Photo: The late Henry Kissinger.
Breaking: Former U.S. Secretary of State, Kissinger dies at 100
Henry Kissinger, a former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, renowned as the architect of the country’s foreign policy, has died at the age of 100.
Kissinger, who escaped Nazi Germany in his youth to later become one of the most influential and controversial foreign policy figures in American history, died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut.
A statement from his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which announced the death of the retired top U.S diplomat, however, did not provide a cause of death.
Kissinger was synonymous with U.S foreign policy in the 1970s. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for helping arrange the end of U.S military involvement in the Vietnam War.
He is also credited with secret diplomacy that helped President Richard Nixon open communist China to the United States and the West, highlighted by President Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972.
But he was also reviled by many over the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War that led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime and for his support of a coup against a democratic government in Chile.
In the Middle East, Kissinger performed what came to be known as “shuttle diplomacy” to separate Israeli and Arab forces after the fallout of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
His “détente” approach to U.S-Soviet relations, which helped relax tensions and led to several arms control agreements, largely guided U.S posture until the Reagan era.
But many members of Congress objected to the secretiveness of the Nixon-Kissinger approach to foreign policy, and human rights activists assailed what they saw as Kissinger’s neglect of human rights in other countries.
No issue complicated Kissinger’s legacy more than the Vietnam War. When Nixon took office in 1969 – after promising a “secret plan” to end the war – roughly 30,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam.
Despite efforts to shift more combat responsibilities to the South Vietnam government, American involvement persisted throughout Nixon’s administration.
Critics accused Nixon and Kissinger of needlessly expanding the war – and U.S engagement ultimately ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and more than 58,000 American lives lost.
In a highly controversial decision, Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho for that year’s Paris peace accords.
Citing the absence of actual peace in Vietnam, Tho declined to accept, and two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest over the award.
Henry Kissinger and Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho signed the Paris peace accords that ended the Vietnam War. Both men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, though Le Duc Tho refused to accept it.
Domestic outrage in the U.S over the war centered on the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, where the brutal Khmer Rouge movement used the American bombings as a recruiting tool before coming into power and carrying out one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.
“For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United States that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made,” Kissinger told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2005.
CNN reports that although his era as a high-powered architect of U.S foreign policy waned with the decline of Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, Kissinger continued to be an independent mover and shaker whose musings on diplomacy always found an ear.
