Henry Alfred Kissinger

Henry Alfred Kissinger, who was born on 27 May 1923, was one of the most
important American statesmen of the half century after World War II, leaving his
mark not only in a remarkable official career but in an influential body of writing on
the history and philosophy of international politics. His rise was an improbable one -
- the German Jewish refugee vaulted to the highest levels of power in the United
States government, the shy professor transformed into a Hollywood-style celebrity,
the theoretician honored with a Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiating achievements.
Kissinger was a forceful personality, with a caustic wit and formidable intellectual
gifts; thus he gained enemies as well as admirers in great numbers. But even in this
there were paradoxes, for after years of being excoriated by the left as a cold-
blooded Cold Warrior (as in Vietnam, Chile, Angola, etc.,) he found himself, to his
consternation, excoriated

as a weak-kneed apostle of "détente" with the Soviet Union.

He was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in the town of Fürth, near Nuremberg in
Bavaria, his father a schoolteacher. It was his practical-minded mother who saw the
Nazi menace most clearly and pushed the family to emigrate to the United States in
1938. Thirteen family members who stayed behind perished in the Holocaust.

Young Heinz (soon Americanized as Henry) was thrown into a New York City
high school at age 15, found part-time work in a brush factory, and dreamt of a
career as an accountant. He spent a year at the City College of New York, and then
the Second World War intervened. He was drafted into the U.S. Army at age 19.

Assigned to minor counter-intelligence duties as a private, Kissinger saw his
life changed by a chance encounter in 1944 with the extraordinary figure of Fritz
Kraemer. Kraemer was a 35-year-old Prussian aristocrat, himself a political refugee,
who had been given the job of lecturing to young GI's on "why we are fighting."
Kissinger attended one such lecture and was inspired to write Kraemer an admiring
note afterwards. Kraemer took the youngster under his wing and was impressed by
his deep intelligence. Kraemer told his superiors about "this little Jewish refugee" he
had met: "He as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything."

Under Kraemer's guidance, the young Kissinger set his ambitions higher.
When the war ended, he gained admission to Harvard. Instead of accountancy, he
studied history and political philosophy. He wrote a grand 383-page thesis on Kant,
Spengler, Toynbee and "the meaning of history." In 1950 he received his B.A.
*summa cum laude* (first class honors), then his doctorate in 1954, and was launched
on an academic career.

His Harvard period (1954 to 1968) was stormy. He had rivals -- such as the
young Zbigniew Brzezinski -- as well as powerful patrons. Though he was a popular
lecturer, his conservative leanings left him out of synch with the prevailing
intellectual fashion. His disgust at his experience in the academy was summed up in
an aphorism he was fond of quoting: "The feuds are so vicious because the stakes
are so petty." But for young Kissinger and Brzezinski, the stakes turned out to be
not so petty after all.

Early in his intellectual odyssey, Kissinger already displayed the
characteristics that made it so difficult to categorize him. His Harvard doctoral thesis
was a study of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, at which conservative statesmen after

Napoleon shaped a European equilibrium that avoided general war for nearly 100 years. What appealed to Kissinger was not the reactionary politics of most of the Congress's leading figures (as Kissinger's liberal critics later caricatured) but the conciliatory peace with France and the general principle that stability is impossible when ideological movements challenge the internal legitimacy of all states in the international system. While viscerally anti-Communist, Kissinger was also one of the seminal thinkers in the academic circles at Harvard and M.I.T. in the 1950s and 1960s in which the theory of nuclear arms control was developed. His first major book (Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, 1957) was a pioneering work in the field.

Thus his conservatism came out of a European tradition that valued the balance of power, adjustment, and stability; it was not of the more ideological tradition that spawned such as William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan (or Margaret Thatcher). His anti-Communism was tempered by a sense that the nuclear age imposed its own imperatives and moral dilemmas. "In previous periods," he would later write, "rivalry between major powers has almost invariably led to war. In our time, when thermonuclear weapons threaten casualties in the hundreds of millions, such an outcome is unthinkable."

His historical understanding also distinguished him from colleagues who tended to think that all of history before 1945 had been transcended by America's entry onto the scene and that American solutions to Alliance issues self-evidently deserved obedience. Kissinger was severely critical, for example, of the Eisenhower Administration's brutal treatment of its British and French allies in the 1956 Suez crisis, and of the Kennedy Administration's abrupt cancellation of the Skybolt missile in 1962, on which the British government had based its defense planning. Allied

confidence, he argued, rested on intangibles of trust, not only on technical judgments.

