28. Kissinger’s Trading Philosophy: Unlocking Success In Conference League – Brilliant, paranoid and cruel are just a few words that come to mind when discussing Henry Kissinger’s mixed legacy.
Editors’ Note: This obituary was originally prepared from a survey of people who died in 2007. These cases are shown below in the text.
28. Kissinger’s Trading Philosophy: Unlocking Success In Conference League
Henry Kissinger, the most famous American diplomat at the end of the twentieth century, died on November 29 at the age of 100.
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Kissinger was the first superstar Secretary of State, the man who ended “shuttle diplomacy,” helped Richard Nixon open U.S. relations with China, and won the Nobel Prize for pulling the United States out of the losing Vietnam War.
Kissinger was also a highly controversial figure, harshly criticized for US policies that contributed to the deaths of thousands in combat in Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia, and the coup that led to two decades of authoritarian rule in Chile.
“He was a true politician in the German sense of the term,” says Robert Dallek, whose 2007 book “Nixon and Kissinger” recounts the high point of Kissinger’s career, his partnership with Nixon from 1969 to 1974.
“He was the most influential foreign secretary of modern times, but he was not the most constructive or successful,” Dallek added. Such praise should go more to George Marshall and Dean Acheson, who created institutions like NATO that saved Western democracy in Europe after World War I and ultimately won the Cold War, he said in a 2007 interview.
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But Kissinger was more famous. The publicity hound, who made his name in the heyday of network news, chatted with Hollywood stars, chatted and directed reporters and columnists. He remained on television talk shows and newspaper editorials until the 1990s.
Both Democratic and Republican presidents have sought his advice on shaping U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Corporations and governments wanted his strategic analysis and connections with those still in power, and they paid millions of dollars to his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates.
In a 2007 interview, Leslie Gelb, the former head of the Council on Foreign Relations and onetime Kissinger’s protégé, said, “Kissinger’s influence remained after he left office, and the influence of everyone except James Baker was gone.” . (Gilby died in 2019.)
On May 27, 1923, Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, Bavaria, the eldest son of Louis, an Orthodox Jewish teacher, and Paula Stern, the daughter of a cattle trader.
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According to Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, during the rise of Nazism, the young Kissinger was banned from football games and schools and beaten by local mobs. Kissinger’s father, along with other Jewish teachers, was expelled from public school in 1935, and in 1938 the family fled to New York.
Smart, hardworking and ambitious, Kissinger worked nights in high school and spent a year at City College studying to become an accountant. But World War I intervened and Kissinger was drafted into the army in 1943.
A chance encounter with Prussian aristocrat Fritz Kremer, a refugee from Nazism, retired Kissinger translator, administrator of occupied German cities, counterintelligence expert, and eventually Harvard professor.
“Gentlemen don’t go to CCNY,” Kramer told Kissinger. They go to Harvard, said Helmut Sonnenfeld, another German refugee who was one of Kissinger’s top aides in the White House and State Department. (Sonnenfeld died in 2012.)
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At Harvard University, where he earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, Kissinger impressed his professors. They particularly appreciated his parallel thesis, which dealt with Europe in the early nineteenth century but included the present-day Soviet Union.
Gelb, a former Kissinger student and research assistant, described his dissertation “Reconstructing the World: Metternich, Castlerea, and the Problems of Peace 1812-22” and his subsequent book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” as two of the most important works on foreign policy. The last half century. In those articles, Kissinger laid out his vision of the world: a pragmatic, even cruel, balance-of-power policy that gave little importance to moral issues such as human rights.
According to Dallek, Kissinger once told a colleague: “If I had to choose between justice and chaos on the one hand, and injustice and order on the other, I would always choose the latter.”
Despite his early accomplishments, no one in the 1950s and early 1960s expected he would become a public figure, Gelb said. At the time, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants ran the State Department, Jewish professors with foreign accents worked in academia, and Hollywood blockbusters like Dr. strange Love.
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Kissinger fell in part because of his close relationship with President Eisenhower’s millionaire advisor, New York Governor, and presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller.
When Rockefeller failed to secure the Republican nomination in 1968, Kissinger turned to Nixon and offered him secret information about American negotiations with communist North Vietnam, which helped Nixon win the election, according to former US Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy.
After his victory, Nixon appointed Kissinger as National Security Advisor, and in 1973 he became Secretary of State. Kissinger continued to work as Harold Ford’s secretary. Ford became president after Nixon resigned in 1974 for his involvement in the 1972 Watergate burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C.
If Nixon had not won the presidency, Kissinger would have won the top job. Kissinger, a registered Democrat who voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, was a partial advisor to both and had a good relationship with 1968 Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey, Dallek, and Isaacson.
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However, it was the combination of Kissinger and Nixon—both intelligent, dangerous, and power-hungry men determined to make history—that created the most impressive achievement in American diplomacy.
Moving forward with China. After spending most of his career hating what he called “Red China,” Nixon decided to make a 180-degree turn and take office. He recognized the folly of the fifth of the world’s population who hated government; He also sought to gain influence with the Soviet Union and compensate for the consequences of the United States’ defeat in Vietnam. Before meeting with Nixon, Kissinger, who favored such a change, held secret talks in preparation for Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972.
Easing the situation with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger used improved relations with China to ease tensions with Moscow and negotiate the first major agreement to limit the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union.
Building peace in the Middle East. In October 1973, when Kissinger was surprised by the war launched by Egypt and Syria against Israel, he brokered agreements that led to the separation of Arab and Israeli forces. The talks increased American influence over Israel and the Arab countries, reduced the role of the Soviet Union in the Middle East, and paved the way for the first peace treaty between Israel and the Arab state of Egypt since the Republicans left power in 1978.
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“These accomplishments were so astonishing that they reversed America’s strategic defeat in Indochina and reaffirmed America’s power in the world,” Gelb told the article’s author in 2007.
Although they came into office knowing that victory in Vietnam was unlikely, Nixon and Kissinger sought an “honorable peace” and continued the war. This led to 20,000 American deaths and thousands of Asian victims compared to what happened when the United States left in 1969.
Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Thu for the agreement that led to the US withdrawal. Two of the five members of the Nobel Committee resigned in protest. The North Vietnamese occupied South Vietnam and overthrew the US-backed government there in 1975.
The administration’s decision to bomb Cambodia in 1969 and attempt to destroy communist strongholds in Vietnam in 1970 spread instability that led to the 1975 genocidal Khmer Rouge takeover, responsible for the deaths of more than two million Cambodians.
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Tapes of conversations between Nixon and Kissinger and between Kissinger and his staff revealed secret American efforts to prevent the 1970 presidential election of Chilean leftist Salvador Allende and to encourage the generals who killed Allende and thousands of Chileans in 1973. Among them were two Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Terrogi. The military regime of General Augusto Pinochet lasted until 1990.
Despite their close cooperation, the relationship between Kissinger and Nixon was turbulent and dysfunctional at times. “Kissinger personally hated Nixon,” Dallek wrote, “but in private he belittled him, calling him ‘crazy,’ ‘drunk,’ and ‘sane.’” Nixon, in turn, described Kissinger as “my Jewish son” and complained that Kissinger was trying to impress him.
Their policies were criticized by human rights activists and anti-communists, who later became known as neoconservatives for their opposition to tensions with the Soviet Union.
Bernard Goertzman, who covered Kissinger for the New York Times, recalls a month-long trip to the Middle East after the 1973 war. Eastern Airlines had recently begun regular flights from New York to Washington. Minutes after the plane took off from Aswan, Egypt, Kissinger’s chief aide, Joseph Sisko, arrived