Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger
56th United States Secretary of State From: September 22, 1973 – January 20, 1977
President	Richard Nixon Gerald Ford
Predecessor	William Rogers
Successor	Cyrus Vance, Sr.
Former United States National Security Advisor From: January 20, 1969 – November 3, 1975
Predecessor	Walt Rostow
Successor	Brent Scowcroft
Information
Party	Republican
Spouse(s)	Ann Fleischer (div.) Nancy Maginnes
Religion	Jewish
Military Service
Allegiance	United States
Service/branch	United States Army
Service Years	1943 – 1946
Rank	Sergeant
Unit	84th Infantry Division
Battles/wars	World War II
Awards	Bronze Star

Henry Alfred Kissinger (birthname "Heinz" as born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, now age 103) was a globalist advocate of a liberal policy of "realism" and appeasement towards enemies of the United States. Kissinger dominated the unsuccessful foreign policies of presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, holding both positions for a time. He won the much-criticized 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for reaching a peace that ended the Vietnam War by essentially capitulating to the communist North Vietnam. In close collaboration with Nixon, he created a détente policy that called for an end to the Cold War and for friendly relations with both the Soviet Union and China. His position on détente was rejected by Ronald Reagan in the 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination. Although Reagan narrowly lost that primary to Ford, due to the immense advantage of incumbency for Ford, Reagan won a landslide victory four years later on a platform that repudiated Kissinger's polices. Kissinger was then left out of any prominent role in the Reagan Administration.

As a globalist, in 1979 Kissinger "was outspoken in his criticism of the Carter administration for its reluctance to let the shah of Iran come to the United States for medical treatment," even though in fact the shah could have received such treatment where he was, in Mexico. President Carter then let the shah into the United States, which sparked in retaliation the capture of the American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing Iran Hostage Crisis.

Life

Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923 to a middle class Jewish family. They fled Nazi persecution, and arrived in New York in 1938, where he changed his first name from Heinz to Henry but never overcame his thick foreign accent. He attended public schools and City University before being drafted at age 19. He returned to Europe during World War II fighting with the U.S. Army; he was in the infantry at first, but his heroism, courage, and daring got him promoted to intelligence. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946. He spent a year as a civilian instructor in de-Nazification at an Army school in Germany; charged with de-Nazifying a German town, he did so with remarkable ease. He had power and responsibility far beyond his years because of his intelligence, his energy, and his commitment to opposing the Nazis.

In the army, Kissinger was informally tutored by Fritz Kraemer, a fellow refugee with two PhD's. In 1950 Kissinger earned his B.A. summa cum laude at Harvard with a 377-page essay on "The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant." He finished his Ph.D. in 1956 at Harvard, with a dissertation on "A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22," a study praising how the conservative diplomats of the era built a stable and peaceful international system after the Napoleonic wars.

He married Ann Fleischer in 1949 and was divorced in 1964. There were two children, Elizabeth and David. In 1974 he married Nancy Maginnes.

Harvard professor

Kissinger became a full professor in Harvard's Department of Government in 1962. As the director of Harvard's University Summer International Seminar, 1952–69, he brought in nearly 700 young European and Asian scholars, many of whom became high officials in their own country. Kissinger met practically every intellectual in international relations at home and abroad.

Kissinger was eager to serve on national commissions. He served as Study Director, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, for the Council on Foreign Relations from 1955 to 1956; Director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 to 1958; and Director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program from 1958 to 1971. He resigned from Harvard in January 1971 when his two-year leave of absence expired.

In 1957 Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which proposed a flexible defense posture, including provision for "limited warfare" and the strategic employment of nuclear weapons as an alternative to the doctrine of "massive retaliation" against direct foreign aggression, which dominated military thinking during the mid-1950s. The book brought Kissinger to national attention, and he became an mid-level advisor on security questions under presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson; he was foreign policy advisor in Nelson Rockefeller's 1968 quest for the Republican party nomination, but Nixon won the nomination and Kissinger switched to the winner.

