Before his tragic 2018 suicide, celebrity chef and documentarian Anthony Bourdain made no secret his unabiding hatred of Henry Kissinger, one of the United States’ most celebrated and reviled diplomats, angrily telling a writer for The New Yorker, “Any journalist who has ever been polite to Henry Kissinger, you know, f*ck that person.” Earlier, in his 2001 travelog A Cook’s Tour, he bitterly denounced Kissinger in a tirade he stood by for the rest of his life:
“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to [Serbian president who died while facing trial for genocide Slobodan] Milošević.”
Henry Kissinger lived to be 100 years old, passing away on November 30th, 2023. During his tenure as Secretary of State (1973-77) and National Security Advisor (1969-75), Kissinger engineered the American withdrawal from Vietnam, established formal relations with the People’s Republic of China, pursued arms control with the Soviet Union, and bolstered American support for anti-Communist governments worldwide, even at their most undemocratic. During his time in government, Kissinger was a larger-than-life celebrity who dated Hollywood starlets and courted at-times fawning media coverage, with a 1974 Newsweek cover famously depicting him—a short, chubby, graying, middle-aged man with thick glasses—as Superman. (One of Kissinger’s favorite sayings, “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” explains this apparent paradox.)
Unfortunately for Kissinger, his powers of persuasion failed to seduce his most bitter critics, largely on the political left. Kissinger, they argue, was directly responsible for crimes against humanity that killed 3 million people worldwide. A brief look back at his life and legacy reveals that it was Kissinger who:
- Withdrew from Vietnam only after raising American troop levels there to their highest point, at about 543,000 soldiers, and expanding the war to neutral Cambodia, delaying peace by up to four years in order to have a “decent interval” before the inevitable fall of Saigon;
- Told military brass to bomb “everything that moves” in an illegal and covert bombing campaign of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, killing an estimated 150,000 people, in addition to the untold thousands who died during his continuation of the secret bombing of Laos;
- Supported the Pakistani military’s 1971 genocide of between 300,000 and 3 million Bengalis in modern-day Bangladesh and fired the American consul in Dhaka for his reporting of the killings;
- Bragged about engineering a successful 1973 military coup in Chile against the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and resolutely backed a military junta that executed over 3,000 of its own citizens;
- Approved the 1975 Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste that killed 200,000 people, or a third of the nation’s population;
- Overlooked the Argentine military dictatorship’s human rights abuses, including the forced disappearances of 30,000 Argentinians, even as the regime kidnapped the babies of executed prisoners and gave them to military families.
Kissinger responded to these severe accusations with his characteristic sarcasm, at one point joking in a 1975 meeting with Turkish officials (the previous year, Turkey had illegally invaded Cyprus) that “the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” His wit did little to disarm his critics, many of whom Kissinger outlived (author Christopher Hitchens, who charged Kissinger with war crimes in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, died at 62 of pneumonia in 2011; Bourdain hanged himself at 61 in 2018), and whose passions have only been inflamed in the days after Kissinger’s death. Not even the sitting President of the United States could resist passive-aggressively jabbing the former Secretary of State in his official statement.
So, can we divorce Henry Kissinger’s reported crimes against humanity from the rest of his resume simply because it doesn’t flatter the legacy of a dead man? Famed journalist Hunter S. Thompson had an answer to that as early as 1994: “It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that – but it would be wrong.” Kissinger, who despised Nixon, abandoned his principles to advance his own career in the Nixon administration. During the 1968 election, Kissinger leaked information about peace negotiations in the ongoing Vietnam War to the Nixon campaign in exchange for a senior position in a future Nixon presidency. Acting on Kissinger’s tip that President Lyndon Johnson would unconditionally halt the bombing of North Vietnam, Nixon ordered a campaign operative to “[throw a] monkey wrench” into the peace talks; the South Vietnamese delegation pulled out of the talks, Nixon eked out a narrow victory, and Kissinger became National Security Advisor. Treason was the price to pay for a seat at the table.
Perhaps the most tragic lesson of Henry Kissinger’s life came from an aspect of his life he rarely discussed. A German Jew by birth, Kissinger lived in Nazi Germany from his birth in 1923 until fleeing to New York City with his family at age 15. Thirteen members of his family perished during the Holocaust. During World War II, Kissinger participated in the liberation of Ahlem concentration camp, and what he saw remained with him for life:
“I had never seen people degraded to the level that people were in Ahlem. They barely looked human. They were skeletons. I don’t have to tell this to the survivors. In fact, they were such skeletons that it was dangerous to give them solid food because some of them could not digest it. It was the single most shocking experience I have ever had, and that’s been impressed on my memory.”
But if the Holocaust was burned into Kissinger’s psyche, he never showed it. If anything, Kissinger’s career was characterized by scorn for Judaism and the Jewish people, with him remarking, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic. Any people who have been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.” On the oppression of Jews in the Soviet Union, Kissinger was similarly callous:
“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
It seems unbelievable that a Jew who experienced Nazi persecution lost family during the Holocaust, and personally witnessed the concentration camps could not only dismiss the plight of Jews but also support atrocities the world over. Henry Kissinger teaches us that “never again” actually means “never begin.”
Henry Kissinger wanted a world frozen in time, not his own time but an era long gone. He viewed the world through the antiquarian lens of 19th-century power politics, in which the great powers of the world played a grand strategic game with each other and in which the titans of diplomacy were immune from public criticism or accountability. In the same way, his idol, the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, had an absolute monarch to protect him from public opinion; Kissinger had Richard Nixon. Kissinger was American policymaking at its most undemocratic, and he exemplified what can happen when an unchecked foreign policy apparatus imposes its twisted vision of power on an unsuspecting world. Kissinger said as much in an infamous 1972 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci:
“I don’t ask for popularity, I’m not looking for popularity. On the contrary, if you really want to know, I care nothing about popularity. I’m not at all afraid of losing my public; I can allow myself to say what I think. I’m referring to what’s genuine in me. If I were to let myself be disturbed by the reactions of the public … I would accomplish nothing.”
Aspiring high school history teacher. Some of my opinions are OK
