He has finished two books since the outbreak of Covid and started working on a third. Last week he returned from the Bilderberg Conference in Lisbon in time to embark on the celebrations that will take him from New York to London and his hometown of Fürth, Bavaria.
Henry Kissinger, author of the famous phrase 'power is the greatest aphrodisiac', turns one hundred years old on May 27.
Statesman or criminal? The legacy of the Machiavellian former American secretary of state continues to be debated between those who consider him a diplomatic genius and those who consider him an evil genius. Astute manipulator and still influential, for the former fifteen-year-old Jew fleeing Europe on the eve of World War II, the world is a gigantic puzzle in which each piece plays an important and distinct role towards a single end: the USA as a world superpower even at the price of realpolitik interventions on the world chessboard judged by many brutal and illegitimate, such as the bombing and invasion of Cambodia and support for Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état in Chile that defenestrated Salvador Allende.
For political scientist Robert Kaplan, Kissinger was the greatest Bismarckian statesman of the twentieth century. With a keen eye also on Italy, of which Kissinger, a close friend of Gianni Agnelli, appreciated the role in the Atlantic Pact despite having the most powerful Communist Party in the West.
Kissinger turns 100
In the Washington Post, his son David, wondering about the exceptional physical and mental vitality of a man who buried admirers and detractors in spite of a diet based on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, identified the recipe in the inexhaustible paternal curiosity for the existential challenges of the moment: from the threat of atomic bombs in the 50s to the artificial intelligence on which two years ago he wrote the penultimate book, 'The Age of AI: and Our Human Future', followed by 'Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy'.
As a child, it was said, he was too shy to speak in public. A foreigner in his new homeland after fleeing Germany in 1938, Heinz became Henry and learned to express himself in perfect English while always retaining the German accent. He made his way first to Harvard, then to Washington, until he reached, thanks to Nelson Rockefeller, the roof of the world at the service of two presidents: Richard Nixon and, after Watergate, Gerald Ford.
Kissinger concentrated every negotiation in his hands, making the work of the diplomatic network superfluous: from the first détente towards the USSR to the thaw with China, culminating in Nixon's trip to Beijing. The Paris agreements for the ceasefire in Vietnam after almost 60,1977 US deaths earned him a controversial Nobel Peace Prize: two jurors resigned in protest.
Kissinger was in fact a shadow president, even if the desk of the Oval Office always remained an impossible mirage for him because he was not born in the United States. Ford's defeat and the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter marked the end of his public career, not foreign policy engagement through groups like the Trilateral. After leaving the government in <>, Kissinger founded the renowned consulting firm Kissinger Associates, through whose revolving door ministers and undersecretaries passed and whose clients were world governments large and small.