Henry kissinger age

Henry Kissinger

American diplomat and scholar (–)

"Kissinger" redirects here. For other uses, see Kissinger (disambiguation).

Henry Kissinger
Official portrait, c.&#;
In office September 22, &#;– January 20,
President
Deputy
Preceded by	William Rogers
Succeeded by	Cyrus Vance
In office January 20, &#;– November 3,
President	Richard Nixon Gerald Ford
Deputy
Preceded by	Walt Rostow
Succeeded by	Brent Scowcroft
Born	Heinz Alfred Kissinger ()May 27, Fürth, Bavaria, Germany
Died	November 29, () (aged&#;) Kent, Connecticut, U.S.
Resting place	Arlington National Cemetery
Citizenship
Political party	Republican
Spouses	Ann Fleischer &#; &#; (m.&#;; div.&#;)&#;
Children	2
Education
Occupation	Diplomat political scientist politician
Civilian awards	Nobel Peace Prize
Signature
Branch/service	United States Army
Years&#;of service	–
Rank	Sergeant
Unit
Battles/wars
Military awards	Bronze Star

Henry Alfred Kissinger^[a] (May 27, &#;&#; November 29, ) was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the 56th United States secretary of state from to and the 7th national security advisor from to , serving in the presidential administrations of both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.^[4]

Born in Germany, Kissinger emigrated to the United States in as a Jewish refugee fleeing Nazi persecution.

He served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After the war, he attended Harvard University, where he excelled academically. He later became a professor of government at the university and earned an international reputation as an expert on nuclear weapons and foreign policy. He acted as a consultant to government agencies, think tanks, and the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller and Nixon before being appointed as national security advisor and later secretary of state by President Nixon.

An advocate of a pragmatic approach to geopolitics known as Realpolitik, Kissinger pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrated an opening of relations with China, engaged in "shuttle diplomacy" in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War.

For his role in negotiating the accords, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which sparked controversy.^[5] Kissinger is also associated with controversial U.S. policies including its bombing of Cambodia, involvement in the Chilean coup d'état, support for Argentina's military junta in its Dirty War, support for Indonesia in its invasion of East Timor, and support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War and Bangladesh genocide.^[6] Considered by many American scholars to have been an effective secretary of state,^[7] Kissinger was also accused by critics of war crimes for the civilian death toll of the policies he pursued and for his role in facilitating U.S.

support for authoritarian regimes.^[8]^[9]

After leaving government, Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm which he ran from until his death. He authored over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations. His advice was sought by American presidents of both major political parties.^[10]^[11]

Early life and education

Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger^[b] on May 27, , in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany.

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He was the son of homemaker Paula (née&#;Stern), from Leutershausen, and Louis Kissinger&#;[de], a schoolteacher. He had a younger brother, Walter, who was a businessman. Kissinger's family was German-Jewish. His great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb adopted "Kissinger" as his surname in , taking it from the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen.^[13] In his childhood, Kissinger enjoyed playing soccer.

Henry kissinger birthdate In , the administration of President Nixon successfully renewed the lease of the American military base in the Azores , despite condemnation from the Congressional Black Caucus and some members of the Senate. Conspectus of History 1. In the s and early s, Kissinger played a relatively minor role in the U. Kissinger was criticized for not disclosing his role in the venture when called upon by ABC's Peter Jennings to comment the morning after the June 4, , Tiananmen Square massacre.

He played for the youth team of SpVgg Fürth, one of the nation's best clubs at the time.^[14]

In a BBC interview, Kissinger vividly recalled being nine years old in and learning of Adolf Hitler's election as Chancellor of Germany, which proved to be a profound turning point for the Kissinger family.^[15] During Nazi rule, Kissinger and his friends were regularly harassed and beaten by Hitler Youth gangs.^[16] Kissinger sometimes defied the segregation imposed by Nazi racial laws by sneaking into soccer stadiums to watch matches, often receiving beatings from security guards.^[17]^[16] As a result of the Nazis' anti-Semitic laws, Kissinger was unable to gain admittance to the Gymnasium and his father was dismissed from his teaching job.^[16]^[18]

On August 20, , when Kissinger was 15 years old, he and his family fled Germany to avoid further Nazi persecution.^[16] The family briefly stopped in London before arriving in New York City on September 5.

