Location: DACOR Bacon House OR Online, 1801 F Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006
Event Description
Please note this is a hybrid event - you have the option to attend in person or virtually. Registrations are required for all attendees. For in-person attendees, the event will run from 12 - 2 pm and will include lunch. The live stream will begin shortly after 1 pm (virtual attendees will be sent a link for the event via email).
Join us for a panel discussion on the legacy of Henry Kissinger, examining both the good and bad of the former Secretary of State's foreign affairs career. Panelists include Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, author of Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia; Ambassador David Passage, Kissinger's Special Assistant from 1975-1977; and Stephen Young, author of Kissinger's Betrayal: How America Lost the Vietnam War.
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a Professor of U.S. History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49, winner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize. She has written op-eds and done media appearances for numerous outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has been a consultant to several members of Congress and is Legislative Coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.
Eisenberg is the author of 2024 Bancroft Prize winning book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia.
Comments by the Prize Committee: “Carolyn Woods Eisenberg provides a sweeping, panoramic, and ultimately damning portrait of Nixon and Kissinger as architects of the wars in Southeast Asia. Fire and Rain is at once a biography of these two men, working desperately to extract the United States from the war in Vietnam, and simultaneously a compelling history that explores the human cost of this conflict for the peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. … Eisenberg offers an unflinching examination of the moral consequences of the policies pursued by Nixon and Kissinger, arguing for a reconsideration of their actions as a part of the corruption and lawlessness that led Congress to seek the impeachment of the President.”
David Passage is a thirty-three year veteran of the US Foreign Service. His overseas posts included London, Saigon (where he was detailed to the CORDS “pacification program” under the US Military Assistance Command/Vietnam, working for Gen. Creighton Abrams and Ambassador William Colby), Quito Ecuador, Canberra, San Salvador as DCM/Charge d’Affaires at the height of that country’s civil war from 1984-86, and was US Ambassador to Botswana from 1990-93. In the Department, he served in the Operations Center, on the Secretariat Staff, and as Special Assistant to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He was director of the press office and Acting Spokesman for the Department during the Iran Hostage Crisis, Director of Regional African Affairs during the effort to free Nelson Mandela from prison on Robben Island and end apartheid in South Africa, oust Cuban forces from Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia and bring independence to Namibia. He was senior director for Africa on the NSC under Brent Scowcroft during President George H.W. Bush’s administration.
As Secretary Kissinger’s longest serving Special Assistant (through the end of Kissinger’s tenure as Secretary and transition to the Carter Administration), Passage worked with Kissinger daily and accompanied Henry Kissinger on all his overseas and domestic trips.
Stephen B. Young is a DACOR member, a former Foreign Service Officer, and is the author of the recently released Kissinger’s Betrayal about the Vietnam War. Stephen is the son of former Ambassador to Thailand Kenneth Young.
He is currently the global executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism and the author of Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good, The Tradition of Human Rights in China and Vietnam, and The Theory and Practice of Associative Power: CORDS in the Villages of Vietnam 1967–1972.
He and his wife, Pham Thi Hoa, translated from Vietnamese the novel about Ho Chi Minh published as The Zenith. His 1968–1971 service in Vietnam for the US Agency for International Development in village development and counterinsurgency was highly praised by President Richard Nixon, Central Intelligence Agency Director William Colby, and ambassador to Saigon Ellsworth Bunker.
In 1975 and again in 1978, Young took a lead in successful efforts to resettle refugees from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the United States. For many years Young was a confidant of Nguyen Ngoc Huy, the founder of the Tan Dai Viet Nationalist political party in South Vietnam. Young also served as an assistant dean at the Harvard Law School and dean and professor of law at the Hamline University School of Law. He graduated from the International School in Bangkok, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School.
In 1966, Young discovered the Bronze Age culture of the village of Ban Chiang in Northeast Thailand, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 1989, he proposed the formation of a United Nations interim administration for Cambodia to finally put an end to the Killing Fields in that country.
