Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravely voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died Wednesday, his consulting firm said. He was 100.
With his gruff yet commanding presence and behind-the-scenes manipulation of power, Kissinger exerted uncommon influence on global affairs under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, earning both vilification and the Nobel Peace Prize. Decades later, his name still provoked impassioned debate over foreign policy landmarks long past.
Kissinger’s power grew during the turmoil of Watergate, when the politically attuned diplomat assumed a role akin to co-president to the weakened Nixon.
“No doubt my vanity was piqued,” Kissinger later wrote of his expanding influence. “But the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrophe.”
A Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family in his teens, Kissinger in his later years cultivated the reputation of respected statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to Republicans and Democrats alike and managing a global consulting business. He turned up in President Donald Trump’s White House on multiple occasions. But Nixon-era documents and tapes, as they trickled out over the years, brought revelations — many in Kissinger’s own words — that sometimes cast him in a harsh light.
Never without his detractors, Kissinger after he left government was dogged by critics who argued that he should be called to account for his policies on Southeast Asia and support of repressive regimes in Latin America.
For eight restless years — first as national security adviser, later as secretary of state, and for a time in the middle holding both titles — Kissinger ranged across the breadth of major foreign policy issues. He conducted the first “shuttle diplomacy” in the quest for Middle East peace. He used secret channels to pursue ties between the United States and China, ending decades of isolation and mutual hostility.
He initiated the Paris negotiations that ultimately provided a face-saving means — a “decent interval,” he called it — to get the United States out of a costly war in Vietnam. Two years later, Saigon fell to the communists.
And he pursued a policy of detente with the Soviet Union that led to arms control agreements and raised the possibility that the tensions of the Cold War and its nuclear threat did not have to last forever.
At age 99, he was still out on tour for his book on leadership. Asked in July 2022 interview with ABC whether he wished he could take back any of his decisions, Kissinger demurred, saying: “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life. It’s my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”
Even then, he had mixed thoughts on Nixon’s record, saying “his foreign policy has held up and he was quite effective in domestic policy” while allowing that the disgraced president had “permitted himself to be involved in a number of steps that were inappropriate for a president.”
As Kissinger turned 100 in May 2023, his son David wrote in The Washington Post that his father’s centenary “might have an air of inevitability for anyone familiar with his force of character and love of historical symbolism. Not only has he outlived most of his peers, eminent detractors and students, but he has also remained indefatigably active throughout his 90s.”
Asked during a CBS interview in the leadup to his 100th birthday about those who view his conduct of foreign policy over the years as a kind of “criminality,” Kissinger was nothing but dismissive.
“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger said. “It wasn’t conceived that way. It wasn’t conducted that way.”
Kissinger was a practitioner of realpolitik — using diplomacy to achieve practical objectives rather than advance lofty ideals. Supporters said his pragmatic bent served US interests; critics saw a Machiavellian approach that ran counter to democratic ideals.
He was castigated for authorizing telephone wiretaps of reporters and his own National Security Council staff to plug news leaks in Nixon’s White House. He was denounced on college campuses for the bombing and allied invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, intended to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam.
That “incursion,” as Nixon and Kissinger called it, was blamed by some for contributing to Cambodia’s fall into the hands of Khmer Rouge insurgents who later slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians.
Kissinger, for his part, made it his mission to debunk what he referred to in 2007 as a “prevalent myth” — that he and Nixon had settled in 1972 for peace terms that had been available in 1969 and thus had needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives.
He insisted that the only way to speed up the withdrawal would have been to agree to Hanoi’s demands that the US overthrow the South Vietnamese government and replace it with communist-dominated leadership.
Pudgy and messy, Kissinger incongruously acquired a reputation as a ladies’ man in the staid Nixon administration. Kissinger, who had divorced his first wife in 1964, called women “a diversion, a hobby.” Jill St. John was a frequent companion. But it turned out his real love interest was Nancy Maginnes, a researcher for Nelson Rockefeller whom he married in 1974.
In a 1972 poll of Playboy Club Bunnies, the man dubbed “Super-K” by Newsweek finished first as “the man I would most like to go out on a date with.”
