U.S. President Richard Nixon meets with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in the Oval Office, in Washington, on Jan. 21, 1974.National Archives/Getty Images
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
Seldom has a global figure with such a strong personality, such a long record and such a significant impact embodied so many contradictions.
Born in Germany, Henry Alfred Kissinger, who died Wednesday at 100, spoke of American values while cozying up to dictators. He was called a war criminal and a peacemaker. He was a classic Cold Warrior who opened up American relations with both China and the Soviet Union.
He supported the Vietnam War until he negotiated a “peace with honour” that many of today’s Republicans regard as dishonourable – and which, in any case, did not last. He was a brilliant strategist who nonetheless prompted chaos and death in Cambodia and Chile and erred by tilting to Pakistan in its 1970-1971 war with India. He was the classic Washington public figure – everyone in the capital knew he preferred the table at the San Souci restaurant that was closest to a phone line, so he could confer with the president in full view of other diners – and yet he luxuriated in operating in secrecy.
From 1969 to 1977 he was both practitioner and personification of realpolitik, a 19th-century German term he is responsible for introducing into 20th-century American argot. But he was also a romantic, comparing himself to “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else” – an image he shared with the interviewer Oriana Fallaci, who later said, “What an icy man.”
First as national security adviser and then as secretary of state, Dr. Kissinger was a Shakespearean figure who bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus, and petty men – for that is how the two presidents he served, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, sometimes seemed – walked under his huge legs.
The last surviving member of the Nixon cabinet, Dr. Kissinger was an enduring symbol of those years, when brave idealistic rhetoric collided with cynical manoeuvring and manipulation, often in the service of opportunism and self-aggrandizement. (It is revealing that he instructed colleagues and journalists to refer to him, based on his Ph.D. from Harvard, as Dr. Kissinger rather than Mr. Kissinger – the sort of courtesy title insistence that president Woodrow Wilson, with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, and, more recently, Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf, with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, never demanded.)
All these elements of the Kissinger years, which arguably extended well beyond his official governmental positions to his role as memoirist and essayist, consultant and consiglieri, contributed to the creation of a new word: “Kissingerian.” Customarily, the “ian” suffix is applied in the United States primarily to presidents, as in “Wilsonian” or “Nixonian” – both employed as terms of opprobrium today.
He also co-opted a phrase, dating to the moving shuttles on the power looms operated by 19th-century New England mill hands (and from the 1919 Paris Peace Conference), when his jetborne negotiations in the Middle East became known as “shuttle diplomacy.”
Dr. Kissinger, the only secretary of state until Madeleine Albright to be born abroad, is more likely to be recalled in history alongside the British diplomats Canning, Palmerston, and Castlereagh, the Austrian statesman Metternich, even the German chancellor Bismarck – all known today by their surnames alone – than with the secretaries of state (Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Daniel Webster, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, George Shultz and James Baker) whom American memorialists invoked this week. Indeed, Dr. Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation treated with Castlereagh and Metternich, with emphasis on the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna. A new edition of A World Restored, growing out of his 1954 thesis, was released a decade ago.
Dr. Kissinger came into general prominence as a Harvard professor advising Mr. Nixon’s principal Republican rival, Nelson Rockefeller. When the New York governor’s 1968 presidential campaign sputtered to an end, Dr. Kissinger easily – though suspiciously gracefully – slid into the Nixon camp.
He later twice slipped into what was then known as Red China to arrange Mr. Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 trip. The image – no one knows precisely where it came from – of Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger, one a Quaker, the other a Jew, on their knees in prayer in the embattled president’s final days in the White House, is yet another example of the way the secretary of state served a leader whom he privately resented, and who reciprocated the sentiment.
While other leading American political figures of the period operated pretty much in a straight line, Dr. Kissinger specialized in detours. For better or for worse, they were detours with a difference.