Henry Kissinger has died. He was 100 years old

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died early this Thursday morning (Wednesday night in Washington, USA). He was 100 years old.

A charismatic diplomat in the 1970s, he was US secretary of state and national security adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Applauded and challenged, he is considered the architect of postwar North American diplomacy and recognized as a skilled negotiator during the hottest times of the Cold War.

Henry Kissinger was a German-American citizen who joined the US Army during World War II. He was also a professor of history and politics at the prestigious Harvard University.

A man who served two US presidents has died at his home in Connecticut, US.

Diplomatically active until the end of his life, Kissinger was in Beijing on a surprise visit in July this year to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Kissinger’s difficult relationship with China has always been one of the milestones in the career of America’s most famous diplomat. US rapprochement with China was always a topic that was always on Kissinger’s agenda.

Kissinger also negotiated difficult negotiations for the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam after America’s most difficult war.

The ceasefire agreement between Washington’s troops, then-North Vietnam and Hanoi-backed communist guerrillas in South Vietnam ultimately earned him a controversial Nobel Prize.

His support for the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 also caused controversy.

In 1975, Henry Kissinger and President Ford approved the Indonesian military’s invasion of the then Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste.

Kissinger and Portugal

US State Department documents released in 2014 showed that Kissinger was a supporter of the right-wing coup d’etat in Portugal during the revolutionary period of 1975 and even admitted to supplying weapons to the so-called “Group of Nine”. “.

This belief arose from a meeting held on August 12, 1975, between Kissinger, the US Ambassador in Lisbon, Frank Carlucci, and several members of the State Department, including William Hyland, director of the organization’s Office of Information and Research.

It is at this meeting, held at the State Department in Washington, that Kissinger and Carlucci talk about the hypothesis of a civil war in Portugal and the possibility of US arms supplies to names associated with Mario Soares or the “Group of Nine”, formed by moderate elements of the Armed Forces Movement led by Melo Antunes.

Active life to the end

Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27, 1923 in Fuerth, Germany. “The young Heinz was introverted and studious, but passionate about football, so much so that he risked confrontations with the Nazis to watch games,” wrote the New York Times. In the fall of 1938, the diary adds, “with the war still a year away,” Nazi authorities allowed young Heinz’s family to leave Germany. “With little furniture and one suitcase, the Kissingers set off for New York aboard the French liner Ile de France. Heinz was 15 years old,” he says.

Few figures in American political life have remained so influential for so long. Kissinger dies without erasing the contradictions that surrounded his active political and diplomatic life, which lasted a century and until the end showed extraordinary clarity in his participation in conferences, trips and the publication of books.

“The Cold War was more dangerous,” Henry Kissinger said at a public ceremony in 2016 at the New-York Historical Society. “Both sides were ready to start an all-out nuclear war,” he said at the time. But, the diplomat added, “today everything is more complicated.” Perhaps he was right.