Professor Kissinger's intellectual eminence brought him to the attention of political figures. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller became a mentor and the recipient of Kissinger's foreign policy advice, as Rockefeller unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for President in 1964 and 1968. When Rockefeller telephoned Richard Nixon at the Miami Beach Republican Convention in 1968 to concede defeat, Nixon inquired politely if Dr. Kissinger wasn't available to join the Nixon campaign. Kissinger refused recruitment, having a low opinion of the man. In fact his advice was also being sought by the camp of Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey, and there is a serious possibility that he would have been chosen Humphrey's White House national security advisor if the Democrat had won.

In the event, it was harder to refuse Nixon's renewed invitation after he was elected president, and a historic partnership was then formed. Kissinger joined him as White House advisor. Nixon, for all his brooding personal insecurities, was unusually sophisticated in international affairs; he too viewed the world in sober terms of power politics -- less driven by pure anti-Communist ideology than many assumed. He found in Kissinger the perfect soul-mate, tutor, and lieutenant. Given Nixon's own profound mistrust of the State Department bureaucracy, his deliberate choice of a lawyer-amateur (William P. Rogers) as his Secretary of State, his declared desire to dominate foreign policy himself, and the intellectual affinity he had with his brilliant advisor, it was inevitable that Kissinger would quickly gain ascendancy over Rogers.

The centralization of authority in the White House in the hands of the Nixon-Kissinger combination has no parallel in post-1945 America. Nor has U.S. policy ever regained the discipline and intellectual coherence it had in those days. The centripetal tendency was only reinforced by the challenges they inherited -- half a million U.S. troops mired in Vietnam, relations with the Soviet Union in a deep freeze after Czechoslovakia, China embittered and isolated in the Cultural Revolution, the Arab-Israeli conflict smoldering after the 1967 war. All these issues would require bold political decisions at the highest level.

The Nixon Administration soon demonstrated its mastery. When Syria invaded Jordan in September 1970, the U.S. pressed the Soviets and Syrians and forced a withdrawal. A breakthrough with China came in July 1971 with the announcement of a dramatic secret visit by Kissinger to Beijing and of a Nixon visit to follow. A 1971 quadripartite agreement (U.S., UK, France, USSR) ended the perennial postwar crises over Berlin. Negotiations with the Soviets on strategic nuclear arms limitation and with the North Vietnamese to extricate the Americans from Indochina achieved significant results in 1972 and early 1973. In many cases the State Department was not even aware of White House negotiations with other governments. In other cases there were public negotiations conducted by professional diplomats, but the breakthroughs, it turned out, were the handiwork of Kissinger operating through White House "backchannels."

Kissinger was to pay a price for his eminence. There were periods of intense jealousy on the part of Nixon, exacerbated by Kissinger's evident enjoyment of the limelight. There was the bitter reaction of the left (as when the White House was accused of coup plotting against the radical Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile) and the reaction of the right when disillusionment set in with Kissinger-sponsored

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agreements (as with the Soviets and the North Vietnamese). He was tarnished by
reports that he had cooperated in a wiretap program -- targeting journalists and even
members of his own staff -- to track down leaks of sensitive military and diplomatic
information.

Détente with the Soviet Union -- a policy practiced by all Western governments of the time, and by the Nixon Administration the most grudgingly -- suddenly became controversial in America in Nixon's second term. The irony was not lost on a President and his partner who had been assaulted for four years for excessive anti-Sovietism. Perhaps the Nixon-Kissinger *Realpolitik* was too cold-blooded for American tastes; perhaps it was all a function of the weakening of Nixon's authority due to the Watergate scandal, or a delayed popular reaction to the humiliation of Vietnam. Whatever the cause, previously accepted policies in arms control, trade, and human rights were now denounced as sell-outs. But when the Soviets and Cubans sent an expeditionary force to Angola in 1975, in an unprecedented projection of Soviet military power, Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress blocked a U.S. response. Kissinger was scathing in his comments on conservatives who lambasted the Administration over abstruse details of missile "throw-weight" but were nowhere to be found when real Communists were committing real aggression and tipping the geopolitical balance.

