On Henry Kissinger

America is a generous country. In 1938 we took in a 15-year-old immigrant with a suitcase escaping Nazis Germany. He flourished in the safe soil of America, graduating Harvard with honors, writing books, becoming a professor, presidential adviser, then secretary of state.

He was soon knee-deep in enough assassinations, palace coups and regime changes to keep an action writer busy for a decade.

Mr. Kissinger’s reward: Nobel Peace Prize (disputed), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Medal of Liberty and even a Bronze Star.

But China made him famous. He, Midas-like, made a communist tyrannical government specializing in religious suppression and lateterm abortions look clean enough for American businesses’ purposes. Cheap goods, increased profits and inflation kept in check; what’s wrong with that? The shortsighted merchants lined up like gullible get-rich-quick suckers to buy and build factories in China. Kissinger opened the door to a Trojan horse that gutted American well-paying jobs, substituting plastic toys and tools with the lifetime expectancy of an insect.

Every year we discovered that we could buy a bigger, then bigger again, wall TV for half the price. No inflation here. But when the shelves were dusty without American-made products, competition ended.

Covid shut down China. American plants shuttered for years were unable to supply our own needs. Eventually container ships lined up to discharge our backlog of toothpicks and treasures. We waited, and the conflagration of inflation arrived along with the foreign cargo.

Don’t worry, Mr. Kissinger didn’t sacrifice his personal welfare by his many years of public service. He sat on more boards of A-listed corporations than Midas.

In fact, he led the land rush with a joint venture with the communist state-owned investment corporation.

You have repaid us well for our generosity, Mr. K.

DANNY HANCOCK Lonoke