This Thursday, the White House considered the death of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “a great loss,” remembering him as a man who marked US foreign policy for decades.
“It was a great loss. This was a man who, whether you agreed with him or not, whether or not you had the same opinions, served in World War II, served his country bravely in uniform and decades afterward,” he said. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a press conference this Thursday.
Henry Kissinger, an unavoidable figure of world diplomacy during the Cold War, died this Wednesday at the age of 100, in the house where he lived in the US state of Connecticut.
“I think we can all be grateful and praise his public service,” John Kirby said.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger, a German Jew born in Bavaria in 1923, fled Nazi Germany and became a naturalized American at the age of 20.
The son of a professor, he joined military counterintelligence and the United States Army, before completing brilliant studies at Harvard University, where he also taught.
Recognized for his thick glasses, he became the face of world diplomacy when Republican Richard Nixon called him to the White House in 1969 as National Security Advisor and later as Secretary of State.
He survived the departure of Nixon, who resigned in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal, and remained chief of diplomacy to his successor Gerald Ford until 1977.
Signing a ceasefire earned him the Nobel Peace Prize alongside the North Vietnamese leader in 1973.
Duc Tho rejected the award, claiming that the truce had not been respected, and Kissinger did not go to Oslo for fear of demonstrations.
Kissinger will also be remembered for his support for dictatorships such as those in Argentina, between 1976 and 1983, the last years of the Francisco Franco regime, in Spain, and the coup d’état against Salvador Allende, in Chile, in 1973.
He is, to date, the only person in United States history to simultaneously hold the positions of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor.
Despite praise from several world leaders, criticism also emerged on social media shortly after the announcement of his death.
Rolling Stone magazine headlined “Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by the American ruling class, finally dies,” according to the American agency AP.
Sophal Ear, an academic at Arizona State University, wrote in The Conversation that Kissinger’s bombing campaign “killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and paved the way for the devastation of the Khmer Rouge.”
Henry Kissinger remained active until the end of his life. In July, when he turned 100, he visited China, where he met with the country’s president, Xi Jinping.
The former diplomat’s opinions on current issues, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the risks of artificial intelligence, have also been frequently cited in the media.
Source: TSF
