Kissinger, Henry

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Henry Kissinger

Born May 27, 1923

Füurth, Germany

U.S. secretary of state and foreign policy expert

"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full."

H enry Kissinger, who immigrated to the United States as a teenager, was one of the most powerful American officials during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994; served 1969–74) and Gerald R. Ford (1913–; served 1974–77). He is widely credited with negotiating an end to the Vietnam War (1954–75), as well as opening a new era of improved relations with the Soviet Union (a country made up of fifteen republics, the largest of which was Russia, that in 1991 became independent states) and the People's Republic of China. Critics of Kissinger, however, also blamed him for supporting the brutal anticommunist policies of governments in South America that resulted in violations of human rights. Kissinger, who came to the United States as a child refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his work in ending the Vietnam War.

Beginnings in Germany

Alfred Heinz (Henry) Kissinger was born in Füurth, Germany, in 1923, the son of a Jewish schoolteacher. In 1933, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) came to power in Germany, partly on the strength of the party's strong anti- Jewish program. Soon, Jews were prohibited from certain professions, including teaching, and the Kissinger family fled Germany for the United States in 1938, just ahead of the brutal Holocaust that ended with the killing of millions of Jews in Europe. Kissinger was fifteen when he and his family left their native country.

The Kissinger family resettled in New York City, where young Henry went to high school, attending classes at night while working in a shaving-brush factory during the day. In 1941, Kissinger enrolled in the City College of New York as an accounting student while still working full time. He was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II (1939–45), and he was assigned to deliver lectures to American troops on the objectives of the United States in the war. As a result of his talks, Kissinger was recruited to become a member of the Army's intelligence division. He later worked with American troops occupying Germany after the defeat of the Nazi government.

After the war, in 1947, Kissinger enrolled in Harvard University, where he graduated in 1950. He later earned advanced degrees, including a doctorate in philosophy (in 1954) at Harvard, and joined the university's faculty. In the 1960s, Kissinger began consulting with New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908–1979), who was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Rockefeller lost out to Richard Nixon, who then defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1911–1978) in the general election. Nixon asked Kissinger to become his national security advisor. (A national security advisor is an expert in foreign affairs who works in the White House rather than at the State Department.) Under Nixon, Kissinger became more influential than the secretary of state in formulating American policy at a time when competition with the Soviet Union was at the heart of U.S. policy.

It was also a time when the United States seemed to be in a stalemate with communist rebels in Vietnam, and Nixon had promised in his successful 1968 election campaign to end the war. Negotiating an end to the conflict fell to Kissinger.

Nobel Peace Prize

The Vietnam War became a turning point in American history. Starting gradually with a few troops in the early 1960s, the involvement by the United States in trying to prevent domination of South Vietnam by communist troops from the North had become a full-scale war by the late 1960s. The war was highly unpopular with the American public, and Nixon had been elected president in 1968 on a promise to negotiate an end to the fighting. In fact, it took Kissinger more than four years to conclude a peace treaty with North Vietnam, and not long afterwards, communist forces took control over the entire country. By any measure, American policy had failed.

Nevertheless, Kissinger shared the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize with his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho (1911–1990), in 1973. In his acceptance speech for the prize, Kissinger declared: "To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power." The United States had in fact lost the war in Vietnam, and the loss pointed Kissinger in a new direction in American foreign policy, particularly in relations with the Soviet Union and China, which was ruled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Henry Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Foundation of Oslo, Norway, annually awards the Nobel Peace Prize to diplomats or world leaders who, in its opinion, have contributed to the cause of world peace. Ironically, the prize is funded from the fortune of Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), who invented dynamite. In 1973, the peace prize was shared by Henry Kissinger of the United States and Le Duc Tho, the foreign minister of North Vietnam, for their role in negotiating an end to the fighting in the long Vietnam War.

The Nobel Committee, in presenting the prize, observed that "we are under no illusion that the differences between systems and ideologies can be ignored [that is, between the communist North Vietnam and the capitalist United States]; but the Nobel Committee has been anxious to emphasize that in a world yearning for peace, no one can assume the right to force his particular system on others by armed might. Nations with different systems of government must be able to live together in peace and solve their controversies [differences] by negotiation."

In his acceptance speech, Kissinger seemed to reflect the same idea: "To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power."

