Kissinger Born: Cold War's Most Controversial Diplomat

Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, the son of a schoolteacher in a Jewish family that fled Nazi Germany in 1938 when he was 15. He settled in New York, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, served in military intelligence in Europe during World War II, and returned to attend Harvard on the GI Bill. He earned his PhD and joined the Harvard faculty, where he became an influential scholar of international relations and nuclear strategy. His academic work on nuclear deterrence and diplomatic history attracted the attention of both political parties, and Richard Nixon appointed him National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973. He held both positions simultaneously for a period, an unprecedented concentration of foreign policy authority. His achievements were substantial. He opened diplomatic relations with China through secret negotiations that culminated in Nixon's 1972 visit to Beijing, fundamentally altering the Cold War balance of power. He negotiated the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which ended direct American military involvement in Vietnam, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for that effort, prompting two members of the Nobel Committee to resign in protest. His critics accused him of extending the Vietnam War for political purposes, authorizing the secret bombing of Cambodia, supporting the military coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende, and tolerating the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. He lived to 100, dying on November 29, 2023, at his home in Connecticut. The debate about his legacy, whether he was a brilliant strategist who navigated the complexities of great-power politics or an amoral architect of suffering who sacrificed smaller nations for geopolitical advantage, was never resolved and likely never will be.