Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passes away, aged 100

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100 at his home in Kent, Connecticut, it was confirmed late Wednesday.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy Kissinger, and his children David and Elizabeth.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, a suburb of the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, in what was then known as the Weimar Republic. His father was a schoolteacher and his mother a housewife, and he had a younger brother. The family were German Jews and suffered heavily under the discrimination of the Nazi regime that came to power in 1933.

The Kissinger family fled Germany in 1938, going first to London, then New York City, where they settled in the German Jewish community in Upper Manhattan. Heinz changed his name to Henry, but as a result of his shyness, he never lost his German accent. He attended high school part-time so he could work in a shaving brush factory.

In 1943, Kissinger was drafted in the US Army, during which time he became a naturalized US citizen and served as a German interpreter and in counter-intelligence. He saw combat at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in 1944 and later was assigned to track down Gestapo members in Hanover and to oversee denazification operations in southern Hesse.

In 1949, he married his first wife, Ann Fleicher, with whom he had two children: Elizabeth and David. They divorced in 1964.

Kissinger then went to Harvard College after the war, studying political science and graduating summa cum laude in 1950. He continued on at Harvard, getting his Master’s and Phd. by 1954. His doctoral dissertation on the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe introduced the concept of “legitimacy” in international diplomacy, describing an international order accepted by all the major powers. By contrast, one in which at least one of the major power dissents was described by him as “revolutionary,” and hence dangerous.

Upon graduating, Kissinger continued to teach at Harvard for several more years and became a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, where he criticized the Eisenhower administration’s plans for massive nuclear retaliation by arguing for the small-scale tactical use of nuclear weapons to win conflicts. Through the 1960s, he served as a consultant on several political campaigns, meeting Richard Nixon in 1967.

Kissinger reportedly called Nixon “the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president,” but cozied up to him after he won the Republican nomination for the 1968 presidential election, and was rewarded with the post of White House national security adviser following Nixon’s victory.

Nixon had run his campaign on a promise to end the US war in Vietnam, and Kissinger devised a plan for a negotiated US exit and an end to the conflict. He proposed that North Vietnam withdraw from the South, and that the US-backed South Vietnamese government form a coalition with the communist National Liberation Front. He initially opposed the bombing of Cambodia, but later supported Nixon’s decision, becoming a key director of the bombing campaign.

As national security adviser, Kissinger developed a penchant for secretive “backchannel” negotiations. During the Vietnam peace talks, Kissinger became frustrated with the South Vietnamese delegation’s obstruction, so he spoke with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho separately. The two later were awarded Nobel Peace Prizes in 1973 for ending the war, although both were deeply ambivalent about it and Tho refused the award entirely.

Kissinger also initiated backchannel talks with Anatoly Dobyrinin, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States, instead of directly with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, which eventually led to the May 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, a major arms control deal that limited defensive systems able to intercept incoming nuclear missiles.

Three years earlier, in the first year of Nixon’s administration, Kissinger helped negotiate the first of the Strategic Arms Limitation talks with the USSR in Helsinki, Finland, which led to the SALT I treaty being signed the same day as the ABM. That treaty set limitations on the number of different types of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles the US and USSR could possess.

Just two months later in July 1972, Kissinger then made a secret trip into the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union’s rival for leadership of the communist world, to meet with Premier Zhou Enlai. The adventure, which took place in Beijing by way of Pakistan and was nicknamed “Operation Marco Polo,” helped pave the way for Nixon to visit China publicly the following year, and eventually establish formal diplomatic relations in 1979.