The 4 Final Acts of Henry Kissinger
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Kissinger waves to guests at the 78th Annual Alfred E. Smith Dinner in October, in New York. Photo: Timothy Fadek/AP
Henry Kissinger was exiting through the bar of the St. Regis Hotel flanked by an entourage, like a minor celebrity or a royal, with a bodyguard, a handler, and what looked to be viziers. He was keynoting a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser for the McCain Institute, which had barred media and withheld the location, but I had figured out where it was being held, put on a tie, and brought a notebook.
“Are you a stalker? Are you really a stalker?” asked his consigliere, Lyndsay Howard.
Was I? My friends and family seemed to think so. I was only fixated on Henry Kissinger because so much of Washington and Wall Street, and so many world leaders, still were. I had been increasingly fascinated with him since I stood outside his 100th-birthday party at the New York Public Library in June. It had been closed to the press, its glitzy festivities a tightly held secret. But I went anyway and saw two members of President Biden’s Cabinet and a coterie of politicos and Fortune 500 A-listers walking in. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and an old friend of Kissinger, had fallen off the guest list and was almost turned away by a bouncer, before he phoned a friend inside to let him in. For his toast, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, had asked ChatGPT to write a poem about Kissinger, who was born in 1923, and the century in which he lived in — in the verse of the King James Bible. Samantha Power, the Biden administration’s voice of human rights, delivered her own toast for him there, too.
Ever since, I thought that tracking Kissinger’s movements was key to understanding his power, and by extension the dark underbelly of the American empire.
All year long, the world’s most connected people had been serving him birthday cake. He had served until the day he died on Biden’s Defense Policy Board, and the international foreign-policy establishment still revolved around him. Xi Jinping threw a five-hour birthday party. Antony Blinken invited him to a banquet for Narendra Modi. This fall, Kissinger joined Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a boardroom table of New York business titans, and that week he also held a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. He was history incarnate, from the nuclear arms race to the opening up with China, and maybe at 100, that’s enough to anchor a $5,000-a-head fundraiser.
A half-century after he’d been in government, he had not only maintained but expanded his influence. That was perhaps less because of his intellect or his accomplishments, per se. He knew better than any statesman of his generation how to rub shoulders, cozy up to financiers, and work the press, right up until the final days of his life. Even when the room is in stitches, few if anyone can remember what he said afterwards. He became famous for being famous.
What turned out to be his farewell tour this year didn’t just say something about his polarizing career or the decaying tenets of U.S. Cold War policy, which are largely in place. It said something about how it was possible to dodge all of the credible allegations of war crimes and straight-up bad policy decisions and still be celebrated by the powerful. He had set the tone for American leaders to come that they could wriggle out of tough questioning and avoid any accountability whatsoever right until the end.
Inside the Council on Foreign Relations, bankers with Ferragamo ties, lawyers in navy blazers, and Vera Blinken, Antony’s mother, munched on grilled salmon and fruit salad in the foyer used for Logan Roy’s midtown apartment in Succession until it was time to see the keynote speaker.
It was October 5, the 50th anniversary of the surprise Arab attacks on Israel. When the doors opened, everyone rushed for seats, bickering over who had left their briefcase where. Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, snagged one in the front row, and Kissinger was already onstage rumpled in a mahogany wood chair, ready to be interviewed by a biographer whose wife had once worked for him — foreign policy is a small world.
Kissinger was lucid and offered minute-by-minute recollections of the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Golda Meir, and Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat. He spoke very slowly, with a thick Bavarian accent, though sometimes when you caught the centenarian with a competent sound technician, he could be coy enough to make a room laugh. This was one of those days, though it was nerd stuff. “Now, about the outbreak of the war itself, when I became secretary of State, I didn’t know that the State Department had an intelligence unit,” he said, and everyone laughed.
He said a lot of words and told anecdotes that in the moment riveted the room, but there was no great substance about how to solve perennial problems that would explode again in less than 48 hours. Indeed, he was holding court about the fact that he had been in the room, not what he would do or advise policy-makers now. Historians had long noted that his policy-making in this period had entirely sidelined the question of Palestinians.
But his recollections of being in Meir’s kitchen were enough to enthrall a certain type of audience and deflect from the bigger questions of what Kissinger’s career really meant. I wanted to ask about the coup he had backed that same year in Chile, too, and the decimation of Cambodia and Laos by U.S. warplanes’ indiscriminate bombing just before that. If Kissinger can detail how strategic he was a half-century ago, could he also reflect on Pinochet? I raised my hand during the Q&A and didn’t get called on, as he fielded softballs.
