Nancy Kissinger, the wife of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, died Thursday at her home in Kent, Connecticut. She was 92. Robert Johnson, the manager of the property, said the cause of death was not disclosed.
Johnson also said she will be buried next to her late husband at Arlington National Cemetery at a later date, closing a life that remained tied to Henry Kissinger long after the couple married in 1974. For readers looking for the reason her name is back in view now, it is the news of her death and the burial plans that follow it.
She met Henry Kissinger while working for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, first in the mid-1960s when he was a consultant for Rockefeller and she was on the staff of Rockefeller's Commission on Critical Choices for America. She was a philanthropist and a onetime foreign policy researcher, and Michael called her a powerhouse of ideas and insights who was Henry's most valued and trusted advisor.
That polished image did not always keep her out of trouble. In 1982, a judge acquitted her of assault after the Newark Airport incident, saying her behavior was a spontaneous and somewhat human reaction to an offensive question. At the time, she and Henry Kissinger were going to Boston, where he was to undergo bypass surgery.
Before Washington and the public life that came with it, Nancy Kissinger grew up with two brothers and a horse on an estate in White Plains, attended Good Counsel Academy in White Plains, and graduated from the Master's School in Dobbs Ferry in 1951. She went on to Mount Holyoke in 1955 and later studied at the University of California at Berkeley before working for Rockefeller. She was widely known in New York philanthropy and social circles, and in the end her life closes where it was anchored: beside Henry Kissinger, with Arlington the final address.
