Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State who turned 100 last May, has died at his home in Connecticut .
An astute manipulator and skilled statesman, he was influential until the last days of his life. His legacy will continue to be debated between those who consider him a diplomatic genius and those who consider him an evil genius.
The former 15-year-old Jew fleeing Europe on the eve of the Second World War had a single goal: to make the USA the greatest international power, even at the price of brutal and illegitimate interventions, such as the bombing and invasion of Cambodia and the support for the 1973 coup in Chile, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende and established a military dictatorship .
He has spoken several times about the war in Ukraine, but not about the one in Gaza which broke out in recent weeks. Yet he was one of the protagonists of the Yom Kippur War , which saw Israel victorious in 1973.
To give an idea of how influential he still was, in recent months he met the Italian ambassador Mariangela Zappia with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Washington. And, in July this year, he met with President Xi Jinping and senior Communist Party officials in Beijing.
A close friend of Gianni Agnelli, Kissinger always had a watchful eye on Italy, whose role he appreciated in the Atlantic Pact , even though our country had the most powerful Communist Party in the West.
On the occasion of his hundredth birthday, in the Washington Post, his son David, wondering about the exceptional physical and mental vitality of a man who buried admirers and detractors despite a diet based on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, identified the recipe in the inexhaustible paternal curiosity for the existential challenges of the moment: from the threat of atomic bombs in the 1950s to artificial intelligence on which two years ago he wrote the penultimate book, “The age of Ai: and our human future”, which was followed by “Leadership : Six studies in world strategy”.
As a child, it was said, he was too shy to speak in public. A foreigner in his new homeland after escaping from Germany in 1938, he learned to express himself in perfect English while always retaining his German accent. He made his way first to Harvard, then to Washington, until he reached, thanks to Nelson Rockefeller, the roof of the world in the service of two presidents: Richard Nixon and, after Watergate, Gerald Ford .
Kissinger concentrated all negotiations in his hands, making the work of the diplomatic network superfluous: from the first détente towards the USSR to the thaw with China, culminating in Nixon's trip to Beijing.
The Paris agreements for the ceasefire in Vietnam after almost 60 thousand US deaths earned him a highly controversial Nobel Peace Prize, so much so that two jurors resigned in protest.
Kissinger was in fact a shadow president , the desk in the Oval Office was always an impossible mirage for him due to the fact that he was not born in the USA. «Power is the best aphrodisiac» , is his most famous phrase.
Ford's defeat and the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter marked the end of his public career, not his foreign policy efforts through groups like the Trilateral . After leaving government in 1977, Kissinger founded the celebrated consultancy firm Kissinger Associates, through whose revolving door ministers and undersecretaries passed and whose clients included world governments large and small. And it was his studio that broke the news of his death.
(Unioneonline/L)