Henry Kissinger was the celebrity statesman of the century in which he lived.
That was his doing as much as it was the consequence of the media age in which he lived. He was his own greatest creation. For all his seriousness as a scholar and diplomat, despite the horrific consequences of many of his acts while in power, because of and in spite of those things, Kissinger became a foreign policy icon and an oracle, the ur-soundbite sought for any story about just about anything weighty and geopolitical.
That is a remarkable accomplishment for a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany. It eclipses the success he achieved at Harvard or in government or afterwards as a businessman. It colors all that with stories infused with his personality. He was not the first diplomat to fly between world capitals seeking diplomatic agreements, but when he did it it became something different, “shuttle diplomacy,” as akin to a sporting event in the eyes of the public as it was to previous efforts by any of his predecessors or contemporaries.
