Henry Kissinger, a ruthless practitioner of the art of realpolitik who had an outsize impact on global events and who won a premature Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that kept going, has died.
A cunning, erudite strategist whose transformative diplomatic efforts helped to reshape the world, Kissinger was 100.
His death Wednesday was announced by his consulting firm. No cause was given.
The former secretary of State will be forever connected with President Richard M. Nixon, particularly for their efforts in three areas: getting America out of the Vietnam War, opening diplomatic relations with China and reducing tensions with the Soviet Union. For decades thereafter, Kissinger’s work with Nixon and President Gerald Ford earned him the role of the Republican Party’s elder statesman when it came to foreign policy.
“The Middle American professional politician and the German-born Harvard professor,” wrote George C. Herring in “America’s Longest War” of Nixon and Kissinger, “could hardly have been more different in background, but they shared a love of power and a burning ambition to mold a fluid world in a way that would establish their place in history. Loners and outsiders in their own professions, they were perhaps naturally drawn to each other.”
In 1973, Kissinger shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese counterpart, for hammering out an agreement to end the Vietnam War. The accord, which was signed Jan. 27, 1973, had “brought a wave of joy and hope for peace over the entire world,” the Nobel committee said.
However, Tho declined to accept the prize, saying peace was not yet a reality, and the war rapidly flared up again, minus the American troops.
More significant in the long term was Nixon’s “opening” of China; Kissinger helped establish relations with communist government there. The duo also focused on “detente,” an effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union. These developments came about as Nixon and Kissinger played the two Communist superpowers off each other, a tactic that also helped extricate America from the quagmire in Vietnam.
“Our objective,” Kissinger once wrote, “was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality.”
Nixon and Kissinger saw nearly all international issues through a Cold War prism, so their efforts, for instance, to end the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East turned into a high-stakes poker game involving the Soviets. The 1971 India-Pakistan war set off similar calculations about superpower relations.
Political developments in South America and Africa — often in places most Americans couldn’t find on a map — also attracted their interest and involvement. Every crisis was assessed, every triumph leveraged. Lethal force was often part of the equation.
“Kissinger personified human complexity — his characteristics ranging from brilliance and wit to sensitivity, melancholy, abrasiveness and savagery,” Stanley Karnow wrote in “Vietnam: A History.” “As he adapted to Nixon’s court, with its arcane and unsavory intrigues, he was able to acquire a talent for duplicity.”
Mostly untainted by the Watergate scandal that toppled Nixon, Kissinger continued to wield influence in the waning days of the administration. “You have saved this country, Mr. President,” he was heard telling Nixon in an April 1973 White House tape. “The history books will show that, when no one will know what Watergate means.”
Nixon resigned in August 1974, but Kissinger remained in office.
“He is, so far as this American is concerned,” said Ford in awarding him a Presidential Medal of Freedom in early 1977, “the greatest Secretary of State in the history of our Republic. His superb record of achievement is unsurpassed in the annals of American history.”
President Richard Nixon (right) meets with Henry Kissinger (left) and Secretary of State William Rogers (center) on Feb. 9, 1969. Nixon and Kissinger largely boxed Rogers out of major policy decisions.
Charles Bennett/AP
When relations were established, the power dynamic of the Cold War shifted dramatically. The Soviet Union came to fear a new U.S.-China partnership, leading to Nixon-Kissinger breakthroughs with Leonid Brezhnev’s stagnating Soviet regime on arms control and trade.
“We were quite convinced that once we were in contact with Beijing, the diplomacy between Washington and Moscow would become unfrozen,” Kissinger said in a 1983 interview, who added: “We would seize the opportunity.”
This Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy served to shake up the dynamics of relationships around the globe, after a long period of superpower stalemate. Remaking the world required the ability to conduct drawn-out negotiations and in-depth geopolitical analysis, as well as to understand the limitations of any diplomat’s knowledge. Those were Kissinger’s strengths.
“The superpowers,” he later wrote, “often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking.”
In September 1973, with the help of the United States, Chilean President Salvador Allende was ousted by the military. A Marxist, Allende had been democratically elected, but Nixon — urged on by Kissinger — feared that example might be contagious. Allende ended up dead, and Gen. Augusto Pinochet launched a bloody regime.
One of Kissinger’s most telling quotes came amid discussion over the situation: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” (That quote is sometimes rendered with stupidity in place of irresponsibility, but the scorn for democratic processes remains intact.)
The globe-trotting Henry Kissinger became an honorary member of basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters in 1976.
