When Henry Kissinger died Wednesday night at the age of 100, the overriding feeling on a large swath of the internet was, well, release. The former secretary of state and national security adviser—and the architect of some of the bloodiest expressions of U.S. foreign policy—outlived his old bosses Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford by decades, becoming an adored figure within the United States’ Beltway elite, a sought-after counselor on world affairs, a prolific writer, and also an investor in Theranos. For those familiar with the lowlights of Kissinger’s career as secretary of state—carpet-bombing Southeast Asia, ruining early chances for peace in Vietnam, abetting genocide in Bangladesh and East Timor, and consigning Chile and Argentina to decades of strongman brutality—the half-century of feting that Kissinger received after leaving government service has always been baffling and angering. Kissinger didn’t just dine out. He continued to sabotage other presidents’ foreign policies, made racist and antisemitic statements, supported the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq, and advised multiple mining companies responsible for human rights violations. For liberals with something resembling a conscience, the frustration arose not just from the fact that Kissinger lived for so long with total impunity, but that he remained an influential voice, despite the millions of lives ended or ruined by his actions as well as the continued pain of his survivors. It’s not as though the people who celebrated him were unaware of these feelings. When the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner confronted veteran broadcaster Ted Koppel in June about his “arm’s-length friendship” with Kissinger, Koppel brushed off the discussions of war crimes by repeatedly referring to Kissinger as an “interesting man.” Certainly one way of putting it.
And then on Wednesday he died, and you can perhaps understand why so many responded with a sense of levity. You could find some glee in recirculating Anthony Bourdain’s rage-filled quote about how Kissinger ruined Cambodia. If you had an emojipasta saved on your phone for this occasion, you could finally, finally dispatch it in a timely manner. If you wanted to make use of the infamous “crab rave” video, now was the chance. Yet among all this catharsis, no one could surpass the “unbeatable levels of hater” reached by the lefty publishers Jacobin magazine and Verso Books. In anticipation of the elder statesman’s demise, Jacobin had assembled an entire book in advance, titled The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger, featuring essays by celebrated scholars like Gerald Horne and Carolyn Eisenberg on the wide-spanning breadth of Kissinger’s noxious foreign-policy legacy and the areas of the world still hurting thanks to his time in power. The 200-page book, which was completed years ago and prepared with a 5,000-copy limited run, went immediately on sale Wednesday night, a fitting counterbalance to the more laudatory remembrances offered by the likes of, say, the Washington Post and Fox News.
To talk about how this project came together, and the ways we should remember Henry Kissinger, I spoke with book co-editor Jonah Walters, a former researcher for Jacobin and a current postdoctoral scholar in the BioCritical Studies Lab at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nitish Pahwa: When did the idea for this project materialize?
Jonah Walters: I was looped into the project around 2015, shortly after I started at Jacobin. René Rojas and Bhaskar Sunkara, the other editors on the project, approached me with the idea to put together a volume of simple essays about Kissinger, which would be geographically themed around countries or regions of the world where Kissinger had some sort of negative effect. This was a moment when Kissinger was about to turn 95, so people were already preparing for and sort of looking forward to his death because there was widespread acknowledgement—certainly among progressives and people on the left—that with the death of Kissinger, there might be an opportunity to have more expansive conversations about what the U.S.’s role in the world should be, and how we should think about the role that the U.S. played in the 20th century. The idea for the book was to encourage those kinds of conversations.
Also, Greg Grandin—who contributed the introduction to the book—had released his own book-length treatment in 2015 titled Kissinger’s Shadow, which is an intellectual biography. Many years before that, we had the famous Christopher Hitchens book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which lays out, in a very lawyerly way, all of the human rights violations and war crimes Kissinger committed over the course of his career. While those books are fantastic and extremely useful, we saw the need for a different kind of book that would point to Kissinger not as an aberration or a uniquely malevolent figure in American history, but rather as the embodiment of official U.S. policies.
What was your personal experience with studying or writing about Kissinger?
I was working on a Ph.D. in geography at the time, which I’ve since finished, so I was and am really interested in questions of international politics. I came to socialist and progressive politics as a young person through the anti–Iraq war movement. That was the background I was bringing: a broad interest in American militarism, in the American imperial adventures of the past 100 years or so, and a firm interest in developing the kind of politics that could slow the American war machine.
Did you immediately have an idea in your head of whom you should contact for the book?
I feel super lucky that we were able to get so many great historians and writers to contribute to the book. I have to admit that I myself, as the junior editor on the team, probably had the least influence over whom we contacted and whom we reached out to, but I’m thrilled with the list that we ended up getting. I know one thing that Jacobin does really well—that it has emphasized from its beginning as a publication—is attracting international writers and developing not only an international audience for socialist politics but also an international base of socialist writers who are able to write about pressing political and social issues. The table of contents of this book reflects that.
Rojas was able to commission several excellent scholars from South America who wrote their contributions originally in Spanish, which he translated for the book. That’s actually one of the things I’m proudest of. There’s a ton of people writing about Kissinger and commenting on Kissinger’s legacy around the world, but in the Southern Cone of South America in particular, there’s been an impressive reckoning with his legacy among historians, and a lot of that work hasn’t appeared in English. We were able to publish people like Aldo Marchesi and others who came out of that intellectual community. And I’m really thrilled to bring their words into English.
How long did it end up taking to put the entire thing together?
It was a process of several years of communicating with authors and developing the chapters that would end up going into the book. We seized on the idea of releasing it on the day of Kissinger’s death pretty early in the process, so it was important to us that we conceive of the book as a document that would be relevant to people no matter when it came out, which was a challenge. For instance, in the early stages, a lot of us were pretty confident that it would come out while Donald Trump was president. So there was some language in Grandin’s introduction that was explicitly about Trump and has since been removed.
