Henry Kissinger Was A War Criminal, But Presidents And Celebrities Smiled With Him

Henry Kissinger, America’s most famous war criminal, died on Wednesday at age 100. As secretary of state and national security adviser for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he micromanaged, presided over or provided crucial support to deadly conflicts on three continents.

In his eight years in power, he unnecessarily prolonged the Vietnam War for five years, ordered the carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos, provided arms for Pakistan’s brutal war in Bangladesh, gave the green light to Argentina’s “dirty war,” endorsed General Augusto Pinochet’s deadly coup in Chile, enabled a genocide in East Timor and fueled civil wars in southern African countries.

The estimated death toll for foreign policy follies connected to Kissinger sits between 3 million and 4 million. The 350,000 to 500,000 Cambodians killed by American bombs, however, are most directly connected to him. As secretary of state, Kissinger personally approved thousands of bombing raids in the country while closely overseeing the campaign. Cambodia’s government collapsed amid the U.S.’s secret bombing, allowing the strongman Pol Pot to fill the vacuum. His short rule ended with the slaughter and starvation of 1 million more.

All those deaths came as part of Kissinger’s pursuit of a version of realpolitik that placed U.S. national interest above all other considerations ― moral, ideological, political — and that made him an elder statesman, bestselling author and sought-after confidant for political figures of all partisan persuasions and nationalities over the years.

Kissinger was a private adviser to former President George W. Bush ― who initially offered him the role of 9/11 Commission chairman. He consulted with then-Vice President Dick Cheney on the Iraq War. He was a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought out his counsel and praised him during her 2016 presidential campaign. Kissinger visited the White House to advise President Barack Obama more than once. And in 2016, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter presented Kissinger with a distinguished public service award from the Defense Department.

All of the top 2016 Republican Party primary candidates, save for Donald Trump, met with Kissinger in hopes of gaining his foreign policy cred by osmosis. Trump later met with Kissinger multiple times. He remained, up to his death, a member in good standing of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Institute. And he held a seat on the board of Theranos, the fraudulent Silicon Valley blood-testing corporation, from 2014 to 2016.

Unlike his predecessors President Joe Biden has not met with Kissinger since taking office. However, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, USAID administrator Samantha Power and CIA director Bill Burns attended Kissinger’s 100th birthday celebration in New York in 2023.

He also remained a cultural figure who dined and partied with the celebrities and socialites of Manhattan high society.

Kissinger’s history of evading any responsibility for war crimes also provided a generation of U.S. and global leaders with the knowledge that they would never face consequences for their actions in office, whether those be launching an illegal war, creating a torture regime, using drones to kill U.S. citizens, or operating concentration camps. He provided a visionary example for our 21st-century age of unaccountable power.

Below are some of the U.S. leaders and other public figures who rubbed shoulders with the now-deceased war criminal: