The death of Secretary of State Kissinger takes, at the age of 100, one of the most remarkable figures in American history. We didn’t know him well, but we covered him glancingly through much of his storied career. We were, in the Cold War, invested on the same side in the same struggle and came to admire him for his appreciation of Vietnam and Israel, for all their own merits but also as parts of an even larger story. On occasion, we glimpsed, his brilliance as a teacher.

We first encountered him in the late 1960s, when we were an undergraduate and covering a parley at Boston. When Kissinger emerged from one session, we approached him and introduced ourselves as being with the undergraduate daily. Kissinger wheeled on us and hissed, “I do not talk to zeeee Harrrrvard Crrrrimson.” Then he stalked away to join, shortly, the Nixon administration as the National Security Adviser.

We didn’t encounter him again until the 1990s. In 2005, the Watergate leaker known as “Deep Throat” had just been identified, and the Sun wrote about it in an editorial called “Watergate and Vietnam,” and when we bumped into Kissinger at a banquet for Milton and Rose Friedman he expressed appreciation for it. Later, Kissinger came to an editorial dinner of the Sun. When the conversation turned to Vietnam, Kissinger said he wanted to ask us a test question.

It concerned the decision by the Democrats in Congress cut off support for South Vietnam in 1975. At the time, Kissinger asked, how many American combat troops were still in the country? We went around the table offering estimates. No one nailed it. The number, Kissinger finally offered, was zero. It turns out that when Congress ended support for Free Vietnam, it was not, contra the peace movement, about saving our GIs. They were gone by 1973. No, it was about abandoning Vietnam to the communists.

Kissinger had a profound understanding of how the Soviet Communists were eventually cornered. We gained a glimpse of that over lunch one day when we suggested tossing out some names we both admired. At one point, we offered Ariel Sharon. Kissinger said Sharon hated him. He did? We were surprised, we said. “I wouldn’t let him destroy the Egyptian Third Army,” Kissinger said. A few minutes later, the name of Lane Kirkland came up.

At the mention of the great anti-communist labor leader who worked to build free trade unions, Kissinger suddenly became animated like we’d never seen. “I loved Lane Kirkland,” Kissinger exclaimed. “I looooved Lane Kirkland.” Kissinger understood the role that free, democratic trade unions, like Solidarity in Poland, which Kirkland backed, played in driving through the beating heart of Soviet Communism the stake of Free Labor.

That conversation was about the time that the Nixon Library released tape recordings on which, among other things, Kissinger was, as the Times put it, “heard telling” Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime was “not an objective of American foreign policy.” Kissinger’s office called to ask whether we’d meet him for breakfast at his apartment.

At breakfast, we discovered that Kissinger was stung by the disclosure of that tape. The point he wanted to make was that only hours, as we remember it, before that conversation, Nixon and Kissinger had decided to rush arms and matériel to Israel and save the Jewish state (the moment is captured in the movie “Golda”). We promised Kissinger that if he ever died (we were in no rush, we assured him), we’d mark the moment in an editorial of the Sun.

We saw Kissinger’s hauteur and his vulnerability as two sides of the same coin. It turns out that he could laugh at himself, as he did when he spoke at a banquet that the chairman of the Wall Street Journal, Peter Kann, held for the paper’s editor, Robert Bartley, who was preparing to retire. Bartley’s editorials against Kissinger’s détente with Soviet Russia, Kissinger said, made him feel like the man who is arrested at a communist meeting and demands to know the charges. 

“You’re a communist!” the policeman growls. “But I’m an anti-communist,” the protester protests. “We don’t care what kind of communist, you are,” the policeman barks, as he clobbers him on the head. It’d be a stretch to suggest that Kissinger admitted that the hardliners against his détente with Russia and China were right. It’s not a stretch to say that Kissinger could take criticism in stride — one of the qualities for which he will be missed more with each passing day.

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Correction: The 1990s were the years when we next met Kissinger after his refusal to speak to the Harvard Crimson. The decade was given incorrectly in the bulldog edition.