Editor’s Note: Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the History Department and the LBJ School. He is the author and editor of 11 books, including “Henry Kissinger and the American Century” and “Civil War By Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy.” He is the co-host of the podcast, “This is Democracy.” The views expressed here is his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
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His life was as improbable as it was consequential. Henry Kissinger was born in a small Jewish ghetto in a small town, Fürth, in Germany. His grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, and he barely escaped. Henry, his father, mother and brother fled to New York in late 1938. They never wanted to leave Germany, but they had no choice.
Jeremi Suri Korey Howell Photography
Like so many other refugees, they were unprepared for their new home. A slight adolescent, 15-year-old Henry did not speak any English, and he had few prospects. He attended public high school in Manhattan, worked evenings to help keep his family fed and prepared to become an accountant. It was a reasonable aspiration for a Jewish immigrant in New York.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the American entrance into the Second World War changed Kissinger, as it changed the United States. He joined the Army, leaving his Orthodox, kosher home for the first time. He went back to Germany, now as a part of the American occupying force. And that is how his career really began, one that would be defined by his identity as a cosmopolitan wise man and his lifelong pursuit of power – and one that would mark America and the world in lasting, controversial ways.
American leaders were desperate for talented young men who knew German society but had an attachment to the United States. Kissinger was a fortunate fit. Although he looked and sounded German (as he would for the rest of his life), his Jewish background meant he would never sympathize with the Nazis. Americans could trust him. He stayed in the Army an extra year after the war, working to create a new American-influenced Germany — the foundation for a postwar order in Europe.
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CNN Army recommendations and the GI Bill gave Kissinger a chance to attend Harvard University as an older undergraduate — unthinkable before the war due to his refugee experience, his Jewishness and his lack of wealth, among other reasons. Harvard connected Kissinger to a new generation of European émigré students and scholars, committed to helping the United States lead the world and prevent another totalitarian regime, this time in the Soviet Union, from destroying civilization.
This became Kissinger’s life-long mission: using power to promote the United States (and himself) as bulwarks against the abyss, light amidst what he saw as the creeping darkness. His pessimism about the threats to humanity, especially in a nuclear world, made him desperate for American dominance. The United States would use its strength to stop another apocalypse. Kissinger never joined the Foreign Service, but he saw the intersection between diplomacy and military affairs as the place to make a lasting difference.
After Harvard, Kissinger rose fast to the heights of power, and he never left, because this mission resonated with presidents, business leaders and so many others. Kissinger worked tirelessly in this pursuit. As a scholar of war and diplomacy he strived to strengthen the American-led Western alliance in Europe, nurturing military, economic and diplomatic cooperation among the key leaders in each capital.
As President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s chief foreign policy aide, he expanded his canvas to China and the Middle East, among many other places. Kissinger opened the first direct relations between the United States and Communist China, giving Washington a clear advantage over Moscow in Asia as Soviet relations in the region deteriorated. After the 1973 War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Kissinger made the United States the key external actor in that region — the largest source of aid and military assistance to Israel, Egypt and other states willing to work closely with Washington and sideline Moscow.
Kissinger was always a refugee, always conscious that he had come to the United States fleeing massive atrocities. He condemned those who believed the United States could somehow perfect human beings. Kissinger described Wilsonian idealistic impulses as naïve and dangerous. The hate and violence always shadowed his views of society.
US President Gerald Ford confers with secretary of State Henry Kissinger 1974. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Universal History Archive/Getty Images Opinion: The one lesson to take away from Henry Kissinger’s journey
Kissinger wanted to use American power as a better alternative, a lesser evil, for salvaging the best of humanity and limiting the damage from human frailty and flaws. That calculus drove him to dark places. That is how he sought to justify intense bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War — killing some innocent people, he claimed, to prevent what he viewed as the far greater suffering that accompanied communist tyranny.
That is also how he explained US support for repressive regimes in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and other parts of South America. And that is how he rationalized diplomatic favoritism for dictatorships in Iran, Egypt, South Korea, Indonesia and Pakistan that offered stability, Kissinger contended, rather than the chaos and strife of societies he deemed ill-prepared for democracy.
His underlying worthwhile mission went too far, producing in Vietnam, Latin America and Iran some of the very nightmares he sought to prevent. Too much American power and too much support for anti-communist strongmen brought its own form of apocalypse.
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The death, destruction and suffering in each of these societies were incontrovertible evidence of this fact. The intense protests in the United States against Kissinger’s policies — and the anger expressed toward him, even in death — show how his unwavering commitment to American power often harmed the people that power was meant to serve.
Kissinger’s life was, therefore, a parable of progress and a tragedy of hubris at the same time. He proudly lived the American dream. He made the world safer for millions of people like himself. Kissinger also imbibed a self-righteousness and an obsession with power that distorted his perspective. For all his intelligence, he never understood how deeply American power could threaten and harm people who stood in its way.
For better and worse, Kissinger’s life was the story of American power in the last century. That is why he matters so much. His death offers an opportunity for reflection on what American power has done and what it might become.
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