Not long after former President Trump took office, he took part in what's become

something of a White House tradition.

A visit with Henry Kissinger.

Usually I say, have you ever been in the Oval Office?

And with Henry Kissinger, I didn't bother asking that question because he has been in this office many many

times. It's just one measure of Kissinger's enduring influence. Ever since serving

as Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Kissinger had met with

every U.S. President, but Biden.

After news of his death came out Wednesday, tributes poured in.

From President George W. Bush Bush who called him one of America's most dependable

and distinctive voices on foreign affairs to current Secretary of State Anthony Blinking.

So, Mr. Kissinger really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job.

Few people were better students of history.

Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry

Kissinger.

Kissinger's admirers frame him as a clear-eyed diplomatic mastermind, the man who engineered the U.S. exit from the disastrous

war in Vietnam, who brokered the first major nuclear arms control agreement with the

Soviet Union, and who thawed relations with Communist China.

But Kissinger's critics, well, they point to another legacy.

In point of fact, many, many, many thousands, tens of thousands of people good people people better than this man people better than his boss were put to death to save those faces

That is journalist Christopher Hitchins back in 2001, arguing that Henry Kissinger's

career amounted to, quote, a one-man international rolling crime wave. There was the carpet bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War

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