“The last night in office, he invited me to come to the Lincoln sitting room where he and I used to plan foreign policy together,” Kissinger recalled in a 2012 interview with CBS News. Nixon’s resignation note was addressed to Kissinger, and the two prayed together on Nixon’s final night in the White House. The pair remained close as the Nixon administration navigated a near-constant stream of controversy at home and abroad.īy the end of Nixon’s presidency, Kissinger was the last original inner-circle adviser to the beleaguered president still standing after Watergate. Kissinger began consulting with the State Department and Pentagon on national security matters before serving as national security adviser and then secretary of state to Nixon.Īt Kissinger’s swearing-in ceremony as secretary of state in 1973, Nixon called it “very significant in these days when we must think of America as part of the whole world community that for the first time in history a naturalized citizen is the secretary of state of the United States.” Yet the lure of public service brought him into government work. He became a naturalized citizen in 1943 before serving in World War II and later earned his doctorate at Harvard University, where he would go on to teach. Henry Kissinger is shown at age 11 with his brother Walter, 10. “About half of the people I went to school with and about 13 members of my own family died in concentration camps,” Kissinger once recalled. “He worked in the Administrations of two Presidents and counseled many more. I am grateful for that service and advice, but I am most grateful for his friendship.”īorn on May 27, 1923, in Furth, Germany, Kissinger, who was Jewish, fled Nazi persecution and came to the United States in 1938. “I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army. When he later became Secretary of State, his appointment as a former refugee said as much about his greatness as it did America’s greatness,” he said in a statement. Bush remembered Kissinger for “his wisdom, his charm, and his humor.” Kissinger is survived by his wife, Nancy, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.įormer President George W. “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that if you bore people, they think it’s their fault,” he once quipped. He topped Gallup’s “Most Admired Man” survey three years in a row in the 1970s and his personal life, public appearances and nights in New York’s famed Studio 54 club once drew regular headlines. Kissinger also commanded attention well beyond the realm of international diplomacy. And there has to be a decision on both sides that they’re going to try to reconcile these differences,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in 2008. And they have to understand our perception. “In order to negotiate, one has to understand the perception of the other side of the world. In a highly controversial decision, Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho for that year’s Paris peace accords citing the absence of actual peace in Vietnam, Tho declined to accept, and two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest over the award. When Nixon took office in 1969 – after promising a “secret plan” to end the war – roughly 30,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam.ĭespite efforts to shift more combat responsibilities to the South Vietnam government, American involvement persisted throughout Nixon’s administration – critics accused Nixon and Kissinger of needlessly expanding the war – and US engagement ultimately ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and more than 58,000 American lives lost. No issue complicated Kissinger’s legacy more than the Vietnam War. His “détente” approach to US-Soviet relations, which helped relax tensions and led to several arms control agreements, largely guided US posture until the Reagan era.īut many members of Congress objected to the secretiveness of the Nixon-Kissinger approach to foreign policy, and human rights activists assailed what they saw as Kissinger’s neglect of human rights in other countries. In the Middle East, Kissinger performed what came to be known as “shuttle diplomacy” to separate Israeli and Arab forces after the fallout of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for helping arrange the end of US military involvement in the Vietnam War and is credited with secret diplomacy that helped President Richard Nixon open communist China to the United States and the West, highlighted by Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972.īut he was also reviled by many over the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War that led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and for his support of a coup against a democratic government in Chile. Kissinger was synonymous with US foreign policy in the 1970s.
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