Henry Kissinger / The Times 30.11.2023

 Heinz Kissinger had the misfortune to be born Jewish in Germany in 1923. He was raised in the town of Fürth, near Nuremberg, as Hitler’s genocidal anti­semitism took hold. He was banned from the state school, from watching the local football team, from the ­municipal swimming pool and other public ­facilities as signs proclaiming Juden Verboten proliferated.

He endured ostracism, humiliations and beatings. His father lost his ­teaching job. Finally, in 1938, the family fled to New York. At least 13 close ­relatives who stayed were sent to the gas chambers or died in concentration camps. “My relatives are soap,” he ­remarked long afterwards.

Kissinger, who changed his first name to Henry, rarely spoke of his upbringing but it imbued him with a deep pessimism about human nature. It convinced him of the paramount need for stability and order, even at the expense of human rights. “Given a choice of order or justice, he often said, he would choose order,” wrote Walter Isaacson, his biographer. “He had seen too clearly the consequences of disorder.”

That world view gave rise to the realpolitik that Kissinger pursued during the eight dazzling years he served under the US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state. It led to his greatest successes: the opening of relations with Red China; détente with the Soviet Union; America’s withdrawal from Vietnam; and a rapprochement between Israel and Egypt.

A brilliant, tireless negotiator and master of what he termed “constructive ambiguity”, he became a diplomatic superstar who dealt directly with presidents and prime ministers — Leonid Brezhnev (who once took him boar hunting), Zhou Enlai, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat. He was a global celebrity who dated Hollywood stars, won the 1973 Nobel peace prize and enraged President Nixon by hogging the limelight and defying his orders. Asked to identify his greatest success and greatest failure, he replied with his customary wit: “I don’t quite understand your second point.”

However, Kissinger was infamous too. He and Nixon bombed neutral Cambodia and helped to propel that country into a singularly awful civil war. They encouraged General Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of Salvador ­Allende’s democratically elected left-wing government in Chile — “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible,” Kissinger said. They abandoned the Kurds of Iraq, and connived in acts of violent ­repression by allies such as Pakistan, Indonesia and Iran. Kissinger’s many critics called him a war criminal.

Like Nixon, he was vain, furtive, ­manipulative, duplicitous and paranoid. He shamelessly sidelined the State Department, Pentagon and Congress in his quest for total control of US foreign policy. He threw tantrums, feuded with other top officials and had journalists and members of his own staff wiretapped to counter leaks. Although he emerged largely unscathed from the Watergate scandal that destroyed Nixon, he helped to foster the mindset and methods that caused it.

The evening before Nixon resigned, in August 1974, he summoned Kissinger to his private quarters in the White House. The president was “almost a basket case”, Kissinger said later. For 90 minutes they recalled their foreign policy triumphs and Kissinger assured the president that history would remember him kindly. Then, as Kissinger was leaving, Nixon asked his secretary of state and national security adviser to pray with him. They went down on their knees and Nixon began to cry. “Nothing I have been through has ever been so traumatic,” Kissinger told aides afterwards.

Ford replaced Nixon and Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state but by the 1976 presidential election Kissinger’s fortunes had begun to wane. Shorn of US support, South Vietnam had fallen to the communist Viet Cong. Liberals and the emerging Republican right of Ronald Reagan had begun to denounce the compromises with Soviet communism required by détente. In a nation that tends to see the world as good or evil, and whose foreign policy had ­traditionally been based on idealism, Kissinger’s European-style realpolitik fell out of favour.

He was 54 when he left office, and though he did not serve in government again he remained an eminent and colourful public figure for the rest of his life. As recently as 2022, when he was 99, his opinion was still being sought in high places. And as he showed when he implied that Ukraine would have to cede territory to Russia if it wanted peace — prompting President Zelensky to respond by accusing Kissinger of 1930s-style appeasement — he could still make headlines around the world.

