The dominating and polarizing force in US foreign policy,Henry Kissinger dies at 100

Henry Kissinger, a former US secretary of state and national security adviser who escaped Nazi Germany in his youth to become one of the most influential and controversial foreign policy figures in American history, has died. He was 100.

Kissinger died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, according to a statement from his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. The firm did not provide a cause of death.

Though he never worked directly under a U.S. president again after Ford left office, Kissinger's achievements were long lasting. U.S. superpower relations to this day still bear his imprint, and he remained a sought-after voice on international affairs to the end of his life.

"Kissinger was the leading scholar-practitioner of the post-World War II era," said Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. "There were other great secretaries of state and a long list of impressive historians, but no one who combined the two pursuits as Kissinger did."

Having arrived as a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, Kissinger never lost his thick German accent, and his pronouncements on foreign policy challenges, delivered in a gruff baritone voice, made him a global celebrity.

After his first year at George Washington High School, he took night classes and worked in a shaving brush factory during the day, according to "Kissinger: A Biography" by Walter Isaacson. After graduating, he enrolled in the City College of New York and planned to become an accountant. But he was drafted into the U.S. Army shortly after his 19th birthday. 

Kissinger, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1943, returned to his motherland as a German interpreter in the U.S. Army. He also arrested Gestapo members and helped liberate prisoners from the Ahlem concentration camp. 

Kissinger’s Jewishness was an essential aspect of his image and often seemed to factor in America’s complex relationship with Israel. He was the first Jewish person to serve as U.S. secretary of state.

“No Jew in modern times has yielded greater power on the world stage,” wrote J.J. Goldberg in “Jewish Power,” a 1996 book.

The comments underscore Kissinger’s enduring divisiveness, even decades after leaving public office. But for a statesman who forged an unlikely path to diplomacy on his own terms, criticism always came with the territory.

“I’ve had an opportunity to do the things that I believe in. I have been able to express myself in many forums,” he told Zakaria in 2008. “And it would be unnatural, and probably would mean I haven’t done very much, if there were not other points of view that were expressed with some vehemence.”

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Sarah H

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