Kissinger's Death and Carter's (Rosalynne's)

Henry Kissinger has died, and it's the kind of death where I would have thought, wait, he's still alive???!!!!  But I had heard a news story not too long ago about his involvement in something, even though he's 100 years old, and he had begun to seem like a vampire to me, this foreign policy vampire who will be around sucking the blood out of social justice movements long after we're all gone.

I thought about not writing much more than that paragraph, but I've seen some evocative writing by others, and I want to record a few thoughts.  The first bit I read was from this piece by the editors of The Washington Post:  "Indeed, Mr. Kissinger’s heyday was a time when the secretary of state could strike grand bargains that seem elusive to U.S. leaders today. Such a time seems long distant."

But I'm old enough to remember the news stories from the 80's and 90's that bemoaned late century politics and how political actors were a faint shadow of the powerful figures who navigated World War II.  Even then, I wondered how we would remember the Henry Kissengers and the Ronald Reagans.  And now, I wonder how the future will respond to our current time, 2023, our curdled politics, particularly in the U.S. House of Representatives where so many seem to have decided not to accomplish a single damn thing.

My view of Kissinger was shaped by events in Latin America during my college years.  I was astonished by U.S. foreign policy that seemed to care not a whit for the humans on the ground.  I still am, but I am less judgmental about situations that seem to have no good ending and humans who have to decide how to navigate that.

Maybe Kissinger was similarly conflicted, but most stories about him don't show him caring about human rights if it meant that his geopolitical goals could be met.  This article in Rolling Stone was quite explicit, but sadly, I can no longer quote it because it seems now to be behind a paywall when it wasn't at 4:30 when I first read it this morning.  But I can summarize:  if you count up all the bodies in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Chile, in Argentina, in Pakistan, in the USSR, in India, on and on I could go, it's clear that his geopolitical goals left millions dead.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, Kissinger's death and Rosalynne Carter's (and I assume that her spouse Jimmy will not be far behind her).  It's interesting to compare the news stories, the retrospectives,  people born at roughly the same time, experiencing the same world events, reacting in such very different ways.

I know how I prefer to be remembered when I die.