Kissinger later downplayed the influence his experiences of Nazi persecution had had on his policies, writing that the "Germany of my youth had a great deal of order and very little justice; it was not the sort of place likely to inspire devotion to order in the abstract." Nevertheless, many scholars, including Kissinger's biographer Walter Isaacson, have argued that his experiences influenced the formation of his realist approach to foreign policy.^[19]

Kissinger spent his high-school years in the German-Jewish community in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

Although Kissinger assimilated quickly into American culture, he never lost his pronounced German accent, due to childhood shyness that made him hesitant to speak.^[21] After his first year at George Washington High School, he completed school at night while working in a shaving brush factory during the day.

Kissinger studied accounting at the City College of New York, excelling academically as a part-time student while continuing to work.

His studies were interrupted in early , when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

U.S. Army

Kissinger underwent basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina. On June 19, , while stationed in South Carolina, he became a naturalizedU.S.&#;citizen. The army sent him to study engineering at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania under the Army Specialized Training Program, but the program was canceled and Kissinger was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division.

There, he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, a fellow immigrant from Germany who noted Kissinger's fluency in German and his intellect and arranged for him to be assigned to the division's military intelligence. According to Vernon A. Walters, Kissinger also received training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, before being shipped to Europe.^[23] Kissinger saw combat with the division and volunteered for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge.

On April 10, , he participated in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp, a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. At the time, Kissinger wrote in his journal, "I had never seen people degraded to the level that people were in Ahlem. They barely looked human. They were skeletons." After the initial shock, however, Kissinger was relatively silent about his wartime service.^[25]

During the American advance into Germany, Kissinger, though only a private, was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld because of a lack of German speakers on the division's intelligence staff.

Within eight days he had established a civilian administration. Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), where he became a CIC Special Agent holding the enlisted rank of sergeant. He was given charge of a team in Hanover assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Kissinger drew up a comprehensive list of all known Gestapo employees in the Bergstraße region, and had them rounded up.

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By the end of July, 12 men had been arrested. In March , Fritz Girke, Hans Hellenbroich, Michael Raaf, and Karl Stattmann were subsequently caught and tried by the Dachau Military Tribunal for killing two American prisoners of war. The four men were all found guilty and sentenced to death. They were executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison in October ^[28]

In June , Kissinger was made commandant of the Bensheim metro CIC detachment, Bergstraße district of Hesse, with responsibility for denazification of the district.

Although he possessed absolute authority and powers of arrest, Kissinger took care to avoid abuses against the local population by his command.

In , Kissinger was reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King and, as a civilian employee following his separation from the army, continued to serve in this role.^[31]

Kissinger recalled that his experience in the army "made me feel like an American".^[32]

Academic career

Kissinger earned his Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa^[33] in political science from Harvard College in , where he lived in Adams House and studied under William Yandell Elliott.^[34] His senior undergraduate thesis, titled The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant, was over pages long, and provoked Harvard's current cap on the length of undergraduate theses (35, words).^[35]^[36]^[37] He earned his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University in and , respectively.

In , while still a graduate student at Harvard, he served as a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board,^[38] and founded a magazine, Confluence.^[39] At that time, he sought to work as a spy for the FBI.^[39]^[40]

Kissinger's doctoral dissertation was titled Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich).^[41] Stephen Graubard, Kissinger's friend, asserted that Kissinger primarily pursued such endeavor to instruct himself on the history of power play between European states in the 19th century.