Kissinger arrived in New York at the age of 15 and his family settled in Washington Heights — a district dubbed the “Fourth Reich” because it was full of German Jewish refugees. He worked in a shaving brush factory by day and attended school at night. He won admission to the City College of New York and planned to be an accountant but in 1943 he was drafted and became a US citizen. Shortly after D-Day he returned to Germany, the country he had fled six years earlier, as a translator and driver for the commander of the US army’s 84th Division.

Margaret Thatcher with Kissinger when he was secretary of state in 1976

Although only a private, Kissinger was made administrator of Krefeld, the first town the division captured, and established a civilian government in eight days. He was transferred to the counterintelligence corps and won a Bronze Star for tracking down senior Nazis. After Hitler’s defeat he was put in charge of more than 20 towns in the state of Hesse — aged 22 he was an occupier in the land of his birth.

Returning to the US in 1947, he won a place at Harvard, which became his home for the next 20 years. His thesis on “The Meaning of History” ran to a record 383 pages, and helped him to graduate “summa cum laude”. In his second year at college he had married Ann Fleischer, a fellow German Jewish refugee from Washington Heights.

Kissinger joined Harvard’s government department, earning his PhD with a dissertation that explored how two 19th-century statesmen, Austria’s Prince Klemens von Metternich and Britain’s Viscount Castlereagh, created a stable balance of power in Europe after the Napoleonic wars — an achievement that inspired his own realpolitik. Under the patronage of a distinguished professor named William Yandell Elliott, Kissinger also set up the Harvard International Seminar, which brought promising young leaders from around the world to Harvard each summer. His global networking had begun.

In 1955 Kissinger took a leave of absence from Harvard, where he had become a professor, to investigate the impact of nuclear weapons on foreign policy for the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The result was a book that became a surprise bestseller and propelled Kissinger to prominence as one of America’s “defence intellectuals”.

He set up a Harvard think tank, advised various government agencies and, in 1961, became a part-time consultant in President Kennedy’s White House — Kissinger was at that time a Democrat. He engaged in some secret, arm’s-length negotiations with the North Vietnamese and also started to advise Nelson Rockefeller, the oil heir and Republican governor of New York. However, one casualty of his ascent was his marriage. He and Ann had had two children — Elizabeth, who became a doctor, and David, a television executive — but his wife was humbler than him and they grew apart. They divorced in 1964.

In 1968 Rockefeller sought the Republican presidential nomination but lost to Nixon. Kissinger had been contemptuous of Nixon, saying he was “not fit to be president”, but during the general election he quietly advised him on the progress of President Johnson’s Vietnam peace negotiations. He was rewarded for his duplicity with the job of national security adviser. Rockefeller’s aides were shocked.

Kissinger and Nixon were not close. Kissinger, although obsequious in Nixon’s presence, privately called him a “madman” and “my drunken friend”. Nixon referred to Kissinger as “my Jew boy”. However, they were made for each other. Both were loners and outsiders. Both were devious, power-hungry and fundamentally insecure. They also shared a passion for foreign policy, secretly agreed to run it from the White House not the State Department, and — when they were not feuding — spent hours discussing it. Undeclared “back channels” were their favoured modus operandi.

The deeply unpopular and immensely costly war in Vietnam was the most pressing problem facing the new administration. Nixon and Kissinger realised that military victory was impossible and needed a face-saving exit. They settled on a policy of “Vietnamisation” — building up South Vietnam’s forces while reducing the US presence and hoping that the Saigon government would survive for a “decent interval” after the last American troops had left. Kissinger embarked on three years of secret on-off ­negotiations with North Vietnamese officials that culminated in the Paris peace accords of 1973 and won him and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, the Nobel peace prize. It was a controversial award. Tho rejected it, saying there was no peace in South Vietnam. Two of the five members of the Norwegian committee that picked the winners resigned in protest. The New York Times dubbed it the “Nobel War Prize”. “Political satire became ­obsolete,” the songwriter Tom Lehrer would quip, “when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.”

