Reflections on Kissinger's death and a visit to Vietnam

Henry Kissinger discusses the evacuation of Saigon with President Gerald Ford and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, 28th April 1975

During the course of Henry Kissinger’s long life he maintained a constant commentary on world affairs. This began in 1954 when he joined the faculty at Harvard, where he had been a student. In 1969 he left to become Richard Nixon’s national security advisor and then also secretary of State, continuing under Gerald Ford until 1977, putting him at the centre of international diplomacy, his star rising even as those of the presidents he served dimmed. Thereafter he maintained his income and influence by trading (as Kissinger Associates) on his celebrity and power networks.

He was one of many of his generation who managed the transition from Jewish schoolboy escaping the Nazis to American academia. Nor was he unique as an émigré student of international relations getting a chance to put his theories into practice. Jimmy Carter, who became president after Gerald Ford, employed Zbigniew Brzezinski, the son of a Polish diplomat. But none wrote about their life and times at such great length. His undergraduate dissertation on the meaning of history came in at just under 400 pages, leading Harvard to change the regulations on word length. Three volumes of memoirs yielded 3,800 pages.

Remarkably he was still producing books into his 100th year, including on the most forward-looking topics, such as the impact of Artificial Intelligence. If age had not finally caught up with him books would have continued to flow. He still had impressive access. He had to end his regular meetings with Vladimir Putin, but, perhaps appropriately, his last visit to Beijing was in July where he was feted by the Chinese leadership as a reminder of a time when the US showed proper respect to their interests and views. President XI told him, ‘The Chinese people never forget their old friends’.

To many the continuing readiness by leading figures at home and abroad to seek out his opinions and take them seriously required an infuriating amnesia about his misdeeds in office. For others he represented the mental toughness and ruthlessness that allowed American diplomacy during his time in office to be both muscular and effective. The complexity of his record led to intense debates about whether, on balance, he had been a good or a bad thing. He pleased the doves by promoting détente with the Soviet Union, opening relations with China, negotiating with North Vietnam (gaining him a Nobel Prize), and arranging the disengagements of Israeli with Egyptian and Syrian forces after the 1973 war.

Against this was his apparent disinterest in human rights, the invasion and bombing of Cambodia in 1970 and the coup in Chile in 1973. For anyone interested in power he was an essential study, both because of his geopolitical theories, as he sought to preserve a pivotal role for the United States at a time when there was reason to suppose its influence would wane, but also because of his mastery of bureaucratic intrigue. Ford considered him a ‘super secretary of state,’ but with ‘the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.’ ‘Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend.’