Walter Kissinger, LI businessman and brother of former secretary of state, dies at 96

Walter Kissinger, a Long Island businessman and philanthropist who raised his family in Huntington Bay, died May 3 at his home in San Rafael, California. He was 96.

The cause was longtime renal failure, his family said.

Kissinger, the younger brother of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, forged a reputation for being forceful and go-for-it-gutsy in both his personal and professional pursuits.

Walter Kissinger straddled his grand Arabian horses and growling motorcycles, and led a multinational conglomerate and research endeavors. They were all in his comfort zone.

A German Jewish refugee who came to the United States with his family in 1938, Walter Kissinger went on to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. "I don’t believe anyone who’s ever worked with me has ever complained about being bored," he said in a late 1980s Newsday interview.

Following career moves leading to Jervis Corp. and other companies, Kissinger in 1969 became chairman of the Allen Group, a maker and supplier of automobile accessories and services based in Suffolk County from his start until a few years after his departure.

When he was offered Allen Group position, Kissinger "made his acceptance conditional on moving the headquarters to Melville," his son John Kissingford, 53, of Ouray, Colorado, told Newsday. "He and my mom bought the house in Huntington Bay, where we all grew up. He loved it there."

During his nearly two-decade stint, Kissinger saw the company through financial highs and lows and lawsuits, earning his own fortune along the way. By February 1982, Forbes had dubbed the Long Island businessman "The Younger, Richer Kissinger." When he left the Allen Group in 1988, Kissinger’s $1.1 million severance turned heads and made headlines.

Walter Kissinger then turned to philanthropy. He spearheaded the 1992 creation of the Long Island Research Institute (LIRI), a collaborative team effort by research centers at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and North Shore University Hospital.

The goal of the group was to create a bridge, between research in the lab and the commercial marketplace. Kissinger wasn’t above tooting his own horn about the LIRI, calling it "something quite unique."

In an October 1995 Newsday interview, Kissinger didn’t flinch from lambasting then-Gov. George Pataki's administration when the institute's state funding was cut by 50%. "As a Republican, I’m just flabbergasted," said Kissinger, who had just quit as LIRI chairman.

Kissinger continued his philanthropic work through the Kissinger Family Foundation, which he established in 1997 with his wife, Eugenie Van Drooge Kissinger, who died in 2014.

Kissinger, who had a ranch in Colorado before moving to California, also leaves a legacy of stories that speak to what made him tick.

One of the richest and most revealing revolves around why his brother still had a foreign accent and he didn’t. Walter Kissinger’s repeated reply: "Because I was the Kissinger who listens," said Kissingford, a teacher in Colorado whose surname is a hybrid of his and his wife’s.

Kissingford confirmed to Newsday that his father was an excellent listener. "When I was a teenager, friends would joke that when they came over for dinner they’d be interviewed by him," he said. "To the end of his life, he was deeply present."

In addition to his brother Henry and son John, Kissinger is survived by a daughter, Dana Kissinger-Matray of Villars-sous-Yens, Switzerland, and two other sons, Thomas Kissinger of Boulder, Colorado, and William Kissinger of Mill Valley, California; and eight grandchildren.

The family held a private memorial in California on May 22 and "will gather as a family for a remembrance in mid-August in New York City," said Kissingford.