Kissinger was consultant to the Department of State (1965–68), United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1961–68), Rand Corporation (1961–68), National Security Council (1961–62), Weapons Systems Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1959–60), Operations Coordinating Board (1955), Director of the Psychological Strategy Board (1952), Operations Research Office (1951), and Chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (1983–84). In 2001 he was not appointed to head the commission studying the 9-11 Attack because he was too controversial.

National Security Advisor and Secretary of State

In 1969, Nixon appointed him his top advisor on foreign affairs as "Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs," (or "National Security Advisor") in charge of the National Security Council staff, which he made his base of power. He and Nixon largely ignored the State Department in setting the main lines of foreign policy. In 1973, Kissinger gained the additional role as secretary of state. He was the only person ever to hold the two top national security roles at the same time, and in 1975 he was replaced as head of the NSC. The foreign-born Kissinger -- the first immigrant who became Secretary of State -- spoke with a thick German accent and some of his testimony at congressional hearings in the early 1970s was not broadcast to the public apparently for that reason.

Kissinger's approach to foreign policy was shaped by his vision of world peace achieved through a global balance of power; and accordingly Kissinger believed that effective U.S. diplomacy needed to be backed by force and guided by the pragmatism of Realpolitik rather than by high ideals and abstract causes. In practice his diplomacy, which mixed a highly visible, personal style with secret, behind-the-scenes maneuverings, was marked by bold, often controversial, initiatives and by frequent travel between world capitals in what came to be known as "shuttle diplomacy".

Nuclear strategy

On taling office Nixon and Kissinger were briefed on the US nuclear war plan, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Appalled by the catastrophic scale of the SIOP, Nixon and Kissinger sought military options that were more credible than massive nuclear strikes. Participants in the Air Force Nuclear Options project also supported more flexible nuclear war plans. Although Kissinger repeatedly asked Defense Department officials to construct limited options, they were skeptical that it would be possible to control nuclear escalation or to introduce greater flexibility without weakening the SIOP. Interagency studies presented a mixed verdict about the desirability of limited options; nevertheless, continued White House pressure encouraged Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to sponsor a major review of nuclear targeting. In 1972 the John Foster panel developed concepts of limited, selective, and regional nuclear options that were responsive to Kissinger's interest in credible nuclear threats. The Foster panel's report led to the controversial "Schlesinger Doctrine" and further efforts to revise the SIOP, but serious questions endured about the whole concept of controlled nuclear warfare.

Détente with Soviet Union and China

Kissinger's first priority in office was the achievement of détente with the Soviet Union and China, and playing them off against each other . Recognizing and accepting the Soviet Union as a superpower, Kissinger sought both to maintain U.S. military strength and to inaugurate peaceful economic, cultural, and scientific exchanges to engage the Soviet Union in the international system. This policy flourished under Kissinger's direction and led in 1972 to the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I). At the same time Kissinger successfully engineered a rapprochement with Communist China, leading to the astonishing news in 1971 that Nixon would visit China, which he and Kissinger did in 1972.

Aware that China and the Soviet Union were at sword's point, with rival claims to be the true Communists, Kissinger used the "Soviet card" to win over China by playing up the Soviet threat to the Chinese as a way of promoting closer relations with China. He even hinted at a US-China alliance to oppose the Soviets, and, with Nixon's trips to Moscow, hinted that China had better come to terms lest the US form an alliance with Moscow. The tactics worked, resulting in a friendly relationship with both Beijing and Moscow. As part of the détente, both powers reduced or ended their aid to North Vietnam, thus allowing a settlement of the Vietnam War.

