Henry A. Kissinger, author of his new book World Order.

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The Washington Post

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U.S. President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger stand at an Oval Office window

U.S. President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger stand on Air Force One during their voyage to China 

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FILE PHOTO: Chinese President Xi is introduced by former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Kissinger at a policy speech to Chinese and U.S. CEOs during a dinner reception in Seattle, Washington

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Henry A. Kissinger, a scholar, statesman and celebrity diplomat who wielded unparalleled power over U.S. foreign policy throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, and who for decades afterward, as a consultant and writer, proffered opinions that shaped global politics and business, died Nov. 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100.

His death was announced in a statement by his consulting firm, which did not give a cause.

As a Jewish immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany, Dr. Kissinger spoke little English when he arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1938. But he harnessed a keen intellect, a mastery of history and his skill as a writer to rise quickly from Harvard undergraduate to Harvard faculty member before establishing himself in Washington.

As the only person ever to be White House national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time, he exercised a control over U.S. foreign policy that has rarely been equaled by anyone who was not president.

He and Vietnam’s <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/tho-facts.html" target=_blank>Le Duc Tho</a> shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the secret negotiations that produced the 1973 Paris agreement and ended U.S. military participation in the Vietnam War. His famous “shuttle diplomacy” after the 1973 Middle East war helped stabilize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

As the impresario of Nixon’s historic opening to China and as the theoretician of détente with the Soviet Union, Dr. Kissinger earned much of the credit for seismic policy shifts that redirected the course of world affairs.

Jason Aldag

With his German accent, incisive wit, owlish looks and zest for socializing in Hollywood and dating movie stars, he was instantly recognized all over the world, in stark contrast to most of his understated predecessors. Shamelessly courting publicity, he was as much a star of the tabloids as he was of the heavy-duty quarterlies that ruminated over his ideas about geostrategy. When he was appointed secretary of state, a Gallup poll found him to be the most admired person in the country.

But he also became the target of relentless critics who deemed him amoral. He refrained from traveling to Oslo to accept the Nobel award for fear of hostile demonstrations — Tho rejected the prize outright — and in later years the animosity he inspired would intensify.

What he viewed as pragmatic, many writers and analysts regarded as unprincipled maneuvering, unguided by respect for human rights or even human life. Dr. Kissinger achieved power, fame and wealth beyond the dreams of most people in public life, yet he spent his final decades defending himself and his place in history, explaining that he did what he had to do.

Ronald Reagan and other conservatives blasted Dr. Kissinger’s quest for accommodation with Moscow as a sellout of countries then in the Warsaw Pact, and of American values. On the other hand, President George W. Bush called him “one of our nation’s most accomplished and respected public servants,” and senior officials of the Bush administration consulted him frequently about international affairs.

On the left, loud voices accused him of a coldblooded pragmatism that put strategic gains ahead of human rights. Some of his critics said the Paris agreement left a longtime ally, the government of South Vietnam, to a dark fate as the North Vietnamese seized control. Others accused him of letting the war continue for three years while he negotiated a deal that he could have had from the beginning.

Critics held Dr. Kissinger responsible for the 1969 “secret bombing” of neutral Cambodia and for the American ground invasion of that country the following year, which expanded the conflict in Southeast Asia and led to a takeover of the country by the murderous Khmer Rouge.

They said his policy of promoting the shah of Iran as the anchor of U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf encouraged the shah to raise oil prices and fed the megalomania that led to the Iranian revolution. They accused him of conniving at the 1974 coup that overthrew the government of Cyprus, and of supporting Pakistan’s brutal campaign to quash a secessionist rebellion in what is now Bangladesh because Pakistan was his secret conduit to the Chinese.

And they said Dr. Kissinger was at least indirectly responsible for the CIA-inspired coup that overthrew the legally elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile — as well as the earlier murder of Gen. René Schneider, commander in chief of Chile’s armed forces, who staunchly opposed a coup.

