Henry Kissinger Was a Complex Man for a Complex Century
The late secretary of state knew that diplomacy inevitably boiled down to a choice between evils.
Henry Kissinger and Niall Ferguson at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in November 2019.
Photographer: Takaaki Iwabu/Bloomberg
Henry Kissinger, who died Wednesday at 100, was as multifaceted as the century he lived through and outlived.
Having spent nearly 20 years researching and writing his life, I have come to see that he requires a kind of Cubist treatment. Like Picasso’s Desmoiselles d’Avignon, you need to see him from multiple angles at the same time fully to comprehend him. And just as only the 20th century could have produced Picasso and made his vision not merely intelligible but wildly popular, so no other century could have produced a man like Kissinger.