Henry
Kissinger, the son of a grocer, was born in Furth, Germany,
on 27th May, 1923. His family were Jewish
and became concerned about the emergence of Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi Party. In 1938 the
family emigrated to the United States. During
the Second World War Kissinger served in the
U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps.
Educated
at Harvard University he obtained a PhD
degree in 1954. He was a member of the teaching staff of Harvard and
taught in the Department of Government and served on the Council of
Foreign Relations (1955-1956), as Associate Director of Center for
International Affairs (1957-1960) and as Director of the Harvard Defense
Studies Program (1958-1971).
Kissinger
also published several books including A
World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace
1812-22 (1957) and Nuclear Weapons
and Foreign Policy (1957).
In 1969
Richard Nixon appointed Kissinger as his
adviser on National Security Affairs and he played an important role
in the improved relations with both China and the Soviet Union in
the early 1970s. He also arranged peace talks between the Arabs and
the Israelis.
Kissinger
later admitted that
in September 1970, Nixon ordered him to organize a coup against the
government of Salvador
Allende. Kissinger
also said that he called off the operation a month later. The government
documents, however, indicate that the Central
Intelligence Agency continued
to encourage a coup in Chile.
In
1972 Nixon was warned that a victory in Vietnam
was unobtainable. Kissinger
was put in charge of peace talks and In October, 1972, he came close
to agreeing to a formula to end the war. The plan was that US troops
would withdraw from Vietnam in exchange for a cease-fire and the return
of 566 American prisoners held in Hanoi. It was also agreed that the
governments in North and South Vietnam would remain in power until
new elections could be arranged to unite the whole country.
The main problem with this formula was that whereas the US troops
would leave the country, the North Vietnamese troops could remain
in their positions in the south. In an effort to put pressure on North
Vietnam to withdraw its troops, Nixon ordered a new series of air-raids
on Hanoi and Haiphong. It was the most intense bombing attack in world
history. In eleven days, 100,000 bombs were dropped on the two cities.
The destructive power was equivalent to five times that of the atom
bomb used on Hiroshima.
The North Vietnamese refused to change the terms of the agreement
and so in January, 1973. Nixon agreed to sign the peace plan that
had been proposed in October. However, the bombing had proved to be
popular with the American public as they had the impression that North
Vietnam had been bombed into submission. As
a result of bring the Vietnam
War to
an end Kissinger was controversially awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Kissinger
became Secretary of State in 1973. On
9th August, 1974, Richard
Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate
Scandal.
Kissinger continued to serve under his successor, Gerald
Ford.
He held the post until Jimmy
Carter became
president in 1977.
After leaving
government service Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates, an international
consulting firm. He returned to public office in 1983 when President
Ronald
Reagan appointed
him to head a bipartisan commission on Central America.
Books by
Kissinger include The White House Years
(1979), Years of Upheaval (1982)
and Diplomacy (1994).
(1)
Richard
Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard
Nixon (1978)
John Mitchell arranged for Kissinger and me to meet on November 25
(1968) in my transition office in the Hotel Pierre in New York. Since
neither of us was interested in small talk, I proceeded to outline
for him some of the plans I had for my administration's foreign policy.
I had read his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy when
it first appeared in 1957, and I knew that we were very much alike
in our general outlook in that we shared a belief in the importance
of isolating and influencing the factors affecting worldwide balances
of power. We also agreed that whatever else a foreign policy might
be, it must be strong to be credible and it must be credible to be
successful. I was not hopeful about the
prospects of settling the Vietnam war through the Paris talks and
felt that we needed to rethink our whole diplomatic and military policy
on Vietnam. Kissinger agreed, although he was less pessimistic about
the negotiations than I was. I said that I was determined to avoid
the trap Johnson had fallen into, of devoting virtually all my foreign
policy time and energy to Vietnam, which was really a short-term problem.
I felt that failing to deal with the longer-term problems could be
devastating to America's security and survival, and in this regard
I talked about restoring the vitality of the NATO alliance, and about
the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Finally I mentioned
my concern about the need to re-evaluate our policy toward Communist
China, and I urged him to read the Foreign Affairs article
in which I had first raised this idea as a possibility and a necessity.
Kissinger said he was
delighted that I was thinking in such terms. He said that if I intended
to operate on such a wide-ranging basis, I was going to need the best
possible system for getting advice. Kennedy had replaced NSC strategic
planning with tactical crisis management; and Johnson, largely because
of his concern with leaks, had reduced NSC decision-making to informal
weekly luncheon sessions with only a few advisers. Kissinger recommended
that I structure a national security apparatus within the White House
that, in addition to coordinating foreign and defense policy, could
also develop policy options for me to consider before making decisions.
I had a strong intuition
about Henry Kissinger, and I decided on the spot that he should be
my National Security Adviser. I did not make a specific offer to him
then, but I made it clear that I was interested in having him serve
in my administration.
I met with Kissinger again
two days later and asked him if he would like to head the NSC. He
replied that he would be honored to accept. He immediately began assembling
a staff and analyzing the policy choices that I would have to address
as soon as I took office. From the beginning he worked with the intensity
and stamina that were to characterize his performance over the years.
(2)
Henry Kissinger, speech when receiving the Nobel
Peace Prize (1973)
To the realist, peace
represents a stable arrangement of power; to the idealist, a goal
so pre-eminent that it conceals the difficulty of finding the means
to its achievement. But in this age of thermonuclear technology, neither
view can assure man's preservation. Instead, peace, the ideal, must
be practised. A sense of responsibility and accommodation must guide
the behavior of all nations. Some common notion of justice can and
must be found, for failure to do so will only bring more "just"
wars.
