New York:Few Nobel Peace Prize winners are called warmongers, but the gravelly-voiced, enigmatic diplomat was.
The contradictions of Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at home in Connecticut at age 100, do not end there.
An academic who became a celebrity, Kissinger was a Jewish teenager who fled the Nazis, a self-confessed “secret swinger” who dated pin-ups, a Machiavellian adviser to United States presidents who changed the course of history and a workaholic who remained active beyond his last birthday.
The debate about whether the former US secretary of state was a brainy adviser or a merciless hawk is not likely to reach a conclusion any time soon. He served in the role under two presidents: Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, both Republicans.
Kissinger’s work on the diplomatic opening of China to the US, landmark US-Soviet arms deals and peacemaking between Israelis and Arabs are not disputed. However, his role in the Vietnam War and his support for anti-communist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, remain divisive.
“He viewed the world from 30,000 feet, advancing broad interests and long-term goals in a way that under-appreciated the negative costs people would bear, especially those in societies that were different from the US,” Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told the news outlet.
In 2021, at the age of 98, Kissinger co-authored a book on artificial intelligence with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher.
“Henry Kissinger at the age of 90 knew nothing about the digital world, although he had a lot of opinions about it,” Schmidt told podcast host Tim Ferris when the book was published.