The outcry was understandable. While talking peace, the US had secretly bombed Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia, then sparked the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge in that country by invading it. They carpet-bombed Hanoi at Christmas in 1972 to persuade the North Vietnamese to change a draft treaty that the communists had accepted and the South had rejected. Moreover the accords were swiftly breached and within two years Saigon had fallen.

Kissinger’s handling of Vietnam hastened Nixon’s downfall too, and not just because it caused such anger in America. Obsessively secretive, he instructed the FBI to bug the phones of 17 White House officials and journalists after there was a leak about the Cambodian bombing. Later, after the leak of the “Pentagon Papers” detailing America’s involvement in Vietnam, Kissinger’s fury led to the creation of a White House unit called “the Plumbers” who subsequently broke into the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters.

Kissinger used Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, as a backchannel to the Chinese — a much more successful enterprise that culminated in Nixon’s unprecedented and triumphant visit to Beijing in 1972. The groundwork was laid the previous year when Kissinger made a secret two-day trip to the Chinese capital while pretending to be ill in Islamabad, and spent 17 hours talking with the premier, Zhou Enlai.

Nixon’s visit ended 23 years of mutual hostility that had begun after Mao Zedong’s communist takeover in 1949. The spin-offs were huge. Suddenly the US could play China off against the Soviet Union — “We moved towards China to shape a global equilibrium … to give each communist power a stake in better relations with us,” Kissinger wrote later. The Chinese helped to persuade the North Vietnamese to accept the Paris peace accords. The US withdrawal from Vietnam marked the end of 20 years of US interventionism, and of its willingness to “bear any burden” in support of liberty, but the opening of relations with China caught America’s imagination and helped to prevent a retreat into isolationism.

Less noticed was Washington’s tacit acceptance of Pakistan’s brutal suppression of Bangladeshi nationalists in 1971. Kissinger “felt that larger strategic issues … should outweigh moral sentiments”, noted Isaacson.

As a backchannel to Moscow, Kissinger used Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, who paid secret visits to the White House ­almost weekly. Nixon and Kissinger thus pursued the policy of détente whereby the superpowers agreed to restrict their global competition and pursue areas of mutual interest. Again, a secret trip by Kissinger led to Nixon making the first visit by a US president to Moscow, only three months after his groundbreaking visit to Beijing. Nixon and Brezhnev signed a strategic arms limitation agreement (Salt 1) and an anti-ballistic missile treaty — the first restraints on the escalating nuclear arms race and the first thaw in the Cold War.

During his first term Nixon kept Kissinger away from the Middle East because he was Jewish, although Kissinger seldom discussed or practised his faith. That changed after Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Kissinger engaged in the ­frenetic shuttle diplomacy that had ­become his trademark. He ­rescued the Israelis by rushing in American arms, then the Egyptians by restraining the Israelis, and averted a Soviet intervention by putting US nuclear forces on alert. He eventually brokered a rapprochement between Israel and Egypt that led to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and Egypt becoming the first Arab state to ­recognise Israel.

Kissinger relentlessly courted, flattered and briefed journalists — “Kissinger doesn’t play golf. His hobby is talking to us,” said one. He could be ­brutal towards his staff but he charmed others with his self-deprecating wit. “I’ve been called indispensable and a miracle worker. I know, because I ­remember every word I say,” he quipped. Though short and podgy, with a rumbling bass voice and Germanic accent as thick as his glasses, his diplomatic triumphs and his flair for the dramatic made him an international superstar — an accolade he adored.

Newsweek dubbed him “Super K”. Time magazine made him man of the year. Monty Python wrote a comedy song about him. He was a fixture at smart Georgetown dinner parties, and dated Hollywood stars including Shirley MacLaine, Liv Ullmann and Candice Bergen. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” he liked to say. However, he seemed keener on being seen with beautiful women than sleeping with them, more interested in foreign affairs than domestic ones. He was once ­photographed with a belly dancer named Nadia on his lap in a pre-revolutionary Tehran nightclub. “She’s a charming girl and very interested in foreign policy,” joked the self-styled “secret swinger”.