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Two of the most vociferous critics, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/christopher-hitchens-a-vanity-fair-writer-was-a-religious-skeptic-and-acerbic-master-of-the-contrarian-essay/2010/12/17/gIQAtiBHxO_story.html?utm_term=.d41197944451" target=_blank>Christopher Hitchens</a> and William Shawcross, branded Dr. Kissinger a war criminal. Journalist Seymour M. Hersh, in “The Price of Power,” said Dr. Kissinger and Nixon were basically two of a kind: They “remained blind to the human costs of their actions. The dead and maimed in Vietnam and Cambodia — as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra and the Middle East — seemed not to count as the President and his national security adviser battled the Soviet Union, their misconceptions, their political enemies, and each other.”

At the very least, those who did not admire Dr. Kissinger felt that his focus on Cold War realities and his willingness to use force — openly or covertly — to advance U.S. objectives blinded him to humanitarian and human rights considerations.

As one example, they cited his opposition to the Jackson-Vanik amendment, legislation that conditioned normal trade relations with the Soviet Union on Moscow’s allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate. Dr. Kissinger, himself a Jewish refugee from persecution, considered the amendment a hindrance to his pursuit of détente.

His willingness to place strategic interest ahead of high-minded values was demonstrated in July 1975, when he persuaded Ford not to meet exiled Russian author <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/03/AR2008080301249.html" target=_blank>Alexander Solzhenitsyn</a> at the White House. Solzhenitsyn was a living symbol of courageous resistance to Soviet oppression, but Dr. Kissinger feared a negative impact on his policy of détente with Moscow.

He was operating, he said, “in a world where power remains the ultimate arbiter.” Reagan, then governor of California, made an issue of the Solzhenitsyn affair when he challenged Ford for the Republican presidential nomination the next year.

In his comprehensive biography of Dr. Kissinger, journalist Walter Isaacson came to the conclusion that he “had an instinctive feel for power and for creating a new global balance that could help America cope with its withdrawal syndrome after Vietnam. But it was not matched by a similar feel for the strength to be derived from the openness of America’s democratic system or for the moral values that are the true source of its global influence.”

Isaacson, who had full access to Dr. Kissinger and many of his friends, described him as “brilliant, conspiratorial, furtive, sensitive to linkages and nuances, prone to rivalries and power struggles, charming yet at times deceitful.”

Dr. Kissinger, responding to his critics, ascribed to realpolitik a moral imperative of its own.

“History presents unambiguous alternatives only in the rarest of circumstances,” he wrote in “Ending the Vietnam War,” published in 2003. “Most of the time, statesmen must strike a balance between their values and their necessities, or to put it another way, they are obliged to approach their goals not in one leap but in stages, each by definition imperfect by absolute standards. It is always possible to invoke that imperfection as an excuse to recoil before responsibilities, or as a pretext to indict one’s own society.”

Or as he put it more bluntly in another context, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Thomas A. Schwartz of Vanderbilt University, who interviewed Dr. Kissinger late in life for his 2020 biography, found that even after decades of criticism, the former policymaker adhered to “his own philosophy of international relations, [which] held that in a tragic world, a statesman was not able to choose between good and evil but only among different forms of evil.”

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Furth, Germany, on May 27, 1923. He became Henry after he moved with his family to the United States.

His parents, Louis and Paula, were respectable middle-class Jews of the type who thought of themselves as entirely German until Adolf Hitler taught them otherwise. Young Heinz loved soccer and excelled at his lessons, but throughout his school years he and his friends were bullied by Nazi gangs as the Jews of Furth were increasingly restricted and ostracized from German life.

He was 12 when the Nuremberg Laws stripped Germany’s Jews of their citizenship. His father lost his teaching job. Sponsored by a relative in New York, the Kissinger family packed the few things they were allowed to keep and left Germany for the United States in August 1938, three months before the rampage of Kristallnacht sealed the fate of most Jews who stayed.

