Henry Kissinger ’50 Remembered As Deft Strategist, Both Celebrated and Reviled on Harvard’s Campus
Henry A. Kissinger ’50, one of the most celebrated and condemned statesmen of the 20th century, died on Nov. 29 in his Connecticut home. He was 100.When Henry A. Kissinger ’50 taught at Harvard, he was always late to class.
As a young Government professor, Kissinger co-taught a seminar on defense policy with the foreign policy expert Morton H. Halperin. Their course convened at 4 p.m. in Langdell Hall.
But each day before class, Halperin and Kissinger would meet in the latter’s office in the Semitic Museum — and Kissinger would stay, talking with Halperin, until 10 minutes after their course was supposed to start.
Only then would Kissinger and Halperin embark on the two-minute drive to Langdell, said Halperin. Until they arrived, the day’s guest speaker would be left alone with the students, unsure whether to begin.
“He needed students to think that he got to class as soon as he could, and was just too busy to get there on time,” Halperin explained. “But in fact, it wasn’t true at all.”
“It was an affliction of Kissinger’s insecurity and need to present himself as very important,” he said.
As a professor, Kissinger juggled his teaching responsibilities with his rocketing star in U.S. foreign policy — one that would eventually lead him to become the most influential secretary of state in U.S. history.
Kissinger, one of the most celebrated and condemned statesmen of the 20th century, died on Nov. 29 in his Connecticut home. He was 100.
Kissinger served as the secretary of state and national security advisor for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. His death leaves behind a complicated legacy. A leading figure in Cold War foreign policy, Kissinger is praised by some as one of America’s greatest strategic minds — and denounced by others as a war criminal responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.
Kissinger had a complicated relationship with Harvard. After graduating from both the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Kissinger spent decades as a faculty member in Harvard’s Government Department. Later in life, he fell out with the University — a relationship that was only repaired decades later.
Kissinger is survived by his wife Nancy Kissinger and his children David and Elizabeth.
Learning from Harvard and History
Early in life, Kissinger’s family fled from Germany to New York City to escape Nazi persecution.
“He had an amazing biography, his own odyssey of having been a Jew that with his family escaped Nazism,” said Graham T. Allison ’62, former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and one of Kissinger’s Ph.D. students.
Kissinger’s experiences as a refugee would shape the way he taught and conducted politics for the rest of his life, said Allison. Whether as a student, professor, or foreign policy titan, Kissinger refused to take his American citizenship for granted.
“He treasured the freedom he found in his adopted land and saw the United States as an unrivaled force for good,” wrote Roger B. Porter, a professor at the Kennedy School who worked with Kissinger during the Ford administration, in a statement that was later published in the Deseret News.
After fighting in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, Kissinger enrolled at Harvard College on the G.I. Bill, where he lived in Adams House. Kissinger used his time at Harvard to better understand the geopolitical forces that shaped his early life.
“He grew up with an international politics of a very extreme time,” said Joseph S. Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School who taught at HKS alongside Kissinger. “Henry’s roots were deep in European realpolitik.”
Realpolitik — a system of politics based on power considerations rather than moral or ideological concerns — defined Kissinger’s political philosophy. In his senior thesis and dissertation, Kissinger examined the role of individuals in shaping history and geostrategic power plays.
His senior thesis — entitled “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant” — still impacts Harvard College students today. It spanned 383 pages, prompting the Government Department to implement its current 30,000-word limit — colloquially called the “Kissinger Rule.”
After receiving his Ph.D., Kissinger remained at Harvard as a professor in the Government Department. Even then, he had one foot on campus and the other in Washington.
“Henry was interested in the students, but not at the cost of his outside activities,” Nye recalled. Even before his time in government, Nye said Kissinger was laser-focused on his reputation and path to foreign policy prominence.
“Henry was always focused on Henry,” Nye added.
Kissinger in Washington
When the newly elected Nixon appointed Kissinger as national security adviser in January 1969, Halperin went from co-teaching with Kissinger at Harvard to serving on the National Security Council alongside him.
Soon after, Halperin said, his relationship with Kissinger started to break down — to the point where his former co-professor gave his name to the FBI for wiretapping.
In November 1969, Halperin left the staff of the National Security Council due to “the inability of Kissinger to define a role for” him.
Halperin continued as an NSC consultant until May 1970, when he resigned because of the U.S.’ continued involvement in Vietnam and invasion of Cambodia — Nixon administration policies that Kissinger oversaw and implemented.
Halperin recalled being disturbed by Kissinger’s approach to foreign policy.
“I do not believe that the civil liberties of either Americans or of the residents of the countries whose governments he was dealing with were a concern to him,” Halperin said. “I don’t think he balanced them at all. He just believed that he could determine what was in the American national interest — which was not what the people of the United States wanted, but what he thought.”
Many Harvard students shared Halperin’s discomfort.
In April 1969, hundreds of Harvard affiliates occupied University Hall to protest the U.S.’ continued involvement in Vietnam. On the night of April 10, 400 police officers stormed the building and forced student protesters out in a violent clash that Mather House Resident Scholar Keith Raffel ’71 said “radicalized” campus.
A year later, an anti-war activist group, who described themselves as a “tribe” of “revolutionary women,” bombed the third floor of the Harvard Semitic Museum because it had once been home to Kissinger’s office.