Eventually, in 1974, Kissinger married Nancy Maginnes, a well-bred New Yorker much taller and younger than him. He had met her at the 1964 ­Republican convention in San Francisco when both worked for Rockefeller. After a private, four-minute ceremony in Washington they flew to Mexico on Rockefeller’s private jet and honeymooned on an estate lent to them by a wealthy Mexican businessman and ­socialite.

Nixon resigned five months later. Ford retained Kissinger as secretary of state but as the 1976 presidential election approached Kissinger’s political fortunes began to ebb. The US-backed governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia fell amid wrenching scenes in 1975. “I’m the only secretary of state who has lost two countries in three weeks,” Kissinger observed. Détente came under attack from left and right — for its compromises with communism, perceived betrayal of eastern Europe in the 1975 Helsinki accords, and failure to ensure the right of Soviet Jewry to ­emigrate. Particularly ­damaging was Ford’s ­refusal, on Kissinger’s advice, to receive ­Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident, at the White House in July 1975.

In the Republican primaries Reagan attacked ­détente for being too cosy with the Soviets. In the general election Jimmy Carter attacked its lack of concern for human rights. He denounced the foreign ­policies of “Nixon-Kissinger-Ford” as “covert, manipulative and deceptive” and contrary to “the basic principles of this country”. Ford lost after a ­campaign from which Kissinger was ­excluded.

Kissinger had no role in the Carter administration and openly clashed with it when it refused to admit the ­deposed Shah of Iran to the US. He was rather more dismayed when the ­Republican administrations of Reagan and George HW Bush offered him no significant role either. During the latter he struck up an improbable and ­expedient friendship with Dan Quayle, offering the vice-president some intellectual heft in return for access to his conservative critics.

He thought of running for the Senate in 1980, and for governor of New York in 1986, but the closest he came to a return to office was in 1980 when Reagan, the Republican presidential nominee, toyed with the improbable idea of making Ford, the former president, his running mate. Ford insisted that Reagan, if elected, should make Kissinger secretary of state. Reagan ­refused. Kissinger also suffered the ­humiliation of being defeated when he sought re-election to the board of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1981 — an apparent rejection of Kissinger by a bastion of the US foreign policy ­establishment.

However, Kissinger did not fade into obscurity, a triple bypass heart operation in 1982 notwithstanding. He and Nancy moved to Manhattan and bought a country estate in Connecticut. He sold his memoirs for $5 million, and wrote numerous other books. He also took on lucrative consultancies with banks and television companies, delivered speeches for tens of thousands of dollars each, wrote syndicated newspaper columns and taught at Georgetown University after turning down a professorship at Columbia because students protested about his role in Vietnam. A lifelong football fan, he helped to bring Pelé to the New York Cosmos and, in 1994, the World Cup to the US.

Most profitably of all, he set up Kissinger Associates, which offered some of the world’s biggest multinational corporations strategic advice, worldwide connections and a certain cachet. This led to some perceived conflicts of ­interest. Kissinger defended China’s crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 without revealing his extensive business links to the regime — “no ­government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its ­capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators”, he argued.

In 2002 the younger President Bush asked him to head an investigation into intelligence failures before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but he resigned after refusing to publish his list of private-sector clients. However, Kissinger remained an influential behind-the-scenes adviser to George W Bush, and openly supported his invasion of Iraq.

All this allowed the erstwhile refugee from Nazi Germany to live in considerable style, with private jets, limousines, bodyguards and access to presidents and prime ministers around the world. He consorted with the rich and famous, and continued to command attention and pontificate on world affairs until his death.

In 2012 he returned to Fürth to watch SpVgg Greuther Fürth, the ­football club he worshipped as a child, play one of its first matches after being promoted to the Bundesliga. This time he was ­welcomed as a local hero, not banned as a Jew.

Henry Kissinger, former national security adviser and US secretary of state, was born on May 27, 1923. He died on November 29, 2023, aged 100