Death of a diplomat: Henry Kissinger, 1923-2023 (The Washington Post)

Death of a diplomat

The Washington Post, Nov 30, 2023

Henry A. Kissinger, a scholar, statesman and celebrity diplomat who wielded unparalleled power over U.S. foreign policy throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, and who for decades afterward, as a consultant and writer, proffered opinions that shaped global politics and business, died Nov. 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100.

His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm, which did not give a cause.

As a Jewish immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger spoke little English when he arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1938. But he harnessed a keen intellect, a mastery of history and his skill as a writer to rise quickly from Harvard undergraduate to Harvard faculty member before establishing himself in Washington.

As the only person ever to be White House national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time, he exercised a control over U.S. foreign policy that has rarely been equaled by anyone who was not president.

He and Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the secret negotiations that produced the 1973 Paris agreement and ended U.S. military participation in the Vietnam War. His famous “shuttle diplomacy” after the 1973 Middle East war helped stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

As the impresario of Nixon’s historic opening to China and as the theoretician of détente with the Soviet Union, Dr. Kissinger earned much of the credit for seismic policy shifts that redirected the course of world affairs.

When he was appointed secretary of state, a Gallup poll found him to be the most admired person in the country. But he also became the target of relentless critics.

On the left, loud voices accused him of a coldblooded pragmatism that put strategic gains ahead of human rights. Some of his critics said the Paris agreement left a longtime ally, the government of South Vietnam, to a dark fate as the North Vietnamese seized control. Others accused him of letting the war continue for three years while he negotiated a deal that he could have had from the beginning.

Throughout his life, Dr. Kissinger ruminated on power and strategy in philosophical and even existential terms, but he always described himself as a realist, able to see which risks were worth taking.

“Policy is the art of weighing probabilities; mastery of it lies in grasping the nuances of possibilities,” he wrote as a young man. “To attempt to conduct it as a science must lead to rigidity. For only the risks are certain; the opportunities are conjectural.”

By Thomas W. Lippman, a former Washington Post reporter who covered Dr. Kissinger’s diplomatic activities in Vietnam and the Middle East.

Read more: Henry Kissinger, who shaped world affairs under two presidents, dies at 100.
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