Final Days

 When I was a young man, I watched Dan Aykroyd caper about in a very lengthy skit about the final days of the Richard Nixon presidency. At one point Dan, as Nixon, grabs his Secretary of State by the shoulder and pressures him into kneeling in prayer. I was already familiar with this episode from my devotion to the reporting of the Washington Post. But to see it played out here, just a few years after the fact on Saturday Night Live, was somehow vindicating. The man playing the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was none other than John Belushi. The other half of the Blues Brothers. 

John Belushi died in 1982. Forty-one years ago. It was a national tragedy. For someone so young to be taken so soon. Of course, there was the matter of all the bad decisions that he made leading up to his death by overdose, but he was only thirty-three years old. 

On the topic of bad decisions, we could add the willingness to kneel with the nutjob in the White House back in 1974. Or rather than taking Woodward and Berstein's collective word for it, let's look at the historical record. No report of Henry Kissinger's accomplishments would be complete without an account of the four year bombing campaign he orchestrated against Cambodia. Also on his resume is his directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it carried out a brutal crackdown on its Bengali population in 1971. He supported the 1973 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, gave the go-ahead to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, and backed Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976. His policies during the Ford administration also fueled civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.

One might imagine the ghost of John Belushi, this time dressed up as former Vice President Dick "Dick" Cheney, pointing a finger in the direction of Henry Kissinger's open grave, shaking his head. Except "Dick" is still alive. But Henry Kissinger is dead. 

He lived to be one hundred years old. Never arrested. Never indicted. Never forced to answer for his crimes. Henry Kissinger never stomped on the Terra. He stomped on humanity. He will not be missed. Not by me, anyway. 

Maybe he lived so long because of that moment of prayer. Aloha, Henry. Good riddance.