Henry Kissinger, who was US Secretary of State and a major figure in US foreign policy during the Cold War, has died at the age of 100.
During the Nixon and Ford administrations, he was the top diplomat and national security director for the United States.
Even though he stopped being president in the mid-1970s, leaders for decades continued to look to him for advice.
The former minister, who was born in Germany, died at his home in Connecticut.
Kissinger was a controversial figure because of the way he did politics. People thought he was guilty of war crimes when he and President Richard Nixon bombed communists in Cambodia.
Over the years, he faced harsh criticism from people who said he put his rivalry with the Soviet Union ahead of human rights and backed oppressive governments around the world, such as Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile.
In his eulogy, former US President George W. Bush said that the US had “lost one of the most reliable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs.”
Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister of the UK from 1997 to 2001, called Kissinger a “artist of diplomacy” and said he did what he did because he “genuinely loved the free world and the need to protect it.”
Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, daughters of President Richard Nixon, said that Kissinger’s life story was “so unique – and so thoroughly American.”
“Henry Kissinger will long be remembered for his many achievements in advancing the cause of peace,” said the statement. “But it was his character that we will never forget.”
The son of a school teacher was born in Germany in 1923. He and his family first came to the US in 1938 to escape the Nazis. He never really got rid of his Bavarian accent.
- See Henry Kissinger’s own words about his life and work.
- The controversial statesman Henry Kissinger changed the course of world events.
In 1943, he became a citizen of the United States. He then served for three years in the US Army and then in the Counter Intelligence Corps.
Having earned a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD, he taught international affairs at Harvard.
In 1969, when he was President Nixon, he made him national security adviser, which gave him a lot of power over US foreign policy.
The US finally got out of the Vietnam War during his eight years as national security adviser and secretary of state, from 1969 to 1977. It also improved relations with China and ended the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East between Israel and Egypt and Syria.
It was this work that led to the idea of “shuttle diplomacy,” in which a mediator goes between two sides in a dispute to help them come to an agreement.
Israel is at war with Hamas right now, but Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, praised Kissinger’s work on the peace deal with Egypt, writing on social media that “the whole family of nations is blessed to this day by the fruits of the historic processes he led.”
Kissinger was very well-liked in China, and soon after his death, the news spread quickly on the social media site Weibo.
He was called “an old friend of the Chinese people” in an obituary in China News, and “a legendary diplomat” on China Central Television. He was a key figure in US-China ties.
South Vietnam And Cambodia
People have said harsh things about Kissinger over the years. They said he put his feud with the Soviet Union ahead of human rights and backed oppressive governments around the world, like Augusto Pinochet in Chile.
While he was in talks with North Vietnam, Kissinger gave the go-ahead for an operation that dropped more than two million tons of bombs on neutral Cambodia and sent thousands of troops on the ground to cut off the communists from troops and supplies.
The raids killed more than 50,000 people and forced millions to leave their homes.
Even after he died, people were still mad at some of the decisions he had made. Huffpost, a website moving to the left, put “The Beltway Butcher” over a picture of him on its home page and called him “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies” in its obituary.
Kissinger, on the other hand, didn’t care about critics.
In an interview with CBS not long before his 100th birthday, the gravelly-voiced leader said, “That shows how ignorant they are.”
He and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam were both given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, but Tho refused to accept it. They had worked together to negotiate the Paris Peace Accords, which ended the US role in the Vietnam War.
Peace activists were very angry about the award, and two members of the Nobel committee quit because of it.
Kissinger stopped working for the government in 1977, but he kept writing a lot about current events. Lawyers and a dozen US presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, came to him for advice.
Kissinger is also the only American who has met and talked with every Chinese leader, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.
Besides writing 21 books, he was on the boards of several companies and a regular at events about foreign policy and security.
Kissinger kept busy even after he turned 100. In July, he went to Beijing without warning to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, where he was greeted with great honors, even though ties between China and the US were tense at the time.
According to John Kirby, a director for the National Security Council, the visit made the White House angry. He said, “It’s unfortunate that a private citizen” had access to Chinese leaders while the US government did not.”
Kissinger was asked by ABC during a book tour in July 2022, when he was 99 years old, if he would change any of the choices he had made.
“I’ve thought about these issues my whole life. “I do it as a hobby and for work,” he said. “And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”
Barbara Kissinger, his wife of almost 50 years, and their two children, Elizabeth and David, from a previous marriage, as well as five grandkids, will miss him.
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