Henry Kissinger

In 1938, a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy was forced to flee from Germany with his parents in order to escape imprisonment in one of Hitler's concentration camps. The family went to live in the United States where the boy got a job cleaning bristles in a shaving-brush factory. He was clever and hardworking, however, and went on to become a brilliant student at Harvard University. Just over thirty years later he became the Secretary of State of the United States. His name was Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger's rise to importance began when Richard Nixon became President in 1969. He became Nixon's personal adviser in all the United States' dealings with the rest of the world. In 1973 Kissinger officially became Secretary of State, a position he held until Jimmy Carter became President in 1977.

All through the early and middle 1970s Kissinger played a central part in shaping American foreign policy. He helped to form and direct the Nixon government's policy in the later years of the Vietnam War. He prepared the way for détente with communist China. He worked to bring peace between the United States' ally Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Some people believed that Kissinger's boyhood experiences in Germany played an important part in forming his ideas about the kind of world he wanted to shape as Secretary of State. One man who knew him said:

"I think he came out of it with a kind of burning need for order. People in these experiences have a real memory of chaos, of violence and brutality, like the world is collapsing under them. Kissinger, more than most, would probably agree that disorder is worse than injustice."

Kissinger's critics saw him as a showman, whose achievements were more apparent than real. His admirers believed that he was one of the most effective statesmen of the twentieth century.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 134