Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, has died at 100

"Doctor Strangelove," "Nixon's Metternich," "Middle East Cyclone": These nicknames attributed to Henry Alfred Kissinger, dead on Wednesday, November 29, at the age of 100, testified to the exceptional personality and immense power in world affairs, from 1968 to 1977, of the one who was mostly called "Dear Henry," through affection or derision.

His life illustrated the extraordinary success of an academic, a diplomacy theorist promoted to a first-rank actor on the international scene. Between cynicism and seduction, brutality and skill, this architect of American Realpolitik and of the policy of "détente" with the USSR favored global stability over democracy and human rights. His career testified to the mobility of American society, where a German-Jewish emigrant with no resources managed to reach the heights of power, until he became the most famous diplomat in the world.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923, in Fürth near Nuremberg, the first son of a family whose father, Ludwig, a schoolteacher, was strictly Jewish. Later, Heinz, who became Henry, would recall with emotion his bar mitzvah celebrated in the midst of Nazi anti-Semitism. Paula, his mother, organized the family's departure for the United States. In 1938, the Kissingers moved to a Jewish neighborhood in New York City, where Heinz attended school while earning his first dollars as an errand boy.

Determined to assimilate, he experienced a difficult adolescence but shone in exams, until the war altered his career plan. Naturalized as soon as he was drafted, he underwent a baptism of fire in the Ardennes, where he volunteered for dangerous patrols. At the end of the war, the army entrusted him with the administration of Bavarian cities and the application of "denazification." In spite of the instructions forbidding fraternization, Henry had already shown a pronounced taste for the company of women. In 1947, he returned to the United States: The prestigious Harvard University admitted him in view of his service record.

Under the supervision of the head of the political science department, who had access to the White House, Kissinger had been in charge of organizing an "international seminar" in which many foreign personalities had participated. In so doing, he built up a prestigious address book that he was able to draw on later.

A lack of scruples

But "Henry" owed his political rise to his meeting with Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, two Republican Party personalities, in constant competition. The first, then advisor to President Eisenhower and located on the left of the party, met him at a conference. Dazzled by the young academic's talent, he commissioned him to write a summary report of an international symposium on nuclear weapons. The text, published in 1957, became a bestseller.

Now in the public eye, Kissinger returned to Harvard to write his doctoral dissertation in international relations on Metternich and Castlereagh. This did not prevent him from working as a consultant for Rockefeller. In the wake of his protector, the governor of the State of New York, he frequented salons and became a sought-after personality in Manhattan. He published numerous articles and sold his advice for a time to President Johnson's Democratic administration.

In the summer of 1968, disappointed that the Republican Party had not chosen his mentor Rockefeller but Richard Nixon as its presidential candidate, Kissinger declared that the latter was "unfit" for the presidency and dangerous, because he was capable of starting a nuclear war. Once elected, Nixon did not hold a grudge: He appointed him advisor for security affairs. The State Department diplomats, conscious that the great options of foreign policy would escape them, considered him as an intruder.

Installed in the White House during Nixon's first term, he combined the position of advisor with that of secretary of state from September 22, 1973. That day, with tears in his eyes, he declared: "In no other country in the world could a man of my origins be called to the position that has just been given to me." To the journalists who asked him how he wanted to be called, he answered with a smile: "Simply Excellency, that will be enough."

The historian Kissinger and the politician Nixon formed an apparently harmonious team, united by immense ambition, an absence of scruples and a will of total control that bordered on paranoia. Their relationship was actually tormented: Kissinger called the president "our drunken friend" when he was not present, while Nixon advised him to "seek treatment." But Nixon despised professional diplomats, hence his desire to strengthen Kissinger's authority. "Foreign policy must be the responsibility of the White House and not of the homosexuals in striped pants of the State Department," the president believed. He made his advisor the sole executor of his diplomacy. "It has to be Henry for Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East."

Virtuoso

Henry Kissinger often quoted Goethe for whom "better an injustice than a disorder." The stability of a world where the two super-great powers were able to destroy each other was his main objective, hence his permanent search for compromise through negotiation, using force if necessary. In this way, he accomplished a difficult balancing act through secret diplomacy, to the displeasure of professional diplomats.

Opposed to the war in Vietnam, he privately reproached Presidents Kennedy and Johnson for having committed themselves to a military adventure doomed to failure. But once in power with Nixon, the adviser justified the commitment of American forces by the need to maintain American power in Asia, without believing that a military victory was possible. "Hippies," students, Quakers and other pacifists bristled at his actions.

After three years of secret negotiations, under pressure from public opinion, he reached an agreement with Hanoi in January 1973, while at the same time conducting an intense bombing campaign. He also extended the war to Cambodia, which facilitated the tragic takeover of the Khmer Rouge. This strategy, intended to safeguard an autonomous South Vietnam and to end the war "with honor," was defeated by the North Vietnamese offensive that swept away the Saigon regime in 1975. In the meantime, at the end of 1973, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, provoking the irony of his detractors.

In the manner of De Gaulle after the Algerian war, Kissinger tried to mask the defeat in Vietnam by "bouncing back" on other grounds and achieved two major diplomatic breakthroughs. He put an end to two decades of hostility between Washington and Beijing by organizing Nixon's visit to China in February 1972. At the same time, he worked towards a rapprochement with the Soviet Union with the visit of the same president to Moscow in May 1972.

The good climate of American-Soviet relations, however, was clouded in October 1973 by the Yom Kippur War. The threat of Soviet intervention in the Middle East could have jeopardized any easement. "Henry of Arabia" – another of his nicknames – defused the crisis: He obtained the disengagement of Egyptian and Israeli forces along the Suez Canal, paving the way for the 1978 Camp David agreements between Egypt and Israel.

Scathing, even contemptuous

His relationship with Europe was ambiguous. His origins enabled him to understand the Old Continent's aspiration to free itself from American tutelage, but he remained suspicious of European leaders. The latters' reluctance, and their concern to negotiate directly with the Arab countries at the time of the oil crisis, forced him to abandon his idea of a new "Atlantic Charter" in 1974. Much later, in 2022, shortly after the beginning of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Kissinger refered to the disaster of the First World War to suggest to the Ukrainians, to the great displeasure of Kiev, to agree to cede some of their territory to Russia in exchange for a peace agreement.

But after 1972, the Watergate scandal relegated the other files to the back burner and splashed Kissinger. He defended himself for having had several of his collaborators placed on a wiretap and distanced himself from the president, but he did not abandon the man to whom he owed his ascension and remained in the White House under Gerald Ford until the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976.

According to his close collaborators, "Dear Henry" was demanding and impatient. He could be scathing, even contemptuous, but he knew how to charm those he needed, starting with journalists who were seduced by his brilliant mind, his sense of repartee and a sharp sense of humor often exercised at his own expense.

His deep voice and strong Germanic accent was a boon to his imitators. He was a sensation at social functions in Washington. For a long time, before his second marriage to Nancy Maginnes in 1974, he cultivated his reputation as a "swinger" always accompanied by beautiful women. "They are attracted by power and that's a real aphrodisiac," he said. But according to his friends, he played this character although he was, at heart, a tidy and rather conventional man.

A deadpan, he knew how to amuse and disarm those he was speaking with. To an aggressive journalist, he replied: "I appreciate the constructive spirit that inspires your question." To another who asked him where he had been the night of the Watergate break-in, he said: "I usually have excellent alibis for my evenings." And to explain his final trip to Moscow, he confided: "I'd do anything for caviar."