Kissinger's remark struck some people as a distinct departure for American foreign policy, which seemed to have been based on a belief of what was thought to be "right": the idea of democratically elected governments, guarantees of free speech, and freedom to own property. Kissinger seemed to be saying that in diplomacy, what mattered was "power," which might be based on the force of arms (such as by the police) rather than on the will of the people. It was, to many, a viewpoint that seemed more at home in Europe than in the United States. It was also a viewpoint that helped turn the United States toward a policy of negotiating peaceful arrangements with governments that held power, rather than refusing to deal with such governments (as in the case of China) because of their political beliefs or the manner in which they achieved power (through violence, for example, rather than through elections).

Prior to Vietnam, American foreign policy had been dedicated to the notion of combating communism wherever the political philosophy gained power. The United States and the Soviet Union, the world's most powerful communist government, had been engaged in a back-and-forth struggle for world power and influence since 1945, the end of World War II. American policy towards China had been hostile since the victory of communist fighters in China in 1948; in fact, the United States officially maintained that the legitimate government of mainland China was situated on the Pacific island of Taiwan, a province of China where anticommunist Chinese had fled.

Kissinger introduced a new concept to American foreign policy: dealing with governments as they existed, while effectively dropping a long-standing crusade against communism. Consequently, it was partly as a result of Kissinger's urging that President Nixon, who had made his early political reputation as a strong anticommunist in the late 1940s and 1950s, made a surprise diplomatic visit to China in 1972, and a separate trip to the Soviet Union later the same year. Nixon's visit to China led directly to the opening of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries, and his visit to the Soviet Union led to a treaty under which the two countries agreed to control their buildup of nuclear weapons.

Nixon sank into political problems as a result of a scandal called Watergate, in which agents of Nixon's reelection campaign had broken into the headquarters of the opposition Democratic Party in June 1972. Kissinger emerged as a stable leader of the government in foreign policy. After Nixon resigned office in the face of almost certain impeachment (the formal accusation of a public official charged with misconduct and the trial that follows), Kissinger continued in his role of secretary of state under Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford.

Kissinger the man

Kissinger brought a distinctive personality to his job. He had never lost a distinctive German accent while speaking English, and his slow, careful delivery of heavily accented English was unique. Presiding over American foreign policy at a time of domestic political chaos made Kissinger seem like a figure of stability in government.

His style did not prevent him from becoming a highly controversial figure, however. Although Kissinger's world policy was based on the notion that the Soviet Union should be allowed to dominate other communist countries, in cases where communists tried to gain influence elsewhere, such as in Chile, Kissinger was swift to take action to maintain what he regarded as the American sphere of influence. When communists appeared to be gaining too much influence over Chile's government for Kissinger's taste, the United States secretly supported the military takeover of the government in Santiago in 1973. The president of Chile, Salvador Allende (1908–1973), who had been elected democratically, was killed. Kissinger was roundly criticized for supporting an antidemocratic coup d'état, or the violent overthrow of a government by a small group, in the South American country.

Out of office

In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter (1924–; served 1977–81) of Georgia defeated Gerald Ford in the presidential election, and Kissinger left office. Although he was consulted after later Republicans Ronald Reagan (1911–; served 1981–89) and George Bush (1924–; served 1989–93) were elected in three consecutive elections (1980, 1984, and 1988), Kissinger did not return to office. Instead, he established a consulting firm for large American corporations doing business overseas.

Kissinger enjoyed enormous prestige while in office. In later years, however, Kissinger's reputation was mixed. On the one hand, he negotiated a peace agreement with North Vietnam; on the other hand, communist Vietnamese soon afterwards seized control of the entire country, making the Vietnam War, and the fifty-five thousand American deaths in the war, seem pointless. The American role in aiding the bloody military takeover of Chile's government, which had been democratically elected, seemed to contradict the country's long vision of itself as the defender of democracy over military dictatorships.

Kissinger was also widely credited for maintaining the stability of American foreign policy during the period when his boss, President Nixon, was under increasing political attack for the Watergate affair. Kissinger's defenders credit him with persuading Nixon to adopt a more realistic attitude towards the world's most populous nation, China, and towards the other nuclear-armed superpower, the Soviet Union, thereby helping promote more stable international relations.

—James L. Outman