The bombing — which blew out windows and caused major structural damage to the upper floors of the museum — was condemned by student and University leaders. But Raffel said campus activists shared the outrage behind it, as many perceived Kissinger to be a “war criminal.”
Students were also organizing at campuses across the United States. In March 1971, a nationwide network of students in opposition to the U.S. air assault on Laos set up talks with officials in Washington — including George McGovern, then the Democratic candidate for president. Raffel was selected as Harvard’s representative.
At the meeting, McGovern phoned Kissinger — who offered to meet with students later that day. The students made their case to Kissinger in the White House Situation Room.
“I don’t think we made much progress,” Raffel reflected.
In 1971, Kissinger resigned from his Government professorship because of a rule limiting faculty leaves to two years. In 1973, the department voted to stop reserving a place for him.
That year, Kissinger was appointed secretary of state. On the eve of his confirmation, students wrote in protest to The Crimson.
“The blood of dead and homeless Indochinese is on Kissinger’s hands,” wrote one Harvard student. “He has no place anywhere in the United States government.”
During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger pioneered the policy of detente with the Soviet Union, led the U.S. in opening relations with China, helped end the Middle East’s Yom Kippur War through his policy of “shuttle diplomacy,” and negotiated the Paris Peace Accords between the U.S. and Vietnam.
Alongside his role in the Vietnam War, Kissinger was also closely involved with the U.S. bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 — which killed more than 50,000 Cambodian civilians and whose leftover ordnances kill Cambodians to this day — and supported military dictators in Chile, Pakistan, Argentina, and Indonesia.
When Porter entered the Ford administration, he recalled being impressed by Kissinger’s ability to balance the roles of secretary of state and national security adviser — all while deftly navigating power politics in the White House and on the global stage.
“He was like a chess player who thinks several moves ahead — constantly probing for advantage but equally resisting moves that would involve excessive risk,” Porter wrote.
Porter recounted a meeting of Ford’s cabinet members and other top advisers where Kissinger weighed two foreign policy plans, each proposed by a department he headed.
“‘A fellow cabinet officer observed: ‘Henry, you seem to have difficulty making up your mind,’” wrote Porter. “Kissinger responded: ‘My staff at the National Security Council favors option 1. My staff at the State Department favors option 2. I must keep them happy. Now I will reveal the correct answer.’”
“The room erupted in laughter,” Porter recalled.
A Long Road Back to Cambridge
When Kissinger left the Ford administration in 1977, the Government Department offered him a post — but Kissinger rejected the offer.
Nye was one of the faculty members who voted to bring Kissinger back as a full professor.
“I don’t know all the details, because I saw the part of the elephant that I touched,” Nye cautioned. But, he said, the offer may have left Kissinger feeling slighted.
But he said he thought Kissinger “wanted more than that” — to be appointed by then-President Derek C. Bok as a University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, which would free him from many teaching responsibilities and “allow him to do his outside activities.”
“He left Harvard saying that Harvard rejected him,” Nye said. “The real story was more complicated.”
After his feud with Harvard, Kissinger accepted a position at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. He would not return to Harvard’s campus for 35 years.
In 2001, Kissinger almost came back to Harvard Square — what would have been his first public appearance on campus since joining the Nixon administration. He had scheduled a Harvard Book Store event that June, intending to discuss his new book, “Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century.”
Kissinger canceled the event just days prior because of a scheduling conflict. However, rumors swirled around Harvard Square that Kissinger’s controversial reputation was really to blame.
For months before Kissinger’s events, the Harvard Book Store’s staffers were embroiled in a heated debate over whether it was ethical to platform the former statesman. It culminated in bookstore employees writing battling op-eds in the store’s monthly newsletter, The Crimson reported in 2001.
“An exchange of ideas is the lifeblood of a bookstore, and it should be anathema for us to sponsor an appearance by a man who…has sought to deny freedom of expression to others,” wrote Mark Lamphier — the store’s assistant manager — in one of these columns.
Ten years later, Kissinger finally did return to his alma mater. In 2011, Allison — then dean of the Kennedy School — reached out to the Harvard administration suggesting Kissinger would be willing to mend his rift with the University. President Drew Gilpin Faust invited Kissinger to speak on campus, and he participated in a Q&A session in Sanders Theatre led by Allison and Nye.
“After that event, he returned to campus on a number of occasions, including as a participant in an HKS project on former Secretaries of State that will be part of an important historical record of American foreign policy,” Faust wrote in an email to The Crimson.
Faust described Kissinger as “an extraordinarily influential figure in American foreign policy for more than a half century — from his formal positions in the United States government from the Nixon administration onwards to his influence as a writer and as an advisor to political leaders up until the eve of his death.”
Nye offered a different assessment of Kissinger, who he called a “very complex and complicated man.”
“I’ve tried to have a balanced view toward him — neither hagiography nor demonology,” said Nye. “For me, Henry was a bit of a saint, a bit of a sinner, but aren’t we all?”
Nye paused.
“Well, maybe not. Maybe there wasn’t much saint.”
—Staff writer Adelaide E. Parker can be reached at adelaide.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @adelaide_prkr.
—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com.