THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BIOGRAPHICAL SERVICE

EDITORS: This biographical sketch is intended for your reference library files. Its purpose is twofold: (1) It provides material about the subject for use in connection with his current activities, and (2) the subject's life story is readily available in connection with his death. Inquiries should be addressed to: Biographical Editor, The Associated Press, 50 Roscoe feller Plaza, New York, N. Y. 10020

No.
4584

SKETCH (4584)

issued Sept. 10, 1975

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Presidential Adviser

Born May 23, 1923

(Editors: The following subs for Kissinger Biographical Sketch 4448 issued May 1, 1971.)

By The Associated Press

If ever a youngster seemed unlikely to become one of the most powerful figures in United States diplomatic history, it was young Heinz Kissinger.

Born in Furth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, Heinz Alfred Kissinger was the first son of middle-class Jewish parents. He seemed destined to follow his father and paternal grandfather into the life of an anonymous school teacher making a comfortable but undistinguished living.

Young Kissinger was a competent student, but not brilliant. He grew up liking sports, particularly soccer, but not excelling. He was outgoing and fond of girls, associates of the time relate, and he took part willingly in the orthodox practice of Judaism.

But even as he was born, events in another part of Germany were predetermined the life of the Kissinger family and that of every other Jew in Germany. The year of his birth, 1923, was the year Adolph Hitler broke into public view with his abortive beer-hall putsch in Munich.

From that point, no Jew was safe in Germany and by the time Heinz was a teen-ager he was feeling the cruel and inhuman change in what had been the tolerant and happy attitude of Furth.

He and his fellow Jewish students were cut off from other children. The pressures grew worse and Jewish children began to be beaten by former friends. Finally, they were expelled from the city high school and forced into a ghetto school for Jews only.

By 1938, Kissinger's parents had had enough. They escaped from the country, going first to England, then to New York City.

Young Kissinger, Heinz now anglicized to Henry, showed evidence of promise at George

Washington High School in Manhattan's Washington Heights. He was a straight A student with more aptitude for mathematics than history, but he had trouble learning English and his high school records indicate he had a "foreign language handicap."

(At the height of his power, Kissinger still spoke with a thick German accent even though he had become eloquent in the use of English.)

He decided to become an accountant. The need for a job was all-consuming to someone of Kissinger's age at that time. It also was a time when Jews faced discrimination in hiring, a fact his father discovered when he was turned down for teaching positions and hired only as a clerk.

With his family facing hard times in New York, Kissinger switched to night school in order to work during the day. What proved an important turning point in his life occurred when he was 19 and studying accounting in college: He was drafted into the Army.

A few months later, on June 19, 1943, he became a naturalized American citizen, and Army IQ tests soon disclosed that the potential accountant was exceptionally bright, so bright that he was put into special training.

It was Kissinger's brilliance that caught the eye of another expatriate German, Fritz Kraemer, then an Army intelligence officer.

Kraemer was the first great influence in Kissinger's life, giving him a taste of the conceptual approach to problem solving that marked all of Kissinger's public career. Kraemer also got Kissinger his first important assignment, running the occupation of the captured German city of Krefeld with its 200,000 inhabitants. Kissinger was only 21, but within three days he had the city working. For the first time he seemed to realize he had more to offer, and the world had more to give, than keeping credits and debits in an account book.

Entered Harvard

With Kraemer's encouragement, Kissinger returned home after the war and entered Harvard on a scholarship. He worked hard and quickly, getting his B.A. in 1950 after three years.

By 1954 Kissinger had both a masters and doctorate degrees.

His course was now set. He moved quickly with only a few setbacks up the academic ladder, and he received public attention when his dissertation was published as a book "A World Restored." It was a brilliant examination of the post-Napoleonic world of Europe, in which Kissinger first offered his theory of international power and balance based on something more than an organization of force.

Pushed by his Harvard mentors, Kissinger was already acting as a consultant to the defense department, while he was working on his masters degree in 1952.

It wasn't entirely steady, but Kissinger's way was clear. He widened his acquaintances with the powers of academia, gaining teaching tenure and moving on to more and more prestigious committees at Harvard. In 1955 he accepted the job as study director for the Council on Foreign Relations, a private organization which was based in New York and counted some of the most important and influential figures of the East Coast Establishment among its members.

His interests widened and he began the study of nuclear weapons as a new factor in the international power equation, taking a hardline view on the necessity of an American willingness to use the new weapon of unspeakable terror. In fact, he argued, that willingness would be the key to peace—a balance of terror caused by both sides' knowledge that either could destroy the other.

Kissinger's 1957 book on the subject, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy," brought more attention, particularly from a man who was to be the final and most important influence in his life—then Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Presidential Adviser

In this period, Kissinger met another man with presidential hopes—New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller. The two became attached, even though their backgrounds would suggest almost nothing in common.

Rockefeller brought Kissinger into his campaign orga-

nization as foreign policy adviser, a role that put the Harvard professor into contact with even more powerful men. His role as an adviser to the government also grew, although he still remained on a low level.

By the 1960's he was serving President John F. Kennedy as a special adviser, but only for a short time. His style and that of the new Camelot didn't mesh and there were some policy disagreements. For instance, he argued that Kennedy should not have tolerated the building of the wall separating East and West Berlin.

The Vietnam War

He played intermittent roles in the rest of the Kennedy administration and continued to do so under President Lyndon B. Johnson. It was during Johnson's time that Kissinger got his first taste of the Vietnam War, acting as a consultant to the State and Defense departments. He made the first of many trips to Vietnam in the fall of 1965.

