When he died last month, Henry Kissinger was lauded as preeminent diplomat of the past half-century. The news media didn’t shy from the fact that he was controversial, but for the most part they left graveyards he created unvisited.

Growing up in Hitler’s Germany, Henry had the propensity to become an ideological figure and leading actor of the Nazi state but for the fact his parents brought him here, and they were Jewish.

Hitler’s people weren’t stupid. Defeat in war and starvation pressed them to support a dynamic leader who promised, then delivered, relief from their desperate circumstances. Hidden were his demented aims.

Their circumstances are mirrored in the U.S. today, where some Republicans’ sense of being politically and economically left out, further distorted by a racist, authoritarian ex-president into a patriotic cause, hearkens back to the 1950s when people of color were kept oppressed. Neither Hitler nor Trump cared or care about people. The former wanted to establish a pure white race, rid the earth of Jews, and conquer. The latter seeks white power, authoritarian control, and total loyalty.

Born abroad, Henry was barred by the Constitution from seeking the presidency he would both have wanted, and abused. Envision him not as the towering presence accepting an undeserved Nobel Prize for Peace (because peace wasn’t achieved), but as the drunken and drooling companion of a stumbling, inebriated president in Oliver Stone’s film “Nixon.”

Henry filled the roles of secretary of state and national security adviser for Nixon, and later for Ford. Reagan found him not conservative enough to continue at those posts. So we are considering here the mischief of a man who guided U.S. foreign policy for eight wicked years, in Southeast Asia, South America and the Middle East.

Ho Chi Minh was the leader for liberation from Indochina’s French rulers even before the communist revolution in Russia. He sought an end to French colonial rule at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. His appeal was rejected by the treaty’s chairman, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson.

Ho became a follower of Marxism. He led fighting against the French, the Japanese invasion for oil, then again against the French. Truman financed restoration of French rule. Ho’s forces defeated the French at Dien Bien Pho, and a Geneva Conference arranged voting to unite the rival factions of North and South Vietnam.

The U.S., supporting the South, calculated they would lose the vote and blocked it. The South’s struggle against Viet Cong rebellion was supported by U.S. “advisers.”

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy decided to withdraw support for South Vietnam. For this and other reasons, he was assassinated. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, lied to Congress about the U.S. Navy being attacked by the North, and he obtained approval to send in combat troops. The 10-year Vietnam War followed. Richard Nixon promised to end it. but Kissinger expanded it to Cambodia.

But the most egregious foreign policy activity Kissinger engaged in occurred in Chile in 1973.

When U.S. Ambassador Claude Bowers advised President Franklin Roosevelt to intervene on the side of the republic in the historically significant Spanish Civil War (1936-39), isolationism, led by Republicans in Congress, prevented Roosevelt from doing so. Hitler and Mussolini conducted Francisco Franco’s air and ground battles. Fascism itself might have been stopped before becoming World War II in Europe. Bowers predicted that Franco’s practices, unstopped in Spain, would reappear in Spanish South America. And they did.

On Sept. 11, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet led a coup against Chile’s democratic socialist President Salvador Allende. He was the first popularly elected Marxist in Latin America. Kissinger and Nixon were deeply involved in planning and execution of the plot. Allende died during an air assault on the National Palace. Thousands were herded into a Santiago soccer stadium where they were tortured and killed. Many more were “disappeared,” with over 40,000 considered victims of the coup.

Pinochet’s coup then spawned Operation Condor, the 1975-83 Nixon/Reagan/CIA-supported kidnapping, torture, and murder of leftists in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil. One method of victim disappearance was to be thrown from planes over the ocean. As occurred in the Spanish Civil War, babies born to captive women were distributed to the powerful.

Chileans are still trying to rid themselves of Pinochet’s constitution.

Kissinger defended bringing Pinochet to power in Chile, saying Allende’s democratic socialism was more dangerous to capitalism than communism because it was a form of government more likely to be adopted by other countries.

Kissinger told Pinochet, “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.”

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian, currently editing his new work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”