Henry Kissinger passes away (nfm)
- Thread starter GrimReaper
- Start date
The Gateway to China for Nixon....
"Chinese officials and state media mourned the death of Henry Kissinger, the 100-year-old who was at the heart of the United States’ rapprochement with China half a century ago and had visited Beijing only this summer."
As a young boy, I remember watching him speak in a measured yet forceful manner. Always felt he was probably one of the better statesmen in my generation.
An extremely intelligent individual. He was valued by both political parties because of his incisive mind.
And his accent added to his gravitas.
Like, Bob Hope, Queen Elizabeth, and a few others...he was always with us and suddenly is gone.
Couple of funny (or maybe not) stories about Kissinger.
His senior thesis at Harvard ran nearly 400 pages, prompting the school to impose a length-limit on future submissions. The restriction was informally dubbed "The Kissinger Rule."
A professor of mine was at different times both a student and colleague of Kissinger. A group of Harvard Government Department faculty and graduate students would hold mock news conferences, where one member was tapped to play Kissinger and the others the pool of news reporters. One exchange:
Reporter: Dr. Kissinger, you have a very distinct German accent. Your brother, Walter, who came to this country at the same time, has no accent. Can you explain why?
"Kissinger": Zere iss a very zimple explanation for zat. I am a German and my brozer iss a Jew.
His senior thesis at Harvard ran nearly 400 pages, prompting the school to impose a length-limit on future submissions. The restriction was informally dubbed "The Kissinger Rule."
A professor of mine was at different times both a student and colleague of Kissinger. A group of Harvard Government Department faculty and graduate students would hold mock news conferences, where one member was tapped to play Kissinger and the others the pool of news reporters. One exchange:
Reporter: Dr. Kissinger, you have a very distinct German accent. Your brother, Walter, who came to this country at the same time, has no accent. Can you explain why?
"Kissinger": Zere iss a very zimple explanation for zat. I am a German and my brozer iss a Jew.
Ok. You win. Thomas Jefferson would be the best, Was trying to think of someone last 100 years. Should have went back further.What about this guy?
I won't argue with your comment. Lots of damage done during the Vietnam war.
However, things were different. HK escaped Nazi Germany so he didn't grow up in a cushy situation in a stable nation. He grew up watching monsters eat sheep. He also was at the Battle of the Bulge as a combatant and private. He did translations. He also worked in the post war era trying to help the army stabilize after the East fell.
In his time, he saw the efforts of both China and Russia to colonize south America and the far east. He saw it as kill or be killed. both Korea and Vietnam, along with wars in south American that don't get the press, were wars to stop the spread of those two totalitarian government models. And to that end, they were successful although Vietnam eventually fell.
But you also have to give him credit for being the primary figure to END our involvement with Vietnam although he absolutely knew it wouldn't last.
I won't post any more on the subject but wanted to get my $0.02 in. I find people lose context when looking at history.
I know it was but he wasn’t Secretary of State. lol.That's Ben Franklin bro! Jefferson definitely the best dancer though.
Well, he was before it was called that.....you don't get a whole top floor of the HST building named after you for nothing....
I'll take "People I thought were dead 30 years ago" for $1000 Alex/Ken/Mayim
Give him credit for what? He prolonged the Vietnam War. He secretly bombed Cambodia and lied about it. Nam went on far too long.
well, it wasn't totally his call. he worked for a guy (nixon) who inherited the mess from the other guy (Johnson) after Kennedy made a mss of it. I do agree that there was lying. To me, I still can't believe that Nixon was forced to resign when Johnson got off scott-free after the Pentagon Papers and the Gulf of Tonkin. He did win the Nobel Peace Prize.
But you and I could go on forever. If I am looking for evil people from 1960 ~ 2023, he doesn't make the top 100 in my book.
Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times.....
As thousands walked down the ho Cho Minh trail in Cambodia and supplies as well came through to attack our soldiers. Of course we bombed it. Why wouldn’t we.
Jefferson the best? I would strongly disagree with that.
