The ex-PM, who was in office for 49 days, gives supporters and former aides honours, sparking criticism.

Lizzie: The Yuletide Blues are a real thing. Elvis had them. Charlie Brown had them. Tim Allen had them in Christmas With the Kranks and in The Santa Clause (during his custody battle). And that’s why we host holiday parties: to shoo away the blues until New Year’s, at which point we party again.

When we last left you, I mentioned that I was planning a tiki-inspired holiday party. The whole thing came to fruition last weekend, minus the fruit tower and the shrimp luge. (It was really quite difficult, veering on impossible, to find a full-body pineapple in Brooklyn in December). Maybe this festive update, for you, is highly anticipated. Perhaps you’ve been waiting, breath bated, to hear how it all turned out. Well, you can unbate.

Kaitlyn: I hate to say this, but I think Lizzie might have been suffering from some kind of pineapple-specific vision problem. The first four grocery stores I went to in search of star fruit, which I wanted for a recipe called “star-fruit chips,” had an obscene number of whole pineapples, which I didn’t want because I was sure that Liz already had the pineapple aspect of the event covered. I distinctly remember feeling kind of taunted by them. Lizzie and I live in the same neighborhood and probably went to the same grocery stores. So my guess is that she was looking a little too hard. One of those “right in front of your nose” things. Like when you stare at the Wordle for two hours on a day when the answer is “THEIR.” Happens to all of us!

Anyway, the fifth store I went to had just one single star fruit mixed in with the kumquats, and this was only the beginning of my problems getting ready for a party that I wasn’t hosting and had no real stake in. After standing in the corner by the yogurts for a while to think, I bought the lone star fruit, two kiwis, a pear, a mango, and a small bucket of plantain chips. I figured I could make a variety of fruit chips and then mix them in with the professionally made plantain chips to create something really impressive and delicious.

At home, I first attempted a recipe for “Whipped Mai Tai Jell-O” from the book The Great Gelatin Revival. The recipe was weird, because it said to boil the alcohol, but I wanted the alcohol to stay (and, later, enter people’s bloodstreams). So I skipped that step. The recipe also called for homemade almond milk, which I ignored, opting for store-bought. To get the mixture to set, the recipe instructed me to, as the name implies, whip it while holding the bowl aloft in an ice bath. This did not work at all (duh). Instead, I put the mixture in plastic shot glasses and put them in the freezer for a while.

Of course, the star-fruit-chip recipe worked for the star fruit but not for any of the other fruits, which had to be thrown in the trash after sitting in the oven for four hours and getting brown but not dry. The paltry 15 star-fruit chips I ended up with went into the Jell-O shots as garnishes. I thought, What could possibly go wrong next? Well, while watching Paddington 2, Nathan and I accidentally ate all of the plantain chips, so I had to send him out for a last-second bag of classic Lays. [Deep breath] No matter what happens, you can always bring classic Lays.

Santa at the beach at Lizzie's house! (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: The pineapple thing … I need a psychologist’s opinion on that. Would you believe me if I said we started our party prep three weeks prior to the big day? I can’t in good conscience recommend it. I cleaned the fridge. I scrubbed a wall. Matt spent many hours crafting paper lampshades to hang over our recessed lights and giant paper flowers to hide the parts of the ceiling where it leaks when it rains.

We had initially planned a menu of mini hot dogs, sliders with caramelized onions, pineapple upside-down cupcakes, and coconut shrimp, but once I realized that we had no savory vegetarian options, I added a cheese ball and cheesy garlic knots into the mix. Matt batched a cocktail called the Jungle Bird (rum, Campari, pineapple juice, lime, and simple syrup). We also had Ghia and a pineapple-flavored THC drink for the sober and plant-curious among us.

If I had to do it over again, I would’ve refreshed the snacks more often. I think our cheese ball ran out of Ritz accompaniments, and our freezer is still full of shrimp.

