Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger, an indispensable foreign policy adviser to four presidents and a front-row witness to history in the crumbling Nixon White House, died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger was among the 20th century’s busiest and most influential diplomatic figures: He negotiated an end to the Vietnam War, championed détente with the Soviet Union, opened the door for U.S.-China relations. The expression “shuttle diplomacy” was coined during the 1970s as Kissinger flew back and forth to the volatile Middle East following the Yom Kippur War.
His rise to prominence started in unlikely fashion. Kissinger, German-born and Jewish in the years before World War II, arrived in New York City as a 15-year-old boy with parents fleeing the rampant anti-Semitism in their homeland.
Three decades later, he was a key player in the White House.
The globe-trotting one-time Secretary of State served as one of Richard Nixon’s closest confidantes during the Watergate scandal that forced the disgraced president’s resignation. Kissinger memorably prayed alongside the sobbing president during Nixon’s last days in the White House — a poignant scene revealed in “The Final Days” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
“It was the most wrenching thing I have ever gone through in my life — hand-holding,” Kissinger later said about the Aug. 7, 1974, session in the Lincoln Sitting Room. The overwrought Nixon resigned two days later.
But the two men shared six years of better days in Washington before the president’s historic decision to leave office, driven off by the scandal exposed by the two Washington Post reporters.
Kissinger’s clandestine 1971 trips to China paved the way for Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing and the eventual normalization of U.S. relations with Chairman Mao’s nation.
Though he captured the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire agreement in Vietnam, Kissinger was castigated as a war criminal by critics over the secret bombing of Cambodia. The secretary of state’s commitment to “peace with honor” in Southeast Asia was blamed for extending the unpopular war at a cost of 20,000 more American lives.
A taped August 1972 Oval Office chat between Nixon and Kissinger caught the president declaring the war couldn’t end before the November election and his bid for a second term.
Late journalist Christopher Hitchens feuded openly with Kissinger over his Washington legacy, even penning an intensely critical book dubbed “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” Kissinger replied by blasting Hitchens as a “Holocaust denier.”
But Kissinger was generally held in high regard. He was honored in 1977 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and with the Medal of Liberty in 1986. Among his most recent public appearances was a eulogy at the Washington funeral of U.S. Sen. John McCain.
The rotund Kissinger, with his white hair and thick accent, was also an unlikely ladies’ man — linked with glamorous, high-profile women including Diane Sawyer, Jill St. John, Shirley MacLaine and Liv Ullman.
“Power,” he once noted, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Kissinger appeared as often in the gossip columns as the news pages over the years. He wed philanthropist Nancy Maginnes in 1974, and they were married until his death. He had two children, David and Elizabeth, from a previous marriage that ended with divorce in 1964.
Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923, in Fuerth, Germany, where the bookish young man was exposed to rampant antisemitism. He arrived in New York City in 1938 after his Jewish parents fled the Nazis.
The immigrant became a naturalized citizen five years later, and served his new country in the Army during World War II — fighting in France and Germany. Kissinger earned a doctorate at Harvard and became a faculty member, all the while turning an eye toward Washington and international affairs. When Nixon was elected in 1968, Kissinger became his National Security advisor and eventually Secretary of State.
He was among the few Nixon aides to emerge unscathed from the crushing Watergate scandal. Kissinger served as Secretary of State from September 1973 through Jan. 20, 1977, working for Presidents Nixon and Ford.
Kissinger remained active for decades after Nixon’s resignation, opening the international consulting firm Kissinger Associates, Inc.
Under President Reagan, Kissinger chaired the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America. He also served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under President George H.W. Bush. Kissinger served briefly as chairman of the 9/11 investigation commission before resigning in Dec. 2002 amid complaints from victims’ families about possible conflicts with his business.
The diplomat also wrote extensively on foreign affairs and diplomatic history, penning 13 books, including “White House Years” in 1979 and “Ending the Vietnam War” in 2003. He met several times in recent years with NYPD brass at One Police Plaza to discuss global terrorism, and offered foreign policy advice to GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
The bespectacled man with the lingering German accent endured as a staple of the New York City scene, joining Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in his box at Yankee Stadium or sharing dinner with Joe DiMaggio. He swam at the indoor pool inside George Washington High School in Washington Heights, and was among the A-list witnesses at the trial of philanthropist pal Brooke Astor’s son.
He became a regular at Le Cirque and the Four Seasons. And he was once introduced backstage at a Madison Square Garden concert to R&B great Wilson Pickett.
“Henry Kissinger, my man!” barked the Wicked Pickett, wrapping the diplomat in a bear hug.
Kissinger will be interred at a private family service. There will be a memorial service in New York City at a later date.
