Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger (born May 27, 1923, Fürth, Germany—died November 29, 2023, Kent, Connecticut, U.S.) was an American political scientist, who, as adviser for national security affairs and as secretary of state, was a major influence in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy from 1969 to 1976 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In 1973 he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam for their efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Vietnam War.

Early life, academic career, and initial government service

Kissinger’s family immigrated to the United States in 1938 to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews. He became a naturalized citizen in 1943. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II and in the postwar U.S. military government of Germany. After leaving the service, he entered Harvard University, where he received a B.A. (1950) and a Ph.D. (1954). In 1954 he joined the faculty as an instructor, becoming professor of government in 1962 and director of the Defense Studies Program from 1959 to 1969. He also served as a consultant on security matters to various U.S. agencies from 1955 to 1968, spanning the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957) established him as an authority on U.S. strategic policy. He opposed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s policy of planning a nuclear “massive retaliation” to Soviet attack, advocating instead a “flexible response” combining the use of tactical nuclear weapons and conventional forces, as well as the development of weapons technology in accordance with strategic requirements. That book and The Necessity for Choice (1960), in which Kissinger limited his concept of flexible response to conventional forces and warned of a “missile gap” between the Soviet Union and the United States, had a significant impact on the activities of the Kennedy administration.

Kissinger’s reputation as a political scientist led to his role as an adviser to New York governor and Republican presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller. In December 1968 Kissinger was appointed by President Nixon as assistant for national security affairs. He eventually came to serve as head of the National Security Council (1969–75) and as secretary of state (September 1973–January 20, 1977).

Britannica Quiz

Pop Quiz: 19 Things to Know About the Vietnam War

Rapprochement with China, détente with the Soviet Union, peace with Vietnam, and the Nobel Prize

Kissinger soon emerged as an influential figure in the Nixon administration. His major diplomatic achievements involved China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and the Middle East. He developed a policy of warmer U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, détente, which led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in 1969. He established the pro-Pakistan policy in the India-Pakistan war of late 1971, helped negotiate the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union (signed 1972), and developed a rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (1972), the first official U.S. contact with that nation since the Chinese Communists had come to power.

Although he originally advocated a hard-line policy in Vietnam and helped engineer the U.S. bombing of Cambodia (1969–70), Kissinger later played a major role in Nixon’s Vietnamization policy—the disengagement of U.S. troops from South Vietnam and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces. In 1972 Kissinger engaged in peace negotiations with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam. Believing that these negotiations had reached a successful conclusion, on October 26 Kissinger announced that “peace was at hand.” It turned out, however, that the bilateral agreement had not been approved by the South Vietnamese government, and the peace efforts once more reached a stalemate. In mid-December Nixon authorized saturation bombing of North Vietnam, but by the end of the month he had halted it. With progress being made in the talks with North Vietnam in Paris, on January 15, 1973, Nixon ceased all military action against North Vietnam. Just over a week later, on January 23 in Paris, Kissinger initialed a cease-fire agreement that provided for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and outlined the machinery for a permanent peace settlement between the two Vietnams. In a news conference on January 24, which clarified the main points of the agreement, Kissinger said:

The United States is seeking a peace that heals. We have had many armistices in Indochina. We want a peace that will last. And therefore it is our firm intention in our relationship to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to move from hostility to normalization, and from normalization to conciliation and cooperation. And we believe that under conditions of peace we can contribute throughout Indochina to a realization of the humane aspirations of all the people of Indochina. And we will, in that spirit, perform our traditional role of helping people realize these aspirations in peace.

For this apparent resolution of the Vietnam conflict, Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Peace with Le Duc Tho (who refused the honor).

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

Shuttle diplomacy, books, and awards

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 (see Yom Kippur War), Kissinger used what came to be called shuttle diplomacy in disengaging the opposing armies and promoting a truce between the belligerents. He was responsible for the resumption of diplomatic relations between Egypt and the United States, severed since 1967. He remained in office after Nixon’s resignation in 1974, directing foreign affairs under President Ford. After leaving office in 1977, Kissinger became an international consultant, writer, and lecturer. In 1983 U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan appointed him to head a national commission on Central America. In the 1980s he also served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. Kissinger’s later books included American Foreign Policy (1969), The White House Years (1979), For the Record (1981), Years of Upheaval (1982), Diplomacy (1994), Years of Renewal (1999), Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (2001), Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (2003), Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises (2003), On China (2011), and World Order (2014). With Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, he published The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (2021).

Kissinger was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), the United States’ highest civilian honor, and the Medal of Liberty (1986), which was given to 10 of America’s most important foreign-born leaders.

Criticism and controversy

Notwithstanding Kissinger’s many diplomatic achievements and the widespread celebration of him as a world statesman that accompanied his later life, there are many around the globe who revile Kissinger for the role they believe he played in world events. Indeed, a number of his critics have branded him a war criminal and called for his prosecution, most prominently British-born American political pundit Christopher Hitchens. Those who condemn Kissinger often begin their list of accusations against him with his alleged efforts to aid Nixon’s presidential campaign in its attempts to sabotage peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam in the run-up to the 1968 U.S. election. They also have taken him to task for advocating the secret expansion of the Vietnam War to the bombing of the noncombatant country of Cambodia.

According to some accounts, Kissinger, fearful of the potential political blowback of discovery, was obsessed with protecting the clandestine nature of the bombing. Reportedly having seen Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of portions of the Pentagon Papers as an imminent threat to the operation’s secrecy, Kissinger is said to have been an instigator of the creation of the “plumbers,” who burglarized Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in a failed attempt to uncover embarrassing material and who would later be at the center of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex that sparked the Watergate scandal, from which Kissinger managed to remain distant.

Kissinger also has been accused of endorsement via inaction of deadly anti-democratic activities by right-wing Latin American governments, including Operation Condor, in which several South American military governments—most notably those of Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile—coordinated their efforts to systematically eliminate opponents in the 1970s and ’80s. Operation Condor activities included the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in 1976. Moreover, critics allege that Kissinger’s actions contributed to the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army in 1971 in what would become Bangladesh and to the depredations of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975.

Personal life

Kissinger married twice—to Ann Fleischer (1949, divorced 1964), with whom he had a son and daughter, and to Nancy Maginnes (1974). Between marriages he developed a reputation as something of a sex symbol (“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” he was fond of saying), and he dated such glamorous celebrities as actresses Jill St. John, Shirley MacLaine, and Candice Bergen. A longtime fan of football (soccer), he served for a while as the chairman of the board of governors of the North American Soccer League, the forerunner of Major League Soccer.