Vietnam

Kissinger worked to achieve a disengagement of U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam. He promoted Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," aimed at turning the burden of actual combat over to the South Vietnamese, with repeated shows of U.S. air strength, notably in the bombings of Cambodia and North Vietnam. Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris from 1969 on, finally concluding a cease-fire in January 1973, for which he and chief North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Later rumors to the effect that Kissinger knew the South Vietnamese government was too weak to survive long were wrong; Kissinger and Nixon had built South Vietnam into one of the strongest militaries in Asia—much stronger than the North Vietnamese—and they had stripped away much of Hanoi's support from Moscow and Beijing. The problem was that Saigon put all its future on the continuation of Nixon in office and his promises to intervene militarily if necessary. Nixon collapsed unexpectedly (because of Watergate) and his personal promises were gone. Saigon despaired and desperately fought back when Hanoi did invade in 1975, after Nixon was gone and Congress forbad further American intervention.

Demographic evidence indicates that the US bombings of Cambodia, especially the Menu bombings, ultimately killed about 40,000 Cambodian combatants and civilians. Some estimates go as high as 100,000 killed by the bombing. The US Seventh Air Force argued that the bombing prevented the fall of Phnom Penh in 1973 by killing 16,000 of 25,500 Khmer Rouge fighters besieging the city. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.

The communist leaders had expected that the ceasefire terms would favor their side. But Saigon, bolstered by a surge of U.S. aid received just before the ceasefire went into effect, began to roll back the Vietcong. The communists responded with a new strategy hammered out in a series of meetings in Hanoi in March 1973, according to the memoirs of Tran Van Tra.

As the Vietcong's top commander, Trà participated in several of these meetings. With U.S. bombings suspended, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other logistical structures could proceed unimpeded. Logistics would be upgraded until the North was in a position to launch a massive invasion of the South, projected for the 1975–1976 dry season. Trà calculated that this date would be Hanoi's last opportunity to strike before Saigon's army could be fully trained.

In 1974, Congress voted not to enforce the commitments agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords. Air support for Cambodia, South Vietnam, and Laos was cut off. The military aid promised was scaled back or never materialized, and the North was allowed to resume support for the Khmer Rouge. "After Nixon stepped down over Watergate," said one Communist commander, "we knew we would win." Without the logistical support provided by the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North would not have been able to launch an invasion of South Vietnam by 1975, which it predicted would be its "last chance" before the South was self-sufficiently able to defend itself. The US canceled the bombing of Communist positions on the trail. In Cambodia, last minute efforts on the part of the US to arrange for a peace settlement involving Sihanouk ended in failure. When the US Congress vetoed Ford's call for a resumption of air support in Cambodia, panic and a sense of doom filled the capital, which was mercilessly shelled for more than a year by the Communists. President Ford openly predicted a "bloodbath" and stated that the Congress's decision to abandon Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, in particular, would lead to "an unbelievable horror story". The US frantically abandoned Saigon, and the Pathet Lao advanced throughout Laos. The Ford administration's prediction that the Khmer Rouge would murder at least one million people was laughed off by liberal reporters. Some journalists, mocking the claims of a bloodbath, were so bold as to sing the following lyrics to the tune of "She Was Poor But She Was Honest": "Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town?/ Aye, there'll be a dreadful bloodbath/ When the Khmer Rouge come to town."

In one of the largest mass killings since the Nazi Holocaust, the victorious Communists murdered 3-4 million people throughout Indochina, including over 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia alone.

Middle East

One challenge to détente under Kissinger came with the outbreak of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Faced with a threat of Soviet intervention, Kissinger successfully urged that U.S. forces be placed on worldwide alert. With Israel facing possible defeat at the hands of the Arab aggressors, President Nixon launched the largest airlift in military history to replenish Israel's stocks (the left would condemn his actions no matter how big or how small, Nixon said, so "let's make it big"). Kissinger had urged Nixon to delay the airlift so as to let Israel "bleed a little", in the hopes that a badly bruised Israel would be more pliable to concessions in post-war negotiations, but Nixon refused.

