Kissinger, Henry 1923-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henry Kissinger is a political scientist who served as national security adviser (1969–1975) and secretary of state (1973–1977) during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994) and Gerald R. Ford (1913–2006).

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger on May 27, 1923 in Fürth, Germany, Kissinger and his family escaped Nazi persecution by immigrating to New York City in 1938. Kissinger joined the U.S. army during World War II, and later earned his BA, MA, and PhD in government at Harvard University. After joining the Harvard faculty, in 1955 and 1956 Kissinger served as director of a study group set up by the Council on Foreign Relations to analyze the influence of nuclear arms on international relations. Although he served as a consultant to the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973), Kissinger tried but failed to secure a major, influential position under either Kennedy or Johnson. Generally indifferent to party affiliations, Kissinger also served as a foreign and defense policy adviser to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York (1908–1979), a liberal Republican with presidential ambitions during the 1960s.

Partly because Kissinger was identified with the Rockefeller faction of the Republican Party, President Richard M. Nixon appointed Kissinger national security adviser in 1969. Kissinger perceived the United States to be experiencing a period of relative decline in its international power during the 1970s. He believed that U.S. foreign policy needed to adapt to this relative decline by practicing “power politics,” or the politics of “realism,” by reducing its ideological hostility and distrust of the Soviet Union and mainland China and protecting U.S. interests through the creation and maintenance of a balance of power and spheres of influence among major world powers. Kissinger had studied and developed the ideas of “realism” in international relations since he was a student at Harvard. His application of “realism” in Nixon’s and Ford’s foreign and defense policies was evident in the gradual U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam, the negotiation and signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union in 1972, and Nixon’s diplomatic visit to Communist China in 1972. For their efforts in negotiating and securing a peace treaty to end the Vietnam War, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, a North Vietnamese diplomat, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

Kissinger, however, found the practice of “power politics” to be more difficult in the Middle East. Oil-producing nations in the Middle East imposed an embargo on oil exports to the United States, and U.S.-Soviet relations were strained because of U.S. support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Nonetheless, Kissinger’s diplomacy helped to achieve cease-fire agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria. During the 1976 presidential election, Kissinger’s “realism” was criticized by Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) for neglecting human rights and lacking a moral purpose.

After leaving the Ford administration in 1977, Kissinger headed an international consulting firm, lectured, wrote his memoirs, and occasionally advised Presidents Ronald W. Reagan (1911–2004) and George H. W. Bush (b. 1924) on foreign policy. In 1983 Seymour Hersh, an American journalist, published The Price of Power, in which he implicated Kissinger in several controversial decisions of Nixon’s foreign policy such as the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, the massive U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, and the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile. During the 1990s more national security documents and other government sources pertaining to Kissinger’s roles as national security adviser and secretary of state were made available to researchers. Using some of these primary sources, Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist, published The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), denouncing Kissinger as a war criminal. In particular, Hitchens argued that Kissinger’s influence on U.S. foreign policy prolonged the Vietnam War, violated human rights and international law, and contributed to politically motivated mass murders in Chile, Cambodia, East Timor, and elsewhere.

Kissinger refused to publicly comment on Hitchens’s book. He continued to lecture, write, and manage his consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates. He briefly served as chairman of the 9/11 Commission in 2002, but resigned after Democrats claimed that there were conflicts of interest between his chairmanship and consulting firm.

SEE ALSO Diplomacy; Nixon, Richard M.; Nobel Peace Prize; Realism, Political; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Vietnam War

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Kissinger, Henry. 1979. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown.

SECONDARY WORKS

Hanhimaki, Jussi. 2004. The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hersh, Seymour. 1983. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit.

Hitchens, Christopher. 2001. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Verso.

Isaacson, Walter. 1982. Kissinger. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Sean J. Savage