So, on the sidewalk, as two courtiers escorted him into a black Mercedes sedan, I went for it. I asked Kissinger to reflect on Chile, Cambodia, Laos, the alleged war crimes. Kissinger has always been expert at creating a media persona. (He had avoided critical interviews, somehow managing to never get asked on radio or TV about Christopher Hitchens’s polemic, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.) He looked right at me, unflappable, perhaps since he’d been asked about this stuff for 50 years. The assistants looked more flustered. He said nothing, the car door closed, and his driver pulled away.
In the last few years of his life, Kissinger pivoted to talking about artificial intelligence and the future of technology. It seemed a bit incongruous for a man reared on Metternich, but it showed his ability to update his grift for the present. During this night at the McCain Institute’s dinner, he would share the stage with Schmidt, a billionaire investor in AI and especially its military applications, and Mike Bloomberg.
As I waited outside the St. Regis, I wondered how many times Kissinger had dropped by its King Cole Bar for a cocktail in the past century on his way to the club, or coming from his $1 million-a-year office on the 26th floor of a nearby Park Avenue skyscraper, in a suite since the ’80s, whose lease and was to terminate upon death. Maybe en route home to his redoubt at the city’s most exclusive co-op, River House.
So many black SUVs were pulling up that it was hard to figure out who was off to the AI lecture and who across the street to the Polo Bar. Ronald Lauder breezed. Rick Davis, another Republican honcho and investor, didn’t want to chat. Then came the asset managers, philanthropists, and a Macedonian mayor. Bloomberg, with a lapel pin of the U.S. and Ukraine flags, was trailed by two large bodyguards. They pushed me aside, as I told Bloomberg I wanted to hear about his vision for the Defense Innovation Board. “I’m sure you would,” he replied, and he slipped through the gilded revolving door.
An hour or so passed, and the pinstripes and pants suits started coming down the steps of the St. Regis. They were all smiling and thrilled to have witnessed Kissinger, but not a person could remember exactly what he or his AI buds Bloomberg and Schmidt, who likes to fancy himself as Biden’s shadow tech czar, had said. Maybe it was because he didn’t have much to say. Actual experts in machine learning had panned the 2021 book he had co-authored on AI. Of course, the guests who had shelled out $2,500 a head were not really there to hear a 100-year-old veteran diplomat’s insights on AI but to bask in the aura of Henry Kissinger.
That’s when I turned and glimpsed Kissinger and his entourage leaving the bar, and Lyndsay Howard came up to me. The war-crimes question must have gotten to them.
“Are you going to show up at every event?” she said to me. “Fortunately, he has people who care about him, who have read his books.”
It’s true, I hadn’t read all 3,500 pages of his memoirs, and even if I had, I don’t think they would grant me an interview about Pinochet.
Kissinger has long been deeply polarizing. J. Robert Oppenheimer dismissed him and the new field of nuclear strategy he was a leading scholar of in the 1950s and ’60s — Kissinger popularized the idea that tactical nukes could be a deterrent in his best-selling 1957 book — as “a lot of nonsense.”
Daniel Ellsberg, who died earlier this year at 92, had been a peer of Harvard and a lifelong critic. “Kissinger has no originality whatsoever as an intellect,” he once told Rolling Stone. “I read all of his writings, since they were within the field that I was working in, and thought of them as extremely derivative.”
Ellsberg would go on to leak the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of how bad the Vietnam War was really going, which led Kissinger to call him “the most dangerous man in America.” Ellsberg challenged him to read the actual papers, but he refused.
And even some of those who attended Kissinger’s 100th bash, like retired ambassador Dick Viets, spared no criticism. “He is a person of exceptional talent and knowledge, but also a man who was not nearly as wise, I think this is the word I want to use, as he managed to make the world believe,” Viets said in an oral history. “U.S. policy, as a consequence, enjoyed both the benefits and the downside of that man’s power.”
A day earlier, Kissinger made headlines in Europe when he said it “was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different culture and religion” into Germany.
A black Mercedes whisked him away.
Then Schmidt walked by. I asked about the parallel between Cambodia and Israeli bombs then falling on Gaza. He had also met Netanyahu in September and even agreed to work as an AI adviser to the Israeli government.
“Can you stop filming me, please?” Schmidt asked.
