Nancy Kissinger

Nancy Sharon Kissinger is an American philanthropist and Rockefeller political aide, and the widow of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The couple married on March 30, 1974, in Arlington, Virginia.

Life and career

Nancy Maginnes was born in Manhattan and raised in White Plains, New York. She attended The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Her parents were Agnes and Albert Bristol Maginnes, a wealthy lawyer and football player. She received a B.A. in history in 1955 from Mount Holyoke College and later took a sabbatical from her Rockefeller research job to study at the Sorbonne in the late 1960s.
Before her marriage, she was a long-time aide to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, recommended to him in 1964 by Kissinger, then a professor at Harvard, where she was a student. Her first job was as Kissinger's researcher on a Rockefeller task force; she continued working for Rockefeller at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund after the task force finished its work. She was notably one of the tallest female public figures of her era, at 6'0" tall. In one newsreel of her accompanying Henry Kissinger during a 1975 meeting with CCP leadership, Mao Zedong looked with amazement at the height difference between the couple. She later became director of international studies for Rockefeller's Commission on Critical Choices for Americans.