Opinion by David Kissinger: On Saturday, my father celebrates his 100th birthday. Though he’s been caricatured as a cold realist, he’s anything but dispassionate. It pains him to see the nastiness in today’s public discourse and the collapse of diplomacy.
Even the pandemic did not slow him down: Since 2020, he has completed two books and begun work on a third. He returned from the Bilderberg Conference in Lisbon earlier this week just in time to embark on a series of centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.
My father’s longevity is especially miraculous when one considers the health regimen he has followed throughout his adult life, which includes a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, a career of relentlessly stressful decision-making, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never a participant.How then to account for his enduring mental and physical vitality? He has an unquenchable curiosity that keeps him dynamically engaged with the world.
The other secret to my father’s endurance is his sense of mission. Although he has been caricatured as a cold realist, he is anything but dispassionate. He believes deeply in such arcane concepts as patriotism, loyalty and bipartisanship. It pains him to see the nastiness in today’s public discourse and the seeming collapse of the art of diplomacy.
Even as Cold War tensions persisted, Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin was a frequent guest at our house. The two of them would occasionally play games of chess between negotiating issues affecting the entire planet. My father had no illusions about the repressive nature of the Soviet regime, but these regular conversations helped de-escalate tensions at a time when the nuclear superpowers appeared to be on a collision course.
Chess aside, diplomacy was never a game for my father. He practiced it with a commitment and tenacity born of personal experience. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he had lost 13 family members and countless friends to the Holocaust. He returned to his native Germany as an American soldier, participating in the liberation of the Ahlem concentration camp near Hannover. There, he witnessed the depths to which mankind can sink unconstrained by international structures of peace and justice.
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