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Reflections on the Death of Henry Kissinger

Oliver Angert (Reporter ‘2024)


First, I’m going to preface this by saying that I don’t exactly know whether a school paper is the right place to talk about the death of a major politician. Most of the time, we write articles that are related to the school, but hey, might as well broaden our horizons. Even if no one else is interested in this, I am, so I’m going to write about it.


Most students probably don’t even know who Henry Kissinger was, so that seems like a good place to start. Henry Kissinger was the secretary of state and national security advisor during the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1969 and 1977. He was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1938, later serving in the US military during WW2. He then went on to attend Harvard University, later becoming a professor there, before being appointed national security advisor. Kissinger was involved in a lot of the most… let’s say controversial foreign policy decisions (war crimes) the United States has made, like the carpet bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 — which resulted in the deaths of between 150,000 and half a million Cambodians —, supporting Pakistan


Former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger attends the American Academy's award ceremony at Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, Germany, in this January 21, 2020 photo.

during the Bangladesh genocide, and the coup in Chile, where the dictator, Augusto Pinochet, backed by the United States, overthrew the democratically elected president Salvadore Allende. Also, supporting the Argentine military junta and many other cases where, to prevent the spread of communism, the United States set up authoritarian dictatorships. This, of course, is where I have to bring up his most famous atrocity—the Vietnam War. Kissinger was credited for ‘ending’ the Vietnam War, which he did by negotiating with the North Vietnamese for the release of prisoners of war from the United States in exchange for the removal of all US troops in a secret negotiation that The South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu did not agree with and was forced to sign. For this, Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, proving that literally anyone could win that thing. Two members even left the Nobel Prize committee in protest.


In conclusion, Henry Kissinger was a controversial figure in American politics who was also an active supporter of dictators and war criminals, while probably being one himself. He represents the side of America that people don’t like to think about, the part of America that is willing to do anything to keep its position as a global superpower. There’s a reason why so many people were celebrating his death.




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