Dr. Kissinger said later in life that this experience had left no permanent mark on his psyche, but friends and relatives interviewed by Isaacson said otherwise. “Dr. Kissinger is a strong man, but the Nazis were able to damage his soul,” said Fritz Kraemer, a Kissinger intimate quoted by Isaacson.

The humiliation of his father and the destruction of their community, Isaacson wrote, “made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”

Those traits would surface years later in Dr. Kissinger’s relationship with Nixon. Many who knew him in the U.S. Army, academic life and government said his desire to please everyone and his craving for praise derived from an outcast’s desire for acceptance.

In New York, the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a largely Jewish neighborhood. Dr. Kissinger enrolled in the local public high school, George Washington, where he quickly mastered English and excelled in other subjects. He worked in a shaving-brush factory to earn extra cash and enrolled in accounting classes at City College of New York.

Before he could get his degree, he was drafted into the Army in 1943, during World War II. He studied engineering before being assigned, just after D-Day in June 1944, to the 84th Infantry Division at swampy Camp Claiborne, La. He impressed another German-speaking soldier, Kraemer — later known as “the man who discovered Kissinger” — and through his influence was assigned to intelligence duties.

When the 84th deployed to Germany after the Battle of the Bulge, he found himself a conquering occupier of the people who had persecuted his family into exile just a few years earlier. He received the Bronze Star medal and was promoted to sergeant for his work in organizing a local government and ferreting out members of the Gestapo.

Associated Press

When he returned to civilian life in 1947, the nation’s colleges, even the most elite, were reaching out to young veterans. He joined Harvard’s class of 1950 as a 24-year-old sophomore, beginning the academic career that would propel him to the pinnacle of American life.

While still an undergraduate, he married his high school girlfriend, Anneliese “Ann” Fleischer, a fellow refugee who was working as a bookkeeper. They had two children, Elizabeth and David, before divorcing in 1964.

At Harvard, he avoided student social life, studied hard and sought the favor of powerhouse members of the Harvard faculty such as scientist George Kistiakowsky and historian William Yandell Elliott.

Through such connections, he was able as a graduate student to start a quarterly magazine of world affairs, Confluence, which attracted as contributors such luminaries as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/09/17/mcgeorge-bundy-adviser-to-presidents-dies/981afc21-1af9-4fe3-ab82-59b6d66f2ed5/?utm_term=.2d0acc321ce3" target="_blank">McGeorge Bundy</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2003/02/15/kennedy-johnson-adviser-walt-w-rostow-dies-at-86/161c1ddb-5f16-45b3-8518-57ff0c8b4337/?utm_term=.b072ec6fc8a5" target="_blank">Walt Rostow</a>, Hannah Arendt, <a href="https://kennedysandking.com/obituaries/author-shaped-lens-for-viewing-u-s-history" target="_blank">Arthur Schlesinger Jr.</a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48221-2004Oct20.html" target="_blank">Paul Nitze</a>. While young and still unknown, Kissinger was moving into the world of foreign policy heavyweights, a world he would come to dominate.

His PhD thesis was written as the United States was extricating itself from the Korean War and when the Cold War with the Soviet Union dominated policy discussion. Looking for applicable lessons, he analyzed how Austria’s Prince Metternich and Britain’s Viscount Castlereagh restored order in Europe after the Napoleonic wars.

Titled “A World Restored,” the thesis was soon published in book form. That and an article in Foreign Affairs — in which he challenged the value of a policy of massive retaliation in nuclear war — launched him on a path to academic stardom.

He took a leave from Harvard to accept a job at the Council on Foreign Relations as staff director of a study group examining the topic of nuclear weapons and foreign policy. In the group were such prominent people as banker David Rockefeller, Army Lt. Gen. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1990/02/25/lt-gen-james-m-gavin-world-war-ii-hero-dies-at-82/28346792-082f-47bf-aa12-8e2a812e8da8/" target=_blank>James Gavin</a> and Nitze, former policy planning director at the State Department.