Kissinger’s explanation: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Yet Kissinger was reviled by many Americans for his conduct of wartime diplomacy. He was still a lightning rod decades later: In 2015, an appearance by the 91-year-old Kissinger before the Senate Armed Services Committee was disrupted by protesters demanding his arrest for war crimes and calling out his actions in Southeast Asia, Chile and beyond.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the Bavarian city of Fuerth on May 27, 1923, the son of a schoolteacher. His family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in Manhattan, where Heinz changed his name to Henry.
Kissinger had two children, Elizabeth and David, from his first marriage.
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Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, dies at 100
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Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, dies at 100
An internal document shows the Vietnamese military preparing for a possible American war
HANOI: A year after Vietnam elevated its relations with Washington to the highest diplomatic level, an internal document shows its military was taking steps to prepare for a possible American “war of aggression” and considered the United States a “belligerent” power, according to a report released Tuesday.
More than just exposing Hanoi’s duality in approach toward the US, the document confirms a deep-seated fear of external forces fomenting an uprising against the Communist leadership in a so-called “color revolution,” like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines.
Other internal documents that The 88 Project, a human rights organization focused on human rights abuses in Vietnam, cited in its analysis point to similar concerns over US motives in Vietnam.
“There’s a consensus here across the government and across different ministries,” said Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project and the report’s author. “This isn’t just some kind of a fringe element or paranoid element within the party or within the government.”
‘The 2nd US Invasion Plan’
The original Vietnamese document titled “The 2nd US Invasion Plan” was completed by the Ministry of Defense in August 2024. It suggests that in seeking “its objective of strengthening deterrence against China, the US and its allies are ready to apply unconventional forms of warfare and military intervention and even conduct large-scale invasions against countries and territories that ‘deviate from its orbit.’”
While noting that “currently there is little risk of a war against Vietnam,” the Vietnamese planners write that “due to the US’s belligerent nature we need to be vigilant to prevent the US and its allies from ‘creating a pretext’ to launch an invasion of our country.”
The Vietnamese military analysts outline what they see as a progression over three American administrations — from Barack Obama, through Donald Trump’s first term, and into Joe Biden’s presidency — with Washington increasingly pursuing military and other relationships with Asian nations to “form a front against China.”
Vietnam balances diplomatic outreach with internal fears
In his term, Biden in 2023 signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Vietnam, elevating relations between the nations to their highest diplomatic level on par with Russia and China as “trusted partners with a friendship grounded in mutual respect.”
In the 2024 military document, however, Vietnamese planners said that while the US views Vietnam as “a partner and an important link,” it also wants to “spread and impose its values regarding freedom, democracy, human rights, ethnicity and religion” to gradually change the country’s socialist government.
“The 2nd US Invasion Plan provides one of the most clear-eyed insights yet into Vietnam’s foreign policy,” Swanton wrote in his analysis. “It shows that far from viewing the US as a strategic partner, Hanoi sees Washington as an existential threat and has no intention of joining its anti-China alliance. ”
Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not answer emails seeking comment on The 88 Project report or the document it highlighted.
The US State Department refused to comment directly on the “2nd US Invasion Plan,” but stressed the new partnership agreement, saying it “promotes prosperity and security for the United States and Vietnam.”
“A strong, prosperous, independent and resilient Vietnam benefits our two countries and helps ensure that the Indo-Pacific remains stable, secure, free and open,” the State Department said.
Documents offer a window into internal thinking
Nguyen Khac Giang, of Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute research center, said the plans highlighted tensions within Vietnam’s political leadership, where the Communist Party’s conservative, military-aligned faction has long been preoccupied with external threats to the regime.
“The military has never been too comfortable moving ahead with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the United States,” Giang said.
Tensions within the government spilled into the public realm in June 2024, when US-linked Fulbright University was accused of fomenting a “color revolution” by an army TV report. The Foreign Ministry defended the university, which US and Vietnamese officials had highlighted when the two countries upgraded ties.
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, said the Vietnamese military still has “a very long memory” of the war with the US that ended in 1975. While Western diplomats have tended to see Hanoi as most concerned by possible Chinese aggression, the document reinforces other policy papers suggesting leaders’ biggest fear is that of a “color revolution,” he said.
Further undermining trust between the US and Vietnam were cuts made to the US Agency for International Development by President Donald Trump’s administration, which disrupted projects such as efforts to clean up tons of soil contaminated with deadly dioxin from the military’s Agent Orange defoliant and unexploded American munitions and land mines.
