I’m not going to belabor this with my personal views except to note that one of my tasks for a few years of my stint at the Los Angeles Times was being Henry Kissinger’s editor for the 1990s essays he wrote for the opinion pages of the Times and other papers, and the supervisor of the editors later assigned that task. Given his record and my earlier activism around the Vietnam War and U.S. policy in Latin America—a region I studied as the backbone of my two degrees—this was an almost intolerable job. It was made more so by the fact even a suggested comma change had to be cleared with him personally.
But let others tell pieces of the story. For instance, this: Henry Kissinger, War Criminal—Still at Large at 100. Excerpt:
Henry Kissinger should have gone down with the rest of them: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and Nixon. His fingerprints were all over Watergate. Yet he survived—largely by playing the press.
Until 1968, Kissinger had been a Nelson Rockefeller Republican—though he also served as an adviser to the State Department in the Johnson administration. Kissinger was stunned by Richard Nixon’s defeat of Rockefeller in the primaries, according to the journalists Marvin and Bernard Kalb. “He wept,” they wrote. Kissinger believed Nixon was “the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President.”
It wasn’t long, though, before Kissinger had opened a back channel to Nixon’s people, offering to use his contacts in the Johnson White House to leak information about the peace talks with North Vietnam. Still a Harvard professor, he dealt directly with Nixon’s foreign policy adviser, Richard V. Allen, who in an interview given to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia said that Kissinger, “on his own,” offered to pass along information he had received from an aide attending the peace talks. Allen described Kissinger as acting very cloak-and-dagger, calling him from pay phones and speaking in German to report on what had happened during the talks.
Nixon campaign, “They’re breaking out the champagne in Paris.” Hours later, President Johnson suspended the bombing. A peace deal might have pushed Hubert Humphrey, who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. Nixon’s people acted quickly; they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks.
Through wiretaps and intercepts, President Johnson learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese “to hold on until after the election.” If the White House had gone public with this information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. “This is treason,” he said, as quoted in Ken Hughes’s excellent Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate. “It would rock the world.”
Johnson stayed silent. Nixon won. The war went on. [...]
And this: Henry Kissinger is 100, but his legacy is still shaping how US foreign policy works. How Kissinger centralized White House power, went corporate, and never apologized. Excerpt:
In 2001, firebrand author Christopher Hitchens made the case in The Trial of Henry Kissinger that Kissinger was liable for war crimes. At the time, Kissinger sought assurances before doing media interviews that the book would not be raised. He still rarely answers reporters’ questions about the Vietnam War.
Kissinger has been the original “don’t apologize and just tweet through it.” It’s part of how Reagan, Bush, and Trump have persevered and survived — Kissinger modeled that you can play foreign policy like chess and not have to answer domestically for the disastrous consequences in other countries. And it’s had a major impact on the way leaders subsequently have conducted themselves internationally. “The methods employed by Nixon and Kissinger to circumvent democratic scrutiny of foreign policy have since become standard; they were deployed recently to discredit critics of and spread disinformation about the invasion of Iraq,” historian Greg Grandin has written.
“He’s never apologized,” Carolyn Eisenberg, a professor of history at Hofstra University, told me. And this says as much about the foreign policy establishment as Kissinger himself. “It’s taking place in a context where the damage of these policies has not really been acknowledged — the killing of huge amounts of people in Laos, and Cambodia, and the list goes on.”
As Eisenberg said, “The fact that Kissinger’s kind of immune from criticism is a consequence of that larger failure.” [...]
And this:
Blood On His Hands: Survivors of Kissinger’s Secret War in Cambodia Reveal Unreported Mass Killings:
Key Takeaways
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Henry Kissinger is responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and groundbreaking interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.
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The archive offers previously unpublished, unreported, and underappreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remain almost entirely unknown to the American people.
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Previously unpublished interviews with more than 75 Cambodian witnesses and survivors of U.S. military attacks reveal new details of the long-term trauma borne by survivors of the American war.
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Experts say Kissinger bears significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11.
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When questioned about these deaths, Kissinger responded with sarcasm and refused to provide answers.
And if you’ve got the time, Hitchens’ book itself: The Trial of Henry Kissinger.