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HENRY KISSINGER

HENRY KISSINGER
By Mohan Guruwamy

Henry Kissinger died yesterday at the age of 100. He was active till almost the end giving his opinion on issues and lending weight to his causes. Over the years I met him a few times. 

The first meeting was in November 1982 when I was in the Mass General Hospital in Boston for the excision of a soft tissue tumour in my head and neck area. On the second morning after surgery I was rolled in on a wheelchair into the solarium to cheer me up and deaden the pain a bit. There was one other person in the solarium, also on a wheelchair. It was Henry Kissinger recovering from open heart surgery. Our nurses rolled the wheelchairs close and took off for a coffee break. He was a much reviled man in Harvard for his role in the Nixon administration and his brand of cynical realpolitik. 

I wished him and said I was a graduate student doing International Relations and Security courses at the Kennedy School that term. He responded with a self deprecatory “guess what, they found I had a heart!” After chuckles he asked if I was an Indian? When I responded in the affirmative he said with a chuckle “I know Mrs. Gandhi and I also know she doesn’t care for me!” We then had a brief chat about my faculty and coursework. Then he suddenly said: “I don’t think there will be a world crisis for the next two weeks!” I asked why he thought so, he replied “because both of us are here!” His deadpan sense of humour delivered in his Teutonic accent was famous.

I then met him when he visited New Delhi in the early 1990’s. It was known that the Narasimha Rao government had retained Kissinger and Associates to bolster India’s standing in the USA and use him to lobby for India in high places. I met him at a small luncheon at the Oberoi hosted for him by a former Indian ambassador in Washington. Kissinger wanted to get a feel of India after reforms and the end of the Cold War. I had been to Russia a few times in the waning Gorbachev era and he was interested in my take. The conversation was interesting and wide ranging. While we were waiting for the lift, I told him about our meeting at Mass General. Without batting an eyelid he said: “Of course I do!” Of course he didn’t. But that’s what made him such a famous diplomat.

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