Kaitlyn: Speaking of ceiling leaks, I need to share something amazing we heard in the fourth meeting of the dinner-party course Liz and I have been taking. One woman, during the show-and-tell portion of the class, explained that her house is extremely structurally unsound. Among other problems, she said, there is a huge hole in the kitchen floor, and to get around it, you have to go down a flight of stairs into the basement and then up another flight on the other side. Before the house is gutted, whenever that day comes, she wants to throw a cave-themed dinner party for which she fills the place with geodes and candles and paper-mache boulders. “Honestly, if my house is falling apart, I might not have money to have an elaborate dinner, but when the fuck else am I going to be able to have an empty house that has a fucked-up design?” she said. Now, that is a truly enviable attitude to carry into 2024. That’s what I’m talking about!

I somehow lost a star-fruit garnish on the two-block walk to Lizzie’s house. But my spirits rose dramatically when we arrived. Christmas in July in December … As we walked in, our jaws hit the floor.

The decorations that Matt made were so, so good—if Jimmy Buffett (RIP) had been present, he would have fainted. Or moved right in! I always love being in Lizzie’s apartment, but the space was looking extra beautiful because of the lanterns, the flowers, and Matt and Lizzie’s enormous tinsel-covered Christmas tree. We all complained for a minute about the wild, possibly illegal pricing of trees this year in Brooklyn, but we quickly concluded that any reasonable person would pay basically as much as they could possibly afford in order to have one. I mean, at what point would it not be worth it? It smells fantastic and is so good for morale.

Re: the coconut shrimp, I’d be happy to go over later in the week to have some.

Lizzie: Imagine a party where the only food is coconut shrimp …

I think there were close to 30 people in my apartment at the party’s peak. People came from as far afield as Philadelphia, New Jersey, and the Upper East Side. There was even one guy who I’m not totally convinced knew anyone at all. He said he was the plus-one of someone who had been planning to attend but was no longer coming. He showed up with a giant backpack that I’m guessing weighed at least 40 pounds, and when I showed him where to put his coat, he kept saying, “Thank you for being so hospitable.” But what was I supposed to do? Not let a stranger with a giant backpack into my house?

You know the John Early and Kate Berlant short Rachel? It was kind of like that, except less thrilling, because he eventually just left without much fanfare.

Kaitlyn: Lizzie and Matt just got a new buzzer—one of those where the person inside the apartment can look at a live video feed of the person outside. The lighting on the stoop is really flattering and makes everybody look hot and famous on the screen. So, for a while, I was hanging out in the kitchen and ogling people, then buzzing them in.

I was also talking to Colin about Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. He had only seen the movie, and I had only read the book. I asked if Eileen is obsessed with her bowels in the movie, and he said no. I was like, well, then, what even happens? (I read the book a long time ago, but I remember her talking about pooping basically the whole time.) I guess I may have buzzed in a mysterious backpack person during that conversation, but I don’t think so.

I did have the honor of buzzing in Colin—not the Colin I was already talking to, but the Colin who lives in New Jersey and knew Lizzie as a child. I told him his pink floral shirt was great, and he said, “It’s my grandmother’s.” The two Colins met because of a confusing moment when I said “Colin” to one and the other thought I was talking about him. Shortly after this, Stephanie saw Michelle walk by and said, “Wait … is that … ?” She didn’t know Lizzie had a twin! If the theme of the night hadn’t been “tiki bar,” it would have been “doppelgängers.”

These paper lanterns were made by hand... by just one man, Matt. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Doppelgängers, party crashers … Here’s another trend report from the party: the J.Crew 1988 Heritage Cotton Rollneck™ sweater. Brandon was wearing it, and he received multiple compliments throughout the night. The man-in-a-turtleneck look can go House of Gucci fast, but the roll neck keeps it off the ski slopes, if you know what I mean.

