So I have this really brainy coworker who knows a butt load about history and he seems to know a bunch of Washington types and he said to me today that, "there are only really two diplomats working in the world that are truly elite - Lavrov and Kissinger."
I understand that this is probably an exaggeration, but my surprise was that he - and upon my further reading many others - still consider Kissinger to be the sort of Ultimate Voice in the US government over the last 50+ years when it comes to Foreign Anything. My further research has Kissinger in rooms with Kushner in 2017 acting on behalf of the United States, and his modern presence shocked me.
Is Kissinger's modern influence being overstated by my coworker? If it isn't, how is it even possible that Henry Kissinger (who in my 1993-born brain is synonymous with NIXON/SEVENTIES and hardly anything more) has carried his influence all the way to present day in his nineties? Half the time I hear about him he's being accused of war crimes, the other half speaks of him in the past tense.
To be brief and redundant, my question is: I usually associate Kissinger with the 70s, but he is still considered not only relevant but essential to US foreign policy. What did he do in the 80s and 90s to maintain his importance (as anything after 1998 is not allowed to be discussed on this sub)?
The thing about Kissinger and his association with Nixon is that Kissinger didn't go down with the proverbial Watergate ship. In the immediate years after Watergate Nixon was pretty much ostracised. It wasn't until the mid-eighties that Nixon slowly got accepted for his foreign policy expertise again, and only in a private capacity, as a speaker and author. He did do some unofficial work advising Reagan on diplomacy with Gorbachev but other than that he was never really involved with government again. Kissinger meanwhile was mostly involved with academia, although he also has involvement in several consulting firms. His only official involvement with the US government came following the September 11 attacks. In 2002 the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States was established to investigate the attacks with Kissinger as chairman, but he stepped down after only a few weeks to avoid having to divulge his client list as a political consultant.
Kissenger managed to avoid the stain of Watergate. He has been accused of war crimes, mostly over his role in planning the Cambodia bombings. But without Watergate looming over him he has always maintained a respected voice in foreign relationships. He pulled off what was probably the biggest coup in post-World War II diplomatic relations by opening up diplomacy with the Peoples' Republic of China. The amount of manoeuvring that took, outside of the public eye, has earned him the respect of even his most vocal critics. No matter what their opinion on the legality of the policies he has been involved in, he has always been given at least grudging acknowledgement for his accomplishments. Perhaps no other moment highlights this than the 2016 Democratic primary debates. Hillary Clinton pushed her foreign policy credentials by talking about the fact that Kissinger advised her and approved of her work as secretary of state, with Sanders replying that he was proud that Kissinger wasn't a friend of his and wouldn't advice him.
The problem with quantifying something like Kissinger's influence is that while certain facts, like his constant involvement advising top level US officials, are easy to establish, the consequences of his advice, how relevant it actually is, and what influence it has, whether positive or negative, is almost impossible to quantify. Furthermore, by necessity, a lot of his work has been carried out in secret. There's still a lot we don't know. There's a famous story about Mao offering to export ten million Chinese women to the United States. This came from papers released by the State Department in 2008. When Mao was reminded of the fact that his derogatory comments about Chinese women would cause disapproval he and Kissinger calmly agreed to have them stricken from the record. Obviously that hasn't actually happened, but who knows what has been removed?
There are three books on Kissinger that I can recommend: The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House by Seymour Hersh, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy by Jussi Hanhimäki and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson. All three books provide different angles and none of them tell the complete story, but all of them provide interesting analyses of both Kissinger as a person and as a diplomat.