Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I'm joined today by Jonah Walters. He is a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Society and Genetics, the University of California, Los Angeles,

is also the co-editor, along with Renee Rojas and Basco Sankara, of the new book,

The Good Die Young, The Verdict on Henry Kessinger, available from Verso, Jonah Walters.

Thank you for joining us.

So, Kurt a phrase today.

Thanks for having me.

So Henry Kissinger, Dr. Kissinger, as he preferred to be known, died last year at the age of 100,

hailed by some as great statesmen of our age.

He had many friends in Washington on both the right and among liberals.

Huge fans include Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton.

After, of course, Henry Kissinger is also one of most controversial statesmen of the 20th century.

And some might consider him to be one of the worst butchers of the second half of the century,

with a great deal of blood dripping from his hands.

Pretty clear where the contributors to the good die young stand. This book was released by Jacobin magazine as soon as Kessinger's death was announced, which suggests that it had been in preparation for some time.

So let me start by asking you, Jonah Walters, why did you and Jacobin Magazine think Henry Kissinger was so important and so necessary of commentary that you had a secret book prepared on him ready for release at the moment of Kissinger's death?

Well, that's a great question. It's a very fair question. I think that our thinking when we

plan the book, and we began working on the book all the way back in 2015, I guess, sort of in the

final days of the Obama administration and then continued working on it throughout most of the

Trump administration and had the manuscript basically locked around 2018, 2019. But the reason that we thought that Kissinger warranted this kind of attention and this

kind of analysis is because he, first of all, exerted such a high level of influence

over American foreign policy for such a long period of time.

And also the period of time during which he exerted this influence was really crucial

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