Henry Kissinger who has died age 100 was one of the most powerful public figures of the past half century.
It was a power based in his willingness, as America’s National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State, to put himself in the middle of major Cold War crises and take controversial decisions that allowed dictatorships to flourish, all in the pursuit of maintaining a “balance of power” between the United States and its communist rivals.

He was controversial in almost every area of his life not least in the relationship of his Jewishness and his diplomatic work on behalf of his country of refuge, the United States.

The trajectory of his life was astonishing. Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the Bavarian town of Fürth, near Nuremberg, on 27 May 1923.
His father was a teacher at the gymnasium and his family were comfortably off.
The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 changed all that. Jews were dismissed from teaching positions and step by violent step their rights were taken away. The teenage Kissinger experienced the violence and fear that all Jews did in that dreadful time.

In 1938, several months before Kristallnacht, Kissinger and his immediate family left Germany and were able to emigrate to New York City. Not all of his relations were so fortunate, Thirteen perished in the Holocaust.

The Kissingers settled in Washington Heights, the area of Manhattan above the George Washington Bridge. The neighbourhood was known locally as the Fourth Reich because there were so many German Jewish refugees living there.

Young Kissinger attended an Orthodox shul, went to a local high school, and did his best to try and fit into his new country.

Like many brilliant Jewish students in the city, he enrolled in City College of New York, in part because tuition was free but also because in those days America’s elite universities, such as Harvard, operated quotas restricting Jewish enrollment.

He was in the middle of an accounting course when he was drafted into the Army in 1943.
Kissinger’s rise to power began shortly after his induction when he became the protege of an older, fellow emigre, Fritz Kraemer, like himself a private, but already on the staff of Major General Alexander Bolling, commander of the 84th Infantry Division.

Once deployed to Europe, Kissinger, through Kraemer’s help, became an indispensible part of Bolling’s intelligence staff.

He saw action at the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the Bronze Star for his intelligence work tracking down Gestapo officers.

Following the war, he enrolled at Harvard. With the new challenges of the Cold War and Nuclear Age, Harvard was remaking itself from a WASP gentleman’s club into a training ground for America’s policy elites. Jews were more welcome.

Kissinger, now 27, did his undergraduate and doctoral degrees there. His dissertation, “A World Restored” was published and gained him notice and he was fast-tracked onto the faculty.

“A World Restored” looks at the Congress of Vienna, the peace conference that redrew the map of Europe after the Napoleonic wars.

The treaty negotiated there did bring a period of stability to western Europe and restored the balance of power among its big nations but at a price.

Nations such as Poland were partitioned, absolute monarchs returned to their thrones, and secret police empowered in the German-speaking world to curtail dissent.

In Kissinger’s view these restrictions on freedom were a pragmatic price worth paying for stability. One of his many biographers, Walter Isaacson, says his views were a natural outgrowth of his first-hand experience of the destruction of Europe.

“Given a choice of order or justice,” Issacson wrote, “he would choose order. He had seen too clearly the consequences of disorder.”

His doctoral thesis was also personally revealing. Kissinger wrote: “The statesman manipulates reality;” and “Anyone wishing to affect events must be an opportunist to some extent.”

Now a Harvard academic, Kissinger, aggressively courted opportunities. He charmed a series of patrons, including Nelson Rockefeller, who introduced him into the upper echelons of Washington policy-making circles.

When Richard Nixon became president in 1968 he appointed Kissinger his National Security Adviser. This position gave him the chance to “manipulate reality,” often in secret.

The Vietnam War was the first crisis Kissinger needed to address. The war had become very unpopular in America, and not just among the young.

He developed the concept of Vietnamization, slowly withdrawing American troops and letting the South Vietnamese Army fight the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong insurgents.

To speed this process along Kissinger convinced Nixon to bomb North Vietnamese supply routes just inside the country’s border with Cambodia.

In theory this was supposed to create time for the South Vietnamese Army to improve their fighting skills by disrupting the flow of arms to the NVA, who were already in control of substantial parts of the south.

The pair decided not to inform Congress about this expansion of the war. But the scale of the bombing was too big to be kept secret for long.

Protests erupted on American campuses. Four students were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio.

In Cambodia the price was even more severe. The bombing destablized the government and led to the growth of the Khmer Rouge.

Kissinger became a hate figure for a generation of Americans but in the macho environment of the Nixon White House he was seen has having the “balls” to take tough decisions.

He was also admired for his bureaucratic infighting skills. Nixon made him the lead negotiator on ending the Vietnam War, not the Secretary of State.

While those negotiations went on Kissinger was steering Nixon, an arch-anticommunist, towards a policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

He also built up via secret, personal contact a channel of communication with the leaders of the People’s Republic of China.

In 1972, he accompanied Nixon on his trip to China and his historic meeting with Mao Tse-Tung.

This diplomatic initiative was not about furthering world peace or bringing about an end to totalitarianism in these countries, rather it was meant to balance the two communist powers against each other. Kissinger was emulating what happened at Vienna in 1815.

Kissinger was now one of the most important and powerful men in the world. He was named Time Magazine’s man of the year in 1972.

He was also indispensible to Nixon. But there was a trade-off for this power and position.
Nixon was an antisemite. In Kissinger’s presence he called him, “my Jew boy,” “kike” and discussed “the damn Jew press”.

