Henry Kissinger — a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who was the public face of U.S. diplomacy under two U.S. presidents, defused tensions with the Soviet Union, opened up China and negotiated an end to the Vietnam War — died Wednesday evening. He was 100.
His consulting firm said he died at his home in Connecticut but gave no further details or specified a cause of death.
Former President George W. Bush said the U.S. “lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs.”
“We will always be thankful for the contributions of Henry Kissinger,” he said.
Former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called him “endlessly generous with the wisdom gained over the course of an extraordinary life.”
Under President Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Kissinger became a diplomatic star as the only man to serve jointly as secretary of state and national security adviser, despite personal tension between the two men with colossal egos and sometimes deep paranoia. Mr. Kissinger would insulate himself from the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign and go on to serve as secretary of state under President Gerald R. Ford.
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During the turbulent years from 1969 to 1974, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger became fast partners in foreign affairs as both men embraced realpolitik over ideologically driven foreign policy.
Mr. Kissinger displayed his diplomatic skill in the policy of detente with the Soviet Union that lowered tension between the two superpowers and led to the SALT I nuclear arms treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
He also played China against the Soviet Union with secret talks with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, which led to the ground-breaking 1972 summit between Nixon and Communist China’s “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong. By the end of the decade, the U.S. had recognized Beijing, rather than Taiwan, as the legitimate government of China.
Mr. Kissinger’s effort to mediate an end to the 1973 Yom Kippur War involved months of shuttle diplomacy, as he flew from one Middle East capital to another to propose peace terms to Israelis and Arabs who refused to meet with Israeli leaders.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, along with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (though Mr. Le refused the award), for hammering out the Paris Peace Accords that ended the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Two years later, South Vietnam fell to the communist North.
Nixon and Mr. Kissinger made a diplomatic odd couple and will forever be linked in American history.
After his success in opening China, Mr. Kissinger noted that his “relationship with Nixon had grown complicated” because many of Nixon’s closest aides — sometimes called his “Praetorian Guard” — grew jealous of the media attention Mr. Kissinger drew.
He privately called Nixon a “madman.” Nixon publicly called him his “Jew boy.”
Mr. Kissinger was eminently quotable, although some of his words shocked his admirers when private conversations became public.
During his efforts to negotiate a trade deal with the Soviet Union in 1973, Mr. Kissinger lashed out at his fellow American Jews who blocked the trade pact until Moscow lifted restrictions on the emigration of Soviet Jews.
He told Nixon: “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern — maybe a humanitarian concern.”
Mr. Kissinger also displayed a sly sense of humor.
“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer,” he said in December 1973 — a year and a half after the Watergate scandal broke and eight months before Nixon resigned.
Victoria Coates, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said in a statement Wednesday evening that he “knew not just how to make his point, but how to make it memorable.
“For example, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, he noted that it was a pity they couldn’t both lose. And indeed, both countries have remained problem areas for the United States ever since,” she said.
After leaving government with the 1976 victory of Democrat Jimmy Carter in the presidential election, he cultivated the reputation of respected world statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to presidents of both parties, managing a global consulting business and trotting the globe to meet with generations of world leaders.
He visited China in July, reportedly for the 100th time at age 100, and met with President Xi Jinping.
“We will never forget our old friend and your historic contribution to promoting the development of Sino-U.S. relations and enhancing the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples,” Mr. Xi said.
At age 99, he still went out on tour to promote a book on leadership. Asked in July 2022 interview with ABC whether he wished he could take back any of his decisions, Mr. Kissinger demurred, saying: “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life. It’s my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”
Even then, he had mixed thoughts on Nixon’s record, saying “his foreign policy has held up and he was quite effective in domestic policy” while allowing that the disgraced president had “permitted himself to be involved in a number of steps that were inappropriate for a president.”
As Mr. Kissinger turned 100 in May 2023, his son David wrote in The Washington Post that his father’s centenary “might have an air of inevitability for anyone familiar with his force of character and love of historical symbolism. Not only has he outlived most of his peers, eminent detractors and students, but he has also remained indefatigably active throughout his 90s.”
Asked during a CBS interview in the leadup to his 100th birthday about those who view his conduct of foreign policy over the years as a kind of “criminality,” Mr. Kissinger was dismissive.
“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” he said.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born May 27, 1923, in the medieval Bavarian town of Furth. His father was a school teacher, his mother a homemaker.
In 1938, the family fled Germany as the Nazis increased their persecution of Jews. They moved first to London and later that year settled in New York, where Kissinger’s first name was changed to Henry. They moved to the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, joining other Jewish refugees from Germany. Young Henry attended George Washington High School at night and worked in a shaving-brush factory during the day.
He studied accounting at the City College of New York, where his life was soon sent on a path that would lead him into international intrigue when he was drafted into the Army in 1943, shortly after becoming a naturalized American citizen.
Because of his fluency in German, Mr. Kissinger, a private, was assigned to the military intelligence unit of the 84th Infantry Division, where he volunteered for hazardous duty during the Battle of the Bulge. Soon he was chasing Gestapo officers and saboteurs as a new sergeant reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, where he won the Bronze Star.
After the war, Mr. Kissinger attended Harvard University and earned a doctoral degree in political science with a thesis on Metternich and Castlereagh, two formidable 19th century statesmen who reshaped Europe after the Napoleonic wars with a diplomatic style later called “realpolitik.” Kissinger promoted that doctrine of diplomatic realism in the Nixon White House, as he played China against Russia.
In 1954, he joined the Harvard faculty, teaching government and international relations and later serving as a consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and to the National Security Council under President John F. Kennedy. He was a consultant to the State Department under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mr. Kissinger dabbled in politics as he supported New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964 and 1968.
A short, chubby academic with thick horn-rimmed glasses, Mr. Kissinger would also become an unlikely sex symbol in the drab, buttoned-down Nixon White House.
“Power,” he once said, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Mr. Kissinger dated Hollywood actresses such as Candice Bergen, Jill St. John, Shirley McLean and Liv Ullmann. He even went out with a young White House aide, Diane Sawyer, who would go on to be a television network news star. He was photographed with Elizabeth Taylor, Raquel Welch and Liza Minnelli.
In 1972, Playboy Club bunnies voted him the man they would most want to date.
His swinging bachelor days faded in 1974 with his marriage to philanthropist Nancy Maginnes. His first marriage to Ann Fleischer ended in divorce in 1964. He is survived by two children from that marriage — Elizabeth and David.
• This article was based in part on wire service reports.