Henry Kissinger’s death yesterday at the grand, round age of 100 was greeted with a broad chorus of “It’s about times” and “good riddances” and “go straight to hells.” I have always been fascinated by the intensity of the animus toward the man. And to be clear: that’s not because I necessarily disagree with the verdict.
In the quickest possible summary, during his roughly eight years as first National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State, Kissinger spearheaded or oversaw two broad policies which account for most, but by no means all, of what that vituperation is about.
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First there was expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos. This expanded the war, escalated the war, dramatically lengthened the war and killed vast numbers of people, all with an eventual conclusion to the core conflict in Vietnam, which certainly could have been had in 1969 when Kissinger first took over US foreign policy. But perhaps without all the subsequent death and destruction. Then there’s the support for and help in bringing to power brutal military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. This sparked a generation of repression and vast numbers of people disappeared and killed.
Whatever the costs, the latter policies at least had a logic and some real success within the conceptual framework of the Cold War. The US didn’t want Argentina and Chile to go communist and they never did. In Vietnam, the US drove policies which led to the deaths of an unimaginable number of people and even on its own terms, the conceptual logic of global containment, accomplished basically nothing.
There are a whole bunch of other coups, assassinations and generally bad things that I don’t have time to get into.
There’s a lot to hate.
What has always been uncanny to me, though, is that diplomats and foreign policy hands just seldom ever figure so prominently in popular culture one way or another. Kissinger on the other hand seeps so far into the culture he might almost be like a rapper or some particularly reviled Reality TV star. Notwithstanding the slow-speeched, diminutive person he was in person, he snaps and crackles across the TV screen of history.
It’s hard to figure at some level.
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The other thing that doesn’t quite fit is that Kissinger worked for two Presidents who were ultimately responsible for everything he did, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Nixon certainly had a whole generation of haters too. And he was deeply involved in foreign policy. But in some ways even he, the bête noire of a whole generation, didn’t generate quite the intensity. Ford meanwhile … well, nobody seemed to mind him.
Meanwhile, for all the hits Nixon takes on the foreign policy front and, let’s say, his imperfect management of the rule of law in the US, his reputation is usually at least bracketed by detente and the US opening to China. But Kissinger was certainly just as involved in those arguable successes too.
So what’s the deal?
The answer, I think, is two or threefold.
First, Kissinger managed to have some very prolific and popularizing critics. Not just people who made a good case, but who wrote or spoke or published in ways and in venues that went way beyond normal historical or foreign policy debates. The best, though by no means only example of this, is the late Christopher Hitchens and his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, a literal book length indictment of the man for all manner of war crimes. That was followed a year later by a 2002 documentary based on the book.
In the wake of Kissinger’s death, this scathing passage from the late celebrity chef and writer Anthony Bourdain has reemerged and is making the rounds on social media. Bourdain didn’t get his hatred of Kissinger from reading books. He got it from spending time abroad, especially in Cambodia. “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands,” Bourdain wrote in his 2001 memoir, A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines. But I wondered on reading Bourdain’s comments whether visiting Cambodia alone would have spurred his focus on Kissinger. In Cambodia I have to imagine that the shattering of Cambodian society and the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge is something the United States did, not the US National Security Advisor. How many people ever know who the National Security Advisor even is?
Did Hitchens book focus Bourdain’s animus on Kissinger specifically? The two books both came out in 2001. So while it’s possible that Bourdain read Kissinger, the timing is a bit tight. But like with many of his targets Hitchens’ had been on Kissinger’s case for a long long time.
After I’d written most of this post a colleague of mine made clear that for him it was definitely from Bourdain that he learned that Henry Kissinger totally absolutely sucked. So who influenced who is really beside the point. They are both examples, in far flung parts of American popular culture, of the same phenomenon. Kissinger made enemies of a series of highly prolific and engaging writers and popularizers who did a very good job at spreading a very dark view of Kissinger far and wide through the culture.
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From yet another vantage point, Kissinger is at the heart of bookshelves of books that a generation of baby boomers wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, two of the three formative events of their generational memory (the third being the Kennedy assassination). Many of those books are quite good. If you haven’t read Time of Illusion by Jonathan Schell, absolutely go read it. Everybody may hate the baby boomers now. But in their day, with their admittedly sometimes self-obsessed wrestling with the things that happened in their 20s, the early baby boomers generated quite a lot of literary and popular culture heat. Kissinger managed to do enough when relatively young enough to be at the center of a lot of that heat and then live enough into the age of social media for all that heat surrounding him to … well, splatter all over everything in a new way before he finally died.
The other part of the story is that from the start of his time on the national political stage, Kissinger inserted himself into the popular culture in ways that were then and remain now all but unheard of. Kissinger was a single man from 1964 and 1974 and he made sure you knew it. His personal life was the topic of the gossip columns and intrigue. Late last night The Washington Post published this article, The surprising dating life of Henry Kissinger, a West Wing ‘playboy’. He reputedly dated countless high profile actresses and female celebrities. He made appearances at Studio 54. He’s publicly credited with originating the phrase “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Is this getting awkward?
Well, this all happened. Really.
The point is that Kissinger, unlike really any diplomat in American history, pushed himself into the popular culture, the celebrity pages, TV, everything. Just after leaving office he was made an honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters. The Times says that Kissinger appeared on the cover of Time magazine — back when that was a thing — no less than 15 times. If concern about him seems weirdly pervasive today, it was really like that, albeit in a different media age, from the beginning.
The final part of the equation is money and longevity. When Kissinger died yesterday he hadn’t held any position of formal power for almost half a century. But during that time he all but invented the business of prestige ‘geopolitical consulting.’ He routinely met with foreign heads of state until very, very late in life and made a huge amount of money doing it. That money clearly rankled everyone who took a dim view of Kissinger: If you believe the darkest view of Kissinger, he was a global war criminal who made vast sums of money off that history for decade after decade.
And then there’s the prestige and respect. While Kissinger had been the toast of the town and a most eligible bachelor in office, over time he became the ultimate wiseman, the mentor and advisor to seemingly every future Secretary of State and most Presidents. He was almost a German Jewish Billy Graham. He made so many visits to so many future chief executives, a kind of mutual association with greatness that suited both men’s purposes whether it was Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton or George Bush or Barack Obama or Donald Trump. Official Washington couldn’t quit Henry Kissinger.
And then there’s the longevity. Few prominent people make it to 100. Kissinger might have died in his 70s at some point during the Clinton administration. The fact that that didn’t happen is key. It’s hard to imagine that Hitchens would have written his book if Kissinger were no longer alive. What would be the point? Old guy who’s not even alive anymore was super bad. Who cares? The point was precisely that he was still alive, still making bank, still operating at the pinnacle of respect and prestige at least in Washington, DC and in global corridors of power. Richard Nixon was just as responsible, really more so in most ways, for everything that Kissinger did under Nixon’s presidency. But there wasn’t a chorus of people still around saying Nixon was awesome, paying him tons of money and giving him a nonstop list of awards. It was precisely in Hitchens’ transgressive nature to punch him right in the face, at least in literary terms.
In short, Kissinger’s life of wealth and respect was simply too jarring a contrast with his detractors’ account of the chaos, suffering and death he left in his wake. He lived long enough for making the case against him to remain relevant for decade after decade. As they did, that bill of particulars against Kissinger took hold in the popular culture in a way that would be unthinkable for any other diplomat or government official because Kissinger had placed himself there, unlike any in history, right at the beginning of the story.
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Category: WHY
