Do we like them?

Do we like Henry Kissinger?

Our score: 2 out of 10. A long record of decisions that critics say cost many lives, with some real diplomatic good set against it.

Henry Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923 and left for the United States in 1938, before the Nazi regime's worst. He served in the US Army, then studied and taught at Harvard before moving into government. He ran national security policy as adviser and then as secretary of state under Nixon and Ford, holding both jobs at once from 1973 to 1975.

His fans point to real stuff. He opened relations with China, helped build détente and arms control talks with the Soviet Union, and used shuttle diplomacy to win a ceasefire after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. He also won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, one of the most argued-over awards ever handed out.

Now the other ledger. Critics say he prolonged the Vietnam war and expanded it into Cambodia. In 1971 he backed Pakistan despite reports of severe repression in what is now Bangladesh, which many judged to be genocide. He is still criticised for his role in efforts to topple Chile's elected president Salvador Allende.

None of this ever got tested in a criminal court. Lawsuits in the US over his alleged role in Chile were thrown out on political question grounds, so the accusations stayed accusations, though a lot of historians and rights groups have never let them go. Decide for yourself how much weight 'no one ever convicted him' deserves.

On the harm check: nothing in what we found suggests he campaigned against LGBTQ+ people, and the Nixon tapes chatter we saw came mostly from secondary reports, so we've left it out. The harm here is of a different kind. It's about policy choices that critics say backed military governments and cost civilians dearly, in places like Cambodia, Bangladesh and Chile.

Nothing new on him lately, since he died in 2023 at the age of 100. His legacy keeps being fought over, with admirers like Richard Haass arguing his achievements outweighed his failures, and others calling for him to be remembered as a war criminal. Where you land depends on whether you read the Cold War as justifying hard choices or excusing them.