THIS SATURDAY, my father, Henry Kissinger, turns 100a of his birthday, which may have a sense of inevitability to anyone who knows his strength of character and his love of historical symbolism. Not only has he outlived most of his colleagues, many eminent critics and students, but he has also remained tirelessly active throughout the last decade.
Even the pandemic hasn’t slowed him down: As of 2020, he’s completed two books and started work on a third. Earlier this week he returned from the Bilderberg Club conference in Lisbon in time to attend a series of centenary celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.
Although he has been characterized as a cold realist, he is anything but detached. He deeply believes in concepts like patriotism, loyalty and bipartisanship. It pains him to see the viciousness in today’s public discourse and the collapse of the art of diplomacy.
My father’s longevity is especially admirable when you consider the schedule he followed throughout his adult life, which included a diet of many sausages and schnitzels, a relentlessly stressful career, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never as participant.
So how is his continued mental and physical vitality explained? He has an unquenchable curiosity that keeps him actively engaged with the world. His mind is constantly identifying and struggling with the existential challenges of the times. In the 1950s, the major issue was the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their threat to humanity. About five years ago, as a promising young man of 95, my father became obsessed with the philosophical and practical implications of artificial intelligence.
In recent years he has pondered the implications of this new technology, in a way that sometimes reminded his grandchildren of the stories of the Terminator movies. While diving into the technical aspects of artificial intelligence with the intensity of an MIT graduate student, he enriched the debate about its uses with his unique philosophical and historical insight.
The other secret of my father’s endurance is his sense of mission. Although he has been characterized as a cold realist, he is anything but detached. He deeply believes in concepts like patriotism, loyalty and bipartisanship. It pains him to see the viciousness in today’s public discourse and the collapse of the art of diplomacy.
Even when Cold War tensions were at their height, Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin was a regular visitor to our home. The two would occasionally play games of chess in between negotiations on issues affecting the entire planet. My father was under no illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime, but these regular discussions helped de-escalate tensions at a time when the nuclear superpowers seemed on a collision course. I wish there was such a regular dialogue between the leading players in today’s global tensions.
Apart from chess, however, diplomacy was never a game for my father. He practiced it with dedication and perseverance born from personal experience. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he had lost 13 family members and countless friends in the Holocaust. He returned to his native Germany as an American soldier, participating in the liberation of the Achlem concentration camp near Hanover. Next month, he will return to Fürth, where he will lay a wreath at the grave of his grandfather, who did not escape.
I know that no son can be truly objective about his father’s legacy, but I am proud of his political acumen, his consistent principles and his deep awareness of historical reality. This is the mission he has pursued for the better part of a century, using his rare mind and inexhaustible energy to serve the country that saved his family and led him on a journey beyond his wildest dreams.
