Kissinger, Henry (1923–)

Henry Kissinger was a U.S. policy maker who has received considerable criticism for supporting dictatorships in Latin America and Asia while serving as the national security advisor and secretary of state during the 1970s. Born in Germany in 1923, Kissinger and his family moved to New York City to escape Nazi repression. After earning a PhD, he taught international relations at Harvard. Advising New York's Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s, Kissinger became acquainted with Richard Nixon. When Nixon won the U.S. presidency in 1968, he appointed Kissinger as his national security advisor. In 1973, Nixon also appointed Kissinger secretary of state. Despite the resignation of Nixon in 1974, Kissinger continued in this position until 1977 under the administration of Nixon's successor Gerald Ford. Possibly his most significant foreign policy achievement, Kissinger and Nixon reestablished in 1972 relations with communist China. In 1973, Kissinger, along with North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho, won the Nobel Prize for negotiating an end to the war in Vietnam, even though Tho did not accept the award and hostilities continued until 1975. Since the end of the Vietnam War, critics of Kissinger have noted that he supported the unlawful bombing of Cambodia, Vietnam's neighbor, which allowed the brutal dictatorship Khmer Rogue to gain power and commit genocide.

While Kissinger has been closely tied with the Vietnam War and Asia, his support for dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s has received notable scrutiny. In 1970, socialist Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidency causing concern in the United States about the spread of communism in South America. Kissinger and the Nixon administration imposed severe economic sanctions to weaken the democratically elected government. When Augusto Pinochet, leader of Chile's armed forces, overthrew Allende's government in 1973, the United States immediately supported the military government. Even though the Pinochet regime openly tortured and killed its political opponents, Kissinger continued aid to Chile and never denounced the brutal, undemocratic tactics. Later, in the 1970s, the Argentine military took over its government. To quell opposition and communism, the armed forces kidnapped, killed, and disappeared leftist students, intellectuals, and workers. Later declassified documents revealed that Kissinger told his Argentine counterpart that the United States would support the regime because of its anticommunist stance. He only urged the dictatorship to "get back to normal procedures" before the U.S. Congress investigated human rights abuses. Moreover, when the U.S. ambassador in Argentina protested the human rights violations, Kissinger threatened to fire him.

Kissinger's actions in Latin America have continued to raise controversy in the early twenty-first century. A court in Spain brought charges against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was in the United Kingdom at the time, for the murder of Spanish citizens. While the United Kingdom allowed Pinochet to return to Chile, Spain's action set a precedent for holding policy makers accountable for human rights violations. Instead of answering a French court's questions in 2001 about the disappearance of French citizens in Pinochet's Chile, Kissinger left the country. Several courts in Spain, Argentina, and Chile would like Kissinger to testify regarding his knowledge of state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America and Asia. A Spanish court in 2002 tried to have Kissinger extradited. Despite these legal issues, Kissinger's consulting firm works with major corporations and Kissinger regularly advised President George W. Bush during the U.S. war in Iraq.

See alsoAllende Gossens, Salvador; Kissinger Commission; Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garcés, Joan E., and Christopher Hitchens. La intervención de Estados Unidos en Chile. Chile: Editorial 30 Años, 2003.

Hanhimäki, Jussi M. The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Suri, Jeremi. Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

                                             Byron Crites