In a maneuver that anticipated his style as a high-level government official, he converted this prestigious panel’s staff into a research team for a book that became his own. He was 31 when he produced a 450-page tome, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” that argued for a policy of limited use of nuclear weapons.

At about that time, Dr. Kissinger met David Rockefeller’s brother Nelson, who was then a foreign policy adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and who would soon be elected governor of New York. Nelson Rockefeller, a backslapping optimist, became Dr. Kissinger’s patron and his mentor in the world of Republican politics, despite their very different personalities.

Dr. Kissinger continued to teach at Harvard and write, but by the time John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he wanted to join the ranks of men who actually wielded power in international affairs, and the place to do that was Washington, not Cambridge. He became a part-time consultant to Kennedy and later to President Lyndon B. Johnson, but his political loyalties remained with Rockefeller.

After Nixon was elected in 1968, according to Dr. Kissinger, he received a call from a Nixon aide with a job offer. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger barely knew each other, but former senator <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1985/02/28/henry-cabot-lodge-dies-at-82/2805ed58-dbfa-45b7-966f-25bf391d0a43/" target=_blank>Henry Cabot Lodge</a> (R-Mass.), who had been Nixon’s running mate in 1960 and became an influential U.S. ambassador in Vietnam and elsewhere, recommended Dr. Kissinger for national security adviser.

James K. W. Atherton

In Nixon’s White House, Dr. Kissinger was a complicated, ambitious, often devious man serving a complicated, erratic and often devious president. Their intimate but uneasy relationship was intensified by the magnitude of the history-making events that erupted in rapid succession during Nixon’s first term.

A single week in September 1970, for example, brought Syria’s invasion of Jordan, the discovery that the Soviet Union had sent a nuclear-armed submarine and other warships to Cuba, Nixon’s order to the CIA to block the installation of Allende as president of Chile, and the resumption of the secret Paris talks with the North Vietnamese after a five-month hiatus.

At such times Nixon would stay awake through most of the night, calling Dr. Kissinger and other senior officials at all hours to issue bizarre orders that they could not or would not carry out, and Dr. Kissinger would rage at staff members as tensions and voices rose.

In one extreme example, Dr. Kissinger was in Moscow trying to negotiate a cease-fire in the 1973 Middle East war when he received instructions from Nixon to hand Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev a letter saying that the United States wanted a long-term partnership with Moscow to establish peace in the region.

Dr. Kissinger — who had his hands full trying to achieve a cease-fire and who knew that Nixon was grappling with a crisis in the White House because of the Watergate scandal — not only refused to give the letter to Brezhnev, he also rejected the instructions as “unacceptable.”

He fired off a letter to his deputy, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/brent-scowcroft-key-security-adviser-to-two-presidents-dies-at-95/2020/08/07/307a061c-d8b9-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html" target=_blank>Brent Scowcroft</a>, saying he was “shocked at the tone of the instructions, the poor judgment in the context of the Brezhnev letter and the failure to let me know in advance that a press statement would be issued.” Soviet influence was diminishing in the Middle East; the last thing Dr. Kissinger wanted was to bolster it with an arrangement such as Nixon was seeking.

Throughout those tense episodes, Dr. Kissinger found time for meals and long conversations with favored members of the news media, including <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071703345.html" target=_blank>Walter Cronkite</a> of CBS, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1993/09/22/cl-sulzberger-dies-at-80/53cdcadd-0452-41bb-ab20-dca46916e261/" target=_blank>C.L. Sulzberger</a> of the New York Times, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2005/11/22/time-magazine-reporter-hugh-sidey/6bedd7e5-0c46-4a9f-9cb3-032dc12a98ef/" target=_blank>Hugh Sidey</a> of Time, his longtime friend and conservative author <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/27/AR2008022702056.html" target=_blank>William F. Buckley Jr.</a> and even the humor columnist <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011800616.html?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_17" target=_blank>Art Buchwald</a>.

