The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger

"The collection strikes a blackly comic but erudite tone."
–Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post

Kissinger is dead but his blood-soaked legacy endures

If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, then Henry Kissinger is the ghoul haunting its hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the American empire through successive rounds of growing pains. For multiple generations of anti-war activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the American war machine.

The world Kissinger wrought is the world we live in, where ideal investment conditions are generated from the barrel of a gun. Today, global capitalism and United States hegemony are underwritten by the most powerful military ever devised. Any political vision worth fighting for must promise an end to the cycle of never-ending wars afflicting the world in the twenty-first century. And breaking that cycle means placing the twin evils of capitalism and imperialism in our crosshairs.

In this book, Jacobin follows Kissinger’s fiery trajectory around the world — not because he was evil incarnate, but because he, more than any other public figure, illustrates the links between capitalism, empire, and the feedback loop of endless war-making that still plagues us today.

René Rojas is a sociologist studying neoliberalism in the Southern Cone. Originally from Chile, he received his PhD from New York University in 2016.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founder and Editor of Jacobin, which he launched in 2010 as an undergraduate at George Washington University. He has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, Vice, and the Washington Post. Sunkara is also the publisher of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and the UK-based Tribune. He lives in New York.

Jonah Walters is a researcher at Jacobin and a doctoral student in geography at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University and a Nation editorial board member, is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize; Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Empire's Workshop; The Last Colonial Massacre; The Blood of Guatemala; and Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman.