Credit: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Henry Kissinger, the German-born American diplomat, academic and presidential adviser who served as secretary of state for two presidents is dead.
He died on Wednesday, November 29 at the age of 100.
A statement released by Kissinger Associates said Kissinger died at his home in Connecticut.
Kissinger was both revered and controversial, praised by supporters as a brilliant strategist and condemned by critics as a master manipulator.
He pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, began a rapprochement with China and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords to end U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
At various points before his second marriage, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, Kissinger dated actresses Jill St. John, Shirley MacLaine, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen and Liv Ullman.
“Power,” he once famously said, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
He was also a man used to perennially being in charge.
“There cannot be a crisis next week,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times in 1969. “My schedule is already full.”
He maintained his global influence well after leaving public life, evidenced most recently by his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in July. The Chinese leader greeted the former American diplomat who had celebrated his 100th birthday less than two months prior with deep respect.
“The Chinese people never forget their old friends, and Sino-U.S. relations will always be linked with the name of Henry Kissinger,” Xi said at the time.
Kissinger played a leading role in the normalization of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and China under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
By 1980, he told Time magazine, “The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.”
Kissinger is survived by his wife, Nancy, whom he married in 1974, and two children, David and Elizabeth, from his first marriage.
He was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany, May 27, 1923, and, even as a child, was known for his intellect.
Kissinger, his younger brother, Walter, and his parents fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1938 by way of London when Henry was 15.
After attending the City College of New York, he served in the U.S. military, becoming a U.S. citizen, then enrolling at Harvard, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and a Ph.D.
Kissinger then joined the Harvard faculty, where he became an expert in the field of international relations and an adviser to government agencies under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
