I was sitting on the mezzanine of the Yale Club’s ballroom in midtown Manhattan as a sea of men in dark suits and women in bright dresses stood up from their white-draped tables while a cake was brought out.
“Happy Birthday, dear Henry,” they sang, and the man a few days shy of his 100th birthday blew out the candles, then raised his two arms with a Richard Nixon-like flourish.
This was Henry Kissinger’s birthday celebration at the Economic Club of New York, one of the city’s most elite organizations. He had been introduced by the chief executive officer of the New York Fed. Here everyone was, gathered to celebrate Kissinger and what he represents.
Kissinger’s legacy as a Cold War strategist, influential adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and jet-setting diplomatic shuttler has persisted even though he’s now been out of office much longer than in government and has outlived his peers. Despite his record for perpetuating atrocities around the world, he’s still called upon for counsel as to how the war in Ukraine will end or how to avert conflict with China.
During the Nixon administration, Kissinger opened relations with China and helped broker arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. But he also prolonged the Vietnam War and extended the conflict into Laos and Cambodia. As many as 150,000 Cambodian civilians were killed, more than were previously known, when Kissinger ordered the carpet bombing of the country from 1969 onward, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Kissinger backed leaders in Pakistan and Indonesia as each killed 200,000 people in neighboring territories, embraced Argentina’s military as it disappeared tens of thousands, and supported Gen. Pinochet’s military overthrow in Chile.
Much has been written about his record. Yet three aspects of his legacy — the centralization of foreign policymaking power in the White House, the avoidance of ever apologizing for his destructive actions, and the…
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