Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry A. Kissinger

Kissinger reaches for "Greek tragedy" to do two things at once: elevate Watergate into myth and quietly launder agency out of the story. In a tragedy, the ending is not a surprise but a fulfillment - the hero’s downfall is wired into character. By casting Nixon as a tragic figure "fulfilling his own nature", Kissinger frames the scandal less as a chain of discrete crimes than as an inexorable collision between personality and power. It’s fatalism with a scholar’s vocabulary.

The subtext is self-protective and, frankly, politically elegant. If "once it started it could not end otherwise", then the catastrophe becomes a kind of natural disaster, not a set of decisions made by specific people in specific rooms - including the ones still angling for credibility afterward. Kissinger’s language places him in the role of observer of destiny, not participant in a government that normalized secrecy, paranoia, and ends-justify-means thinking. Tragedy implies inevitability; inevitability dilutes blame.

Context sharpens the edge: Kissinger was Nixon’s most prominent foreign-policy architect, a man whose influence depended on proximity to a volatile president. Calling Nixon tragic allows a measure of admiration to survive the wreckage - tragic heroes are flawed but consequential - while also signaling that the system couldn’t have contained him. It’s an epitaph that doubles as an alibi: Nixon didn’t merely break the rules; he acted out a script. And scripts, Kissinger suggests, don’t leave many fingerprints.