In his doctoral dissertation, Kissinger first introduced the concept of "legitimacy",^[43] which he defined as: "Legitimacy as used here should not be confused with justice. It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy".^[44] An international order accepted by all of the major powers is "legitimate" whereas an international order not accepted by one or more of the great powers is "revolutionary" and hence dangerous.^[44] Thus, when after the Congress of Vienna in , the leaders of Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed to co-operate in the Concert of Europe to preserve the peace after Austria, Prussia, and Russia participated in a series of three Partitions of Poland, in Kissinger's viewpoint this international system was "legitimate" because it was accepted by the leaders of all five of the Great Powers of Europe.

Notably, Kissinger's Primat der Außenpolitik (Primacy of foreign policy) approach to diplomacy took it for granted that as long as the decision-makers in the major states were willing to accept the international order, then it is "legitimate" with questions of public opinion and morality dismissed as irrelevant.^[44] His dissertation also won him the Senator Charles Sumner Prize, an award given to the best dissertation "from the legal, political, historical, economic, social, or ethnic approach, dealing with any means or measures tending toward the prevention of war and the establishment of universal peace" by a student under the Harvard Department of Government.

It was published in as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace –.

Kissinger remained at Harvard as a member of the faculty in the Department of Government where he served as the director of the Harvard International Seminar between and In , he was a consultant to the National Security Council's Operations Coordinating Board.^[38] During and , he was also study director in nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

He released his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy the following year.^[46] The book, which criticized the Eisenhower administration's massive retaliation nuclear doctrine, caused much controversy at the time by proposing the use of tactical nuclear weapons on a regular basis to win wars.^[47] That same year, he published A World Restored, a study of balance-of-power politics in post-Napoleonic Europe.^[48]

From to , Kissinger worked for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund as director of its Special Studies Project.^[38] He served as the director of the Harvard Defense Studies Program between and In , he also co-founded the Center for International Affairs with Robert R.

Bowie where he served as its associate director. Outside of academia, he served as a consultant to several government agencies and think tanks, including the Operations Research Office, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Department of State, and the RAND Corporation.^[38]

Keen to have a greater influence on U.S.

foreign policy, Kissinger became foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller, supporting his bids for the Republican nomination in , , and ^[49] Kissinger first met Richard Nixon at a party hosted by Clare Boothe Luce in , saying that he found him more "thoughtful" than he expected.

During the Republican primaries in , Kissinger again served as the foreign policy adviser to Rockefeller and in July called Nixon "the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president". Initially upset when Nixon won the Republican nomination, the ambitious Kissinger soon changed his mind about Nixon and contacted a Nixon campaign aide, Richard Allen, to state he was willing to do anything to help Nixon win.

After Nixon became president in January , Kissinger was appointed as National Security Advisor. By this time, he was arguably "one of the most important theorists about foreign policy ever to be produced by the United States", according to his official biographer Niall Ferguson.^[52]

Foreign policy

Kissinger served as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon and continued as Secretary of State under Nixon's successor Gerald Ford.^[53] With the death of George Shultz in February , Kissinger was the last surviving member of the Nixon administration Cabinet.^[54]

The relationship between Nixon and Kissinger was unusually close, and has been compared to the relationships of Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, or Franklin D.

Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins.^[55] In all three cases, the State Department was relegated to a backseat role in developing foreign policy.^[56] Kissinger and Nixon shared a penchant for secrecy and conducted numerous "backchannel" negotiations, such as that through the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, that excluded State Department experts.

Historian David Rothkopf looked at the personalities of Nixon and Kissinger, saying:

They were a fascinating pair.
Ann fleischer These experiences understandably made a lasting impression on Kissinger. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter. Nonetheless, he was widely considered the strategic thinker of greatest consequence in the second half of the twentieth century. Kissinger remained at Harvard as a member of the faculty in the Department of Government where he served as the director of the Harvard International Seminar between and
In a way, they complemented each other perfectly. Kissinger was the charming and worldly Mr. Outside who provided the grace and intellectual-establishment respectability that Nixon lacked, disdained and aspired to. Kissinger was an international citizen. Nixon very much a classic American. Kissinger had a worldview and a facility for adjusting it to meet the times, Nixon had pragmatism and a strategic vision that provided the foundations for their policies.