He won plaudits from the press even though his most important work was done in total secrecy — he often visited foreign capitals on critical missions without informing even the U.S. ambassadors there — and he manipulated journalists the way he manipulated everyone else.

In the peak years of his power, most of the coverage in the mainstream media was little short of adulatory. Asked by a reporter whether he preferred to be addressed as “Mr. Secretary” or “Dr. Kissinger,” he replied, “Excellency will do.”

Jim Palmer

The fame produced by saturation media coverage contributed to his power and to the wealth of his later years. But the quest for celebrity and popular adulation also led him into some embarrassing moments, in particular a 1972 interview with the Italian writer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2006/09/16/reporter-provocateur-oriana-fallaci-77/f5cb6ddf-0278-447a-9474-0076520165c9/" target=_blank>Oriana Fallaci</a>. Fallaci asked if he thought of himself as a diplomatic chess player, but he offered a different analogy.

“Americans,” he said, “like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. This cowboy doesn’t have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into the town and does everything by himself.”

This “lone cowboy” image of the short, bespectacled, owlish, accented Dr. Kissinger provoked widespread ridicule. There was more of the same when The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, at a Georgetown party, asked him if he was a “swinger.” “Well, you couldn’t call me a swinger because of my job,” he replied. “Why don’t you just assume I’m a secret swinger.” Like “lone cowboy,” his “secret swinger” description of himself immediately entered Kissinger lore.

As much as Dr. Kissinger courted the press, his boss Nixon loathed reporters and was infuriated when the media broke news stories that clearly came from individuals inside the administration — especially the Pentagon Papers, a history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that detailed government deception spanning several administrations.

In an effort to stop the “leaks,” Nixon ordered the FBI to tap the telephones of certain reporters and their suspected sources. Dr. Kissinger, who flew into a rage exceeding even Nixon’s when the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, collaborated with this illegal program, giving the FBI names of people whose phones were to be wiretapped. The targets included journalists, State and Defense department officials, members of Kissinger’s staff and presidential speechwriter William Safire.

Frank Johnston

Dr. Kissinger did not deny afterward that he abetted the wiretapping but said in his memoirs that “I simply went along with what I had no reason to doubt was legal.” He also denounced “the immorality of those who, in their contempt for their trust, attempted to sabotage national policies and risked American lives.”

Nixon’s chief of staff, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/stories/halobit.htm" target=_blank>H.R. Haldeman</a>, said the wiretapping program “began with Henry’s anger” over media exposure of the secret bombing of Cambodia.

The airstrikes on neutral Cambodia and the subsequent ground invasion by U.S. troops stirred fury across the United States and prompted the resignations of some of Dr. Kissinger’s most accomplished staff members, including Anthony Lake, who later became national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.

But Dr. Kissinger was unapologetic. He argued that Cambodia’s neutrality was first violated by North Vietnam and that the United States had no obligation to allow Hanoi to use Cambodia as a sanctuary for attacks on Americans.

That U.S. actions made Cambodia a participant in a war for which it was woefully ill equipped, and opened the door to the takeover of the country by the murderous Khmer Rouge, may have been unfortunate, but to Dr. Kissinger it was not his problem.

In addition to the wiretaps, Nixon’s obsession with leaks led to creation of the White House unit assigned to stop them known as “the Plumbers.” Thus was planted the seed of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/timeline.html" target=_blank>Watergate political scandal</a> and White House coverup that would destroy Nixon’s presidency. Because Dr. Kissinger did not order any illegal break-ins or participate in coverups, he — almost alone among Nixon’s senior advisers — emerged unscathed from Watergate to continue his government career.

Nixon was elected to end the unpopular war in Vietnam, but Dr. Kissinger convinced him that the United States would lose all credibility in world affairs if it simply walked away. Thus the war continued, and widened into Cambodia, throughout Nixon’s first term, even though the number of U.S. ground troops was steadily reduced.

As Nixon and Dr. Kissinger reduced tensions with China and the Soviet Union and a major North Vietnamese military offensive stalled in the spring of 1972, Hanoi became amenable at last to a negotiated settlement.

