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Henry Kissinger, the most powerful U.S. diplomat, former secretary of state, Cold War strategist, and adviser to 12 American presidents, died at age 100 on November 29, 2023, in Connecticut.

This year on May 27, Kissinger celebrated his 100th birthday, having outlived many of his political contemporaries. His death was announced by Kissinger Associates consulting firm. “Dr Henry Kissinger, a respected American scholar and statesman, died today at his home in Connecticut,” the firm said, adding that Kissinger’s family would hold a private funeral with a memorial service in New York.

Architect of U.S. foreign policy

Dr. Kissinger is considered one of the most influential foreign policy scholar-practitioners in the United States. His hero in international affairs was Otto von Bismarck who “urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength.” This became one of Kissinger’s guiding principles.

Some of Kissinger’s talents and successes may find roots in his diverse experiences — from being a Jewish child in Nazi Germany to serving as a soldier during World War II and an analyst of the Cold War.

Kissinger was an immigrant who fled Nazi Germany with his family and arrived in America in 1938. After obtaining American citizenship in 1943, he served in the 84th Army Division until 1946, earning a Bronze Star for meritorious service.

Hailed as an academic star at Harvard University, Kissinger became known both for his brilliance and his ambitiousness. Graduating from Harvard University with bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees, he taught international relations for nearly two decades. In 1969, President Nixon appointed him National Security Advisor, and later, he served as Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford.

Fast Facts

Birth name: Heinz Alfred Kissinger (His name was changed to Henry when his family immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis)

Birth date: May 27, 1923

Birthplace: Fürth, Germany

Religion: Jewish

Marriages: Nancy Maginnes Kissinger (March 30, 1974-present) and Ann Fleischer (1949-1964, divorced)

Children: Elizabeth and David Education (with Ann Fleischer)

Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1950; M.A., 1952; Ph.D., 1954

Military: He served in the 84th Army Division from 1943 to 1946 and was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service.

Nobel Peace Prize: In 1973, he won the Nobel Prize with North Vietnam’s chief negotiator Le Duc Tho (who declined the award) for the accord under which America pulled out of South Vietnam.

Achievements of Kissinger – top diplomat and brilliant strategist

After completing his Ph.D. in 1954, Kissinger taught the Harvard University faculty for 20 years. During this time, Kissinger assumed an advisory role for the State Department, think tanks, defense contractors, and various politicians, earning a reputation as a “foreign policy realist” who used diplomacy to achieve practical objectives rather than lofty ideals. 

Serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he gained celebrity status for opening U.S. relations with China, negotiating the end of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, ending America’s role in the Vietnam War, and negotiating arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

Talented strategist and negotiator: Biographers have described Kissinger as America’s successful Cold War containment strategist. “The structure of peace that Kissinger designed places him with Henry Stimson, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson atop the pantheon of modern American statesmen,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his 1992 biography of Kissinger. “In addition, he was the foremost American negotiator of this century and, along with George Kennan, the most influential foreign policy intellectual.”

Vietnam War: Kissinger received a Nobel Peace Prize for helping arrange the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. He called it “peace with honor,” but the war proved far from over as the North Vietnamese failed to honor the peace accord and resumed their advance in South Vietnam. After Saigon fell to the communist forces in 1975, Kissinger offered to return his Nobel Prize medal.

Middle East Shuttle Diplomacy: Nearly 50 years ago, Kissinger conducted the first “shuttle diplomacy” in the quest for Middle East peace, flying back and forth between direct meetings with the Israelis, the Egyptians, and the Syrians. Kissinger cultivated a relationship with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, convincing Egypt to gradually move from the Soviet orbit to the American one. He negotiated the end of the Yom Kippur War of 197, seeking a new U.S.-led order following the war between Israel and Arab states. Though the region is yet to attain peace, Kissinger won praises for transforming Middle East politics, at least inside the United States.

The two foreign leaders Kissinger admired the most, according to Isaacson, were Premier Zhou Enlai of China and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, who would later be assassinated. During Kissinger’s first attempt at shuttle diplomacy in 1974, Sadat told him ”You are not only my friend … You are my brother,” Isaacson wrote.