Kissinger would, of course, say that he was not political like Nixon—but in fact he was just as political as Nixon, just as calculating, just as relentlessly ambitious&#; these self-made men were driven as much by their need for approval and their neuroses as by their strengths.^[57]

A proponent of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a dominant role in United States foreign policy between and In that period, he extended the policy of détente.

Nancy kissinger Close Menu. Congress, the State Department, and the U. Winton M. Under Nixon, Kissinger served as National Security Adviser from to , and then as Secretary of State until , staying on as Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford following Nixon's resignation in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

This policy led to a significant relaxation in U.S.–Soviet tensions and played a crucial role in talks with the People's Republic of China premier Zhou Enlai. The talks concluded with a rapprochement between the United States and China, and the formation of a new strategic anti-Soviet Sino-American alignment.

He was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Lê Đức Thọ for helping to establish a ceasefire and U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. The ceasefire, however, was not durable.^[58] Thọ declined to accept the award^[59] and Kissinger appeared deeply ambivalent about it—he donated his prize money to charity, did not attend the award ceremony, and later offered to return his prize medal.^[60]^[61] As National Security Advisor in , Kissinger directed the much-debated National Security Study Memorandum ^[62]

Détente and opening to the People's Republic of China

Vietnam War

Main article: Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War

Kissinger discussed being involved in Indochina prior to his appointment as National Security Adviser to Nixon.^[74] According to Kissinger, his friend Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the Ambassador to Saigon, employed Kissinger as a consultant, leading to Kissinger visiting Vietnam once in and twice in , where Kissinger realized that the United States "knew neither how to win or how to conclude" the Vietnam War.^[74] Kissinger also stated that in , he served as an intermediary for negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam, with Kissinger providing the American position, while two Frenchmen provided the North Vietnamese position.^[74]

When he came into office in , Kissinger favored a negotiating strategy under which the United States and North Vietnam would sign an armistice and agreed to pull their troops out of South Vietnam while the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong were to agree to a coalition government.

Kissinger had doubts about Nixon's theory of "linkage", believing that this would give the Soviet Union leverage over the United States and unlike Nixon was less concerned about the ultimate fate of South Vietnam. Though Kissinger did not regard South Vietnam as important in its own right, he believed it was necessary to support South Vietnam to maintain the United States as a global power, believing that none of America's allies would trust the United States if South Vietnam were abandoned too quickly.

In early , Kissinger was opposed to the plans for Operation Menu, the bombing of Cambodia, fearing that Nixon was acting rashly with no plans for the diplomatic fall-out, but on March 16, , Nixon announced the bombing would start the next day.

Henry kissinger new world order See also: Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind. In —, Kissinger engaged in "shuttle diplomacy" flying between Tel Aviv , Cairo , and Damascus in a bid to make the armistice the basis of a permanent peace. In February , then-president of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid appointed Kissinger as a political adviser.

As he saw the president was committed, he became more supportive. Kissinger played a key role in bombing Cambodia to disrupt raids into South Vietnam from Cambodia, as well as the Cambodian campaign and subsequent widespread bombing of Khmer Rouge targets in Cambodia. For his role in planning the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, scholars have stated that Kissinger bears substantial responsibility for the killing of between 50, and , Cambodian civilians and also the destabilization of Cambodia that the U.S.

bombing campaign caused, which contributed to the Khmer Rouge's ascendance to power.^[81]^[82] The Paris peace talks had become stalemated by late owing to the obstructionism of the South Vietnamese delegation. The South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu did not want the United States to withdraw from Vietnam, and out of frustration with him, Kissinger began secret peace talks with Le Duc Thọ in Paris parallel to the official talks that the South Vietnamese were unaware of.

In June , Kissinger supported Nixon's effort to ban the Pentagon Papers saying the "hemorrhage of state secrets" to the media was making diplomacy impossible.

On August 1, , Kissinger met Thọ again in Paris, and for first time, he seemed willing to compromise, saying that political and military terms of an armistice could be treated separately and hinted that his government was no longer willing to make the overthrow of Thiệu a precondition.

