No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times‘ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.

I'm not sure that's accurate anymore.

Niall Ferguson centered his thesis in The Square and the Tower on Kissinger and extended Kissinger as a metaphor going back clear through the Bavarian Illuminati all the way to Athenian Greece. Ferguson, notably, had been working on a poorly reviewed authorized biography with Kissinger for ten years at that point so it's safe to say a number of unique insights were available to Ferguson, whether or not he chose to examine them.

Ferguson's whole point on Kissinger is He's important because he knows everybody.

The fundamental point of The Square and the Tower is that the patterns of power throughout history have been the patterns of relationships, not the patterns of oligarchy or democracy or whatever. It's who you know, Ferguson argues, and he makes a number of compelling points. Carter accomplished nothing as president because he ran as an outsider and brought with him a network utterly incapable of plugging into the existing power structure. Trump, likewise, ripped the beating heart out of American bureaucracy and replaced it with a bunch of inexperienced grifters - aside from Paul Ryan's tax cuts, the Trump administration accomplished exactly fuckall.

But Ferguson, maddeningly, does not see this parallel at all with the Nixon White House. Instead, axiomatically argues that where Kissinger goes, there goes power. From your Rolling Stone article:

Once in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger found themselves without leverage to produce a peace accord with Hanoi.

...because they had burned literally everyone who could have helped.

In 1971, the Pakistani government waged a campaign of genocide to suppress the independence movement in what would become Bangladesh. Pakistan’s Yahya Khan, an architect of the genocide, was valuable to Nixon’s ambitions of restoring diplomatic relations with China. So the U.S. let Khan’s forces rape and murder at least 300,000 people — and perhaps three million. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China’s to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of India’s,” Nixon quoted Kissinger shrugging.

...when you have chased away all but the craven opportunists, your foreign policy reflects craven opportunism.

Kissinger might not have been motivated by hatred of communism. But he was a reactionary who empowered and enabled the sort of reactionaries for whom anticommunism was a respectable channel for America’s racist and exploitative socio-economic traditions. His chief aide on the National Security Council was a rabid anticommunist militarist, Army Col. Alexander Haig, a future secretary of state for Ronald Reagan.

Al Haig famously flamed out for not understanding power structures.

And here's the thing. The post-Nixon political world was absolutely shaped by Henry Kissinger. He was the devil you danced with because he was an influence peddler that knew where all the bodies were buried (because he put most of them there). But that led to an extremely insular power structure - the fact that the entire political class came out of either the Nixon campaigns or the Goldwater campaign is positively shameful. The median age of the Executive branch has been older than the median age of the Soviet Politburo for like ten years now, and those guys were basically "friends of Stalin." The end result with the Soviets was Gorbachev - an up-jumped provincial golden boy who had never played cards with Lenin and who proceeded to crash the whole system. The end result with the Americans is AOC - a politician with a popular groundswell behind her who owes zero allegiance and has zero fucks to give about Kissinger.

All the lying-in-state bullshit that Kissinger is about to experience is the old guard covering their bases. They can't be seen to trash the legacy of the man who held their chains for so many decades. But the lack of reasonable succession within the American polity has caused a total disconnect in the relationship web that makes the country run. I think this is why Mitch McConnell has had nothing to say for about six years now - he's a lot smarter than most of them and I think he realizes that his legacy will be viewed as evil.

The Silents and Boomers didn't bother to drag GenX and the Millennials along in their escapades, preferring to keep power to themselves until the bitter end. The result is a rejection of their idols. Kissinger will be reviled, and the people who do not revile him will be reviled in turn. The Republicans didn't even succeed in their hagiography of Reagan, a man whose heart was substantially closer to human than Kissinger's - in no small part because the Republicans running the show these days are too busy wrapped up in their own craven opportunism.

It's either "who you know" or "what you believe" and "what you believe" tends to build legacy. "Who you know" crashes to the ground the minute your last acolyte falls out of favor.