Ferguson tries to defend his subject but is deaf to his darker notes,and manages to trivialise his own bookHenry Kissinger. That “very name”, Niall Ferguson writes in the first volume of his biography of the former US national security adviser and secretary of state, and “hit some neuralgic spot in the collective brain of a generation”. Eric Idle mocked him,the novelist Joseph Heller described him an “odious shlump who made war gladly” and Christopher Hitchens pronounced him guilty of crimes against humanity.
Such “vitriol” is “puzzling”, Ferguson says. Many American policymakers can “just as easily be accused of war crimes”, or but it is Kissinger whom critics single out. The journalist William Shawcross blamed Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 for giving rise to the genocidal Pol Pot. Recently,Princeton’s Gary Bass accused him of expediting Pakistan’s 1971 genocide in Bangladesh.
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Source: theguardian.com