On the evening of October 8, , at a secret meeting of Kissinger and Thọ in Paris came the decisive breakthrough in the talks. Thọ began with "a very realistic and very simple proposal" for a ceasefire that would see the Americans pull all their forces out of Vietnam in exchange for the release of all the POWs in North Vietnam.

Kissinger accepted Thọ's offer as the best deal possible, saying that the "mutual withdrawal formula" had to be abandoned as it been "unobtainable through ten years of war&#; We could not make it a condition for a final settlement. We had long passed that threshold". In the fall of , both Kissinger and Nixon were frustrated with Thiệu's refusal to accept any sort of peace deal calling for withdrawal of American forces.

On October 21 Kissinger and the American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker arrived in Saigon to show Thiệu the peace agreement. Thiệu refused to sign the peace agreement and demanded very extensive amendments that Kissinger reported to Nixon "verge on insanity".

Though Nixon had initially supported Kissinger against Thiệu, H.R.

Haldeman and John Ehrlichman urged him to reconsider, arguing that Thiệu's objections had merit. Nixon wanted 69 amendments to the draft peace agreement included in the final treaty and ordered Kissinger back to Paris to force Thọ to accept them. Kissinger regarded Nixon's 69 amendments as "preposterous" as he knew Thọ would never accept them.

As expected, Thọ refused to consider any of the 69 amendments, and on December 13, , left Paris for Hanoi. Kissinger by this stage was worked up into a state of fury after Thọ walked out of the Paris talks and told Nixon: "They're just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits".

On January 8, , Kissinger and Thọ met again in Paris and the next day reached an agreement, which in main points was essentially the same as the one Nixon had rejected in October with only cosmetic concessions to the Americans.

Thiệu once again rejected the peace agreement, only to receive an ultimatum from Nixon which caused Thiệu to reluctantly accept the peace agreement. On January 27, , Kissinger and Thọ signed a peace agreement that called for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam by March in exchange for North Vietnam freeing all the U.S. POWs.

Along with Thọ, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, , for their work in negotiating the ceasefires contained in the Paris Peace Accords on "Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam", signed the previous January.^[58] According to Irwin Abrams in , this prize was the most controversial to date.

For the first time in the history of the Peace Prize, two members left the Nobel Committee in protest.^[94]^[95] Thọ rejected the award, telling Kissinger that peace had not been restored in South Vietnam.^[96] Kissinger wrote to the Nobel Committee that he accepted the award "with humility",^[97]^[98] and "donated the entire proceeds to the children of American service members killed or missing in action in Indochina".^[60] After the Fall of Saigon in , Kissinger attempted to return the award.^[60]^[61]

By the summer of , the U.S.

embassy reported that morale in the ARVN had fallen to dangerously low levels and it was uncertain how much longer South Vietnam would last. In August , the U.S. Congress passed a bill limiting American aid to South Vietnam to $&#;million annually. By November , Kissinger lobbied Leonid Brezhnev to end Soviet military aid to North Vietnam.

The same month, he also lobbied Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to end Chinese military aid to North Vietnam. On April 15, , Kissinger testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee, urging Congress to increase the military aid budget to South Vietnam by another $&#;million to save the ARVN as the PAVN was rapidly advancing on Saigon, which was refused.

Kissinger maintained at the time, and until his death, that if only Congress had approved of his request for another $&#;million South Vietnam would have been able to resist.

In November , seven months after the Khmer Rouge took power, Kissinger told the Thai foreign minister: "You should tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them.

They are murderous thugs but we won't let that stand in our way."^[] In a interview, Kissinger said: "some countries, the Chinese in particular supported Pol Pot as a counterweight to the Vietnamese supported people and We at least tolerated it." Kissinger said he did not approve of this due to the genocide and said he "would not have dealt with Pol Pot for any purpose whatsoever." He further said: "The Thais and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina.

We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot. But I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot."^[]

Interview with Oriana Fallaci

On November 4, ,^[] Kissinger agreed to an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.

