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 U.S. secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Nancy Kissinger evoked the elegance of former first lady Jackie Kennedy. At almost six 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.

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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 defence was that she was protecting him on his way to open-heart surgery in Boston.

“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.