Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
New York, United States – Few Nobel Peace Prize winners are called warmongers, but the gravelly-voiced, enigmatic diplomat Henry Kissinger 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 Al Jazeera.