Kissinger, who had been beaten and abused by his German schoolmates for being a Jew, endured the insults.

The year 1973 put Kissinger’s Jewishness under the microscope. Early in the year, he and Nixon met with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir who asked for their help in getting the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel.

After the meeting Kissinger said, according to transcripts released decades later, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy.

”And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

In September 1973, Nixon appointed him Secretary of State. He was the first Jew to hold that position. Three weeks later, on Yom Kippur, Israel was invaded from the north and south by Syria and Egypt.

The first days of the Yom Kippur War were the closest the Jewish State has ever come to annihilation. Kissinger was informed immediately about the invasion but delayed telling Nixon, possibly because he feared Nixon would push him sideways in the decision-making process. The President had made comments about Kissinger’s potential dual loyalties.

But there was more at stake in Kissinger’s mind: the balance of power.

Egypt was a Soviet client. But in the months before the war Egypt’s President Anwar al-Sadat had opened a secret backchannel to Kissinger.

Sadat signalled an interest in negotiating a separate peace with Israel under a US umbrella.

Prying Egypt out of the Soviet orbit was a strategic prize for Kissinger.

However, Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir was not interested in Sadat’s overture. Sadat grew impatient and mobilized for war in the hope of pressuring Israel into negotiations.

In the first days of the war, as Israeli positions in the Sinai and on the Golan were overrun, Kissinger initially resisted calls for America to resupply Israel with arms.

Like many in Washington he assumed that Israel would be able to quickly reverse the situation militarily. In addition through his contact with Sadat he believed the Egyptians were not interested in pressing into Israel.

But the military situation remained dire. Kissinger and others in the Nixon administration had underestimated just how devastating the initial attack had been to Israel’s military.

Ultimately the US resupplied Israel with arms and the Israelis rolled back the Egyptian army to the other isde of the Suez Canal.

Now the crisis escalated further as Russia signalled it might send troops to intervene.

At this point Kissinger, to deter the Russians, worked to put the US military at DEFCON 3, the highest alert before a declaration of war. DEFCON 3 meant nuclear forces were ready for war.

He enlisted Nixon’s Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig, to push the decision.

The men did not tell Nixon because while the war was going on, Nixon was preoccupied with the Watergate scandal.

Four decades later Kissinger would recall for an Israeli documentary, “For those of us who conducted foreign policy, we had a Vietnamese problem, we had a Chinese challenge, we had a cold war with Russia, and then, on top of this, the Arab-Israeli war at a moment when the President was getting under the beginning of an impeachment proceeding.”

Luckily the Soviets were aware of Nixon’s problems with Watergate. They rightly saw the DEFCON 3 move as a bluff and their response was to do nothing.

After nearly three weeks of conflict, Israel had reversed its losses. General Ariel Sharon’s troops had encircled Egypt’s Third Army on the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal.

The time for peace talks had come. This was Kissinger’s moment. No one was as well positioned – through his personal contacts and the knowledge that he had the real decision making power in Washington – to shape the Middle East.

He signalled very clearly the US would be even-handed in overseeing negotiations.

“The conditions that produced this war were clearly intolerable to the Arab nations,” he told a press conference.

“In the process of negotiations it will be necessary to make substantial concessions.”

The crisis was not quite over. Syria refused to attend a peace conference in Geneva. So Kissinger decided to invest his personal authority flying from one to one meetings with Arab leaders to relay their thoughts to the Israelis as neither side would meet the other face to face.

This shuttle diplomacy led to Israel pulling back to its side of the Canal and set the template for future land for peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt and, ultimately, Sadat’s historic trip to Jersualem in 1977.

The results of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy led to criticism from some in the Jewish community. An anonymous rabbi was quoted in the New York Post: “He is a Jew but it’s as if he had a lobotomy on that part of himself.”

Menachem Begin in a speech to the Knesset said of the Secretary of State: “You are a Jew. You are not the first to reach a high position in your country of residence … there were such Jews [in the past] who out of a complex feared lest non-Jews charge them with acting for their people, and therefore did the opposite.”

Following Nixon’s resignation, Kissinger continued as Secretary of State in Gerald Ford’s administration. When Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in 1976, Kissinger left government service.

For a while, Kissinger remained close to the centre of power.

But in the 1980s Kissinger’s influence on America’s foreign policy ebbed. A new generation of policy-makers followed Ronald Reagan to Washington.

Many were refugees from Warsaw Bloc countries and hated the idea of détente. They wanted the end of the Soviet Union, not accomodation with it.

Now that he was out of the Washington loop, he used his contact book to set up Kissinger & Associates, a consulting firm, to advise business clients and goverrnments around the world and took time to write more than a dozen books.

As the decades went by and his health remained strong, he created a niche for himself as a consigliere to whoever was in power.

Most recently and publicly he was praised by Hillary Clinton for his wise counsel. But he also remained a figure of genuine hate. In a recent Democratic Primary debate, Clinton touted her contacts with him. Her opponent, Bernie Sanders, replied: "I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.”

The debate over Kissinger’s life and his legacy is not likely to become less contentious any time in the near future. He wanted to exercise power, he achieved it.

He would not have been surprised by the hatred his decisions caused. He would have known that great men, like great countries, don’t have friends … they just have interests.