When the Israelis surrounded the Egyptian Third Army at the end of the war, Kissinger believed that the United States had a tremendous opportunity. Egypt was now dependent on solely the United States for the survival of its Third Army, and Kissinger hoped that the United States could mediate the dispute and wean Egypt from Soviet influence. As a result, he exerted intense pressure on Israel not to destroy the Third Army and to allow it to receive non-military supplies. Among other things, he threatened that the United States would resupply the Third Army by helicopter, support a UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the Third Army's encirclement, and falsely told the Israelis that the Soviet Union had threatened to intervene over the Third Army.

Kissinger then employed shuttle diplomacy to secure disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states and to restore U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic ties, broken since 1967. Kissinger's goal was to drive the Soviets out of Egypt by showing the Egyptians that only the United States could persuade Israel to make concessions. The US assisted in a vast rescue operation conducted by Israeli forces to save Egyptian troops stranded in the Sinai. US-brokered peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt continued past Nixon's term. Though negotiations were tough, with both sides sometimes intransigent, President Ford ended up securing the first peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, which would be finalized under President Carter. In turn, Jordan felt compelled to reach a separate peace, which resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

Kissinger and Nixon approved a covert CIA campaign of subversion and sabotage designed to weaken the Socialist government of Iraq in 1973. Done in collaboration with the Shah of neighboring Iran, it involved Soviet arms captured from Egypt and Syria in the 1973 war being dispatched to Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq. The Shah cynically used the Kurds to pressure the Ba'athist government to back down on a number of serious territorial disputes between the two nations. The US brokered a peace treaty between Iraq and Iran in 1975, and aid to the Kurds was subsequently cut off. The Kurds were then viciously slaughtered. "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work," Kissinger famously declared.

Kissinger helped to diffuse sectarian conflicts in Lebanon in order to prevent a possible regional war, and opposed the Soviet-backed attempt by Communist forces to conquer North Yemen (which was the recipient of much US aid).

On 20 July 1974, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, overthrew its Greek-backed dictatorship (headed by Nikos Sampson), and installed a new regime. This led to the collapse of the Greek military junta, and the restoration of democracy in Greece, three days later—July 23, 1974. Sampson had been brought to power by the Greek Cypriot national guard (acting under the orders of Athens), which ousted the elected president, Makarios; Turkey removed him from power after a mere eight days in office. "Had Turkey not intervened," Sampson told the Greek newspaper Eleftherotipia, "I would not only have proclaimed Enosis [union of Cyprus with Greece] but I would have annihilated the Turks in Cyprus as well." Turkey took control of one-third of the country. Civilian casualties were remarkably light. Turkey restored democracy to Cyprus, and new elections brought Glafcos Clerides to power. President Makarios, in his speech to the UN Security Council on 19 July 1974, described the coup that replaced him as "an invasion of Cyprus by Greece."

Both the Turks and the Greeks committed indiscriminate ethnic cleansing against the other side. Facts and information on the death and the burial site of 201 out of 500 cases of Turkish Cypriot "missing" persons were provided by the Cyprus government on 12 May 2003. A typical report stated:

In a Greek raid on a small Turkish village near Limassol, 36 people out of a population of 200 were killed. The Greeks said that they had been given orders to kill the inhabitants of the Turkish villages before the Turkish forces arrived.

Numerous studies reported accounts of "anti-Turkish pograms," hostage taking, and mass murder.

Kissinger approved of the Turkish invasion, viewing the Greek junta as a Cold War liability. Kissinger had resolved to find a solution to the Cyprus problem in May 1974. Kissinger intervened to prevent a planned British military response to the second phase of the Turkish invasion in order to avoid a war between the two American allies.

Some 70,000 Turkish civilians were displaced by the Greeks. It is estimated by independent sources that 140,000 to 160,000 Greek civilians were displaced by the Turkish invaders. Only 20,000 Greeks remained in the north. Five Americans disappeared during the Turkish invasion.

