Henry Kissinger, whose style and image shaped diplomacy and foreign affairs thinking for generations, was in office in the US for only eight years between 1969 and 1977. He was national security adviser and then secretary of state.
In that time he set his mark on policy on Vietnam and South East Asia, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize – ironically for launching peace talks that eventually led nowhere.
The big achievements, though, are his enduring legacy – paving the way for President Nixon to go to China, and retooling the policy of détente with Russia. In both he ensured that there would be no World War III.
But the style was the man, the gravelly German accented delivery became the trademarks of the globe trotting diplomatic superstar. Though tough, he had great charm leading to enduring friendships – especially with beautiful women. He had a regular correspondence and meetings with the late Princess Diana.
He also struck a firm friendship with Chancellor Angela Merkel – and he is alleged to have kindled her passion for football; they certainly went to several matches together.
There was the dark side, too, which made him an easy target for the peaceniks. He was blamed by critics for needlessly prolonging the Vietnam war and taking it into Cambodia and Laos. There are still some 80 million pieces of American ordnance scattered across Laos.
He is also fingered in being behind CIA machinations to bring down the elected Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende who died in a military coup by the subsequent military dictator Agosto Pinochet in 1973. There are suspicions of similar machinations leading up to the assassination of the Italian statesman Aldo Moro five years later.
He was driven by a sense of America’s destiny and its role in leading the free world. He was one of the arbchitects of what came to be seen as America’s sense of its exceptionalism – that it works to its own rules – which reaches back to the founding fathers of the Union and the settler leaders of the century before.
Perhaps one of his greatest moments in his service to America – not much remembered today – was holding things together as the White House and presidency seemed about to fall apart in the crisis of Presdent Nixon’s resignation over Watergate in 1974. At one point he literally held the declining President’s hand as he broke down in tears.
Kissinger’s influence, his clarity of thought and brilliance of expression ran up to the very end – a staggering achievement in itself. He had more books on the stocks on all aspects of diplomacy. He spoke to statesmen and took seminars regularly – in China he was received as a superstar. His influence continues through scholars such Niall Ferguson, his biographer.
His first studies were on the diplomacy of Europe – and the world – in the era of the British Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh and the Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich, who pulled Europe together after the trauma of Napoleon’s wars. Kissinger argued that such high skill at diplomacy saved Europe from a massive, convulsive war for a century.
He could make all kinds of people talk to him, and make the toughest shift their positions and even find compromise. These are just the skills that are needed now in the Israel – Gaza crisis sprung by Hamas.
On Ukraine he was brilliantly clear sighted. He urged the Western allies had to back Zelensky’s Kyiv to the hilt. Europe needs to come to together with the US on this, and Ukraine’s membership of Nato should be considered without delay. Otherwise, he argued, Europe and the world faced war with Russia for a generation.
