The man many love to hate…Henry Alfred Kissinger

Henry Kissinger / Source - State Department

It may not be proper to say nasty things about people who have passed on; but one person who will not measure up to this custom would be Heinz Alfred Kissinger, later coming to be known as Henry Kissinger, a powerful diplomat who just about “ruled” American foreign policy between 1969 and 1977.

He had the rare distinction of being a Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, holding both positions at one time during the Ford administration. Kissinger who recently passed away at the age of 100 is remembered for different things and often at the same time.

He is seen as the person instrumental in bringing about détente between the United States and the then Soviet Union and in the process enabling the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT); opening up America to China or vice versa; laying the first foundations of peace between Egypt and Israel; and perhaps a person who made sure that principles of realpolitik were preeminent in foreign policy as opposed to moralism.

Critics of Kissinger—and there are aplenty—have just about no use for someone they hope is “apartment hunting” in Hell for the misery he wrought in the pursuit of treachery and duplicity in American foreign policy leading to thousands of deaths in Asia and Latin America.

Principally in the course of the Vietnam war and support to ruthless dictators, the Nixon administration made no distinction between right and left-wing regimes.

To many Kissinger ought to have kept company at The Hague with notorious mass murderers and war criminals like Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic. And much of this ire stems from the decision to drag Cambodia and Laos into the Vietnam war on the pretext of choking off enemy supply lines.

The United States is said to have dropped more bombs on the Indochina states than during the course of the second world war with some of the unexploded ordnances still doing the kills of innocent people in those hapless countries.

Closer home, in the name of reaching out to China and needing the help of Pakistan for his diplomatic visits, Kissinger was perfectly fine with ignoring the genocide taking place in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971.

Scholars have maintained that Kissinger’s secret war in Cambodia paved the way for Pol Pot-Ieng Sary-Ta Mok clique to come to power in Phnom Penh resulting in the deaths of nearly three million people and eventually paving the way for Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

Still till the very end neither Richard Nixon nor Kissinger admitted that the “Domino Theory” about which the Vietnam war was all about never actually materialized and that the war could have been brought to an end at the start of the Nixon era in 1969 instead of to a rancorous drama in 1975.

A celebrity in his own right Kissinger is known to have had an ego that knew no bounds as well as a temper that would only sound like paranoia like that of his boss.

His standard dictum at work was apparently “There should be absolutely no leaks; and if there is to be a leak, I should be the only one to leak”, or words to that effect. At one time he is supposed to have quipped that Nixon was a “drunken lunatic” implying that he was the one holding things together.

Kissinger, some maintain, nearly brought Nuclear Armageddon at the time of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 by mis-reading noises and signals from Moscow and placing the American strategic nuclear command on high alert.

“A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery” wrote Chile’s Ambassador to the United States on X, formerly Twitter; and historian Robert Dallek had once noted that Kissinger’s failings were that he was “too egotistical, too convinced of his own brilliance”.

But for Kissinger who thought that neither the intelligent nor the dumb-wits understood what he was saying, all these would hardly matter.

Currently Editor in Chief of New India Abroad, the writer was Special Correspondent of The Hindu in Washington DC covering North America and the United Nations.