I’m pleased with the work that the contributors did to write essays that capture something really deep and meaningful about Kissinger’s legacy, which is just as relevant to readers coming to this in the middle of a Biden presidency as it would’ve been to audiences reading it in the middle of a Trump presidency. That’s another one of the things we really wanted to emphasize with this book—that Kissinger is a bipartisan figure. Maybe more than any other American figure, he represents the institutional memory of American empire, and that institutional memory persists no matter who’s sitting in the White House. There’s a fun little section in the preface that René, Bhaskar, and I wrote where we describe Kissinger’s 90th birthday party in New York City, which was a huge, black-tie affair that received all sorts of coverage in the tabloids. What’s really striking about that gathering is that it was full of Bush administration people—Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld—and it’s also full of Democratic people. Veteran for Peace John Kerry is in attendance. Hillary Clinton is in attendance. It captures the bipartisan nature not only of Kissinger as a figure, but his entire political and his entire geopolitical project.
Did you keep the book top-secret?
We certainly weren’t advertising the project, but I also don’t think it was any secret at any point. We commissioned about 15 different authors to write for the book, so keeping a lid on the project entirely would’ve been pretty impossible. Also, the designers at Jacobin did such a wonderful job developing the splash page and the new landing webpage for the homepage to promote the book. And then when the news became public and Kissinger was the word on everybody’s lips, we set everything in motion, we released the book, and we started advertising it.
Where were you when you heard Kissinger had died?
I was in the car pumping gas, and I got a text from a loved one telling me that Kissinger had died—or actually, it was just a single word. It was just “Kissinger!” with about a million exclamation points. And my first thought was, “Oh geez, my calendar this week just filled up.” It’s been a period of about seven years since most people completed their contributions to the book. I know I immediately had a thought of I haven’t even looked at this manuscript in more than a year, and I sure hope it holds up. I have to say, I was pleased to return to it and read some of my favorite chapters of the book and be reminded that a lot of what the book says is pretty timeless.
What did you make of the public reaction to Kissinger’s death?
It’s only in the past couple of years that Kissinger’s reputation as a mainstream political figure has taken some dings. As recently as when we first started working on this book, it was still unusual to hear Kissinger criticized publicly. I remember that during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton was quite boastful about her relationship with Kissinger, and Bernie Sanders took some serious heat from liberal commentators for famously saying from the debate stage that Kissinger was no friend of his and he wouldn’t be proud of an association with Kissinger.
I was pleasantly surprised that there was so much published about him that in fact was critical over the past day or so. Obviously, there are still the hagiographies and the mainstream obituaries, which really exert themselves to apologize for or excuse the atrocities that he was responsible for, but I think it’s become much more difficult even for centrist or mainstream liberal commentators to be uncritically celebratory of Kissinger and his legacy.
The mirthful and relieved response to the death of this man—that’s how most people in the world are reacting to this news. It’s really only in the United States where we can even stomach a conversation about whether or not it’s proper to not publicly grieve Henry Kissinger. There are quite literally tens of millions of people all over the world in countries as far-flung as Bangladesh, Chile, certainly Palestine, all over the world, who recognize Henry Kissinger as a symbol of some of the most cynical and destructive political decisions that have been taken in the past 100 years. Even without the existence of a magazine like Jacobin, most people in the world would be giddily celebrating the death of this man today.
I’m curious what you make of the fact that Kissinger’s death has come at this time of heightened conflict in Israel and Palestine, as well as the shift in the discussions around that sphere.
I think that one of the most urgent political tasks that confronts progressives in the United States—and around the world today—is how to rein in the self-perpetuating cycle of forever wars that structured so much of the 20th century, and that continues to structure our global politics today. The world Kissinger was instrumental in creating is a world in which the military might of dominant powers, notably the United States, plays a sort of discretionary, disciplinary role the world over. The Kissinger doctrine—if we can call it that—was to use the might of the American military, as well as its client militaries around the world, to come down hard against any country that threatened to develop its own sphere of influence or chart its own path toward a future that wasn’t constrained by U.S. hegemony.
In a lot of ways, that world still exists. That is still the overriding objective of the U.S. government when it comes to foreign policy. It’s less possible for the U.S. security state to unilaterally stage invasions like the Iraq war, but it certainly has a network of extremely powerful allies around the world and key geopolitical feeders who may support it with weapons, with political legitimacy, with money. And chief among these client militaries or these geopolitical partners is the state of Israel.
There are obvious, immediate things that I think need to happen to make this a more peaceful and just world—checking the power of the state of Israel over Palestinians is certainly one of those things, but in a more long-term sense, I think the anti-Kissinger doctrine, if we can call it that, would be to quit thinking about the world as a place that is only manageable through the might and power of the American military.
There’s so much you can get into with Kissinger, but if there’s one thing you want to make sure that Americans don’t forget or continue to ignore about him and his life and career, what would it be?
It’s really hard to pick one historical example and hold it up as the most damaging thing that Kissinger accomplished, because there are so many places around the world that continue to struggle with the aftermath of the decisions he and others made.
For me personally, one thing that stands out is the absolutely horrific role that he played in the Southern Cone of South America—not only in paving the way for a coup d’état against Salvador Allende in Chile, but also in creating what was known then and now as Operation Condor, the program through which South American dictatorships collaborated with one another to disappear one another’s exiled opponents. It was a horrible, murderous program that led to the total destruction of the left in South America, which is a legacy that that part of the world has been living with for generations.
It’s shocking to me, on a personal and moral level, that someone like Kissinger, who as a young boy had fled Nazi Germany, was actively collaborating with fascistic dictatorships in South America to commit horrible crimes against humanity and to disappear political dissidents. It’s striking to me that his path led him to that place.
