Henry Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923, in Germany. Growing up in a Jewish household, he spent around two hours a day studying the Bible and the Talmud. During his childhood years, he experienced the rise of German nationalism and Nazism and he encountered anti-Semitism daily. At sporting events, he would sneak in, defying the laws that banned Jews from professional sporting matches, and several times was beaten by the stadium guards. When Kissinger was 15 years old, his family eventually decided to flee to the United States.
Once he arrived in the United States, Kissinger immediately took up a job at a shaving brush factory and enrolled at New York's George Washington High School. After high school, Kissinger attended the City College of New York but was later drafted into the army during WWII. It was fighting in the war that helped Kissinger decide that he wanted to focus on political history.
After the war, Kissinger was admitted to Harvard University where he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of Government. After receiving his doctorate in 1954, Kissinger stayed at Harvard to become a member of the faculty in the Department of Government. In 1957, he wrote Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, opposing Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation. It was in this book where he proposed his idea of a "flexible" response model, arguing that a limited war fought with conventional forces was winnable.
In addition to teaching at Harvard, from 1961-1968, he served as a special advisor to Kennedy and Johnson. Then in 1969, he was appointed as national security advisor by Nixon. It was his idea to achieve "peace with honor" in the Vietnam War by withdrawing troops from Vietnam while also bombing areas of North Vietnam. This strategy was designed to help end America's involvement in the war while also maintaining its credibility with its allies and enemies.
Kissinger was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize after helping to bring an end to the war. However, he has many other accomplishments, such as helping bring about detente between the United States and the Soviet Union, negotiating SALT I and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and making visits to the People's Republic of China to help pave the way for American-Chinese relations in 1979. Overall, Kissinger is one of the most influential foreign policymakers in American history.
Sources:
https://www.biography.com/political-figure/henry-kissinger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger
Henry Kissinger certainly did play a large role in the United States government, and therefore American foreign affairs, especially in the Nixon Administration. While Kissinger did end up orchestrating the "peace with honor movement", he initially advocated a hard-line policy regarding Vietnam. In fact, he was the one who engineered the bombing of Cambodia, which was one of Nixon's most unpopular moves. While it did push the Vietnamese to the negotiation table, Nixon's reviews tanked because of it, and some argue that even without the bombings, Vietnam would still have negotiated. This shows that even superb foreign policy strategists can sometimes make mistakes, and that successful actions abroad can sometimes have the opposite effect at home.
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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Kissinger
While Henry Kissinger had a large and important role for some long time, particularly and most notably during the Nixon administration, his influence did eventually fade away. With his foreign policy achievements crumbling after defeat in Vietnam, and the emergence of the Watergate scandal which saw his own investigations, alongside the fact that Reagan and Carter both went against his detente policy to calm tensions between the US and USSR, Kissinger was no longer the figure he once was. Ultimately, Kissinger lost influence as he slowly began to lose control of American foreign policy.
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https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/henry-kissinger