Kissinger, who rarely engaged in one-on-one interviews with the press and knew very little about Fallaci, accepted her request after reportedly being impressed with her interview with Võ Nguyên Giáp.^[] The interview turned out to be a political and public relations disaster for Kissinger as he agreed that Vietnam was a "useless war", implied that he preferred to have dinner with Lê Đức Thọ over Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (in her book Interview with History, Fallaci recalled that Kissinger agreed with many of her negative sentiments towards Thiệu in a private discussion before the interview), and engaged in a now infamous exchange with the hard-pressing Fallaci, with Kissinger comparing himself to a cowboy leading the Nixon administration:

Fallaci:
Kissinger:
Fallaci:
Kissinger: ^[]

Nixon was enraged by the interview, in particular the comedic "cowboy" comparison which infuriated Nixon.

For several weeks afterwards, he refused to see Kissinger and even contemplated firing him. At one point, Kissinger, in desperation, drove up unannounced to Nixon's San Clemente residence but was rejected by Secret Service personnel at the gates.^[] Kissinger later claimed that it was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press".^[] Fallaci described the interview with the evasive, monotonous, non-expressive Kissinger as the most uncomfortable and most difficult she ever did, criticizing Kissinger as a "intellectual adventurer" and a self-styled Metternich.^[]

Bangladesh Liberation War

Further information: Bangladesh Liberation War, Bangladesh genocide, and Indo-Pakistani War of

Nixon supported Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan in the Bangladesh Liberation War in Kissinger sneered at people who "bleed" for "the dying Bengalis" and ignored the first telegram from the U.S.

consul general in East Pakistan, Archer K. Blood, and 20 members of his staff, which informed the U.S. that their allies West Pakistan were undertaking, in Blood's words, "a selective genocide" targeting the Bengali intelligentsia, supporters of independence for East Pakistan, and the Hindu minority.^[] In the second, more famous, Blood Telegram the word 'genocide' was again used to describe the events, and further that with its continuing support for West Pakistan the U.S.

government had "evidenced&#; moral bankruptcy".^[] As a direct response to the dissent against U.S. policy, Kissinger and Nixon ended Archer Blood's tenure as United States consul general in East Pakistan and put him to work in the State Department's Personnel Office.^[]^[] Christopher Clary argues that Nixon and Kissinger were unconsciously biased, leading them to overestimate the likelihood of Pakistani victory against Bengali rebels.^[]

Kissinger was particularly concerned about the expansion of Soviet influence in the Indian subcontinent as a result of a treaty of friendship recently signed by India and the Soviet Union, and sought to demonstrate to China (Pakistan's ally and an enemy of both India and the Soviet Union) the value of a tacit alliance with the United States.^[]^[]^[]^[]^[]

Kissinger had also come under fire for private comments he made to Nixon during the Bangladesh–Pakistan War in which he described Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi as a "bitch" and a "witch".

He also said "the Indians are bastards", shortly before the war.^[] Kissinger later expressed his regret over the comments.^[]^[]

Europe

As National Security Adviser under Nixon, Kissinger pioneered the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, seeking a relaxation in tensions between the two superpowers.

Elizabeth kissinger: Cabinet of President Gerald Ford — He served first as a rifleman in France and then as a G-2 intelligence officer in Germany. April 3, In a statement made a month before his death, Kissinger responded to the Hamas-led attack on Israel and outbreak of the Israel—Hamas war by saying that the goals of Hamas "can only be to mobilize the Arab world against Israel and to get off the track of peaceful negotiations".

