In 1977 Kissinger was instrumental in making progress in Arab Israeli peace when he got President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt to travel to Jerusalem in November 1977 and in a speech at the Israeli Knesset (parliament), addressed the Israeli people with a call for reconciliation and peace.. This led to the Camp David Accords where Formal negotiations ensued the following September when Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin joined U.S. President Jimmy Carter at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.and ultimately a 1979 peace agreement between Egypt (Anwar el-Sadat) and Israel shifting the balance of power in the Middle East.
1973 - Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State and Le Duc Tho, Special adviser to the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris Peace Conferences in 1968-73 won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Kissinger declined the prize on grounds that his country was still not at peace.
1974 Kissinger went with Ford in 1974 to Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, where the president met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and agreed to a basic framework for a strategic arms pact. The agreement capped Kissinger's pioneering efforts at détente that led to an easing of U.S.-Soviet tensions.
Criticism:
Kissinger played a signifiant role in the overthrow of governments in Cambodia and Chile, which resulted in brutal replacements and signifiant loss of life.
Kissinger’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to cut off supply routes for the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians − and set path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge.
In the 70's Kissingers was concerned the free election of Salvador Allende, a pro-Cuba socialist in Chile, the first democratically elected socialist in the world would result in the spread of socialism in Latin American and Europe.
Kissinger was the chief architect of efforts to overthrow Allende that paved the way for Gen. Augusto Pinochet to sieze power in a military coup.
Under Pinochet’s regime in Chile, thousands of people were tortured, and over 3,000 people died or disappeared due to political violence. An estimated 200,000 Chileans fled into exile in Europe and the U.S.
.
He
Secret Document Collection:
Hours after his death at age 100 in 2023, the non-profit and non-partisan National Security Archive released a “declassified obituary” that shows “the long paper trail of secret documents” recording Kissinger’s policy deliberations, conversations.
They includes Kissinger’s role in the secret overthrow of democracies in Latin America, secret bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia and secret wiretaps of his own aides.
They includ 30,000 pages of “telcons,” or transcripts of Kissinger’s top-secret – and self-recorded – telephone conversations with his two commanders-in-chief and foreign leaders.
Kissinger justified taking the documents by saying that all of them were his personal papers, and that a lawyer at the State Department approved his taking them.
Kissinger used the documents to write a series of best-selling memoirs, complete with often-lengthy verbatim quotations.
