Nancy Kissinger, a force beside her diplomat husband, dead at 92

Nancy Kissinger, who transformed from a foreign policy specialist into a force beside her diplomat husband, Henry, and helped cement their place among New York’s social elite, has died. She was 92.

She died at her home in South Kent, Connecticut, the New York Times reported, citing an announcement from her family.

In her travels with her husband, who served as US secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Nancy Kissinger evoked the elegance of former first lady Jackie Kennedy. At almost 6 feet tall, with a ready wit, lithe figure, patrician manners and Episcopalian rearing, she was an intriguing foil to her 5-foot-8 husband, who’d fled Nazi Germany at age 15. No one was ever bored when seated next to her.

She met Mao Zedong in China and Mother Teresa in India and visited Harry Truman’s widow, Bess, in Independence, Missouri. The leader of the Kurdish rebels in Iraq gave her a gold and pearl necklace. King Hussein of Jordan flew her in his helicopter.

From the late 1970s until Henry’s death in November 2023, at age 100, the couple mixed with titans, socialites and media elite in New York, including Henry Kravis, Steve Schwarzman, Brooke Astor, Katharine Graham and Barbara Walters. Nancy organized Henry’s 50th birthday party at the Colony Club in 1973 — a year before they were married — as well as his 90th birthday party at the St. Regis hotel.

Whether being photographed at galas and fashion shows or hosting intimate dinners at their homes in Manhattan and Kent, Connecticut, Kissinger elevated her husband and bolstered him through scrutiny of his career. In 1982, she was acquitted of a simple assault charge involving a woman who’d verbally harassed her husband at an airport. Her defense was that she was protecting him on his way to open-heart surgery in Boston.

‘My conscience’

“My wife Nancy encouraged me with her advice and love,” Henry Kissinger wrote in the introduction to Years of Renewal, the final volume of his memoirs. “As always, she served as my conscience.”

Nancy Sharon Maginnes was born on April 13, 1934, in Manhattan, to Albert Bristol Maginnes, a trusts and estates lawyer who had played professional football, and the former Agnes McKinley. She grew up in White Plains, studied at the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry and graduated in 1955 from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

She met her future husband in the summer of 1964 when both worked for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, he as foreign policy adviser for Rockefeller’s presidential campaign, she as a researcher.

She was pursuing a Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, when Henry Kissinger convinced her to return to New York to work for Rockefeller. She directed international studies for the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, which Rockefeller organized, financed and, late in 1973, quit the governorship to lead. Henry Kissinger, meantime, became Nixon’s secretary of state in September 1973.

By then, the New York Times called Nancy “a frequent companion of Mr. Kissinger,” whose first marriage had ended in divorce in 1964 and produced two children, David and Elizabeth.

Henry was 50, and Nancy 39, when they married on March 30, 1974, in Arlington, Virginia. The New York Times reported, “Although there had been rumors of Mr. Kissinger’s wedding plans for a long time, he gave no indication that he was about to be married when he met with newsmen shortly before noon today to comment on his talks yesterday and this morning with Defense Minister Moshe Dayan of Israel.”

At a White House dinner a few weeks later, Nixon drew laughs by remarking of his secretary of state’s new wife, “She’s a little liberal, but otherwise she’s all right.”

Magazine cover

Kissinger was plunged into the public eye, with the press carrying photos of her honeymoon in Acapulco. The couple appeared on the cover of People magazine in 1975, with an article dubbing her Henry’s “intellectual soulmate” and “ambassadress-at-large.”

“Nancy Kissinger was one of the most gracious, lovely women I ever met,” Bruce Tully, who protected her for the State Department Diplomatic Security Service, said in an interview with the Association for Diplomatic Services and Training.

In 1983, the couple bought a home in Kent, and Nancy oversaw its decoration and gardens. Her eye for beauty prized peonies, clothes by Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta and classic statement jewels.

The couple shared a love of dogs. Theirs included Tyler, a golden retriever who was a descendant of President Ford’s dog, Liberty; and Labrador retrievers Amelia and Abigail. Kissinger was a trustee of the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in Manhattan for about 30 years and helped make its Top Dog Gala a hit on the social calendar.

“It didn’t matter if she was in a $50,000 gown, she’d stand there with the dogs we’d be honoring, bend down and pet them,” Kathryn Coyne, the center’s chief executive officer, said in an interview. “You can really tell the people who care about animals at those events, and she was one of them, not worrying about dog hair or the dogs jumping up on her. She was dedicated and down to Earth.”

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(With assistance from Sarah Gray and Jon Herskovitz.)