In his Nobel acceptance
speech, William Faulkner expressed his hope that "man will not
merely endure, he will prevail".1 We live today in a world so
complex that even only to endure, man must prevail - over an accelerating
technology that threatens to escape his control and over the habits
of conflict that have obscured his peaceful nature.
Certain war has yielded
to an uncertain peace in Vietnam. Where there was once only despair
and dislocation, today there is hope, however frail. In the Middle
East the resumption of full scale war haunts a fragile ceasefire.
In Indo-china, the Middle East and elsewhere, lasting peace will not
have been won until contending nations realise the futility of replacing
political competition with armed conflict.
America's goal is the building
of a structure of peace, a peace in which all nations have a stake
and therefore to which all nations have a commitment. We are seeking
a stable world, not as an end in itself but as a bridge to the realisation
of man's noble aspirations of tranquility and community.
If peace, the ideal, is
to be our common destiny, then peace, the experience, must be our
common practice. For this to be so, the leaders of all nations must
remember that their political decisions of war or peace are realised
in the human suffering or well-being of their people.
(3)
Larry Rohter, New
York Times (13th February, 2000)
With a trial of General Augusto Pinochet increasingly unlikely here,
victims of the Chilean military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing
legal actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry A.
Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who supported plots
to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the Socialist president, in
the early 1970's.
In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an investigating judge
here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger, a former national security
adviser and secretary of state, and Nathaniel Davis, the American
ambassador to Chile at the time, to respond to questions about the
killing of an American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military
coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11, 1973.
General Pinochet, now 85,
ruled Chile until 1990. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish
warrant charging him with human rights violations. After 16 months
in custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because of his
declining health. Although he was arrested in Santiago in 2000, he
was ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.
The death of Mr. Horman,
a filmmaker and journalist, was the subject of the 1982 movie "Missing."
A civil suit that his widow, Joyce Horman, filed in the United States
was withdrawn after she could not obtain access to relevant American
government documents. But the initiation of legal action here against
General Pinochet and the declassification of some American documents
led her to file a new suit here 15 months ago.
William Rogers, Mr. Kissinger's
lawyer, said in a letter that because the investigations in Chile
and elsewhere related to Mr. Kissinger "in his capacity as secretary
of state," the Department of State should respond to the issues
that have been raised. He added that Mr. Kissinger is willing to "contribute
what he can from his memory of those distant events," but did
not say how or where that would occur.
Relatives of General René
Schneider, commander of the Chilean Armed Forces when he was assassinated
in Oct. 1970 by other military officers, have taken a different approach
than Mrs. Horman. Alleging summary execution, assault and civil rights
violations, they filed a $3 million civil suit in Washington last
fall against Mr. Kissinger, Richard M. Helms, the former director
of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other Nixon-era officials
who, according to declassified United States documents, were involved
in plotting a military coup to keep Mr. Allende from power.
In his books, Mr. Kissinger
has acknowledged that he initially followed Mr. Nixon's orders in
Sept. 1970 to organize a coup, but he also says that he ordered the
effort shut down a month later. The government documents, however,
indicate that the C.I.A. continued to encourage a coup here and also
provided money to military officers who had been jailed for General
Schneider's death.
"My father was neither
for or against Allende, but a constitutionalist who believed that
the winner of the election should take office," René Schneider
Jr. said. "That made him an obstacle to Mr. Kissinger and the
Nixon government, and so they conspired with generals here to carry
out the attack on my father and to plot a coup attempt."
In another action, human
rights lawyers here have filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger
and other American officials, accusing them of helping organize the
covert regional program of political repression called Operation Condor.
As part of that plan, right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay coordinated efforts throughout
the 1970's to kidnap and kill hundreds of their exiled political opponents.
(4)
Julian Borger, The
Guardian (6th July, 2001)
A judge in Santiago has drawn up a list of questions for the US statesman
and Nobel laureate, Henry Kissinger, about the 1973 killing of the
American journalist Charles Horman, whose execution by forces loyal
to General Augusto Pinochet was dramatized in the Hollywood film,
Missing.
The
questions, drawn up by the investigating magistrate Juan Guzman and
lawyers for the victims of the Pinochet regime, were submitted to
Chile's supreme court, which must now decide whether to forward them
to the United States.
The list is under seal
but it is thought to cover the extent of Mr Kissinger's knowledge
of the Horman case. Horman's family have repeatedly claimed that the
Nixon government, in which Mr Kissinger was national security advisor
and secretary of state, knew more about what happened when the journalist
was murdered in Chile than it has ever admitted.
Mr Kissinger, awarded the
Nobel peace prize for his role in bringing the Vietnam war to an end,
is now under increased scrutiny for his leading role in a number of
controversial US actions abroad, including the bombing of Cambodia
and Washington's support for authoritarian rightwing governments such
as Gen Pinochet's.
Charles Horman's widow,
Joyce, said yesterday that Mr Kissinger was "ultimately the one
who has to answer the questions for the disappearance of my husband".
She added: "He was
really calling the shots, as far as I'm concerned, in questions of
state and the CIA, with regard to the protection and knowledge of
what happened to Americans there."
Encouraged by the success
of international human rights cases against Gen Pinochet and Balkan
war crimes suspects, human rights activists have recently drawn up
allegations against Mr Kissinger.
While visiting Paris in
May, Mr Kissinger was subpoenaed by a French judge to answer questions
about the death of French citizens under the Pinochet regime. Mr Kissinger
refused to appear in court to answer the questions, saying he had
a prior engagement.
This year, a Washington-based
British journalist, Christopher Hitchens, published The Trial of
Henry Kissinger, in which he accused the veteran proponent of
realpolitik of conspiring to sabotage 1968 Vietnam peace talks and
pursuing an illegal war in Cambodia, among other charges. Mr Kissinger
called the book "contemptible".
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