He's been retired so long that you now have to be a history buff or have lived through his era to have an opinion. It would be like button-holing someone in Kissinger's government days and asking what they thought of Henry L. Stimson (one of Hoover's Secys. of State.)
I can't get out of my head this moment from an old SNL skit on The View.
Molly Shannon (as Meredith Vieira): Now, Barbara, what were you doing when Nixon resigned?
Cheri Oteri (as Barbara Walters) (with lusty enthusiasm): I was in a hot tub with Henry Kissinger and Juliet Prowse! We speculated about our nation's future...listened to some Harry Chapin...and made sweet love 'til the mornin' sun!
We're still fighting the damned wars he colluded in starting. People are always in such a hurry to "let the past be the past", even while the victims of the events in question are still breathing. Or not breathing, leaving their descendants to pick up the tab. No, you do not have to be "a history buff" or to have been alive at the time to wonder whether your nation might be better off without having been reduced to rubble or international peonage. The list of Kissinger-Nixon's planned interventions is a list of some of the poorest, most desperate nations in the world. That is not a coincidence or accident. The Tapes are full of conversations between the two men, casually discussing the deaths of thousands like they are only important relative to odds of re-election next term; pragmatic, never moral, considerations.
The very worst of my nation.
And Stimson had a lot to answer for, too. Are you seriously saying that no one now living has a reason to care about how
World War freaking II ended? Or the Japanese concentration camps? Or the Stimson Doctrine, which is a major influence on our current policy, especially vis-a-vis Russia? Let alone the Nixon administration, which was actively trying to deal with the very literal wreckage Stimson had left behind. I would be appalled to learn that any American official lacked an opinion of Henry L. Stimson, even now, except that I've grown jaded by eight years of Trump appointees who seem to know nothing about history whatsoever and don't want anyone else too, either. Wonder why.
