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Henry Kissinger
1923–2023 · 100 years Tier II
The Fürth boy who spent 60 years arguing about order
He was nine when Hitler took the chancellorship, and he still described the day precisely in a BBC interview 89 years later. In Fürth he played for the youth side of SpVgg Fürth while Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his friends in the street. The family left Germany on August 20, 1938, stopped in London, and reached New York on September 5. He finished George Washington High School at night and spent his days in a shaving brush factory, then studied accounting at City College until the draft took him in 1943. He was naturalized that June in South Carolina. In the 84th Infantry Division another German émigré, Fritz Kraemer, noticed his German and his head and had him moved to intelligence.
Kraemer's transfer decided the rest. Kissinger came out of the war having hunted Gestapo officers in Hanover and run denazification at Bensheim, with a Bronze Star, took three Harvard degrees, wrote a 400-page senior thesis that is why Harvard caps their length, and published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. Nelson Rockefeller kept him through three presidential campaigns. Nixon made him national security adviser in 1969 and secretary of state in 1973, and for two years he held both jobs. He opened China on two 1971 trips to Zhou Enlai, the first in secret, built the arms control that gave détente content, ran shuttle diplomacy after the Yom Kippur War, and signed the Paris accords that ended American fighting in Vietnam.
The Nobel committee gave him the 1973 Peace Prize jointly with Lê Đức Thọ, who refused it on the ground that there was no peace. Scholars now assign him substantial responsibility for between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian civilian deaths in the bombing that started in March 1969. He and Nixon backed Yahya Khan through the 1971 killings in East Pakistan and set aside the cable in which the American consul general in Dacca called it a selective genocide. He authorized CIA work against Salvador Allende, stayed cordial to Pinochet and to Videla's junta, and sat with Ford and Suharto in Jakarta the day before Indonesia invaded East Timor. Christopher Hitchens wrote a book arguing for his prosecution. Niall Ferguson and Robert Kaplan answer that the standard is applied to him alone.
He was 100 and still on airplanes. In July 2023 he flew to Beijing and met a Chinese defense minister under American sanctions, and the Communist Party received him as an old friend. He died of heart failure at his house in Kent, Connecticut, on November 29, 2023, and is buried at Arlington. The obituaries agreed on nothing. Chile's ambassador in Washington credited him with brilliance and profound moral wretchedness in the same statement, and Chile's president reposted it. Fifty years on, the argument about him is really an argument about whether foreign policy is scored on its results or on its methods, and it has not been settled.
Lifespan
Henry Kissinger's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
book
The book that made him a public figure 1957 -
A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22
book
His doctoral work, on how a broken order is rebuilt 1957 -
Opening to China
mission
Two trips to Zhou Enlai, the first of them secret 1971 -
Paris Peace Accords
other
Ended American fighting in Vietnam and brought a Nobel Prize 1973 -
Kissinger Associates
company
The consultancy he ran until his death 1982 -
Diplomacy
book
His long account of the balance of power 1994
Life in brief
with age at each point- August 20, 1938 aged 15 The family leaves Germany They stopped in London and reached New York on September 5.
- June 19, 1943 aged 20 Naturalized as an American citizen during basic training
- April 10, 1945 aged 21 Takes part in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp
- February 6, 1949 aged 25 Marries Ann Fleischer, also of Fürth They had two children and divorced in 1964.
- 1950 aged ~27 Graduates from Harvard with a 400-page thesis on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant
- January 20, 1969 aged 45 Becomes Nixon's national security adviser The bombing of Cambodia began that March.
- July 1971 aged 48 Flies secretly to Beijing to meet Zhou Enlai
- December 6, 1975 aged 52 Meets Suharto in Jakarta with President Ford Indonesia invaded East Timor the next day.
- November 29, 2023 aged 100 Dies at Kent, Connecticut, at 100 He had been in Beijing four months earlier.
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