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The Washington Roundtable: Henry Kissinger, who died this week, at the age of a hundred, served in the Nixon and Ford Administrations as national-security adviser and Secretary of State; for a period, he was both at the same time. Kissinger fled Nazi Germany as a teen-ager, and went on to advise a dozen U.S. Presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden. He opened up relations between the U.S. and China with Richard Nixon, pursued d\xe9tente with the Soviet Union, and made decisions that led to death and destruction across Southeast Asia and beyond. Earlier this year, he travelled to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping in an attempt to massage U.S.-China relations. \u201cThere are not that many hundred-year-olds who insist upon their own relevance and actually are relevant,\u201d the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. Glasser calls Kissinger \u201cthe paradigmatic Washington figure,\u201d and says that despite Kissinger\u2019s history of destructive foreign-policy decisions, the American national-security establishment had a \u201ccollective addiction\u201d to his thinking. How did Kissinger shape U.S. foreign policy, and what enabled him to remain a central political player in Washington long after he left office? The New Yorker staff writers Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join Glasser to weigh in.