“This pervasive insecurity about color revolutions is very frustrating, because I don’t see why the Communist Party is so insecure,” said Abuza, whose book “The Vietnam People’s Army: From People’s Warfare to Military Modernization?” was published last year.
“They have so much to be proud of — they have lifted so many people out of poverty, the economy is humming along, they are the darling of foreign investors.”
While China and Vietnam have been at odds over territorial claims in the South China Sea, the documents portray China more as a regional rival than a threat like the US
“China doesn’t pose an existential threat to the Communist Party (of Vietnam),” Abuza said. “Indeed, the Chinese know they can only push the Vietnamese so far, because they’re fearful that the Communist Party can’t respond forcefully to China (and will) look weak and it will cause a mass uprising.”
China is Vietnam’s largest two-way trade partner, while the US is its largest export market, meaning Hanoi needs to perform a balancing act in keeping up diplomatic and economic ties, while also hedging its bets.
“Even some of the more progressive leaders look at the United States, saying, ‘Yes, they like us, they’re working with us, they are good partners for now, but given the opportunity if there were a color revolution, the Americans would support it,’” Abuza said.
Trump’s second administration softens some concerns, but raises more
Under Vietnamese leader To Lam, who became Communist Party general secretary at around the same time the document was written, the country has moved to strengthen ties with the US, especially under Trump, Giang said.
Lam was reappointed general secretary last month and is expected to also assume the presidency, which would make him the country’s most powerful figure in decades.
With Lam at the helm, Trump’s family business has broken ground on a $1.5 billion Trump-branded golf resort and luxury real estate project in northern Hung Yen province. The Vietnamese leader almost immediately accepted Trump’s invitation to join the Board of Peace, which Giang said was an unusually swift decision given that foreign policy moves are typically calibrated with close attention to Beijing’s possible reaction.
But Trump’s military operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have given Vietnamese conservatives fresh justification for their unease about closer ties with Washington. Any US military action involving Hanoi’s ally Cuba could upset Vietnam’s strategic balance, Giang added.
“Cuba is very sensitive,” he said. “If something happens in Cuba, it will send shock waves through Vietnam’s political elites. Many of them have very strong, intimate ties with Cuba.”
Overall, the first year of Trump’s second term is likely to have left the Vietnamese happy about the focus on the Western Hemisphere but wondering about other developments, Abuza said.
“The Vietnamese are going to be confused by the Trump administration, which has downplayed human rights and democracy promotion, but at the same time been willing to violate the sovereignty of states and remove leaders they don’t like,” he said.
More than just exposing Hanoi’s duality in approach toward the US, the document confirms a deep-seated fear of external forces fomenting an uprising against the Communist leadership in a so-called “color revolution,” like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines.
Other internal documents that The 88 Project, a human rights organization focused on human rights abuses in Vietnam, cited in its analysis point to similar concerns over US motives in Vietnam.
“There’s a consensus here across the government and across different ministries,” said Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project and the report’s author. “This isn’t just some kind of a fringe element or paranoid element within the party or within the government.”
‘The 2nd US Invasion Plan’
The original Vietnamese document titled “The 2nd US Invasion Plan” was completed by the Ministry of Defense in August 2024. It suggests that in seeking “its objective of strengthening deterrence against China, the US and its allies are ready to apply unconventional forms of warfare and military intervention and even conduct large-scale invasions against countries and territories that ‘deviate from its orbit.’”
While noting that “currently there is little risk of a war against Vietnam,” the Vietnamese planners write that “due to the US’s belligerent nature we need to be vigilant to prevent the US and its allies from ‘creating a pretext’ to launch an invasion of our country.”
The Vietnamese military analysts outline what they see as a progression over three American administrations — from Barack Obama, through Donald Trump’s first term, and into Joe Biden’s presidency — with Washington increasingly pursuing military and other relationships with Asian nations to “form a front against China.”
Vietnam balances diplomatic outreach with internal fears
In his term, Biden in 2023 signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Vietnam, elevating relations between the nations to their highest diplomatic level on par with Russia and China as “trusted partners with a friendship grounded in mutual respect.”
In the 2024 military document, however, Vietnamese planners said that while the US views Vietnam as “a partner and an important link,” it also wants to “spread and impose its values regarding freedom, democracy, human rights, ethnicity and religion” to gradually change the country’s socialist government.