As a part of this strategy, he negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (culminating in the SALT I treaty) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Negotiations about strategic disarmament were originally supposed to start under the Lyndon Johnson administration but were postponed in protest upon the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops of Czechoslovakia in August ^[]

Nixon felt his administration had neglected relations with the Western European states in his first term and in September decided that if he was reelected that would be the "Year of Europe" as the United States would focus on relations with the states of the European Economic Community (EEC) which had emerged as a serious economic rival by ^[] Applying his favorite "linkage" concept, Nixon intended henceforward economic relations with Europe would not be severed from security relations, and if the EEC states wanted changes in American tariff and monetary policies, the price would be defense spending on their part.^[] Kissinger in particular as part of the "Year of Europe" wanted to "revitalize" NATO, which he called a "decaying" alliance as he believed that there was nothing at present to stop the Red Army from overrunning Western Europe in a conventional forces conflict.^[] The "linkage" concept more applied to the question of security as Kissinger noted that the United States was going to sacrifice NATO for the sake of "citrus fruits".^[]

Israeli policy and Soviet Jewry

According to notes taken by H.

R. Haldeman, Nixon "ordered his aides to exclude all Jewish-Americans from policy-making on Israel", including Kissinger.^[] One note quotes Nixon as saying "get K. [Kissinger] out of the play—Haig handle it".^[]

In , Kissinger did not feel that pressing the Soviet Union concerning the plight of Jews being persecuted there was in the interest of U.S.

foreign policy. In a conversation with Nixon shortly after a meeting with Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on March 1, , Kissinger stated, "The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."^[] He had a negative view of American Jews who lobbied for aid to Soviet Jews, calling them "bastards" and "self-serving".^[] He went on to state that, "If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic" and "any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong."^[]

Arab–Israeli conflict

Main article: Yom Kippur War

In September , Nixon fired William P.

Rogers as Secretary of State and replaced him with Kissinger. He would later state he had not been given enough time to know the Middle East as he settled into the State Department. Kissinger later admitted that he was so engrossed with the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam war that he and others in Washington missed the significance of the Egyptian-Saudi alliance.

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet advisors from Egypt in May , attempting to signal to the U.S. that he was open to disentangling Egypt from the Soviet sphere of influence; Kissinger offered secret talks on a settlement for the Middle East, though nothing came of the offer. By March , Sadat had moved back towards the Soviets, closing the largest arms package between Egypt and the Soviet Union and allowing for the return of Soviet military personnel and advisors to Egypt.

On October 6, , at &#;am, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs Joseph Sisco, informed Kissinger that Egypt and Syria were about to go to war with Israel.

Sisco had been warned by U.S. ambassador to Israel, Kenneth Keating, who two hours previously had been urgently summoned by Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir who believed conflict was imminent.^[] Prioritising detante, Kissinger's first phone call (at &#;am) was to Soviet ambassador and good friend Anatoly Dobrynin.

He would later make calls to British ambassador Rowland Baring and the U.N. secretary-general Kurt Waldheim. Kissinger did not inform President Richard Nixon or White House chief of staffAlexander Haig about the start of the Yom Kippur War until either ^[] or &#;am.^[] as both were spending the weekend at Key Biscayne discussing Spiro Agnew's imminent resignation.^[] According to Kissinger his urgent calls to the Soviets and Egyptians were ineffective.

On October 12, under Nixon's direction, and against Kissinger's initial advice,^[] while Kissinger was on his way to Moscow to discuss conditions for a cease-fire, Nixon sent a message to Brezhnev giving Kissinger full negotiating authority.^[] Kissinger wanted to stall a ceasefire to gain more time for Israel to push across the Suez Canal to the African side, and wanted to be perceived as a mere presidential emissary who needed to consult the White House all the time as a stalling tactic.^[]

Kissinger promised the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir that the United States would replace its losses in equipment after the war, but sought initially to delay arms shipments to Israel, as he believed it would improve the odds of making peace along the lines of United Nations Security Council Resolution In , Meir requested $&#;million worth of American arms and equipment to replace its materiel losses.

Nixon instead sent some $2&#;billion worth.^[] The arms lift enraged King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and he retaliated on October 20, , by placing a total embargo on oil shipments to the United States, to be joined by all of the other oil-producing Arab states except Iraq and Libya.

On November 7, , Kissinger flew to Riyadh to meet King Faisal and to ask him to end the oil embargo in exchange for promising to be "even handed" in the Arab-Israeli dispute.