It was that trip that set Kissinger's mind about Vietnam.

He wrote about his impressions in 1966: "withdrawal would be disastrous and negotiations are inevitable."

An American defeat by "a third-class peasant state" would undermine world confidence in the United States and lead to similar actions on a global scale, he said.

(continued)

Sheet 2, Henry A. Kissinger, Sketch 4584

His Vietnam views never changed.

By the time Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968, Kissinger was well entrenched in both government and academic circles, even if relatively unknown by the public. Nixon's appointment of the Harvard savant as his National Security adviser changed that.

It wasn't William P. Rogers, a quiet, unassuming New York lawyer appointed as secretary of state, who ran foreign policy. It was Kissinger, working from a White House office near the President, who centralized control over the diplomatic apparatus and shaped America's strategic positions to meet his concepts.

It was Kissinger who ran the Vietnam negotiations, not the Foreign Service officers who made up the peace team in Paris. Kissinger soon became personally involved, making secret trips one after another to Paris to meet with his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho.

In July of 1971 came another major personal role to play. He flew to Pakistan openly and then disappeared under a cover story of illness. He had flown to China to prepare for one of the major accomplishments of the Nixon administration — a presidential visit to the Communist mainland and the ending of a generation of isolation and conflict between Washington and Peking.

At the same time, he was working on a tandem concept that Nixon claimed would "lead us to a generation of peace": A treaty with the Soviet Union to first limit and ultimately reduce each nation's nuclear arsenal. Tied to that was a more positive approach, detente: The development of a series of links so tightly connected that neither side would

risk war over one issue because the stakes in the other areas were too great to risk.

Still Kissinger was only a presidential adviser and vulnerable to the inevitable intrigues that develop behind the scenes in any White House. He and his staff were accused of leaking important information to newsmen in order to boost his image.

A bigger controversy arose with publication of memoranda by the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover asserting that Kissinger requested wiretaps on the phones of several newsmen and members of his own staff as a means of determining the source of news leaks from the National Security Council. Kissinger denied that he initiated the wiretaps, saying that his role was to supply names of individuals with access to information of the type leaked.

### Nobel Peace Prize

But this was a minor disruption and as the 1972 election approached Kissinger was flying high. For the moment. On Oct. 26, 1972, Kissinger told a news conference "peace is at hand" in Vitetnam. But it wasn't. The war dragged on for two months more and ultimate peace agreement was so full of holes that it had no chance.

Yet Kissinger's reputation stood. He and Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

At his peak, Kissinger and Nixon decided it was time for Rogers to go. There could be no more division in the Foreign Service. Complete unity was needed for the next step in Kissinger's global concept. In August, 1973, Nixon installed Kissinger in the State Department, secretary in name as well as fact.

### Middle East

Confirmed in September, the secretary was beginning his

next great move, to end the simmering Arab-Israeli problem and "expel" the influence of the Soviet Union from the region.

He didn't have time to do much when something happened that seemed horrible at the time, but proved to be the key Kissinger needed. In October, on Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, Egypt and Syria struck Israeli positions on the Golan Heights and Suez Canal.

War broke out and removed nearly all the barriers Kissinger felt stood in the way of his playing an active role in the area. Peace for the world required his personal intervention even if it meant submerging his Jewish background. Early Israeli defeats eliminated some of the smug, overconfidence that had the Jerusalem government refusing to compromise. At the same time, the ultimate Israeli victories brought a loss of Arab confidence, particularly in Egypt, in the support by the Russians.

All this gave Kissinger a golden chance and he leaped. He personally worked out the cease-fire and began perhaps the most difficult plan ever conceived in foreign policy, a step-by-step approach toward peace in the Middle East. He made his first so-called "shuttle" trip to the area on Nov. 9, 1973. These trips exceeded a dozen and some lasted more than 30 days. By the end of summer in 1975 he was still making them as Israel and Egypt signed a disengagement agreement on Sinai.

### Divorced—Remarried

During his early years as secretary of state, Kissinger seemed to have an almost dreamlike career as he achieved success after success. One weekly news magazine pictured him on its cover in superman's garb.

His personal life also seemed ideal. He had married Ann Fleisher, another German refugee, in 1949 and they had two children, Elizabeth and David, but the marriage had dissolved in divorce in 1964. After receiving an undeserved reputation as a lady's man during the early Nixon years, he finally remarried in March 1974 to Nancy Maginnes.

But all this success and hap-

piness was marred by the single greatest political event of modern American history: Watergate. The disclosures of wiretaps, break-ins and illegal use of the Central Intelligence Agency tarred Kissinger, even though no direct proof was ever offered.

The whispers and innuendo finally got to the secretary and brought about a most extraordinary event.

In June of 1974, standing before a hundred reporters in Salzburg, Austria, Kissinger said if the sharpshooting didn't stop he would resign.

Taken either as a sign of petulance by a man who thought he was indispensable or as an act of bravery by a man willing

to give up his career for the national good, it was an exceptional display. But like so much of the turmoil over Kissinger, it passed. So did the charges of illegally trying to overthrow the elected Marxist government in Chile.

He may not have been the greatest diplomat in history, only time and events will tell. But there is no doubt that the short, fat, bespectacled Jewish survivor of the Nazi holocaust was the single dominant figure in mid-Twentieth Century diplomacy. As his biographers put it: "Henry Alfred Kissinger is an extravaganza."

Freed