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I'd go further that Kissenger violated a number of ideological tropes and expectations.
Kissinger was a Holocaust surviving Jew (by narrow evasion of the fascists) who became strongly aligned with the American political right rather than left, a European who became an ardent anti-communist rather than a social-democrat, and thus something of a ideological/race-traitor theme which akin the progressive reaction to prominent black conservatives. He also worked directly against a common preconception/trope of a successful diplomat being someone who is supposed to avoid war at all costs and speak in universalist rather than national-interest terms. More to the point, he was a flagrantly ambitious and a publicity hound at various points, and so rather than quietly exist within the state apparatus or quietly retire to obscurity, he made a good part of his later-life about trying to be an elder statesman and defending his legacy.
That made him an active proponent of an otherwise often faceless machine, but also means that people's desires to anthromorphize broader collectives had an easy target to pin collective actions and policies onto, which has the effect of re-allocating responsibility away from less subtle actors in more flattering ways. It becomes a singular personal issue (Kissinger and his cronies were the cause of State Department anticommunist policy) rather than a broader trend (Kissinger was just the most prominent of an extensive line of anti-communists in the State Department who would have attempted by and large the same things regardless).
While there's plenty to criticize, I do agree that a good deal of the motte-expansive criticism of him rests on hyper-agency/hypo-agency distinctions. Very few Cold War critics treat anti-communists as having their own agency to commit atrocities rather than as American dependents operating at the direction of the Americans (and thus who would not have acted/been successful in their crimes without it). (And, by extension, anti-communists have no agency and commit atrocities; pro-communists have agency in resisting the US/west, and their crimes are brushed over as able. Who, whom, and all that.)
Edited for clarity of the memtic nature of the point.
It's a bit like Klaus Schwab and the alt-right. People see big institutions doing bad things, and some sinister-looking guy gets up to the podium and says "Yes, it's me, I'm the bad guy. Look at my important title, I'm responsible." If you're willing to wear that mantle, outsiders will gladly heap superhuman agency on you.
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Not really; his family left in 1938
Again, not really. He came to the US at age 15, graduated from a public high school in NYC and then got an accounting degree from the City College of New York.
Those are not mutually exclusive categories. It describes tons of people on the left during the Cold War, including LBJ, Scoop Jackson, and the Kennedys.
Fifteen years in Germany, especially the first fifteen years of ones life, when born to parents who themselves were born in Germany, typically makes one European.
Hell, he's named after a city in Bavaria.
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