Just Another Opinion

It’s easy to take pot shots from the sidelines. And universal acclaim is a pipe dream.

PBS Newshour recently featured a long segment on Henry Kissinger, who died a couple days ago at age 100. As it is known for often trying to do, PBS offered an actual fair and balanced attempt at summarizing Kissinger’s legacy.

On one side was a fellow diplomat, a contemporary who was familiar with Kissinger’s efforts during much of the Nixon administration and beyond, and who offered a predictably positive assessment of Kissinger’s achievements. On the other side was a professor who wrote a book decrying, among other things, Kissinger’s support of the bombing of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Starkly differing opinions of the same person. And I have to say that I was a bit annoyed by the professor, who lambasted Kissinger and painted him as something of a pariah, even guilty of war crimes.

No doubt, some horrible things developed in Cambodia after the bombing, namely the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. Such policy decisions might not be feasible in today’s world. But in the early 1970s, Kissinger’s opinions were influenced by a dogged desire to keep Communism at bay and maintain American democracy, at pretty much any cost.

The reason I find the professor’s badmouthing so grating is not because his opinions aren’t without merit, but more so because he wasn’t there, he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day, down and dirty work of trying to broker deals with bad players and angry leadership in situations where there were no perfect solutions, situations that might have appeared intractable to most everyone else.

Kissinger might have seemed ruthless, and like he enjoyed being in the limelight and rubbing elbows with the powerful, but he also had an almost unrivaled gift of vision and language—intelligence—of being able to create a climate in which progress could be made, deals could be hammered out, and wars and conflicts would cease.

I don’t see international diplomacy as being for the faint of heart. It’s not an exact science. Deals and concessions and seemingly impossible decisions must be made. Henry Kissinger was in the middle of many of these situations not only because he seemed to revel in them, but also because he had the once-in-a-generation skill set to handle them and to help render palatable outcomes, as unpopular as these may yet be to some.