Henry Kissinger, who died in November 2023 at the age of 100, was one of the most significant, and controversial, figures of the 20th century. Rana Mitter spoke to Matt Elton about the American diplomat’s life and legacy
Henry Kissinger came to the US while still in his teens, as a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi persecution. What impact did that have on his later worldview?
It had a big impact. Kissinger was born Heinz Kissinger, and changed his name when he got to the US. I think the disorder that shaped his childhood – the feeling that life was always unpredictable – was a major force in his decisions later in his career.
One of Kissinger’s key relationships was with Richard Nixon. How did the men meet, and how did they view each other?
Kissinger had worked for other US administrations in the 1960s, including that of John F Kennedy. He then got to know some of the team working on Nixon’s election campaign: by this point, the former vice president was out of office and seeking to run again in 1968.
We know that Kissinger gave the Nixon team clandestine advice on the Vietnam War. Because the information was obtained from contacts in the Democratic administration, this possibly meant he was breaking some of the protocols he should have been observing. It impressed Nixon, however, and when he gained power in 1969 he appointed Kissinger as national security advisor.
Across the time they worked together, Nixon gave Kissinger pretty much carte blanche on foreign affairs. The secretary of state at the time was essentially cut out of the loop on most of the important things. Let’s be frank: Nixon and Kissinger did not always get on well. Yet they were more than the sum of their parts, and were essential to each other in the overall diplomatic contribution they made. Their relationship was one of the most ambivalent and interesting in 20th-century politics.
Does that carte blanche you mentioned tell us something about Nixon, Kissinger, the politics of the era, or all of the above?
I think they’re all relevant. It’s worth noting that, between 1973 and 1975, Kissinger was both national security advisor and the secretary of state [holding the latter role until 1977]. Nobody had held those positions at the same time before, and the fact that Nixon allowed him to do both was a sign of quite how powerful Kissinger was.
It’s fair to say that both Kissinger and Nixon liked to work behind the scenes using a cloak-and-dagger method of diplomacy. Sometimes, as in the opening of China, it could be very effective. But in other instances it obscured rather than enlightened what was going on. It was characteristic of the Nixon administration: while most presidents want to hear a range of viewpoints and debate the issues they raise, he let Kissinger push things through despite the views of other policymakers.
You mentioned the ‘opening of China’. What do we mean by that phrase, and how big a shift in global relations was it?
Nixon’s visit, as US president, to the People’s Republic of China in February 1972, after a variety of clandestine manoeuvres, was one of the key diplomatic turning points of the 20th century. It represented all of the characteristics of Nixon’s foreign policy and Kissinger’s influence on it: it was bold, it was clandestine, and it proved a major pivot in global relations that transformed the status quo into something new and enduring.
- Read more | Nixon in China: a week that changed the world
The People’s Republic of China, let’s remember, had not been recognised by the United States as a sovereign state in 1949, when the Communist Revolution took over the mainland. The US was one of a relatively small number of nations that still technically recognised Taiwan – the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek – as the official government of China, even though, of course, it was confined to a small island. But in 1967, when he was still out of power, Nixon had written an important essay in the journal Foreign Affairs that looked forward to what might happen when the Vietnam War was over and how China should be rehabilitated. When he got into power, he discussed this with Kissinger – who it seems wasn’t that keen on the idea initially, but came around to it quite fast.
What the development meant was that the US was the only nation talking to both China and the Soviet Union. Don’t forget the Chinese and the Soviets had broken with each other about a decade earlier. This split between the two major communist powers put the US in a powerful position in which it could make China, even though it was a communist nation, a kind of tacit ally. That meant the Soviet Union essentially had to face both China and the United States as adversaries – and, in Kissinger’s view, gave the US a certain amount of pivot power that it could use in other diplomatic initiatives.
Another key episode in Kissinger’s story is the Vietnam War. What was his role?
The Vietnam War is probably one of the most important, and most controversial, aspects of Nixon and Kissinger’s time in power. By the 1960s, there was a growing American conviction that the existence of communist movements anywhere in Asia might mean the start of global communist domination. Most historians and politicians now see that analysis as deeply flawed, but it was powerful at the time. As a result, the number of US troops and extent of its economic commitment to the war had grown and grown, first during Kennedy’s administration and then rapidly under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. By the time of the 1968 presidential election, the horror of Vietnam, the bombings, the American combat deaths and the huge number of Vietnamese deaths were starting to outrage the American public – as well, of course, as the Vietnamese people.
Before he was elected, Nixon had implied that he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, which seemed to involve bombing the country even more than it had been up to that point. But once Kissinger was appointed national security advisor, the two men got together to try and work out if they could reach some kind of settlement. Their approach involved an escalation of the war to try to bring the North Vietnamese to the table. A deal had been possible early in the administration, but Nixon and Kissinger rejected it and tried to get a better deal, as they saw it, by not only upping the bombing of Vietnam but also launching what many people, including those on the right, consider one of the administration’s gravest moral faults: the bombing of neutral Cambodia.
