Fun speculating on your observations about hair color. While writing the Elvis book, I discovered that his hair’s natural color was sandy brown/blonde, but he chose to dye it black all of his short life because he loved the more dashing and formidable look of Valentino and actors like Tony Curtis. After marrying Priscilla he encouraged her to do the same.
I was in the Met sculpture garden several years ago with a friend who specialized in Greek and Egyptian antiquities. He pointed out that most of the Roman copies of the Greek sculptures were all of powerful men. Men like Samson, or Herkules; Caesar and Augustus. And they all had very tight small "packages" as he referred to them. "This", I was told, " is because youth in ancient Greece, the revered kor, was the most potent quality of power and manhood". And then, as power devolved from the youthful 300 willing to die at Marathon, to the aging general with the sagging package, they began to clothe them, put them on horses; or simply show their ample head of hair and leave the rest of the body in the quarry. Thank you for a great story - and a sad story. I fear it is truer now than it has been in awhile. A lot of sagging packages in wild hairdos and big glasses wanting to ride the horse.
I share Karen's skepticism about the excessive praise heaped on Henry Kissinger, who was laser-focused on profiting personally from his close personal connections with numerous officials and oligarchs in the PRC and other countries to become a filthy rich mega-millionaire. At the same time, I am also skeptical of claims that Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal in the Hague alongside Vladimir Putin, whom I do consider a war criminal and who has been appropriately indicted as such by the International Criminal Court. So if I had been sitting across from the ageing Kissinger, I also would have listened politely and refrained from accusatory remarks that he would have rejected out of hand anyway.
Henry Kissinger is at best second-rate if compared to the truly towering figures of US diplomacy and war in the 20th century such as George Kennan and George Marshall. In the mid-1940s, Marshall dared to accept Harry Truman's request to take on the impossible mission of mediating between two irreconcilables in post-war China, the GMD Nationalist party-state and the CCP Communist party-state, both of whom wanted above all to destroy the other side militarily. Nobody could have successfully mediated a peaceful settlement between Jiang Jièshí and Máo Zédong, but Marshall succeeded in just about every other major diplomatic endeavor such as the Marshall Plan in post-war Western Europe.
One of the best books I have read about Kissinger's seriously flawed record in diplomacy and military policy is Vassar College Professor Robert K. Brigham's _Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam_ (2018). The terms of the truce that finally ended the U.S.'s participation in the Vietnam War in 1973 were effectively identical to what North Vietnam had offered the Nixon Administration four years previously. Kissinger was second only to Nixon as chiefly responsible for the unnecessary deaths and destruction in Vietnam over those first four years of Nixon's checkered rule.
Fun speculating on your observations about hair color. While writing the Elvis book, I discovered that his hair’s natural color was sandy brown/blonde, but he chose to dye it black all of his short life because he loved the more dashing and formidable look of Valentino and actors like Tony Curtis. After marrying Priscilla he encouraged her to do the same.
I was in the Met sculpture garden several years ago with a friend who specialized in Greek and Egyptian antiquities. He pointed out that most of the Roman copies of the Greek sculptures were all of powerful men. Men like Samson, or Herkules; Caesar and Augustus. And they all had very tight small "packages" as he referred to them. "This", I was told, " is because youth in ancient Greece, the revered kor, was the most potent quality of power and manhood". And then, as power devolved from the youthful 300 willing to die at Marathon, to the aging general with the sagging package, they began to clothe them, put them on horses; or simply show their ample head of hair and leave the rest of the body in the quarry. Thank you for a great story - and a sad story. I fear it is truer now than it has been in awhile. A lot of sagging packages in wild hairdos and big glasses wanting to ride the horse.
I share Karen's skepticism about the excessive praise heaped on Henry Kissinger, who was laser-focused on profiting personally from his close personal connections with numerous officials and oligarchs in the PRC and other countries to become a filthy rich mega-millionaire. At the same time, I am also skeptical of claims that Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal in the Hague alongside Vladimir Putin, whom I do consider a war criminal and who has been appropriately indicted as such by the International Criminal Court. So if I had been sitting across from the ageing Kissinger, I also would have listened politely and refrained from accusatory remarks that he would have rejected out of hand anyway.
Henry Kissinger is at best second-rate if compared to the truly towering figures of US diplomacy and war in the 20th century such as George Kennan and George Marshall. In the mid-1940s, Marshall dared to accept Harry Truman's request to take on the impossible mission of mediating between two irreconcilables in post-war China, the GMD Nationalist party-state and the CCP Communist party-state, both of whom wanted above all to destroy the other side militarily. Nobody could have successfully mediated a peaceful settlement between Jiang Jièshí and Máo Zédong, but Marshall succeeded in just about every other major diplomatic endeavor such as the Marshall Plan in post-war Western Europe.
One of the best books I have read about Kissinger's seriously flawed record in diplomacy and military policy is Vassar College Professor Robert K. Brigham's _Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam_ (2018). The terms of the truce that finally ended the U.S.'s participation in the Vietnam War in 1973 were effectively identical to what North Vietnam had offered the Nixon Administration four years previously. Kissinger was second only to Nixon as chiefly responsible for the unnecessary deaths and destruction in Vietnam over those first four years of Nixon's checkered rule.
The obvious answer to your not-so-rhetorical question is -- apparently.