There have been a pretty impressive list of Secretary of States in US history. These include (listing some of the more prominent ones but not all of them, and excluding Jefferson and Kissinger who have already been mentioned):
- Edmund Jennings Randolph
- Timothy Pickering
- John Marshall
- James Madison
- James Monroe
- John Quincy Adams
- Henry Clay
- Martin Van Buren
- John Forsyth
- Daniel Webster
- John Calhoun
- James Buchanan
- Edward Everett
- William Henry Seward
- James Blaine
- Philander Chase Knox
- William Jennings Bryan
- George Marshall
- Dean Acheson
- John Foster Dulles
- Dean Rusk
- Cy Vance
- Edmund Muskie
- Alexander Haig
- George Shultz
- Madeleine Albright
- Colin Powell
- Condoleezza Rice
- Hillary Clinton
- John Kerry
If you're looking for the best SOS in the past 100 years, I'd probably go for George Marshall or Dean Acheson, though there were several excellent ones.
If you're looking back a little further, I'd probably go with William Henry Seward.
If you're going way, way back, I'd opt for James Monroe, though you could make a strong case for John Quincy Adams.
Jefferson was bored as Secretary of State, and few historians would point to that part of his life as one of his more important, or more impressive, periods.
He was the first so I give him credit.
.I could see John Quincy Adam’s but Marshall as sec of state for two years and yes the Marshall plan was put in place by him. Think his job as general of the armies was much better. Seward I would say no as he was sec of state when the civil war broke out.
I don't think it would have mattered who was SOS in 1861 in terms of whether or not the Civil War broke out. Lincoln was in office for 1 month when the Civil War broke out. And the SOS's main focus is external relationships, not internal issues. (That said, Seward worked very hard in early 1861 (before the Inauguration) to find a compromise, after several Southern states moved toward seceding.) During the Civil War, Seward worked to keep European nations from recognizing the Confederacy, and neither the United Kingdom nor France ever did. (That's a grand generalization that is accurate, but leaves out quite a few events. the UK did come close to recognizing the Confederacy, but Seward's efforts were able to stave that off. The UK did not challenge the Union blockades of Confederate ports, though it did tacitly allow UK ships to be used to run the blockades to deliver weapons purchased from the UK by Confederate agents.)
John Wilkes Booth's plan was to kill Lincoln, VP Andrew Johnson, and SOS Seward, as he felt they were the three most important members of the administration. Booth's associate, Lewis Powell, made it into Seward's house, and despite a scuffle outside of Seward's bedroom, Powell made it in to the bedroom and stabbed Seward multiple times (I believe it was 5) in the face and neck. A Union private, that was assigned to guard Seward, knocked Powell off the bed during the attack, though the private was also injured in the attack. (Powell ended up escaping, though he was captured the next day at Mary Surratt's boarding house.)
Toward the end of the Civil War, France (under Napoleon III) installed Archduke Maximilian of Austria as the head of Mexico. Seward was rather skillful in objecting to this, but not to the point of causing France to back the Confederacy. After the war ended, Seward upped his pressure on France, and when Napoleon III kept delaying the agreed upon departure of Archduke Maximilian, Seward brought US forces to the border with Mexico, and provided arms to the forces under Beniot Juarez. The Archduke was eventually captured by Juarez's forces, which essentially ended the direct influence of European countries in the running of Mexico.
Seward had realized during the Civil War that the USA was limited in part by its lack of naval bases in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and to a lesser extent the Pacific. He made some efforts to purchase Greenland and Iceland, but Denmark did not agree to this. He also made some efforts to purchase the Danish West Indies (known today as the US Virgin Islands), but though the Danish did agree to a proposed sale, the Senate ended up not agreeing to the terms that he had negotiated. (The US did purchase the islands in 1917.) Interestingly, he had more success in the Pacific, where he was able to purchase Russian America (what we call Alaska) from the Russians.
It ended when Congress stopped funding it with the Case-Church amendment. They could have ended it earlier.
So Case-Church ended it. QED.
K prolonged the war with his and nixon’s lies, in which he was complicit.
The Congress ended it by refusing to go along.
no, I meant Nixon
If you don't like this summary, there is plenty out there on it:
How Nixon Prolonged The Vietnam War, And Why He Did It (allthatsinteresting.com)
Get unlimited access today.