Brilliant, abrasive and ruthlessly ambitious, Henry Kissinger towered over post-World War II US foreign policy like no one else and shaped a fateful new course for the world's relationship with China.
As secretary of state to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger was a master tactician whose intellectual gifts were begrudgingly acknowledged even by his many critics, who nevertheless faulted his disregard for human rights and democracy in the Vietnam War and elsewhere.