“The 2nd US Invasion Plan provides one of the most clear-eyed insights yet into Vietnam’s foreign policy,” Swanton wrote in his analysis. “It shows that far from viewing the US as a strategic partner, Hanoi sees Washington as an existential threat and has no intention of joining its anti-China alliance. ”
Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not answer emails seeking comment on The 88 Project report or the document it highlighted.
The US State Department refused to comment directly on the “2nd US Invasion Plan,” but stressed the new partnership agreement, saying it “promotes prosperity and security for the United States and Vietnam.”
“A strong, prosperous, independent and resilient Vietnam benefits our two countries and helps ensure that the Indo-Pacific remains stable, secure, free and open,” the State Department said.
Documents offer a window into internal thinking
Nguyen Khac Giang, of Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute research center, said the plans highlighted tensions within Vietnam’s political leadership, where the Communist Party’s conservative, military-aligned faction has long been preoccupied with external threats to the regime.
“The military has never been too comfortable moving ahead with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the United States,” Giang said.
Tensions within the government spilled into the public realm in June 2024, when US-linked Fulbright University was accused of fomenting a “color revolution” by an army TV report. The Foreign Ministry defended the university, which US and Vietnamese officials had highlighted when the two countries upgraded ties.
Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, said the Vietnamese military still has “a very long memory” of the war with the US that ended in 1975. While Western diplomats have tended to see Hanoi as most concerned by possible Chinese aggression, the document reinforces other policy papers suggesting leaders’ biggest fear is that of a “color revolution,” he said.
Further undermining trust between the US and Vietnam were cuts made to the US Agency for International Development by President Donald Trump’s administration, which disrupted projects such as efforts to clean up tons of soil contaminated with deadly dioxin from the military’s Agent Orange defoliant and unexploded American munitions and land mines.
“This pervasive insecurity about color revolutions is very frustrating, because I don’t see why the Communist Party is so insecure,” said Abuza, whose book “The Vietnam People’s Army: From People’s Warfare to Military Modernization?” was published last year.
“They have so much to be proud of — they have lifted so many people out of poverty, the economy is humming along, they are the darling of foreign investors.”
While China and Vietnam have been at odds over territorial claims in the South China Sea, the documents portray China more as a regional rival than a threat like the US
“China doesn’t pose an existential threat to the Communist Party (of Vietnam),” Abuza said. “Indeed, the Chinese know they can only push the Vietnamese so far, because they’re fearful that the Communist Party can’t respond forcefully to China (and will) look weak and it will cause a mass uprising.”
China is Vietnam’s largest two-way trade partner, while the US is its largest export market, meaning Hanoi needs to perform a balancing act in keeping up diplomatic and economic ties, while also hedging its bets.
“Even some of the more progressive leaders look at the United States, saying, ‘Yes, they like us, they’re working with us, they are good partners for now, but given the opportunity if there were a color revolution, the Americans would support it,’” Abuza said.
Trump’s second administration softens some concerns, but raises more
Under Vietnamese leader To Lam, who became Communist Party general secretary at around the same time the document was written, the country has moved to strengthen ties with the US, especially under Trump, Giang said.
Lam was reappointed general secretary last month and is expected to also assume the presidency, which would make him the country’s most powerful figure in decades.
With Lam at the helm, Trump’s family business has broken ground on a $1.5 billion Trump-branded golf resort and luxury real estate project in northern Hung Yen province. The Vietnamese leader almost immediately accepted Trump’s invitation to join the Board of Peace, which Giang said was an unusually swift decision given that foreign policy moves are typically calibrated with close attention to Beijing’s possible reaction.
But Trump’s military operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have given Vietnamese conservatives fresh justification for their unease about closer ties with Washington. Any US military action involving Hanoi’s ally Cuba could upset Vietnam’s strategic balance, Giang added.
“Cuba is very sensitive,” he said. “If something happens in Cuba, it will send shock waves through Vietnam’s political elites. Many of them have very strong, intimate ties with Cuba.”
Overall, the first year of Trump’s second term is likely to have left the Vietnamese happy about the focus on the Western Hemisphere but wondering about other developments, Abuza said.
“The Vietnamese are going to be confused by the Trump administration, which has downplayed human rights and democracy promotion, but at the same time been willing to violate the sovereignty of states and remove leaders they don’t like,” he said.
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