One of the 20th century’s most polarising figures, Henry Kissinger was one of the few people trusted by his boss, the eternally suspicious US president Richard Nixon.
His intellectual heft and deft manipulation of power made him a pivotal player in a tense period in American history, a giant of foreign policy and a fixture in international relations for decades to come.
It was an unlikely rise to prominence and power for a Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family in his teens and who never lost his accent.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Bavaria in 1923, the son of a schoolteacher who lost his job because of anti-Jewish discrimination. Kissinger’s family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in upper Manhattan, where Heinz became Henry.
He studied accounting in night school and worked days in a cousin’s shaving brush factory. Drafted during World War 2, he worked in army counterintelligence before assisting the reorganisation of municipal governments in occupied Germany.
Kissinger completed a doctorate at Harvard on the equilibrium of forces in diplomacy — a life-long philosophical and political stance — and in 1957 wrote Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a book which established his reputation as an expert on global diplomacy.
Kissinger was consulted on foreign affairs by the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and in 1968 was a speechwriter and adviser to Republican presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller. When Nixon won the election, he invited Kissinger to be his national security adviser. Kissinger took the job, although he’d "spent 12 years of my life trying to keep him from becoming president", he later recalled.
Kissinger was a practitioner of realpolitik — using diplomacy to achieve practical objectives rather than advance lofty ideals. Supporters said his pragmatic bent served US interests; critics saw a Machiavellian approach that ran counter to democratic ideals.
For eight restless years — first as national security adviser, later as secretary of state, and for a time in the middle holding both titles — Kissinger ranged across the breadth of major foreign policy issues. He conducted the first "shuttle diplomacy" in the quest for Middle East peace. He used secret negotiations to restore ties between the United States and China, ending decades of isolation and mutual hostility.
Kissinger initiated the Paris talks that ultimately provided a face-saving means — a "decent interval," he called it — to get the United States out of Vietnam.
In 1973 he won the Nobel Prize with Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, for the accord under which America pulled out of South Vietnam. (Tho declined the award.)
Two years later, Saigon fell to the communists, leaving a bitter taste among former US allies who blamed Nixon, Kissinger and Congress for abandoning them.
His power grew during the turmoil of Watergate, when the politically attuned diplomat took on a role akin to co-president to the discredited Nixon.
"No doubt my vanity was piqued," Kissinger later wrote of his expanding influence during Watergate. "But the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrop
