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Christopher Hitchens begins The Trial of Henry Kissinger with a dedication and a sentence from Joseph Heller's novel Good as Gold. "In Gold's conservative opinion," Heller wrote in 1976, "Kissinger would not be recalled as a Bismarck, Metternich, or Castlereagh but as an odious schlump who made war gladly." Like Heller's fictional hero, Bruce Gold, I am one of many American professors who loathed Henry Kissinger when he was a principal architect of America's global foreign policy. Heller's novel hilariously reveals how much jealousy of Kissinger's power as a policy maker and media celebrity, as well as his improbable sex appeal, inflamed our loathing for him back in the 1970s. I think we can safely say now that sexual jealousy no longer plays the part it once did in the negative feelings Kissinger still evokes in men like me. However, for those of us-- men and women alike-who even today feel deep revulsion every time we see Henry Kissinger on television making pronouncements about the way the United States should run its foreign policy, a certain envy of his continuing influence in our national life still runs strong.
Christopher Hitchens may very well harbor such feelings, but like Bruce Gold, he has reason to support his criticism of Henry Kissinger. The evidence is presented in Hitchens' wonderful little book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. In his scathing review of the book, Lawrence Douglas contends, misleadingly, that most everything in Hitchens' indictment of Kissinger is already well known by scholars and foreign policy experts. But of course Hitchens' book is not principally directed to academic scholars. More to the point, those scholars and so-called experts have done rather little to draw conclusions about Kissinger's behavior or to propose that anything be done about it by policy makers or jurists. Hitchens' book succinctly lays out in the clearest possible language a rational case for regarding the former National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, and Nobel Peace Prize winner, not as a heroic figure, but as a villain responsible for a wide variety of misdeeds, a man whose celebrity and success tell us a great deal about the culture of politics in the United States.
Hitchens' book is a gift for those readers new to the controversies generated...