Rapprochement with China: Fifty years ago, Kissinger launched an unprecedented rapprochement with communist China. In 1972, Kissinger feigned a stomach illness during a visit to Pakistan and went on a secret trip to Beijing to arrange for President Nixon’s historic visit to China to meet with Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. This was described as a “virtual earthquake” in world politics. In his memoirs, Kissinger recalled his secret trip to China as “a truly extraordinary event, both novel and moving, both unusual and overwhelming,” that restored “the innocence of the years when each day was a precious adventure in defining the meaning of life.”

He was the only American to deal with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping. He even met Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders in Beijing this year at the age of 100.

Arms control agreement with Soviet Union: Kissinger’s achievements in office also include arms control with the Soviets. For the first time during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to limit the number of nuclear missiles in their arsenals. The negotiations that began in Helsinki, Finland, continued for nearly three years, until the signing of the SALT I agreement in May 1972. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) is considered the crowning achievement of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of détente.

Controversies and Consequences of Kissinger’s policies

The United States’s most powerful secretary of state was both celebrated and reviled across the world. Historians and reporters have provided context on Kissinger’s policies and actions that brought death, destruction, and chaos in various regions including Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin.

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” British American journalist Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”.

Remembered as a statesman and master of realpolitik in the political and intellectual circle, Kissinger’s death met with celebrations on social media with some calling him a “war criminal”. The Rolling Stone magazine headline read: “Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.”

Here are some of the controversies and allegations that surrounded America’s top diplomat:

Vietnam: Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize for reaching peace talks and the end of the Vietnam War but two years later it turned into America’s worst defeat in war. Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho, who declined, citing the absence of actual peace in Vietnam, leading to protests and resignations within the Nobel committee.

Many in Congress opposed Nixon-Kissinger’s secretive foreign policy approach, and human rights activists criticized Kissinger for neglecting human rights in other countries. The Vietnam War was the most central issue in Kissinger’s legacy. The war persisted throughout Nixon’s administration, concluding with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and over 58,000 American lives lost. “For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made,” Kissinger told CNN in 2005.

Cambodia: Kissinger has been accused of breaking international law by authorizing indiscriminate carpet-bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 during the Vietnam War. Kissinger told the military to strike “anything that flies or anything that moves,” according to declassified transcripts. Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University, has estimated that around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs were dropped on Cambodia during this period and killed as many as 150,000 civilians.

He was reviled by many over the bombings of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War that led to the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, which carried out the worst atrocities and the genocide of an estimated 2 million people — or 1 in 4 Cambodians at the time. “Mr. Richard Nixon and Kissinger allowed the Khmer Rouge to grasp golden opportunities,” Kaing Khek Iev, a Khmer Rouge official known as Brother Duch, said during a trial by a UN-backed tribunal in 2009. A few top Khmer Rouge leaders were handed life sentences. Kissinger, however, faced little accountability for his role.

“Henry Kissinger’s bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians — and set (a) path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge,” wrote Sophal Ear, a scholar at Arizona State University. “The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger’s watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them.”

Chile: He was the architect of the Nixon administration’s efforts to topple Chile’s democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende. This led to the beginning of the dictatorship era of Augusto Pinochet whose regime tortured and killed thousands of people and forced an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile in Europe and the U.S.

Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects at the National Security Archive, says the records related to Kissinger “paint a picture of a U.S. foreign policymaker for whom morality was not an issue.” Kornbluh, author of “The Pinochet File,” which summarized U.S. declassified documents, said that “Henry Kissinger’s legacy in Latin America is a dark one, and that’s because he didn’t give a damn about human rights. … He had no problem dealing with and supporting some of the most cutthroat dictatorships in the history of the region.” He said: “In Latin America, Kissinger will be remembered and recognized for undermining democracy and human rights.”

Kissinger’s legacy will remain a mixed one, marked by his groundbreaking diplomatic efforts in opening up talks with China and the former Soviet Union and pulling the United States out of the Vietnam War. However, his legacy remains visibly polarized with controversy surrounding his actions in Vietnam and accusations of indiscriminate bombing in Cambodia, leading to prolonged hostilities.