather, he insisted on a complete U. S. withdrawal and the formation of a “coalition” government in the South that the North would obviously dominate. Aware that Nixon was beginning to withdraw his troops, North Korean leaders saw little explanation for giving in.
It wasn’t until January 1973 that Kissinger reached an agreement, assuring the South Vietnamese that the U. S. would return if the North violated the agreement and invaded. Privately, Kissinger was almost certain that the South would not be able to cope. to pressure. He told John D. Erlichman, a very sensible White House adviser, that “if you’re lucky, you can hold out for a year and a half. “
This proved prophetic: Saigon fell in April 1975, with the unconditional support of South Vietnam. Fifty-eight thousand Americans and more than three million North and South Vietnamese were killed, and eight million tons of bombs were dropped across the United States. But for Mr. Kissinger, putting an end to that was the key to moving on to bigger, more successful projects.
When Kissinger wrote crusader speeches for Nelson Rockefeller in 1968, he included a passage in which he envisioned “a sophisticated triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union. “The strategy, he writes, would allow the U. S. to “improve our relations with all countries. “one while we check the will of both towards peace. “
He got a chance to test that thesis the next year. Chinese and Soviet forces had clashed in a border dispute, and in a meeting with Mr. Kissinger, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, spoke candidly of the importance of “containing” the Chinese. Nixon directed Mr. Kissinger to make an overture, secretly, to Beijing.
A staunch anti-communist, he had long maintained close ties with the so-called China lobby, which opposed Mao Zedong’s communist government in Beijing. He also believed that North Vietnam acted largely as a Chinese satellite. in its war against South Vietnam and its U. S. allies.
Nixon and Kissinger secretly contacted Pakistani leader Yahya Khan to act as an intermediary. In December 1970, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington passed Kissinger a message that had been mailed from Islamabad. It was from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai: A special envoy of President Nixon would be welcome in Beijing.
That led to what became known as Ping-Pong diplomacy. A young member of the American table tennis team playing in a championship tournament in Japan had befriended a Chinese competitor. The Chinese leadership apparently concluded that the American player’s gesture was another signal from Mr. Kissinger. The American team was invited to Beijing, where Mr. Zhou surprised the players by telling them, “You have opened a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people.”
Over the next two months, messages were exchanged related to an imaginable presidential layover in. Then, on June 2, 1971, Mr. Kissinger obtained another communication through the Pakistani connection, this one inviting him to Beijing to prepare for a stopover on the Nixon. Mr. Kissinger steered Nixon away from a White House dinner to declare, “This is the most important communication ever made to an American president since the end of World War II. “
The president unveiled a precious bottle of brandy, and the men toasted his triumph in the same room where, three years later, they would kneel together in agony.
In July 1971, Mr. Kissinger left on what was described as an Asian fact-finding trip. In Pakistan, reporters were told that the secretary was not feeling well and that he would spend a few days at a mountain retreat to recover. A motorcade soon set off for the hills. But it was a decoy; Mr. Kissinger was actually flying to China with three aides.
In Beijing, he gave a presentation to Mr. Zhou, ending by saying that, as Americans, “we are here in what to us is a land of mystery,” he recalled in a 2014 interview for the Harvard Secretaries of State Project. Zhou interrupted him. There are 900 million of us,” he said, “and there’s nothing mysterious about that to us. “
It took three days to work out the details, and after Mr. Kissinger telegraphed the code word “Eureka” to Nixon, the president, unannounced, appeared on television to announce what Mr. Kissinger had arranged. His enemies – the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, the Democrats and his liberal critics – were stunned. On February 21, 1972, he became the first U. S. president to make a stopover in mainland China.
The Chinese were also a little stunned. Mao pushed Mr. Zhou aside after a month. After that, no other Chinese ever spoke of Zhou Enlai again, Kissinger told the Harvard Project. He speculated that Mao had feared that his No. 2 “would become too friendly with me personally. “
Years later, Kissinger became more reserved about this achievement.
“Given the necessities of the times, it is inevitable that China and the United States will find a way to unite,” he wrote in “On China,” referring to the internal conflicts in the two countries and the not unusual interest in resisting the Soviet Union. Advances. But he also insisted that he had sought not so much to isolate Russia as to carry out a grand experiment in balance-of-power politics. “Our view,” he writes, “that the lifestyles of triangular relationships are themselves a form of pressure on each of them. “
Historians still debate whether that worked. But there is no debating that it made Mr. Kissinger an international celebrity. It also proved vital for reasons that never factored into Mr. Kissinger’s calculus five decades ago — that China would rise as the only true economic, technological and military competitor to the United States.
