NEW YORK — Philanthropist Nancy Kissinger, onetime foreign policy researcher and wife of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has died. She was 92.
She died Thursday at her home in Kent, Connecticut, Robert Johnson, manager of the property, told The Associated Press. The cause of her death was not disclosed. Johnson said she will be buried next to her late husband at Arlington National Cemetery at a later date.
The daughter of a New York City lawyer, she met Henry Kissinger while working for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. The couple wed in 1974.
She was described by one profiler as a brainy, Blass-bedecked blonde. She was often seen at high fashion openings and was a strong presence on the New York philanthropy scene.
“Nancy Kissinger can pick up the phone and get right through to the CEO. Nobody keeps her waiting,” philanthropist Judy Peabody said after chairing a successful hospital charity event in 1989.
Michael Bloomberg — the billionaire founder of the Bloomberg financial-news empire, former New York City mayor and a friend of the Kissingers — said in a social media post that Nancy Kissinger “was a powerhouse of ideas and insights that she put to work throughout her life in government and philanthropy — and as Henry’s most valued and trusted advisor.”
He added, “She was the ultimate diplomat — as wise as she was discreet — and I know how completely Henry admired and loved her. Diana and I were fortunate to call her a dear friend, and to see their extraordinary partnership in action over the decades. We will miss her greatly.”
Nancy Kissinger made headlines in 1982 when she tried to throttle a woman who harassed her and her husband with insulting questions at Newark Airport. The couple was going to Boston, where Henry Kissinger was to undergo bypass surgery.
The woman, a leafleter for a group affiliated with politician Lyndon LaRouche, accused Nancy Kissinger of choking both her throat and her free-speech rights. Nancy Kissinger said she only wanted to protect her husband from upset.
A judge acquitted Nancy Kissinger of assault and called her behavior “a spontaneous and somewhat human reaction to an offensive question.”
The Kissingers met 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.
Henry Kissinger had joined the Nixon administration and was secretary of state when he and the former Nancy Sharon Maginnes married on March 30, 1974, in a civil ceremony in Arlington, Virginia.
After leaving Washington, they returned to New York and lived in homes in Manhattan and Kent, Connecticut.
The daughter of an Episcopalian Park Avenue lawyer, Nancy Kissinger grew up with two brothers and a horse on an estate in White Plains.
She attended Good Counsel Academy, a Catholic girls school in White Plains, and the exclusive Master's School in Dobbs Ferry, from which she graduated in 1951. She returned to the school to teach history for two years after graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1955.
Graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley followed before she went to work for Rockefeller.
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