The deal Dr. Kissinger brokered allowed the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu to remain in place, but it also allowed the North Vietnamese troops inside the South to remain there — and thus ensured Saigon’s downfall two years later, the “decent interval” that Dr. Kissinger had hoped to achieve.

When Thieu balked at the terms, the White House had to decide what was worse: resuming the war or forcing a longtime ally to swallow a suicidal agreement. To reassure Thieu and perhaps win a few more minor concessions from Hanoi, Nixon ordered the “Christmas bombing” of the North Vietnamese capital, in which the U.S. B-52 fleet dropped bombs on civilian areas for nine days.

The bombings sparked worldwide outrage — especially when it became clear that the peace agreement to which Hanoi finally agreed contained nearly the same terms as those in the final accords that Hanoi had accepted before the nine-day aerial assault.

Unlike with the Paris agreement, there was no downside to what was probably Dr. Kissinger’s single greatest achievement: the secret diplomacy that led to Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, an event that reshaped the global balance of power. Nixon, who built his political career on opposition to communism, nevertheless had long wanted to go to China, and the Chinese were willing.

On a trip to Pakistan, Dr. Kissinger evaded the traveling press corps by feigning illness and flew secretly to Beijing to secure the presidential invitation, which astonished the world when it was announced.

The trip produced, among other things, the “Shanghai Communique,” in which the United States acknowledged that “Taiwan is a part of China.” The two countries also agreed that once this principle was established, they would not do anything to change Taiwan’s quasi-independent status. That is still the basis of U.S. and Chinese policy on this relentlessly discomforting issue.

Another of Dr. Kissinger’s achievements was the 1972 SALT I arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union, negotiated when the two nuclear superpowers were locked in Cold War belligerency and confronting each other in proxy wars around the globe.

The SALT agreements put limits on anti-ballistic-missile defense systems and on the deployment of offensive missiles and effectively committed the two countries to détente rather than confrontation.

The third of Dr. Kissinger’s great accomplishments was the “shuttle diplomacy” that followed the 1973 Middle East war. That conflict erupted two weeks after Dr. Kissinger was sworn in as secretary of state while retaining his White House position as national security adviser.

In most administrations, the president’s national security adviser has been more a coordinator than a policymaker, working with all international affairs agencies to deliver their best counsel and analysis to the commander in chief, including options for action. That was not Dr. Kissinger’s style.

A skillful and ruthless bureaucratic infighter, he cut the State Department and Secretary of State <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2001/01/04/lawyer-statesman-william-p-rogers-dies/be9a8dda-5455-4d35-ad90-ebdee837bfa2/" target=_blank>William P. Rogers</a> out of the most critical decisions and policy initiatives during Nixon’s first term, and he opened secret channels to sub-Cabinet-level officials at State and the Pentagon to collect information without the knowledge of their chiefs.

Rogers, a gentleman diplomat of the old school, was not even told of the China initiative until the last minute. Then Dr. Kissinger excluded him from Nixon’s historic meeting with Chinese leader Mao Zedong. That was probably the worst of the repeated humiliations suffered by Rogers as secretary of state — at least until Nixon reluctantly decided to replace him with Dr. Kissinger after winning reelection in 1972.

The 16-day war that began on Oct. 6, 1973, with coordinated attacks on Israel by Egypt and Syria would confront Dr. Kissinger with perhaps the most severe tests of his career. It threatened the existence of Israel, set off a confrontation with the Soviet Union and inspired an oil embargo by Saudi Arabia and other Arab exporters that crippled the world’s flow of fuel.

Nixon had mostly kept Dr. Kissinger out of Middle East affairs because he was Jewish, but in his new job as secretary of state, his involvement in this crisis could not be avoided.

Thomas W. Lippman

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Henry Kissinger, who shaped Cold War history, dies at 100

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Henry Kissinger, who shaped world affairs under two presidents, dies at 100