Henry A. Kissinger, the scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so, died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 100.
His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm.
Few diplomats have been both celebrated and reviled with such passion as Mr. Kissinger. Considered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era, he was by turns hailed as an ultrarealist who reshaped diplomacy to reflect American interests and denounced as having abandoned American values, particularly in the arena of human rights, if he thought it served the nation’s purposes.
He advised 12 presidents — more than a quarter of those who have held the office — from John F. Kennedy to Joseph R. Biden Jr. With a scholar’s understanding of diplomatic history, a German-Jewish refugee’s drive to succeed in his adopted land, a deep well of insecurity and a lifelong Bavarian accent that sometimes added an indecipherable element to his pronouncements, he transformed almost every global relationship he touched.
At a critical moment in American history and diplomacy, he was second in power only to President Richard M. Nixon. He joined the Nixon White House in January 1969 as national security adviser and, after his appointment as secretary of state in 1973, kept both titles, a rarity. When Nixon resigned, he stayed on under President Gerald R. Ford. » | David E. Sanger | David E. Sanger covers the White House and national security. He interviewed Dr. Kissinger many times and traveled to Europe, Asia and the Middle East to examine his upbringing and legacy. | Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Henry Kissinger muere a los 100 años, marcó la historia de EE. UU. en la Guerra Fría: Fue el secretario de Estado más poderoso de la posguerra, célebre y vilipendiado a la vez. Su complicado legado aún resuena en las relaciones con China, Rusia y Medio Oriente. »
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Kissinger’s Long Presence on the Global Stage Was Both Celebrated and Reviled: In a reflection of Henry Kissinger’s complicated legacy, his passing elicited sharply divergent opinions from admirers and critics. »
OPINION – NYT GUEST ESSAY: Henry Kissinger, the Hypocrite: Henry Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake. Precisely because his America was not the airbrushed version of a city on a hill, he never felt irrelevant: Ideas go in and out of style, but power does not. »
