Henry Kissinger, the towering American diplomat, dies at age 100

SNIP
Henry Kissinger, the Holocaust survivor and Harvard professor who became a towering U.S. diplomat, master political manipulator and pop culture icon — loved by admirers and loathed by detractors — has died. He was 100.

As President Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy aide, Kissinger helped set out the nation’s grand international strategy of extricating itself from an unpopular war and plotting its relations with two rival communist powers. In Nixon’s second term, Kissinger had to navigate against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal that engulfed his commander in chief’s attention and eventually forced the president out. All the while, he fiercely defended his own political turf.
ENDSNIP

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/29/henry-kissinger-the-towering-american-diplomat-dies-at-age-100.html

Frankly, before my time..... I'll let you old timers go back and remember the good (?) and bad of the man.

The only thing I'll always remember is that there were many MANY women who described him as irresistable. Yikes!

Who has a memory to share?

 

He was impressively smart about world affairs, that was my impression of him. I know there was a negative reaction too -- maybe because of some actions he backed in the Vietnam war, I don't recall. I had heard a rumor that he had been declared culpable in war crimes, which is why he never left the states again after retiring.

 

You mean, something like this??

https://www.yahoo.com/news/henry-kissinger-america-most-notorious-015455590.html

 

Yep. His involvement with Pinochet really screwed up Chile and South America. That's what I remembered. Thanks for the link.

 

IMHO he was a great American. RIP.

 

Does anyone really think that Cambodia was a neutral country?

 

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/henry-kissinger-dead-at-100/

Do not speak ill of the dead. That’s an honorable admonition. But what of the truth? When a person dies, should he be remembered accurately? That question is acutely posed by the demise of Henry Kissinger. The veteran diplomat passed away on Wednesday at the age of 100, leaving behind a long legacy that includes such highs as the opening to China, as well as foul deeds that resulted in mayhem and death—thousands and thousands of deaths. His obituaries will be filled with hosannas from the foreign policy establishment that hailed him as the wisest of wise men. Unfortunately, those who were slaughtered in part due to his global gamesmanship are not able to comment on his contribution to international affairs.

Earlier this year, ahead of his centennial birthday, I published an assessment of his career. I noted, “Kissinger is indeed a monumental figure who shaped much of the past 50 years. He brokered the US opening to China and pursued detente with the Soviet Union during his stints as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. Yet it is an insult to history that he is not equally known and regarded for his many acts of treachery—secret bombings, coup-plotting, supporting military juntas—that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.” I provided a break-down of these episodes. Is it an appropriate moment to revisit Kissinger’s dark past?

I could have posted other links, but of late I always try to quote from a liberal source in the spirit of being a "Devils Advocate" but in this case I think the liberal source is probably going to be the most truthful about a man who always seemed to be a real life version of doctor strangelove. His detente with the USSR was perhaps a great success. The opening of relations with China perhaps a huge mistake.

 

I don't know a whole lot about him so my opinion is limited but I do know that if you were a jerk when you were alive that being dead doesn't magically make you a better person.

If you didn't give anyone any good thing to say about you when you were here then there is also nothing good to say about you when you are gone, except perhaps people are happy that you are gone

 

One of the greatest political figures of our age, instrumental in winning the Cold War, the world is demeaned by his passing.

 

Questionable, how instrumental he was-- that is, that nuclear treaties were dependent upon him, and would not have been reached, otherwise. His "opening of China," had been intended as a way to isolate the Soviet Union-- look how well that is turning out, today, with Russia & China as allies. Sure, Kissinger is credited with keeping the Russians out of the Middle East, but at the same time, his mindset led to a souring of our relationships, so that it was easy for Russia to eventually forge alliances, notably with Iran. That's one of the the problems with Kissinger's schemes: the long term, bad "karma," that eventually plays out.

Not to mention, he broke international law, as with carpet bombing of neutral Cambodia (at least 50 thousand civilians killed), and U.S. law, in illegal weapons transfers to Pakistan, for instance, because their leader was helping his grand plan with China. Those jet transfers, btw, were being used by the U.S. backed Pakistani army's genocidal campaign in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Three hundred thousand killed in that slaughter, and ten million refugees driven into India-- but look what a great ally we have today, in Pakistan!

