David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
Henry Kissinger’s ‘Celebrity’ Could Only Happen in America
More complicated than just being a hero and a villain, Kissinger leaves a legacy of unmatched influence, for better and for worse.
Henry Kissinger was the celebrity statesman of the century in which he lived.
That was his doing as much as it was the consequence of the media age in which he lived. He was his own greatest creation. For all his seriousness as a scholar and diplomat, despite the horrific consequences of many of his acts while in power, because of and in spite of those things, Kissinger became a foreign policy icon and an oracle, the ur-soundbite sought for any story about just about anything weighty and geopolitical…
He was known to the average American as much for dating a movie star, Jill St. John, or hobnobbing with the world’s social elites, or the German accent that never left him as he was for any professional accomplishment.
None of this was an accident. Kissinger cultivated his public persona. He recognized that it brought him a kind of continued relevance that few other public officials had ever achieved after they had left office.
This piece, and the story writ large, of Henry Kissinger is as much about us as about him.
