Kissinger's Culpability: At 100, more than a half-century of blood is on the elder statesman's hands.

• Author: Cords, Sarah

Henry Kissinger is still alive and still in possession of the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 1973. Time will eventually address the former issue; as to the latter, the Nobel Foundation has declared that "none of the prize awarding committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered [revoking] a prize once awarded."

This year marks both the fiftieth anniversary of Kissingers peace prize and his 100th birthday. At this point, questioning the former Secretary of States right to retain the award might seem both futile and vindictive. It is neither.

Kissinger remains a lauded and deeply entrenched member of the Washington establishment. Although Joe Biden is the first President since Richard Nixon not to invite "Dr. K" to the White House, this has not kept Kissinger from making headlines. In 2022, Politico revealed that the Biden Administration has consulted Kissinger regularly; he published a new nonfiction bestseller, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy; he spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations lecture and warned that if a country's educational

Sarah Cords is a children's nonfiction book author and lives in Wisconsin.

system--ostensibly Americas--"becomes increasingly focused on the shortcomings of its history," then that country's "capacity to act internationally will be diverted into its internal struggles."

Kissinger has always been adept at controlling the narrative of history, not least because he simply had the time to do so. Most of his similarly notorious political colleagues are gone: Richard Nixon died in 1994; Kissinger's successor as National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, died in 2020; Vietnamese general and politician Le Duc Tho, the co-recipient of the 1973 peace prize who declined the award, died in 1990; and Robert C. Hill, a State Department employee, ambassador, and eventual whistleblower who incurred Kissinger's wrath more than once, died in 1978 at the age of sixty-one.

Hill's is not a name you see in "this day in history" listicles. In fact, it is not a name you'll often find in history books about the 1960s, Nixon, or Kissinger. In part, this is due to his death more than forty years ago, but it is also due to the trajectory of his career, which began with powerful roles within the Republican Party machinery and in Nixon's inner circle, but ended with Hill sounding alarms about human rights abuses and murders from his post as ambassador to Argentina during the 1976 military coup. As is the case with most whistleblowers, Hill's attempts to draw attention to wrongdoing in Argentina -- and his habit of questioning the State Department bureaucracy--led to career marginalization and his erasure from history.

Self-described "history detective" and author of a book on the Argentine military dictatorship, Dossier Secreto, Martin Edwin Andersen is working to highlight Hill's career arc from political party insider to questioner of the party line. Andersen himself is a former Justice Department employee whose career has been derailed due to his whistleblowing. In two recent articles for the research journal A Contracorriente, Andersen contrasts Hill's journey from collaborator to...