It is hard to recall a figure whose death has evoked more polarised reactions than that of Henry Kissinger. The last of America’s grand strategists was as reviled as he was adulated — often by the same people.
Many prominent Americans who as students in the 1970s loathed the Vietnam war and the secret bombing of Cambodia, were only too happy to appear at one of Kissinger’s centenarian parties this year. Kissinger’s rehabilitation owes as much to the passage of time as the evolution of his critics.
Kissinger was vilified as having blood on his hands by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Seymour Hersh. Within minutes of his death on Wednesday evening, Rolling Stone, the counterculture magazine of Kissinger’s era, published an obituary under the headline: “Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.”