American Diplomat and prominent Scientist Henry Kissinger died

American diplomat and prominent scientist Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut at the age of 100.

Henry A. Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State, a respected American scholar and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate who helped create the post-World War II world order and led the U.S. through some of its most complicated foreign policy challenges.

With his distinct German accent, sharp wit, voluminous writings and belief in the peacemaking power of realpolitik, Dr. Kissinger was one of the most influential foreign policy and national security practitioners of the post-World War II era and remained active in national security for more than 70 years. From the age of 20, when he joined the U.S. Army, to nearly his death, Dr. Kissinger continued to travel to Washington to offer testimony on U.S. national security strategy.

As National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Dr. Kissinger was the author of some of those administrations’ most important, and sometimes controversial, policies.
He was instrumental to opening China to the Western world and was the primary voice of détente with the Soviet Union that lowered tensions during the Cold War, a reflection of his belief in the balance of power as a tenet of global order.

Before his government service, Dr. Kissinger served on the faculty at Harvard University, where he ran the International Seminar from 1952 to 1969.

Dr. Kissinger is the recipient of a number of awards and recognitions. In 1945, he was awarded a Bronze Star from the U.S. Army for meritorious service. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the same year a Gallup Poll of Americans listed him as the most admired person in the world. He was also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977 and the Medal of Liberty, given one time to ten foreign-born American leaders, in 1986.

As the architect of a lasting era of peace, stability, prosperity and global order, he made a substantial impact on generations of citizens, from the U.S. to Europe and China.

Henry A. Kissinger was born to a schoolteacher and a homemaker in Furth, Germany, in 1923, just as nationalism was beginning to sweep Germany. As Jews, the Kissinger family found many activities were off-limits, including attending public soccer matches, a sport that Dr. Kissinger loved, even if he did not excel in it. What he may have lacked in athletic talent, however, he made up for in academics. As a child, he was bookish and introverted, yet also competitive.

In 1935, the Nuremburg Laws were enacted, and Dr. Kissinger’s father, Louis, became a casualty of the rules, losing his job as a schoolteacher. Dr. Kissinger’s mother recognized that leaving Germany was the family’s best hope for their future and in 1938, three months before Kristallnacht, Dr. Kissinger, his younger brother Walter and their parents fled Nazi Germany and settled in New York City.

Many of his extended family were not able to escape, and 13 of them perished in the Holocaust. Well into his 80s, Dr. Kissinger remarked that people managed to survive the Holocaust through “singleness of purpose,” a trait that defined him throughout his career.

Dr. Kissinger’s experience of fleeing a country where he once had to cross the street to avoid being beaten by non-Jewish boys, and coming to a country where such persecution did not exist for him, was a transformative one. Upon arriving in America, he was keen to be considered an American. As he later reflected in his farewell speech as Secretary of State, “When I came here in 1938, I was asked to write an essay at George Washington High School about what it meant to be an American. I wrote that…this was a country where one could walk across the street with one’s head erect.”

In America, Dr. Kissinger plunged into his studies at George Washington High. He eventually transitioned to night school so that he could maintain a job at a shaving brush company by day. Good grades coupled with a steady work ethic made it easy for Dr. Kissinger to get into City College of New York, where he enjoyed a free education. His goal was to become an accountant, but time in the Army would set his life on a different path.

In 1943, the year he became a U.S. citizen, Dr. Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army, where his intellect and fluency in German would make him a perfect candidate for military intelligence. His intellectual abilities earned him a placement in the Army Specialized Training Program, an opportunity that sent him from combat training to college instead. Dr. Kissinger was sent to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he studied engineering, read books on history in his spare time, and tutored other students.

In 1944, however, the Army canceled the program, and Dr. Kissinger was returned to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana. From Camp Claiborne, Dr. Kissinger was assigned to the 84th Infantry Division, which set sail from New York to Europe in September 1944 as part of the pursuit phase of the war. When he arrived back in his homeland of Germany, Dr. Kissinger was quickly selected to become a German translator for General Alexander Bolling. Later, in the Battle of the Bulge, when most of the division was forced to withdraw, Dr. Kissinger volunteered to stay behind to be part of hazardous counter-intelligence duties, making good use of his German.

When the 84th Division later captured the German town of Krefeld on the Rhine River, Dr. Kissinger became the town’s administrator — relying on his language skills and his understanding of the German culture to command authority. He succeeded in restoring order and building a civilian government in the town in little more than a week, a success that enabled him to transfer to the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). The mission was to identify Nazis and members of the Gestapo in areas that the Allies had captured. His work there would earn him a Bronze Star.

Dr. Kissinger’s work in the CIC would continue even after the war had ended, as he was called upon to provide order and detect Nazis in Hesse. He kept any feelings of anger or resentment toward the Germans — who had forced his family to flee less than a decade earlier — beneath the surface. Dr. Kissinger operated with remarkable restraint.

In 1946, he was discharged from the Army, having obtained the rank of sergeant. As he would later reflect, his military service would become for him the highlight of his career, and also one that affirmed his American identity and gave him confidence.