Henry Kissinger always took care of his image, even when it came to his obituary

“David,” Henry Kissinger said to me one day in the summer of 2017, after a lengthy interview for the obituary that appeared in the Times on Wednesday evening. “Are you writing one of those articles that will appear when I can no longer argue with the premise?”

He said it with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. In a series of ongoing conversations spanning about seven years, I had told Mr. Kissinger, when he asked, that I was “writing about your life.”

The master of diplomatic nuance knew exactly what that meant. Few interviewed for their own obituaries want to be reminded too explicitly of their mortality. But Henry Kissinger didn’t become Henry Kissinger without careful care of his image, and this time he waited for an answer to his question.

“Mr. Secretary,” I finally said, “if I know you, you’ll find a way.” He chuckled and we continued walking.

There’s no way to write about Henry Kissinger’s life without pissing off pretty much everyone. He had a remarkable story: an immigrant who was one of the last Jews to arrive in New York to flee Nazi Germany, who rose to become secretary of state and, within four decades, did more to expand the diplomacy and geopolitical power of his adopted nation shape than almost anyone else. in the 20th century.

In the mid-1990s, it was difficult to imagine that this hunched Cold Warrior, whose deep accent and oft-imitated mumble often made him difficult to understand, could have ignited such passions, which could last for decades.

But if Mr. Kissinger’s tone softened in his old age, it was, like almost everything else about him, very calculated. He knew that many who were in high school or college when he was in power saw or participated in protests that labeled him a war criminal.

The truth, of course, was more complicated, and it lay in a series of trade-offs he made, both personally and professionally, that determined whether you saw him as a man who turned a blind eye as dictators sent thousands of people to their deaths. , or someone who saved the world from a nuclear disaster. The fires he lit continued to burn for decades. It struck me every time I interviewed his friends, his enemies, and his friends who became his enemies.

Still, it was clear that whatever you thought of him — as an architect of American postwar power or as a callous advocate of the world’s worst dictators — assessing his life would require a lot of reporting.

That meant interviews with Mr. Kissinger himself, and with those who worked with him, those who clashed with him, those who admired his vision and those who despised his tactics. And it wasn’t as if his work had stopped: at 95, he could stay at the table until 11 p.m., discussing everything from what Donald Trump didn’t understand about the world to how artificial intelligence could destabilize major powers and make them more likely to would reach their nuclear arsenals.

Having never dealt with Mr. Kissinger while he was in government—I was 16 when he left the State Department—the assignment to write his obituary was an opportunity both to learn and to make judgments about his role in creating the post-world war. World War II order challenged by America’s adversaries.

I had excellent raw material: a long and careful, nonjudgmental version of an obituary written by Michael Kaufmann, a foreign correspondent and editor of the Times who died in 2010.

But time had caught up, and the editors said Kissinger’s legacy needed to be reassessed. The competition with Russia turned into open confrontation, and even before the invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Kissinger issued prescient warnings about where Vladimir V. Putin was going.

China had risen at a rate that even the man who shaped America’s opening to Beijing could never have imagined—and the relationship he had cultivated for so many years was now in sharp decline. Russia and China were developing a partnership, exactly what he was trying to achieve in the early 1970s.

Kissinger himself had begun to think further about new challenges: at the age of 95, the man who, sixty years earlier, had written one of the first popular books on how nuclear weapons were reshaping world power, began a series of articles and books on how artificial intelligence threatened world power. . do the same. I had problems with his argument, but then I thought: how many non-peers are being written about the global implications of ChatGPT?

That was Henry Kissinger’s contradiction. Few had used raw national power more crudely, nor had they thought about it more subtly.

He wrote extensive memoirs for the same reason as Churchill: he wanted to be the first to portray his role in the best possible light, leaving out almost all of the ugliest moments.

His mistake was living so long that reams of old memos and diplomatic cables were released, including those that revealed his cruelest actions. Yet you couldn’t help but admire how he constantly thought about the new challenges that didn’t fit into the world he once knew.

My goal in talking to him was to engage him with both the past and the future. Some days I was more successful than others.

In 2012, Richard Solomon, one of Kissinger’s former aides and now president of the United States Institute of Peace, asked me to conduct a public interview with the former secretary at a major event. I have Kissinger-on-his-talking points, defending every decision and rejecting every challenge.

He was much more revealing when I played the same role at the Wilson Center for International Scholars in 2018, when he spoke about his calculus in responding to Mao’s vision for China, and how he would have dealt with today’s much more complex environment.

In the process, I hardly became a friend of Mr. Kissinger; we knew each other’s roles in this strange dance, and I kept a professional distance. But as I wrote and rewrote, I couldn’t help but think about some strange intersections.

He had grown up in pre-war Germany, in a town just forty miles from where my father’s family had fled in the mid-nineteenth century. During a reporting trip in Germany, I went to the apartment complex where Mr. Kissinger had grown up and walked through the park across the street where he practiced football. (On the day I visited, it was full of Syrian refugees.)

And the first time I ever heard about Mr. Kissinger was in a story by my grandmother, Dorothy Samuels. It turned out that shortly after the Kissingers took refuge in New York, my grandmother often hired Paula Kissinger, the future mother of the Secretary of State, to cater small dinner parties on East 88th Street. As Mrs. Kissinger buzzed around the kitchen, she talked about the genius of her young son, then a student at George Washington High School.

“We just nodded, thinking this was like any proud mother,” Mrs. Samuels recalled years later. “It turned out she was right.”

Decades later, when I was taught political science by Kissinger’s former academic colleagues, I quickly discovered two camps: those who admired his manipulation of American power and those who despised him. There was little middle ground. “You should always be kind when you talk about the dead,” someone told me when I interviewed him for the obituary. “Except in this case.”

One of my most revealing private interviews with Mr. Kissinger took place in 2017, in Kent, Connecticut, where he had a second home. We were both attending a conference and had agreed to spend an hour together one late summer afternoon. My son Ned, who was then entering his freshman year of college, happened to be with me, and Mr. Kissinger invited him to join the conversation.

He started talking to Ned, first about the dog Mr. Kissinger had hidden in his Harvard dorm room for a semester, and then about dealings with Richard Nixon in the final days of his presidency. Then Vietnam – with some of the most revealing comments I’ve ever heard him make about incorrect American assumptions about the roots of the conflict. Ned asked a few questions, and it was as if the decades had melted away: Professor Kissinger was back in the seminar room, mixing anecdotes with geopolitical observations.

I just shut up and took notes.