Written by Peer Meinert
WASHINGTON — Laying the groundwork for opening relations with China was perhaps Henry Kissinger’s greatest feat, but his many detractors point to the Paris talks to extricate the US out of Vietnam as typifying the worst of his secretive style of diplomacy.
Kissinger, who turns 90 on Monday, won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize along with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho, who turned down his half of the award.
A brilliant Harvard student of political science and history, Kissinger once noted that at least four US secretaries of state had gone on to become president, well aware that he was constitutionally barred from following suit because he was a naturalized, not native born, US citizen.
He was 15 when his Jewish parents fled Nazi Germany as war clouds gathered over Europe.
Kissinger reputedly learned to speak English in a matter of weeks after arriving in New York, and his progress through the US academic elite and on to posts as national security adviser in the White House and then secretary of state was the stuff of the American dream. But his unmistakable deep bass voice has always carried a German accent, which became his trademark.
He walks with a cane, but his mind — and tongue — are sharp as ever.
He mocks Germany’s lingering pacifist tendencies in an insecure world and what he sees as German high-handedness, and he is prepared to acknowledge his own failings over Vietnam and the bitter irony of the peace prize accepted “with humility” as the war rumbled on without even a temporary cease fire.
The Vietnam conflict culminated in the ignominious US retreat in 1975 from Saigon as the world watched on television.
“America wanted compromise. Hanoi wanted victory,” Kissinger said recently in tacit acknowledgement that he had failed.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger has never lost sight of his roots in Germany’s Franconia, though he once insisted: “I’m an American and will remain an American.”
His fluent German stood him in good stead as a young soldier with the US military in occupied Germany.
Thirteen members of his family died in the Holocaust, but he has frequently visited Fuerth, the city of his birth. “I no longer think about the bad things,” he said during one of his visits.
Last year he returned to watch the local team play a football match.
Kissinger’s secret trip to China ahead of US President Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking February 1972 visit was his diplomatic masterstroke, leading gradually to a normalization of relations and putting the Soviet Union on the back foot during the Cold War.
He became an overnight media star, his image enhanced by his efforts in the Middle East to end the 1973-74 Yom Kippur War. Kissinger’s incessant flights between Israel, Egypt and Syria gave birth to the term “shuttle diplomacy.”
Kissinger’s contacts with the world of show business and his rumoured affair with actress Gina Lollobrigida, among others, belied his avuncular appearance and professorial manner. The remark, “Power is the strongest aphrodisiac,” is attributed to him.
But it was his role behind the scenes of the Nixon administration for which he is remembered by friend and foe alike — and which has drawn comparisons with Prince Metternich, the secretive 19th-century fixer for the Austrian Habsburgs, who formed the theme of Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation.
The friends will recall his contribution to rapprochement with China, where he is still a deeply respected figure. Foes have a long list that includes the decisions to bomb Cambodia in secret and to topple the government of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.
