Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger (1923- ) , American foreign policy expert, prominent in the Nixon and Ford administrations as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the Vietnam War. In close collaboration with Nixon, they created a détente policy that called for an end to the Cold War and friendly relations with both the Soviet Union and China.

Life

He was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923. With his middle class Jewish family family Kissinger fled Nazi persecution, stopped in China briefly and arrived in the United States in 1938. He returned to Europe during World War II with the U.S. Army, serving in combat and intelligence units. Following his discharge in 1946, Kissinger earned his B.A. (1950) and his Ph.D. (1956) at Harvard, where he remained to teach.

Harvard professor

Kissinger became a full professor of in the Department of Government in 1962 and held a joint appointment at the Center for International Affairs (Associate Director 1957-1960). He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council of Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; Director of the Harvard International Seminar from 1951 to 1971, and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950's. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an adviser on security questions under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson and foreign policy adviser during Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965-68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961-68), Rand Corporation (1961-68), National Security Council (1961-62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the joint Chiefs of Staff (1959-60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983-84

National Security Adviser

In 1969 Nixon appointed him his top adviser on foreign affairs as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and executive secretary of the National Security Council. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".

Détente with Soviet Union and China

Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the historic 1972 visit of Richard Nixon to Beijing.

Kissinger also worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. Balancing a policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at returning the burden of actual combat to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and Hanoi, Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. He then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure cease-fires between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S. Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967.

Despite his real accomplishments, however, Kissinger's tenure was marked by much controversy. Revelations of his responsibility for secret bombings in Cambodia in 1969 and for the U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia in 1970 stirred particularly strong opposition; and later discoveries that he had authorized wiretaps, aimed at stopping leaks of classified information, and permitted covert CIA operations, designed to destabilize the anti-American Allende regime in Chile and to back anti-government forces in Angola, cost him much additional support. Consequently in 1974 Congress began to reject many of Kissinger's foreign policy initiatives, and in 1975 President Ford acknowledged his declining influence by replacing him as national security adviser. He remained on as secretary of state until the end of the Ford term in January 1977, then became a highly visible corporate consultant on world affairs, and wrote his highly detailed and insightful memoirs.

In 1976 Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination. Ford won, but the détente policy was the focus of Reagan's attacks, as the GOP moved to the right. Jimmy Carter continued the détente policy until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979 destroyed that policy and reopened the Cold War at a more intense level.

Bibliography

• Dallek, Robert. Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (2007) excerpt and text search
• Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger (1992); excerpt and text search
• Litwak, Robert S. Détente and the Nixon Doctrine: American Foreign Policy and the Pursuit of Stability, 1969-1976 (1986)
• Nelson, Keith L. The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam (1995)
• Ross, Robert S. Negotiating Cooperation: The United States and China, 1969-1989, Stanford University Press, 1995 online edition
• Suri, Jeremi. Henry Kissinger and the American Century (2007)

Primary Sources

• Kissinger, Henry. White House Years (1979); Years of Upheaval (1982); Years of Renewal (1999) excerpt and text search
• Nixon, Richard. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1981) excerpt and text search

See also

• Cold War
• Gerald Ford
• Richard Nixon
• Vietnam War