Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Henry Kissinger put the title of that novel into practice in his work as the most famous diplomat of his time.
Admired and reviled. Loved and hated. These are the feelings that were reflected in his obituaries, after he died on Wednesday at his home in Kent, Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
His polarized figure, in a very polarized society, was starkly expressed in the media. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal admired by the American ruling class, finally died,” Spencer Ackerman titled his goodbye article in Rolling Stone. Do not forget that Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for seeking an end to the conflict in Vietnam, a decision so controversial that the other winner, Le Duc Tho, a North Vietnamese soldier and politician, rejected the honor.
Who else but Fox, where Joe Biden's silence was highlighted after several hours of the death of the man who advised twelve presidents, came out to slaughter amplifying the criticism of that magazine. “They should be ashamed of themselves,” replied Tudor Dixon, a former Republican candidate for governor of Michigan. There were other conservative voices that cried foul over this attack on one of their luminaries.
Rarely has the death of a figure of this magnitude provoked so much praise (the Chinese president Xi Jiping expressed pain for a friend and the Russian Putin praised his “pragmatism”) and, in turn, allowed the task of demolishing his legacy to emerge. Even Ben Rhodes, an advisor to President Barack Obama, called him a “hypocrite” in an article in The New York Times.
Kissinger, who made his last name synonymous with diplomacy in the best of senses and also in the worst (that of brutality pursuing results), influential and controversial, forger of alliances and accomplice of dictatorships, praised for his vision and accused of war crimes, a powerful figure whose opinions competed with those of the presidents, all that and more was this man of very long lights and shadows around the entire planet.
He is considered the exponent of realpolitik who served as the engineer of the opening between the United States and China, the negotiator of the end of the Vietnam War and the strategist who used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake the relationship between the American power with the Soviet Union at a height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling democratic values in pursuit of its objectives.
At the same time, his encouragement of the bloodbaths of the military coups in Chile, Argentina and Pakistan is also documented, or, among other perversions, his role in the bombings of Cambodia and Laos in 1969 and 1970. Few have been praised and vilified with as much passion as he was, the government's second-in-command who had more global fame than his boss.
A Holocaust survivor, Kissinger found refuge after fleeing Nazi Germany (in 1938, at the age of 15). He began as a Harvard professor in the 1950s and rose to the top of the American political establishment. He made the leap from academia and was both an undisputed pinnacle of diplomacy and a master of manipulation, and even a pop culture icon.
There was no “peace with honor” as he said in 1973 when he closed the war in the jungle of Indochina. Almost two years later, with Gerald Ford in the White House, the Vietcong took over Saigon. On the contrary, Kissinger was accused of failing to reach a similar agreement years earlier and prevent more deaths, while he tried to prolong the war knowing, as is clear, that the chances of winning were non-existent.
But, just as he survived the Holocaust, he came out of that military disaster and emerged unscathed from the Watergate scandal that ended President Richard Nixon.
He served as Secretary of State and national security advisor under two Republican presidents (Nixon and Ford), as well as a powerful advisor to political leaders in the two major American parties.
“He really set the benchmark for all those who followed him in this job,” said Antony Blinken, current heir to the head of the State Department. “I have had the privilege of having his advice on numerous occasions, the last one a month ago,” he confessed. “He made numerous decisions that changed history and helped deal with the implications of it,” he stressed.
In South America, where he left a few notches, he is remembered as a key figure who aided bloody military coups to stop the spread of communism. He is credited with the architecture to put an end to the Chilean president Salvador Allende. “A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to hide his deep moral misery,” Juan Gabriel Valdés, Chile's ambassador to the United States, wrote in X. His message was retweeted by President Gabriel Boric.
History has judged some of his Cold War exercises in realism in a harsher light than was generally done in his time. With that eye on the competition between great powers, he was often willing to be cruelly Machiavellian, especially when he dealt with “second-rank” nations, which he often viewed as pawns in the great battle.
Although he always liked to respond to his critics, this time Kissinger remains silent.