But there were compensations, not least among them the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, awarded jointly (and controversially) to Kissinger and Hanoi Politburo member Le Duc Tho for their labors to end the Vietnam War. Nixon named him Secretary of State, replacing the hapless William Rogers, in 1973. To his own amazement, Kissinger was becoming an international celebrity. Then a bachelor, he dated Hollywood starlets. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," he concluded. Another of

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the benefits of celebrity, he observed, was that when one was seated at dinner with
a beautiful female companion and the conversation turned boring, she assumed it
was her fault. For all his vaunted ego, Kissinger could view all this with a certain
detachment. He also honed a self-deprecating, even self-parodying, wit. During a
secret White House meeting on Chile, he cracked: "Chile is a dagger pointed at the
heart of Antarctica." There is a U.S. military commando unit that has the slogan:
"The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer." Kissinger's
version, in the wake of Chile and Watergate, was: "The illegal we do immediately;
the unconstitutional takes a little longer." These remarks leaked, and when he left
office in 1977, humorless liberals quoted them back to him as proof of his moral
deficiency.

Yet the Administration's accomplishment had been extraordinary. Nixon and
Kissinger had inherited an anguishing war that was tearing the country apart. While
they were extricating America from the Vietnam morass, they put in place all the
main lines of America's post-Vietnam foreign policy, which were to shape the next
decade and a half -- the basic Western strategy toward the USSR and Russia (arms
control, economic and diplomatic engagement, and the Helsinki process, in addition
to containment); China's reversal of alliances, which transformed the global balance
of power; the Arab-Israeli peace process (which began in the "Kissinger shuttle"
negotiations following the 1973 Mideast war); also the beginnings of the "North-
South dialogue" with the Third World and of the Southern Africa diplomacy that later
brought majority rule to Rhodesia and South-West Africa. These building blocks for
the post-Vietnam world were put in place in systematic fashion even while exiting
Vietnam amid near-civil-war conditions at home.

Some of these developments occurred in the presidency of Gerald R. Ford, who succeeded Nixon in 1974 when Nixon was forced from office over Watergate. But Ford's first act was to announce his reappointment of Kissinger, who had become the indispensable man.

After leaving office in January 1977, following Ford's defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter, Kissinger turned to memoir-writing. He published the highly-praised *The White House Years* in 1979 and *Years of Upheaval* in 1982. [A third volume is in preparation in 1995.] His lifetime reflections on the history of international politics were distilled in a volume called *Diplomacy*, which appeared in 1994. He established a successful consulting business. Two subsequent U.S. Secretaries of State, Alexander Haig and Lawrence Eagleburger, were his protégés. He was named by President Reagan in 1984 to chair a bipartisan commission on U.S. policy in Central America.

He played an active and influential role in the public debates in America over foreign policy -- as a critic, for example, of the Reagan Administration's erratic performance at the Reykjavik Summit with Gorbachev in 1986 and subsequent negotiations to strip NATO of intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which he warned could demoralize America's allies. He became a fervent advocate of expanding NATO to embrace the newly-liberated Central Europeans, and of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area, to bolster the solidarity of the democracies in the post-Cold War era. His reading of history taught him to be skeptical of a Russia that, long before Lenin, had been a clumsy and troublesome factor in European politics. He prized the Western alliance as both a strategic and a moral necessity, and always had particular praise for the "special relationship" between Britain and the U.S., which

gave Britain, he said, a unique moral influence in Washington. He was awarded an honorary KBE by the Queen in 1995.

His longest-lasting legacy, however, may be as a teacher. Americans who study international politics must study Kissinger, whose message is one that Americans do not often hear: that the idealism that inspired America's great achievements needs to be tempered by a realism and maturity that come from a sense of history and a recognition of limits. The collapse of Soviet Communism has ironically ushered in a new world more reminiscent of past centuries when a multiplicity of powers jockeyed for position and when some equilibrium among the major actors was the starting point of peace. This is not an easy lesson for Americans to absorb, because in their optimism they expect to see the triumph of good without sullying compromises -- or even, in some cases, without great exertion on their part. To Kissinger, the tragedies of the 20th Century -- including the personal trauma of his youth -- taught a more sober lesson about the contingent quality of human aspirations.

He had a son and a daughter by his first marriage, which ended in divorce. In 1974 he was remarried, to the former Nancy Maginnes.

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