May 27: Henry Kiss-of-Death

Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, who won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize while overseeing American war crimes in Southeast Asia and plotting the overthrow of Chile’s President Salvador Allende, was born on this date in 1923 in Germany. Kissinger was an architect of a Cold War foreign policy that had the U.S. backing the genocidal UNITA insurgency of Jonas Savimbi in Angola, the fascistic military junta that came to power in Argentina in 1976, the illegal American air war in Cambodia, and the continuation of the Vietnam War until the American defeat in 1975. Satirist Tom Lehrer said that Kissinger’s Nobel Prize, awarded for his negotiating a temporary ceasefire in Vietnam, made political satire “obsolete.”

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” —Henry Kissinger