Nixon’s announcement that he would stop in China came as a marvel to Moscow. A few days later, Mr. Dobrynin made a stopover with Mr. Dobrynin. Kissinger and invited Nixon to meet with Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, on the Kremlin. La date was set for May 1972, only 3 months after the arrival in China. “Having two Communist powers vying for intelligent relations with us can only gain advantage for the cause of peace,” Mr. Kissinger said. “That was the essence of the triangular strategy. “
To prepare for the summit, he flew to Moscow, still in secret. Nixon had agreed to let it pass on the condition that Kissinger spend most of his time insisting that the Soviets rein in their North Vietnamese allies, who were mounting an offensive.
By then, however, Mr. Kissinger had changed his mind about how much control the Soviets had over the North Vietnamese, writing to his deputy, Alexander M. Haig, “I do not believe that Moscow is in direct collusion with Hanoi.”
Instead, he sought to reinvigorate negotiations, which had been stumbling along since late 1969, with the aim of limiting the number of ground-based and submarine-launched nuclear missiles that the two countries were pointing at each other and curbing the development of antiballistic missile systems. Mr. Kissinger achieved a breakthrough, writing to Nixon, “You will be able to sign the most important arms control agreement ever concluded.”
That may have been overstatement, but Mr. Brezhnev and Nixon signed what became the SALT I treaty in May 1972. It opened decades of arms-control agreements — SALT, START, New START — that greatly reduced the number of nuclear weapons in the world. The era known as détente had begun. It unraveled only late in Mr. Kissinger’s life. While Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden renewed New START in 2021, once the war in Ukraine started the Russian leader suspended compliance with many parts of the treaty.
For Mr. Kissinger, there were superpowers and everything else, and everything else got him into trouble.
He never failed to face questions about the overthrow and death of Allende in Chile in September 1973 and that of Augusto Pinochet, the general who had seized power.
Over the next three decades, as General Pinochet came to be accused — first in Europe, then in Chile — of abductions, murder and human rights violations, Mr. Kissinger was repeatedly linked to clandestine activities that had undermined Mr. Allende, a Marxist, and his democratically elected government. The revelations emerged in declassified documents, lawsuit depositions and journalistic indictments, like Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), which was made into a documentary film.
The date dates back to 1970, when Mr. Allende ran for president of Chile. An Allende victory would be the first by a Marxist in a democratic election, a prospect that involved Mr. Allende-Kissinger.
Nixon was also alarmed, according to a White House recording that Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive cited in his e-book “The Pinochet Dossier: A Declassified File on Atrocities and Accountability. “He quotes Nixon ordering the U. S. ambassador in Santiago to “do everything possible. “”That is not a Dominican-type action” to save you, Mr. Allende, from winning the elections. The reference to the U. S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.
Kissinger insisted, in his memoirs and in his testimony before Congress, that the U. S. had “nothing to do” with the military coup that toppled Kissinger. However, according to phone records declassified in 2004, Kissinger boasted that he “helped them” by creating the situations for the coup.
This help included a plot to kidnap the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, General René Schneider, who had refused CIA intervention. Pleas to carry out a coup d’état. The general died in the attempt. His car was ambushed and he was fatally shot at point-blank range.
Kissinger, as national security adviser, chaired the 40 Committee, a secret framework that included the director of central intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All covert moves were subject to committee approval.
In 2001, General Schneider’s two sons filed a civil lawsuit in the United States, accusing Mr. Kissinger of helping orchestrate covert activities in Chile that led to their father’s death. A U. S. federal court, without ruling on Mr. Kissinger’s guilt, dismissed the case, saying foreign policy was up to the government and the courts.
Kissinger, in his defense, said his moves had to be noted in the context of the Cold War. “I don’t see why we deserve to sit and watch a communist country because of the irresponsibility of its people,” he said. , and adds half-jokingly: “The issues are too vital for the Chilean electorate to be left to their own devices. decide for themselves.
Chile is not the only position in which Kissinger accuses him of seeing him as a minor chess piece in his grand strategies. He and President Ford approved the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975, leading to a disastrous 24-year profession through a U. S. government. backed military.
Declassified documents released in 2001 through the National Security Archives that Ford and Kissinger knew about the invasion plans months in advance and knew that the use of U. S. weapons would violate U. S. law.
“I know the law,” Kissinger allegedly told a town hall upon his return to Washington. He then asked how it can be done in “the United States. “”It is in the best interest of Americans to kick Indonesians in the teeth”?