It was during Kissinger's tenure as Secretary of State that Nixon signed away part of American monetary sovereignty to Saudi Arabia through the petrodollar agreement.[1][2]

Latin America

The Nixon administration sought to protect the economic and commercial interests of the United States during a period of heightened Latin American nationalism and expropriations, 1969–74. Though the administration initially adopted a flexible policy toward Latin American governments that nationalized American corporations' assets, the influence of Nixon's economic ideology, domestic political pressures, and the advice of Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, led to a more confrontational stance toward Latin American countries. As the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and Kissinger had warned, however, Latin American countries took an even more anti-US stance and expropriated even more assets. Nixon's "get tough" stance, therefore, had a negative effect on American credibility and influence in the hemisphere.

The de facto Communist dictatorship in Chile headed by Salvador Allende (originally elected in 1970 with a minority of the vote) presented a major obstacle to American interests in the region.

The CIA, as recounted in the Church Committee report, was involved in various plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate: It tried to buy off the Chilean Congress to prevent his appointment, worked to sway public opinion against him to prevent his election, and financed protests designed to bring the country to a stand-still and make him resign. Convinced that a conventional military uprising was still not possible in Chile, the CIA, acting with the approval of the 40 Committee—the body charged with overseeing covert actions abroad—devised what in effect was a constitutional coup. The most expeditious way to prevent Allende from assuming office was somehow to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Alessandri as the winner of the election. Once elected by the congress, Alessandri—a party to the plot through intermediaries—was prepared to resign his presidency within a matter of days so that new elections could be held. The CIA also learned of a number of plots to establish a military dictatorship. Although it pointedly refused to materially assist any of them, and actually intervened to prevent one of the plots for fear it would fail and strengthen Allende; it also encouraged several of the plots and did nothing to prevent them. It assured the plotters that such an event would be welcomed in Washington and that the US would not cut off aid over potential human rights violations. In addition, the CIA provided funding for the mass anti-government strikes in 1972 and 1973. Though the CIA maintained contact with a notorious right-wing extremist named Roberto Viaux, Nixon and Kissinger, recognizing that "nothing could be worse than an abortive coup," repeatedly relayed messages to him urging restraint and went to great lengths to deter him from staging a coup.

The extent of Kissinger's involvement in or support of these plans is a subject of controversy.

Although the US considered economic sanctions against the Allende regime, it never actually implemented them. Although Latin Americans viewed the US as omnipotent, future Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet mocked it as a paper tiger and felt free to launch terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., during his reign. The US ended up giving more aid to Allende's Chile than any of the prior administrations. The US worked to diffuse potential coups that it had once warmly encouraged, fearing that it would be blamed if they failed. Though hesitant and uneasy, the CIA vowed to "continue to put pressure on every Allende weak spot" even after his appointment. The CIA had warned that the odds of either a military or a constitutional coup succeeding were one in twenty; after they both failed to occur in 1970, US policy shifted towards maintaining a democratic opposition to the Allende regime.

US intelligence reports implicated Allende in the assassination of several opponents, while KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin indicate that Allende received funds from the Soviet Union. Allende was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile. The Chilean Chamber of Deputies Resolution of August 22, 1973, accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country. In the infamous "Cuban Packages Scandal" that precipitated the coup, large quantities of weapons were sent from Castro's Cuba to arm pro-Allende terrorists in Chile. Kissinger privately told Nixon that Allende might declare martial law. By 1973, as a result of covert US aid to Chilean dissidents and financing of pro-democracy protestors, US intelligence indicated Allende would likely lose the next Chilean election if it was held. According to The Wall Street Journal, faced with illegal seizures of farms and factories, of defiance of judicial orders, unchecked street violence and death threats against the judges themselves, the Supreme Court warned on May 26, 1973, in a unanimous and unprecedented message, that Chile faced "a peremptory or imminent breakdown of legality." Inflation reached 1,000%. Volodia Teitelboim, the chief ideologue of the Communist Party in Chile, declared that if civil war came, "it probably would signify immen