Henry Kissinger, who served as national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, turned 100 years old on May 27. The birthday was celebrated by the establishment elite in op-eds, interviews, a fawning Ted Koppel CBS piece, a closed-door gathering at the Economic Club of New York, and a secretive black-tie event at the New York Public Library where guests seen walking in constituted an A-list of corporate and political biggies.
Many, of course, including The Nation, The Intercept, and Mehdi Hasan used the occasion to recall the dark side of Kissinger’s legacy – his role in the destruction of Chilean democracy and the consolidation of the Pinochet dictatorship, the atrocities of the Argentine military junta (Kissinger told the country’s foreign minister, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly”), the prolongation of the Vietnam War through the sabotage of Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 peace talks, the Indonesian invasion and subsequent rape of East Timor, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, the extension of the Vietnam war to Laos and Cambodia, and the Pakistani army’s atrocities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Quite an impressive record for one man, even a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.
— source justsecurity.org | Reed Brody | Jun 27, 2023