Columnist Anthony Lewis wrote in the Times: “It was Kissinger realism: the concept that America forgets about brutalities committed through friendly authoritarian regimes because they provide ‘stability. ‘”
It’s a family complaint. In 1971, the bloodbath in East Pakistan, which Nixon and Kissinger ignored out of respect for Pakistan, escalated into a war between Pakistan and India, a country hated by both China and the Nixon White House.
“At this point, the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger has only gotten worse,” wrote the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, analyzing Professor Bass’s account in the New York Times review of the book in 2013. “They sent ships of the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, in all likelihood for an attack, a maneuver that may have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two communist countries have been more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, as India crushed the Pakistani army and East Pakistan declared its independence, thus becoming the new country of Bangladesh.
Occasions like this have led to protests whenever Kissinger ventures onto school campuses.
So did his consulting ties: When President George W. Bush appointed him to lead a commission to investigate the government’s failures to detect and prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Kissinger discovered that the appointment required that he disclose his firm’s clients. Rather than comply, Mr. Kissinger abruptly withdrew, saying he could not serve if it meant revealing his clients.
While Kissinger worked hard to shape the history of his own decisions, he found himself in the bizarre scenario of living so long that his own memos were declassified while he was still on the global stage. In 2004, in reaction to freedom of data requests, the State Department released thousands of pages of Mr. Kissinger’s transcripts under the Nixon administration. Some have revealed friendly conversations with Washington journalists; others showed a president who, in the midst of Watergate, was too incapable of communicating with the British prime minister.
Even more declassified documents revealed how Kissinger had used his historic 1971 meeting with Zhou in China to provide a radical replacement in U. S. policy toward Taiwan. Under this plan, the U. S. would necessarily have abandoned its country in favor of Taiwan’s anti-communist nationalists. replacing China’s help to end the Vietnam War. The account contradicted the one he had included in his published memoirs.
The emerging documents have also revealed the value that must be paid for realism aimed at U. S. interests. In recordings released through Nixon’s Presidential Library and Museum in 2010, Kissinger told Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews migrate and thus escape the oppression of a totalitarian regime “is not a purpose of American foreign policy. “
“And if they put Jews in fuel chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “that’s an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern. “
The American Jewish Committee called the comments “truly frightening” but warned that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House would possibly be partly to blame.
“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no doubt about his loyalty,” said David Harris, the committee’s former executive director.
Mr. Kissinger is survived by his wife, Mrs. Maginnes, and his children with Mrs. Fleischer, David and Elizabeth. His younger brother, Walter B. Kissinger, former chairman of the multinational Allen Group, died in 2021. Kissinger’s latest book, “Leadership: Six Studies on Global Strategy,” published in 2022.
Mr. Kissinger was aware of his questionable position in American history, and possibly would have had his own position in mind when, in 2006, he wrote about Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under Truman, in the Times Book Review, calling him ” perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history.
“History has treated Acheson more kindly,” Mr. Kissinger wrote. “Accolades for him have become bipartisan.”
Thirty-five years after his death, he said, Acheson had “achieved iconic status. “
Mr. Kissinger clearly became an icon of a different kind. And he was acutely aware that the challenges facing the nation had changed. At age 96, he plunged into questions surrounding artificial intelligence, teaming up with Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, and the computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher to write “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” (2019), in which he discussed how the development of weapons controlled by algorithms, rather than directly by humans, would change concepts of deterrence.
After donating his papers to Yale, Kissinger reconciled with Harvard (the institution where he had made an appeal), but made it clear that he had been welcomed after Vietnam.
Mr. Allison, a Harvard professor, and Drew Faust, then president of the university, were determined to heal the wound. Kissinger was asked to return to attend a conference at which he was interviewed by a graduate student; He followed a dinner at the president’s house. “I never imagined he would be back inside those walls,” he said.
A student asked him about his legacy. ” You know, when I was young, I saw other people my age as if they were another species,” he said with a laugh. “And I thought my grandparents had come into the world at that age. “I had lived them. “
“Now that I’ve reached beyond their age,” he added, “I’m not worried about my legacy. And I don’t give really any thought to it, because things are so changeable. You can only do the best you’re able to do, and that’s more what I judge myself by — whether I’ve lived up to my values, whatever their quality, and to my opportunities.”
Michael T. Kaufman, a former Times correspondent and editor who died in 2010, contributed to the report.
A previous edition of this article misspelled the latest call from a former Google CEO. This is Eric Schmidt, Eric Schmitt.
How We Deal with Repairs
David E. Sanger covers Biden’s administration and national security. He has been a reporter for The Times for more than 4 decades and is the author of several books on demanding situations for U. S. national security. Learn more about David E. Sanger
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