Henry Kissinger died: He was 100 years old

Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100 at his home in Connecticut, USA. A historic representative of the Republican Party, he served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1969 to 1977. He was also a hero of American foreign policy for his methods, which were considered unscrupulous and did not exclude field invasions of foreign governments and politicians to preserve US power at all costs in the name of realpolitik and unbridled anti-communism. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. He supported the bombing of Cambodia and Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in Chile.

He was an advisor to twelve American presidents, from John Kennedy to Joe Biden. Despite his centenary, Kissinger remained active and traveled to China last July to meet with President Xi Jinping. He also met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Washington in July.

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in 1923 to a Jewish family in Fürth, Bavaria. His family left Germany in 1938, following anti-Semitic persecution by the Nazis, settling first in London and then in New York. Here Heinz named himself Henry and joined the US Army with his brother in 1943. He later obtained US citizenship. He graduated from Harvard at the end of the war, then became a tenured professor at the university. His meeting with Nelson Rockefeller led him into politics: he became an advisor to Eisenhower, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. His first book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy”, became a bestseller. He became Richard Nixon’s secretary of state after the president’s assassination.

Henry Kissinger built a détente with the USSR and a détente with China. He also organized Nixon’s trip to Beijing. He won the Nobel Prize for the Paris agreements on a ceasefire in Vietnam: two jurors had resigned in protest at the time. After Watergate, when Gerald Ford came to the White House, he continued to cooperate with the state government. After leaving the government in 1977, he founded his own consultancy firm. He was challenged for his support of the Argentine and Chilean military regimes in Latin America. It supported Indonesia during the occupation of East Timor and Turkey in Cyprus. He also organized an airport to supply weapons to Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur attack. He then negotiated with Syria and Egypt, removing them from the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

Kissinger remained active in American foreign policy throughout the 1980s and beyond. In 2001, an Argentinian judge accused him of complicity in Operation Condor, the secret coordination between the secret services of the military dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay that eradicated a generation of young leftists in Latin America in the 1970s. George W. Bush appointed him chairman of the 9/11 commission of inquiry. He resigned after a while.

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