Today is a special day in the household of Heinz (a/k/a Henry) Kissinger, as you may already know. Today, he turns 100. His only son wrote a piece that was published yesterday in the Washington Post. He said a number of things about his father.

First, he suggested that his father’s diet, which he said included a lot of bratwurst and wiener schnitzels, was not responsible for his longevity. Nor was his habit of watching a lot of sports, but never participating in any. And I don’t know how much Kissinger weighs, but svelte he is not.

Then what was? Maybe, it was his mother, who died at 97? His father who died at 95? They could also get credit for Henry’s brother Walter, who died at 96. Let’s assume it was that.

When I was in college at Harvard, Kissinger was a Professor of Government. That is not as surprising (it isn’t surprising at all) as the fact that when I, being 80, entered Harvard, Professor Kissinger was only 37 years old. A wunderkind, he had graduated Harvard summa cum laude in 1950 (I never did that), and his undergraduate thesis was over 400 pages long (and, according to Wikipedia, led Harvard to set a cap on the length of undergraduate theses (mine was 88 pages, not counting appendixes and end notes; I will ask Henry if his 400+ pages includes only text or more the next time I see him). Most of his books are more than 400 pages long by far, so I guess this is not surprising.

There were two competing Government professors at Harvard – both Jewish European refugees – Kissinger and Stanley Hoffman. Hoffman, who died at 86, was a few years younger than Kissinger, Austrian born and French educated. Kissinger, born in Germany, was able to come to the United States with his parents in the late 1930s, while Hoffman had to hide out with his parents in a small French village during the war. I never took a course from Kissinger (somewhat, I guess now, to my regret), but took two from Hoffman, who I thought was a brilliant lecturer (he was one of those who could start a lecture on time, make it appear that he had memorized it word for word – perhaps he had – and end it at the exact second the class was scheduled to end; and he could do that for each class).

Well, Kissinger – when he went to work for Nixon as National Security Director (was that the title then?) and then Secretary of State – was certainly controversial. In the first place, it was surprising to some, if I recall correctly, that he went to work for Nixon at all. But his theory of realpolitik, which had its dose of amorality, was put to the test when he became one of the architects of the Vietnam War for this country, and especially in his involvement in deciding to bomb a neutral country, Cambodia. (I remember at speech Kissinger gave at a DC Bar meeting that I attended. It was during that war, and that Kissinger was so unpopular with many that the then Bar president introduced him by telling the audience and the speaker that his invitation to speak before the DC Bar was by no means to be interpreted as if anyone in the room agreed with what he was doing as Secretary of State at all; I remember agreeing with that statement and being aghast at it at the same time.)

So, Kissinger was also involved in the conference that eventually ended the war. (We didn’t win it, you recall.) And he even got a Nobel Prize, speaking of controversy. His further involvement in world politics was massive, but had – as I suggested above – a sense of amorality. He helped end the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, but he supported dictatorships in Latin America and in Pakistan. He was the guiding force opening up China to the United States.

After being president, 98 year old Jimmy Carter (18 months younger than Kissinger) created the Carter Center and did all sorts of good in the world. Henry Kissinger formed Kissinger and Associates, and made a lot of money for Henry Kissinger. And we should note that Carter is now in home hospice, while Kissinger is still running around the world giving quite lucid speeches.

At any rate, no matter what one thinks of Kissinger’s accomplishments, one must respect his longevity. He has been married to his 89 year old (and second) wife Nancy Maginnes (who is three or four inches taller than he is) for almost 50 years (next April will be 50) and he has two children and (I think) some grandchildren (most of his family is press shy for sure), which – on his big birthday – led me to the title of this blog post which, the more you think about it, makes absolutely no sense at all.