Henry Kissinger, widely considered America’s most popular former secretary of state, has died.
Top News Today :
Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, he served as Secretary of State under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford during the 70s and was credited with getting America out of the Vietnam War, opening diplomatic relations with China, and reducing tensions between the US and Soviet Union. For decades thereafter, Kissinger became revered as an American diplomat, political scientist, geopolitical consultant, and politician. In fact, his work with Nixon and Ford earned him the role of the Republican Party’s foreign policy elder statesman.
“The Middle American professional politician and the German-born Harvard professor could hardly have been more different in background,” George C. Herring wrote of Nixon and Kissinger in his book America’s Longest War. “But, they shared a love of power and a burning ambition to mold a fluid world in a way that would establish their place in history. Loners and outsiders in their own professions, they were perhaps naturally drawn to each other.”
Interestingly, controversy engulfed Henry Kissinger in 1973 when he prematurely won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that kept going.
Kissinger shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese counterpart, for hammering out an agreement to end the Vietnam War. According to the Nobel committee, the accord, signed on January 27, 1973, “brought a wave of joy and hope for peace over the entire world.”
However, Tho declined to accept the prize, saying peace had not yet become a reality, and the war rapidly flared up again.
“Kissinger personified human complexity — his characteristics ranging from brilliance and wit to sensitivity, melancholy, abrasiveness, and savagery,” Stanley Karnow wrote in Vietnam: A History. “As he adapted to Nixon’s court, with its arcane and unsavory intrigues, he was able to acquire a talent for duplicity.”
The death of Henry Kissinger on Wednesday was announced by his consulting firm. He was 100.
OK WASSUP! discusses the Top News Today:
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is dead.
I am not trying to be funny but I thought he died a long time ago. Anyway RIP.