Then there was his "brilliance" in negotiating our exit from Vietnam, in which he negotiated to get the same agreement he could have got, years earlier. It always stuck in his craw, that North Vietnamese negotiator, Le Duc Tho had bested him. I tried to find a snip of Le Duc telling Kissinger that he was responsible for our nation's humiliation, but had no luck. Instead, here's a little snip of something which Kissinger worked on, to save face, and add to the death toll of innocents, afterwards:

<Snip>
In 1975, Mr. Kissinger and President Ford secretly approved the invasion of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor by Indonesia’s U.S.-backed military. After the loss of Vietnam, there were fears that East Timor’s leftist government could also go Communist.

Mr. Kissinger told Indonesia’s president that the operation needed to succeed quickly and that “it would be better if it were done after we returned” to the United States, according to declassified documents from Mr. Ford’s presidential library. More than 100,000 East Timorese were killed or starved to death.
<End Snip>

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/us/henry-kissinger-dead.html


So, the only thing for certain, is that today, passed away, one of the world's most over-inflated egos. Here's one more snip, from the article, above:


<Snip>
President Barack Obama, who was 8 years old when Mr. Kissinger first took office, was less enamored of him. Mr. Obama noted toward the end of his presidency that he had spent much of his tenure trying to repair the world that Mr. Kissinger left. He saw Mr. Kissinger’s failures as a cautionary tale.

“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”

Mr. Obama noted that while in office he was still trying to help countries “remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids.”

“In what way did that strategy promote our interests?” he said.
<End Snip>

 

Jessica (Ka) Burbank on X: "I remember visiting the killing fields in Cambodia and seeing a glass case of human skulls that was easily 5x my height. Henry Kissinger occupies a space in my brain that’s a black hole of disgust. May his memory be proportional to the pain and destruction he caused humanity" / X (twitter.com)

 

Some of us believe in life after death (or the possibility of). If we were to assume that was the case, it would give a whole new, very different meaning to the discussion of Kissinger's death.

Some of his policy actions during the Vietnam war were very what we might call cynical... Is he going to make it into heaven?

He was crafty and above average in intelligence, nobody would dispute that...
but was he blameless?

 

Does anyone really think that many of the dead weren't civilians?

 

Kissinger was pretty smart, but what did he achieve? We lost the War in Vietnam. A successful diplomat would have won the war, or ended it much sooner with a negotiated surrender that would have included the evacuation of Vietnamese who did not want to live under Communism.

Escaping Vietnam clinging to helicopters and abandoning the boat people to Thai pirates was a national humiliation.

 

The embarrassment to America of its many war crimes undermines our position in the world. Certainly, there are many more such criminals from other nations and cultures. The problem for Americans is that they like to think of their country as morally superior. The likes of Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and too many others give our enemies more than enough ammunition to use against such a claim.

 

LOL-- at the irony of giving your humble opinion of one of the 20th century's most pompous & conceited, amoral egotist asses.

 

<Snip>
Domestic outrage in the US over the war centered on the bombings of Laos and Cambodia, where the brutal Khmer Rouge movement used the American bombings as a recruiting tool before coming into power and carrying out one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.
<End Snip>

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/11/29/politics/henry-kissinger-dead/index.html


That points to the problem of Kissinger's short-sighted, amoral approach: the unintended consequences.


<Snip>
President Barack Obama, who was 8 years old when Mr. Kissinger first took office, was less enamored of him. Mr. Obama noted toward the end of his presidency that he had spent much of his tenure trying to repair the world that Mr. Kissinger left. He saw Mr. Kissinger’s failures as a cautionary tale.

“We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.”

Mr. Obama noted that while in office he was still trying to help countries “remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids.”

“In what way did that strategy promote our interests?” he said.

<End Snip>


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/us/henry-kissinger-dead.html


I think Bernie Sanders had it right, when he said, in his debate with Hillary Clinton, "I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. Count me in, as one who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger."

 

Is there anybody that all Americans like? Bambi?

 

Obama threw away the advantageous US position in the Middle East created by Kissinger.

 

Bambi is fine once he stays out of world affairs and politics !

If world stability is the main goal, one must ponder the number of dead civilians and what number is acceptable to achieve that goal. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with those "decisions" and the resulting "outcome".

 

~ Kissinger kept a great head of hair throughout his life. He and Newt Gingrich make Trump-O green with envy .

 

~ Another life cut short by too much booze, wild women and reckless behavior . "

" And through it all, I maintained a beautiful head of hair. "

~ Henry Alfred Kissinger​

 

Damn, he was a 100 years old.. SHORT?

 

He was the ambien of the time, five min of listening to him and you be fast asleep..

 

Yes!!!