Henry Kissassinger is finally, at long last, dead. He lived for a long century over half of which should have been spent in a penitentiary for war crimes as well as treason.
He began his sordid career as an analyst, playing war games, principally nuclear war games dispassionately calculating the relative millions that would be vaporized in the next war. He is said to have inspired the character in Stanley Kubrick's film "Dr. Strangelove". He rose rapidly, working as a pentagon functionary flittering around the National Security Council in the Johnson administration while at the same time courting Republican Nelson Rockefeller, and later Richard Shithouse Nixon, during the presidential campaign of 1968. It was Kissinger who, using his connections with the U.S. delegation at the Paris Peace Talks, sent word to Nixon that a deal was all but done and would be concluded before the upcoming 1968 election. Nixon then sent word via Madame Chenault, a Filipino emigre married to an American Air Force officer with connections in Saigon, that the government of Nguyen Van Thieu should stall at Paris in anticipation of a better deal if Nixon were to win the election. It was Kissassinger who wormed his way into the emerging Nixon administration by selling out his adopted country.
Later, as National Security adviser, it was Henry who engineered the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, with orders to “kill anything that moved”, It was Henry who engineered the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile ushering in Augusto Pinochet; It was Henry who orchestrated the overthrow of the government of Argentina with similar results; it was Henry who supported the slaughter in East Timor by the Indonesian government. By some estimates Kissassinger was responsible for the deaths of some six million souls.
He gained his position by exhibiting a level of obsequiousness rare among subalterns. I used to regularly refer to him as “Kissassinger” because of his constant fawning before power. I had read the White House Transcripts published by The New York Times as the Watergate scandal was unfolding. Later my wife queried me about my use of the moniker, and then a television production based upon a verbatim reading of the Transcripts demonstrated the legitimacy of my characterization. “My god,” Kate exclaimed, “he really is a kiss ass!”
Nixon, whenever he needed reassurance, would call Henry into his office. “What do you think of my speech last night?” he would inquire. “Oh, Mr. President, that was the greatest speech I've ever heard, one of the best ever given by a president”, Kissassinger would intone. "You really think so?" Nixon would press him. "Oh yes, Mr. President, it was beautiful, it was forceful, especially when you gave it to your enemies!", Henry would, on cue, bow and scrape in order to gain influence.
He saw himself as the modern Metternich, the principal architect at Vienna, forgetting that Metternich fell prey to the machinations of Tallyrand. Nevertheless, Henry soldiered on imagining himself, in the tradition of Metternich and Bismark, the modern practitioner of "realpolitik". It was a grandiose proposition given the limited intelligence and vision of his main protagonist; for his imagined 'new world order' would not produce a 'century of peace' as Europe had known in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna but wouldn't outlast his lifetime.
Indeed, his famous Peace Accords of 1973 didn't even end hostilities in Vietnam and would lead, in a little more than two years to the collapse and defeat of our South Vietnamese allies finally ending the war. Kissassinger, nevertheless, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for 'ending' the war, which his counterpart North Vietnamese Le Duc Tho refused to accept.
He got rich in the bargain, opening up the far east, normalizing relations with China, Kissinger and Associates raked in millions mining the relationships with the Communists, acting as a gopher for multi-national corporations and the crony capitalists in Peking and Moscow.
He evaded prison, got filthy rich by selling out his country, posturing for decades as the senior statesman—the go-to-man during every international incident—on network television. He was one of the few in the Nixon administration to survive with his reputation intact. He should have been left rotting in prison.
Kissassinger is, at long last, dead. We can breathe a sigh of relief; the world is a now a better place.
