German-born American diplomat who shaped U.S. foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century and won a Nobel Prize for brokering an end to the Vietnam War, has died.
His death was confirmed in a statement from his consulting firm. He was 100 years old.
Kissinger was the most celebrated U.S. statesman in modern times, helping former President Richard Nixon establish U.S. relations with China, negotiating the 1973 ceasefire with North Vietnam, reaching Cold War detente and arms agreements with the Soviet Union and conducting “shuttle diplomacy” to defuse Middle East tension.Former diplomat and presidential adviser Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100, his consulting firm announced on Wednesday while at his home in Connecticut.
Kissinger’s influence on global policy was far-reaching and continued to play an advisory role even after leaving the White House.
He rose to the national stage in 1969 after becoming former President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. In this role, he conducted negotiations to settle the war in Vietnam, as seen in the Paris Peace Accords, which he later received a Nobel Peace Prize for.
While serving as Nixon’s national security adviser in 1973, Nixon appointed Kissinger as the 56th secretary of state. He was the first person to ever serve as both the secretary of state and a national security adviser simultaneously. In this time, he helped normalize relations between the U.S. and China and conducted negotiations between Egypt and Israel amid the October War of 1973, which broke out just weeks after he entered the State Department.
Kissinger remained secretary of state during the Ford administration until 1977 at the end of former President Ford’s term. That same year, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Kissinger, born in 1923 as Heinz Alfred Kissinger, spent the beginning of his life in Germany before his family, who is Jewish, immigrated to the U.S. after the Nazis seized power. Once in the U.S., Kissinger changed his name to Henry.
He served in the U.S. army as a German interpreter during World War II. Following the war, Kissinger attended Harvard University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and a PhD in 1954. He stayed at Harvard as a faculty member and eventually became the associate director of Harvard’s Department of Government and Center for International Affairs.
His career transitioned to government work by the 1960s, when he served as a consultant for several government agencies before serving in the Nixon administration.
Nixon’s daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, said Wednesday that Kissinger will be remembered for his “many achievements in advancing the cause of peace.”
“But it was his character that we will never forget,” Cox and Eisenhower wrote in a statement, pointing to his immigration from Germany and service in the U.S. army.
“He stood by our father’s military decisions to end the war,” they added. “And he never wavered from our father’s commitment to liberate every American Prisoner of War from the cruel captivity in which they were held by the North Vietnamese.”