He had made more than $20 billion from Google’s surveillance technologies and didn’t want to talk about his vast investments in military tech, or even what he had said on the stage tonight with Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger’s life is an object lesson in how indiscriminate bombings, coups, and mass killing (also by Indonesia and Pakistan with his support) apparently doesn’t hinder a career in government or business. So it vaguely made sense that the Park Avenue Armory, where a national-guard regiment in the 19th century protected the Upper East Side’s mansions, was where he had yet another birthday party.
It was the third Thursday in a row that he had gotten the star treatment — and by far the most lofty, with some 850 guests arriving at the Al Smith Dinner. He was one of the few honorees who had taken that grand podium twice, first fêted in 1974, sitting alongside William F. Buckley Jr., Henry Cabot Lodge, and Robert Moses.
Now, Archbishop Timothy Dolan was welcoming up Eric Adams, Chuck Schumer, and Letitia James; Stock Exchange president Lynn Martin, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and George Pataki; as well as Ray Kelly and Bob Kraft. Brian Kilmeade, another guest, must have been jealous up there, because when Peggy Noonan was called, she got the most cheers.
They all took their seats at three long dinner tables on a tiered dais, before an enormous American flag. The five-foot-tall centerpieces towered over the scores of tables below, as Cole Porter’s music filled the room. The gala raised $7 million for charities, and Dolan told reporters that $150,000 would be given to the United Jewish Appeal to support Israel. I asked whether there would be donations to Palestinians in Gaza. “Right now, there is an acute need in Israel,” he told me, “but we don’t forget the others, either.” Palestinians didn’t come up the rest of the night.
Among this crowd, Kissinger was seen as a peacemaker. “He spent his life trying to see that the assault and the tragedy in Israel wouldn’t happen,” Dolan said. “I’m sure his heart is broken. He spent a good proportion of his half-century in service to bring peace to the Middle East.”
This Catholic fundraiser usually brings some levity, and most famously on presidential years, the speakers roast one another and themselves. “It’s wonderful to be here for the Al Smith Foundation bar mitzvah!” said Rob Speyer, a real-estate mogul and megadeveloper, who like Kissinger is Jewish. But Speyer and other eminences avoided ribbing about war crimes entirely and praised Kissinger’s life. The only zingers were about his age. “In my business, we call him ‘highly coveted prewar,’” Speyer said.
After the grilled filet and artichokes, a banker stepped in to fill Bloomberg’s shoes (he was away with COVID) and lauded the 100-year-old’s “social calendar” as “busier than most of the people in this room,” having just taken a 20-hour flight back from China, where he met Xi Jinping.
When Kissinger began speaking at 9:20 p.m, he looked exhausted. He spoke more slowly than usual, his face on four humongous screens. He delivered a downer of a speech on global threats.
On China: “We must remember that the two of us together have the ability to destroy humanity.”
On Russia and Ukraine: “We have a similar situation.”
On artificial intelligence: “Created by man, and it has the capacity to destroy humanity.”
It was almost like an Animaniacs parody.
Suddenly, there was a cake, and Mary Erdoes, a JPMorgan Chase exec, led an off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
Since his death, the internet has been full of vitriol for Kissinger for what he did in Vietnam and so many other countries. His childhood home in Washington Heights has a one-star rating (presumably since so many people see him as the devil incarnate?). But this was not the case here. For the almost 1,000 people at the Armory, singing to him like a big birthday boy almost six months after his 100th, Kissinger was everything. Then they descended the stairs, most clutching a copy of his new book Leadership.
I spoke with young lawyers from white-shoe firms, a couple of visiting diocese staffers from Minnesota, and a woman wearing a jewelry store’s worth of diamonds, smoking. Then I bumped into Mike Mullen, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The rest of the people on the dais must have snuck out through the back.
The next week, Kissinger was supposed to speak at Rice University with two other former secretaries of State, Hillary Clinton and James Baker.
In the lead-up, as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza intensified, Rice students protested the trio. The university students tied the new war to Kissinger’s in teach-ins and petitions, calling on the school and all of Houston to “Reject the Genocide Gala.” (Kissinger does not like protests and canceled a 2004 talk at Georgetown when students rallied.)
He said an injury prevented him from traveling to Texas. By prerecorded video, he gave a summary of his now usual (to me) foreign-policy speech. “This celebratory evening takes place in a period of profound international disorder,” he said. “These challenges notwithstanding, America requires capacities of changing the course for a more peaceful and prosperous world.”
He died as he lived, talking often to the world’s elite but without ever having to answer to the people affected by his years of power. The only time the powerful stopped listening to him, long after they should have, was when he was finally dead.
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