In due course he became a towering figure of a stature no other American of his time achieved without running for office. Just in his Washington years he appeared 15 times of the cover of Time. In 1973 he appeared fourth in Gallup’s “Most Admired Man in America” Index. The following year he was Number One.

His approved rating was 85 per cent, unique for a non-elected American. He was also hated to a unique degree. Rumours abounded that he was a Soviet spy, a British agent, a diabolist, a secret emissary for the Vatican, the Quai d’Orsay, the Israeli intelligence service and the Chinese. At one time or another Kissinger emerged as any (and all) of the horror figures from the Elders of Zion, and he figured constantly in the anti-Semitic cartoons and comic strips of the Soviet and Arab worlds. His physiognomy lent itself to caricature, and no one seized on the possibilities more eagerly than the brilliant but ruthless David Levine. He did Kissinger a score of times, mostly for the New York Review of Books. Two the Review refused to print: one showing Kissinger naked, covered in sinister tattoos, the other ravishing a nude maiden with a global head. This last eventually appeared in the Nation. He figured in a number of pop songs, some unpublishable because of their obscenity, and in a variety of world famous cartoons and comic strips, such as The Simpsons, Lil’ Abner, Superman and even Blondie. He was also made the anti-hero in The Adventures of Superkraut, and was accused of trying to solve the world’s population explosion by masterminding the spread of Aids.

Kissinger never minded the attacks, calculating they cancelled each other out. Over the quarter century of his greatest prominence he featured in more prime-time TV interviews than any other American, apart from the presidents. That was the kind of popularity he valued since it made it more likely he could get things done. He liked to quote a saying of Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford: “You are more likely to achieve things if you don’t care who gets the credit for them.” It is a thousand pities that he was not called to Washington in a senior capacity during the Johnson Administration: if so, the real catastrophe of Vietnam might have been averted, by never happening in the first place. As he often remarked, what matters most in world affairs are the things that don’t go wrong, because they are avoided. It is a miracle that the Cold War, which lasted for 45 years and was fought with great intensity, never became an open conflict which would have destroyed the world.

Kissinger played a part in winning the Cold War for America second only to President Reagan, but mainly behind the scenes. Yet his open record is pretty impressive. He negotiated the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, both with the Soviets.. He was a key figure in the Nuclear Arms Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Convention banning biological weapons and the Helsinki Final Act. He negotiated the end of the Yom Kippur War and prepared the way to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. Kissinger opened up diplomacy between America and China and was the intellectual driving force behind the process which brought China into the international community.