There were bases in the jungles of Cambodia held by the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong, and the argument was that the organisation would be destroyed if they were bombed. But what it actually did was to bring neutral Cambodia into the war, and allow one of the 20th‑century’s most genocidal regimes, the Khmer Rouge, to take power under Pol Pot in 1975.
I didn’t know Kissinger well, but I met him a few times, and on one occasion he gave me a bit of a hard time about a comment I’d written criticising his Cambodia policy. I said that I thought it had, among other things, allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power, to which he replied: well, what would you have done?
Being confronted by Henry Kissinger with that question was not something I was prepared for. It just goes to show that he never stepped back from saying that he thought the policy was worthwhile. But I think that, when we assess Nixon’s administration and Kissinger’s foreign policy, the bombing of Cambodia still stands as a decision that’s very hard to justify. It did not lead to a peace settlement in Vietnam very different from the one that could have been gained at the start of the Nixon administration and, after the peace agreement was finally signed in 1973, South Vietnam and Cambodia eventually fell to two different communist regimes. Kissinger’s foreign policy in Cambodia, particularly, resulted in an utterly unconscionable human cost and still has a massive legacy today, so cannot ultimately be regarded as anything other than a failure.
Two events of 1973, the Chilean coup and the Yom Kippur War, are also significant. What was Kissinger’s role in both?
The coup by the Chilean army led by Augusto Pinochet essentially destroyed Chilean democracy for a generation. Chile was in political turmoil. The election of a government, led by Salvador Allende, that incorporated political elements from centre left to further left had created a great deal of anger, particularly among land-holding classes who didn’t like the new policies being put forward. There’s little doubt that Allende was elected fairly and then kicked out of power in the coup, and also little doubt that there was a certain amount of rejoicing in Nixon and Kissinger’s White House. An essentially democratic decision had been overturned in the most brutal way, and the US did nothing to stand up for the values of democracy.
The Yom Kippur War [between Israel and a coalition of Arab states], meanwhile, was unexpected on the US and Israeli side. Kissinger’s feeling, shared by Nixon, was that the danger of an all-out Middle East conflict was so great that it was vital to bring the temperature down. He had to find a way for both sides to compromise, and his tactic of flying around the Middle East to talk to various actors who wouldn’t communicate directly was labelled ‘shuttle diplomacy’.
How should we regard Kissinger’s role in all of these events?
On the positive side, although the opening to China was in a sense inevitable, someone had to do it. Nixon very much put it into motion, but Kissinger’s contribution was to be diplomatically supple and subtle enough to be able to deal with a very different system. China was ideologically the enemy, and going into that maelstrom to negotiate wasn’t a skill everyone had. That’s where Kissinger’s contribution still looks distinctive: the approach he and Nixon took enabled a period of genuine cooperation and co-existence that existed for the best part of 40 years. I think that was a worthwhile achievement by anyone’s standards.
And although it was a highly turbulent period in the Middle East, Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy did calm things down. It was a very violent global moment, but it could have been much worse had he not pushed both sides into adopting a halfway solution rather than that which either fully wanted.
The fact Nixon and Kissinger were able to negotiate in a more comprehensive way with the Soviet Union, meanwhile, led to a loosening of relations with the US. Less than a decade before, the Cuban missile crisis had made it seem entirely possible that a nuclear exchange might wipe out much of humanity, and the 1980s saw a return to confrontation. So the importance of lowering the temperature shouldn’t be underestimated.
On the negative side, we’ve talked about the human cost and lasting legacy of his policies in the Vietnam War and in Cambodia. Kissinger and Nixon’s policies also gave undercover support to the murderous regime in Pakistan, which attempted to prevent the independence of Bangladesh. That was done in part to thank Pakistan for helping to facilitate the China opening, and it’s fair to say that Kissinger is remembered in India and Bangladesh with no fondness whatsoever.
Finally, although supporting brutal South American regimes was not exclusive to Nixon’s administration – such regimes had been operating with American sponsorship since the 1920s – Nixon and Kissinger’s willingness to back military juntas did little to further the progress of South American democracy.
Does the controversy around Kissinger mean his role has been overstated?
We cannot understand his impact during the 1970s outside of the context of the presidency of which he was part. If Nixon had not been there, Kissinger could not have operated in the same way. That said, I think it underestimates Kissinger not to acknowledge his very distinctive style and approach. We’re talking nearly half a century on, and he’s still a reference point for politicians in a way that – for good or ill – simply isn’t the case with other US secretaries of state.
Whatever you want to say about Henry Kissinger, he had consequence. I think he’d have appreciated that idea, emerging from a childhood in which he was the victim of circumstances to become a person who controlled knowledge and used it to do things in the world. That’s what he would have regarded as his primary purpose, and I think you can identify that throughout all of his diplomacy.
This article was first published in the February 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine