Henry Kissinger, the refugee child who became United States Secretary of State and defined American foreign policy during the 1970s with his strategies to end the Vietnam War and contain communist countries, died this Wednesday at the age of 100.
This was reported by Kissinger Associates in a statement, in which it specified that the former secretary died at his home in Connecticut.
The Harvard University professor and diplomat earned praise for his role in opening China to the West, detente with the Soviet Union and signing arms control agreements under Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
But he also earned the ire of many for supporting massive bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia, support the authoritarian regime of Chilean Augusto Pinochet and turn a blind eye to the genocide in East Timor and Bangladesh.
This is the story of the important American leader.
His departure from Germany and his arrival in the United States
Named after Heinz Alfred Kissinger, He was born into a Jewish family in Fuerth, Germany, on May 27, 1923. He fled the Nazi regime in 1938 with his father, a schoolteacher, his mother and a younger brother. They settled in New York.
“I thought I would be an accountant,” he told USA Today in 1985. “I never thought I would teach at Harvard. It wasn’t my dream to become secretary of state.” “A more fortunate series of events could not have occurred to me.”
He worked in a shaving brush factory while studying high school at night.
Then He studied accounting at the City College of New York but was drafted into the Army in 1943. before he could graduate.
Henry Kissinger speaks to the press in Paris on January 13, 1973.
His knowledge of German led him to an intelligence unit in charge of identifying Nazis as they advanced through Europe.
In the Army, Kissinger met his first mentor, fellow German refugee Fritz Kraemer, a political scientist who persuaded him to transfer to Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a doctorate in 1954.
The young professor’s first book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” (1957), about how the new and ultra-destructive nuclear weapons should be adapted to the needs of diplomacy, quickly gave rise to something to talk about.
Kissinger’s political ambitions
Brilliant, incisive and relentlessly ambitious, Henry Kissinger reigned over post-World War II American foreign policy. The man marked the modern course of the world’s relations with China like no other.
Kissinger was a master strategist whose intellectual gifts were recognized even by his greatest critics, who, however, blamed him for disregarding human rights and democracy in the Vietnam War and other scenarios.
Kissinger’s name is commonly associated with “realpolitik,” diplomacy based on power and practicality.
Praising his cold perspective that always sought to impose American interests, his admirers compared him to great statesmen in history.
But to many, especially on the left, Kissinger was considered a war criminal who was never tried for his role, among others, in the expansion of the Vietnam War and support for the military coup in Chile in 1973.
Kissinger’s ambitions went beyond academia, and took consulting jobs at the National Security Council and the State Department during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Those jobs included trips to Vietnam, where the United States was involved in containing the communists.
Seeking to serve in government, Kissinger supported New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican who unsuccessfully sought the presidency three times. But In 1968 he became a supporter of Nixon, who later made him his national security advisor.
Nixon first appointed a low-profile Secretary of State, William Rogers. But at the end of 1973, already involved in the Watergate scandal that ended his presidency, Rogers resigned and Kissinger took the position, which he held until January 1977 with Ford.
In an unprecedented agreement that demonstrated his immense influence, He was national security advisor for two years as well as secretary of state.
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Nixon was already leaving his mark with his strident anti-communist policy, but He welcomed Kissinger’s method (called “detente”) of finding areas where the United States could ease tensions with the Soviet Union.
Kissinger conducted talks with Moscow that constituted the most serious effort to control the nuclear race during the Cold War. and, in 1972, the powers reached the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which imposed limits on their arsenals.
As part of a strategy to isolate the Soviet Union, while shaking up diplomacy around Vietnam, Kissinger made a historic decision: to approach communist China.
Self-isolated amid the destruction left by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, mainland China had been left without contact with the United States, which recognized the defeated nationalists who fled to Taiwan.
Kissinger secretly traveled to Beijing in 1971 and met with Premier Zhou Enlai, paving the way for Nixon’s trip a year later in which the president exchanged with Zhou, visited the weakened Mao, and set the stage for the establishment of diplomatic ties.
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Henry Kissinger and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2018.
Photo: Thomas Peter. AFP
“That China and the United States would find a way to come together was inevitable given the needs of the moment,” Kissinger wrote four decades later in one of his 18 books.
“That it happened so firmly and was executed with so few detours is a tribute to the leadership that made it possible,” He wrote with the lack of modesty that characterized him.
This opening eventually led to Western businesses reaching China, which by this century has become the United States’ great competitor.
‘A calculating politician’
Internally, ending the Vietnam War was the priority. Nixon promised in the campaign to achieve “peace with honor” and after taking office, the president and Kissinger launched a policy that forced their ally South Vietnam to take a more leading role so that American troops could withdraw.
To seek strength before the peace talks, Nixon and Kissinger authorized bombings in Laos and Cambodia between 1969 and 1970 to affect the rebel movement.
The bombings, unauthorized by Congress and kept secret from the public, did not stop rebel infiltration, killed thousands of civilians, and aided the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
Kissinger traveled to Paris several times, first discreetly, to speak with North Vietnam negotiator Le Duc Tho.
A 1983 agreement ended US military operations and Both men received the Nobel Peace Prize, although only Kissinger accepted it.
Taped conversations with Nixon later revealed that the calculating Kissinger expected the fall of South Vietnam after the agreement.
In another example of “realpolitik,” Kissinger recommended that the United States delay arms shipments to its ally Israel after it was attacked in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, believing that the Arabs would be in a better position to make peace if they could first some victories.
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Henry Kissinger (R) shakes hands with Le Duc Tho, leader of the North Vietnamese delegation, after signing a ceasefire agreement in the Vietnam War.
Kissinger’s record has come under intense scrutiny. In a 2001 book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” The writer Christopher Hitchens said he should be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Declassified documents have shown the direct role of the United States in undermining the government of Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende, including support for officials who killed a general who refused to participate in the 1970 coup attempt and support for General Augusto Pinochet’s seizure of power in 1973.
Kissinger was also criticized for allowing the Indonesian regime, then a close anti-communist ally, to use its US-provided military equipment to invade East Timor in 1975.
![50 years of the coup in Chile](https://www.eltiempo.com/files/article_content_new/files/crop/uploads/2023/09/08/64fb4c6bc31a7.r_1701313991471.0-0-1287-722.jpeg)
Moment in which Salvador Allende is decorated as president of Chile.
More than 100,000 Timorese died during the occupation, which ended in 1999, according to a 2005 estimate by the country’s truth commission.
For a time, his intellectual capacity led him to be seen as a kind of “sex symbol” and Rumors abounded of his relationships with Hollywood stars.
In 1974, a decade after the end of his first marriage, Kissinger married Nancy Maginnes, Rockefeller’s towering former aide and who survives him, as well as two children from his first marriage, David and Elizabeth.
Kissinger remained available to Republicans when they returned to power under Ronald Reagan and rarely passed up opportunities to give advice, always willing to travel from his Manhattan penthouse to Washington when leaders called.
“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” he himself said in the 1970s.
AFP and Bloomberg
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