Who is henry kissinger

Critical, but balanced. Schulzinger, Robert D. Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy. New York: Columbia Univresity Press, It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. Selected Bibliography By Kissinger Diplomacy. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Harper, Other Sources Hersh, Seymour M.

Back to top Back To Top Takes users back to the top of the page. Nobel Prizes Thirteen laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in , for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. See them all presented here. Henry Alfred Kissinger was sworn in on September 22, , as the 56th Secretary of State, a position he held until January 20, He served as a member of the Defense Policy Board from to At present, Dr.

Kissinger is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc. He is also a member of the International Council of J. Among his other activities, Dr. Among the awards Dr. Kissinger has received have been a Bronze Star from the U.

Kissinger was born in Fuerth, Germany, came to the United States in , and was naturalized a United States citizen in He served in the Army from February to July He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in and received M. From until he was a member of the faculty of Harvard University, in both the Department of Government and the Center for International Affairs. Kissinger is hard to place among the foreign-policy thinkers of his time. These men moved fluidly between lecture halls and RAND Corporation laboratories, where they complained about student protesters and gave alarming slide-show presentations about nuclear apocalypse.

Arendt never warmed to him, but they shared a disappointment about the U. Kissinger argued that the U. The two met at Harvard and maintained a professional friendship that waxed and waned over the decades.

But, unlike Kissinger, Morgenthau was unwilling to sacrifice his realist principles for political influence. Morgenthau and Kissinger both resisted describing themselves as practitioners of Realpolitik—Kissinger recoiled at the term—but Realpolitik has proved a remarkably flexible concept ever since it emerged, in nineteenth-century Prussia.

The irony is that these doctrines were at root an attempt to codify something that their adherents believed Anglo-American statesmen already did instinctively.

America has never been short of statesmen capable of communicating their vision of the national interest to the public. If Kissinger was a realist, it was in this sense—of making the image-management aspect of foreign policy a priority. If the U. The best a realist could do was adapt to situations, working toward a narrowly defined national interest, while other nations worked toward theirs.

Idealistic notions about the advancement of humanity had no place in his scheme. Morgenthau was disappointed when Kissinger defended the Vietnam War in public, despite having privately admitted to him that the U. But the pairing was perfect: Nixon needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him feel like a great figure in the drama of history.

As early as , on his first visit to Vietnam, Kissinger had concluded that the war there was a lost cause, and Nixon believed the same. Yet they conspired to prolong it even before reaching the White House.

In March, , he and Kissinger began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, which was a staging ground for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In four years, the U. The campaign killed an estimated hundred thousand civilians, hastened the rise of Pol Pot, and irrevocably ravaged large tracts of countryside. It also fell so far short of its strategic aims that more than one historian has wondered whether Kissinger—who personally tweaked the schedules of the bombing runs and the allocation of planes—had some other motive.

How would the credibility of the United States be enhanced by dragging out a war against a fourth-rate power? How, to paraphrase John Kerry, do you ask thirty thousand American soldiers to die so that the thirty thousand soldiers before them will not have died in vain?

As it was, each successive American initiative eroded credibility rather than reinforced it. Not even the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, in , the largest of the war, could convince the North Vietnamese to renegotiate.

In retrospect, the notion that everything America did would be duly registered and responded to by its opponents and friends seems like an expression of geopolitical narcissism. Instead, Gewen often seems drawn to defend Kissinger at the points in his career where defense is hardest.

He opens the book with a long chapter on U. The fact that Allende was popularly elected made him only more dangerous in their eyes.