Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger was United States national security adviser and secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and the most consequential and most contested American diplomat of the twentieth century. Born Heinz Kissinger in Fürth, Bavaria in 1923 to a Jewish family, he fled to New York in 1938; at least a dozen relatives were killed in the Holocaust. He returned to Germany as a US Army interpreter and counter-intelligence officer. He took degrees at Harvard, where his doctoral thesis on Metternich and Castlereagh set out the realist conviction he never abandoned: that stability among great powers matters more than the internal character of regimes. Appointed by Nixon in 1969, he conducted policy through back channels, often bypassing the State Department he later led. He opened relations with China through secret visits in 1971, producing Nixon's 1972 trip and a strategic realignment against the Soviet Union; he negotiated détente and the SALT and ABM agreements; and he pursued shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, producing disengagement agreements and moving Egypt out of the Soviet orbit. The charges against him are equally specific. He directed the secret bombing of Cambodia from 1969, dropping more than half a million tons and destabilising the country before the Khmer Rouge took it. He supported the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and the Argentine junta's dirty war, and gave Indonesia approval to invade East Timor in 1975. He shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for the Paris accords with Le Duc Tho, who declined it; the war continued two more years. He advised presidents until his death in 2023 at a hundred.
- Lived: 1923 CE – 2023 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: secretary_of_state, national_security_advisor
