Tunku Varadarajan
WSJ, May 26, 2023
“What Mr. Kissinger sees when he looks at the world today is “disorder.”
Eight years—that’s all the time Henry Kissinger was in public office. From January 1969 to January 1977, Mr. Kissinger was first national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, holding both titles concurrently for more than two years. He was 53 when he cleared his desk at Foggy Bottom to make way for Cyrus Vance. In the 4½ decades since, he has worked as a consultant on strategic relations to governments around the world and consolidated beyond dispute his reputation—first earned when he co-piloted the U.S. opening to China in 1972—as the pre-eminent philosopher of global order and the most original, erudite and hard-nosed statesman of his era.
Mr. Kissinger turns 100 on Saturday, and his appetite for the world he’s spent a lifetime setting to rights is still zestful. We meet at his office four days before his birthday, and he offers swift proof not just of his charm but of his facility as a diplomat. “You never came to see me in my office,” he scolds, reminding me of an invitation he’d made three years ago over dinner at the home of a common friend, my only previous meeting with Mr. Kissinger. I’d dismissed the invitation at the time as a grand old man’s courtesy to a stranger.
The dinner was with Charles Hill, a onetime speechwriter for Mr. Kissinger and later a senior adviser to another secretary of state, George Shultz. The memory of Hill, who died in 2021, prompts Mr. Kissinger to offer an observation on Shultz, who lived to be 100 and also died in 2021. Shultz’s approach to international affairs was “really not the same as mine,” Mr. Kissinger says. “He looked at the economic motivations. I look at the historical and moral motivations of the people involved.”
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