Henry Ksissinger, the man who made his surname synonymous with diplomacy in the best of the senses and also in the worst, that of brutality, 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 who died this Wednesday at his home in Kent, Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
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 of 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 and Argentina 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 so much. passion as he was, the government secondary who had more global fame than the headlines.
Kissinger, a Holocaust survivor who found refuge after fleeing Nazi Germany, began as a Harvard professor in the 1950s and rose to the top of the American political establishment. From the academy he made the leap and was both the pinnacle of diplomacy and a master of manipulation, and even a pop culture icon.
He was born on May 27, 1923, in an industrial suburb of Nuremberg, the son of a teacher and a housewife, Orthodox Jews. In 1938, five years after Hitler came to power, they escaped to London and then to New York, two and a half months before the tragic Kristallnacht. He studied and returned to Germany, this time as an American soldier to fight Nazism. Upon his return he entered Harvard as a student (1947) and his destiny changed, directing him to the government.
He served as secretary of state and national security advisor under two Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as a powerful advisor to political leaders in both American parties for decades. Between one thing and another, he advised twelve presidents. He came to be seen as one of the leading international relations negotiators and intellectuals of the 20th century and who was still either listened to or despised.
In Nixon's second term, Kissinger had to navigate the Watergate scandal that engulfed his boss's attention and even caused the president to resign. But he, meanwhile, defended his own territory.
“My main concern during 'Watergate' was not the investigation that made headlines every day. My concern was to maintain the credibility of the United States as a great power,” he recounted in 'Years of upheaval', the second volume of his memoirs published in 1982, “I became the focal point of a degree of support without precedents for an unelected official. “It was as if the citizens and Congress instinctively sensed the danger of the nation and created a substitute center around which the national purpose could gather,” he stressed.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize for reaching the agreement in 1973 to end the disastrous war conflict in Vietnam. He shared the distinction with Le Duc Tho, a North Vietnamese soldier and politician, who declined the honor. Kissinger called that agreement “peace with honor.” But the war, in reality, had not yet ended and critics reproached him for the fact that he could have made this pact years earlier, saving many lives.
Almost two years later, Saigon fell under the rule of the Viet Cong, already with Ford in the White House. It was a humiliation to conclude the war, there was no honor in a contest that from the beginning Kissinger doubted that the US could win.
For their detractors, the Communist victory marked the inevitable end of a cynical policy that had attempted to create some space between the withdrawal of American troops from Indochina and whatever came next. Indeed, in notes he wrote on his secret trip to China in 1971 he suggested that he simply sought to postpone the fall of Saigon. In short, his image was marked as that of a hawk who played to expand that war, a plan that led to extending the bombings to Cambodia.
Through his shuttle diplomacy, Kissinger reached agreements between Israel, Egypt and Syria after the Arab countries' surprise launch of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
And while he played his chess game against the USSR, he supported brutal regimes, with accusations of human rights abuses, in Pakistan or in Chile and Argentina.
As in the case of Vietnam, history has judged some of his Cold War exercises in realism in a harsher light than was generally cast in portraiture at the time. With that focus on the competition between great powers, Kissinger was often willing to be cruelly Machiavellian, especially when dealing with nations that were for him second-rate, which he often saw as pawns in the great battle.
No one doubts today that he was the architect of the Nixon administration's initiatives to put an end to Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile.
In the war that ended with the division of Pakistan, the American consulate in the east of that country (now Bangladesh) pleaded for an end to the massacre that Pakistani forces were causing. Instead, they approved sending more weapons to the dictatorship that in 1971 caused carnage among Bengalis. Nixon and Kissinger's priorities were different and consisted of supporting the Pakistani dictator, who was paving the way for Kissinger to secretly open up to China.
There were other international aggressions under Kissinger's diplomatic umbrella. He dismissed critics of his moves as failing to confront the world of bad decisions he made, but his efforts to quell those criticisms with sarcasm only inflamed them. “We do what is illegal immediately,” he said on numerous occasions. “What is unconstitutional takes a little longer,” he added.
In the 1983 book “The Price of Power,” journalist Seymour M. Hersh attacked him, describing him as “a double-dealing liar.” In the 1992 biography Kissinger, Walter Isaacson portrayed the former secretary of state as a complicated pragmatist who mastered the art of nuance.
Without giving it too much thought, the social critic Christopher Hitchens directly called him a “war criminal” in his volume 'The trial of Henry Kissinger', from 2001.
Already in 2015, in 'Kissinger's shadow', left-wing historian Greg Grandin argued that never-ending wars show that the US is still paying the price for the policies of that diplomacy. But that same year, in a monumental biography, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson portrayed Kissinger as an idealist who followed the vision of Kant more than the 'realpolitik' of Clausevitz or Bismarck.
In this sense, Barry Gewen, editor of the 'New York Times Book Review', considered that Kissinger's idealism was based on negativism and pessimism. “In his opinion, the task of those responsible for politics is modest and essentially negative. "Not to lead the world along a predetermined path towards universal justice, but to confront power against power to stop the various aggressions of human beings and try to avoid disaster," said Gewen in 'The inevitability of tragedy: Henry Kissinger and his World”, 2020 book.
Until recently he continued giving lectures and teaching. But the inevitable tragedy of Kissinger and his world, as Gewen's title says, reached its peak when the wise man fell into the trap of Theranos. He joined the board of the company of Elizabeth Holmes, who is serving a long prison sentence for fraud. Her magical laboratory, which was going to save humanity with instant blood tests, was a lie. Despite his age, his enormous experience, and the many things he had seen, Kissinger was blinded by the brilliance of a falling star.