And another: Reindeer Ring Toss. It’s a party game that consists of inflatable antlers that you wear on your head and inflatable rings that your teammate (or opponent?) attempts to throw onto your antlers. It’s actually more challenging than it sounds, because all of your props are essentially slightly heftier balloons. Have you ever tried to throw a balloon with any sort of specificity or target in mind? They want nothing to do with you! They just want to float around without accomplishing anything besides half-heartedly defying gravity.

Kaitlyn: The game looked incredibly hard. I was too intimidated to even try it. But throughout the evening, I did manage to sample most of the snacks. The sliders were better than anything I’ve eaten all year and, unlike every other dinner I’ve had in New York, didn’t cost $70. I ate two. I could have had, conservatively, six. I also had some wontons with spicy mustard, some hot-chocolate-flavored Hershey’s Kisses, and a few cheesy garlic balls. Plus punch, which I spilled on the rug after only a few sips. That’s one of the worst things that can happen at a party—seeming drunk and doing something a drunk person would do, but really you were just being clumsy. Luckily, Stephanie poured half a seltzer on the stain and dabbed it right up.

People kept asking what was in the Jell-O shots because they were a stupid color and tasted like rum and nothing else. Eventually, I started pretending I didn’t know anything about them.

Lizzie: I actually liked that the Jell-O shots were an off-putting off-white color, but Kaitlyn’s right: They really tasted mostly of alcohol, and I don’t think I finished mine.

Here’s a question for the group: Is it a mood killer to tidy during a party? I feel like once the cups and cans start to pile up on random surfaces, you gotta do something about it. Otherwise it feels like soaking in bath water a little too long—time to pull the plug. Speaking of cans, how can we, as a society, prevent the one-last-sip-in-the-can thing from happening? Why aren’t you all finishing that last, warm, flat sip?

Kaitlyn: Around the time that Lizzie began tidying, I guess I was starting to get actually drunk, because I asked five or six people if we could be the first to sit down on the floor and just kind of get that started—“no more standing.”

Russell sat next to me and Lori, and started to talk to us about The Power Broker. He said he has a bone to pick with Robert Caro, because there wasn’t anything about Jane Jacobs in the book. We told him that Robert Caro did write a chapter about Jane Jacobs—as you, reader, may know—and it was cut from the book, because the book was so long that it was going to be literally too large to be bound as a single volume if something didn’t get scrapped. I mean, rebutting this complaint was child’s play for us.

He then said that there should at least have been a chapter about Robert Moses picking a fight and losing. We said, please, Russell, there are chapters about that! I love Russell, but he was being very antagonistic. I lost my voice while talking to him because I had to talk so loud.

Lizzie: I lost my voice too. I realized that once one person starts talking a little louder, everyone needs to talk louder and louder, until we’re basically all screaming to be heard over the noise that we as a group have created. I even turned the music all the way down to combat the noise issue, but it didn’t help. Maybe I need to talk to my landlord about the apartment’s acoustics.

I wish I could remember more of what happened, but the truth is, it’s all kind of a blur. I swear, it wasn’t too much eggnog; it was hosting. Hosting goes straight to my head.

I hope everyone had fun. If you were hoping for a shrimp luge, I can only say: Maybe in the future.

Kaitlyn: Speaking of fun and the future, we should mention that this will be the last issue of Famous People published in The Atlantic. This is it, and we’ve had a ball!

You can keep up with us elsewhere if you’d like, and please continue inviting us to parties. Ideally, we would like to go to the Met Gala.

Henry Kissinger spent half a century pursuing and using power, and a second half century trying to shape history’s judgment of the first. His longevity, and the frantic activity that ceased only when he stopped breathing, felt like an interminable refusal to disappear until he’d ensured that posthumous admiration would outweigh revulsion. In the end none of it mattered. The historical record—Vietnam and Cambodia, the China opening, the Soviet détente, slaughter in Bangladesh and East Timor, peace in the Middle East, the coup in Chile—was already there. Its interpretation will not be up to him.

Kissinger is a problem to be solved: the problem of a very human inhumanity. Because he was, undoubtedly, human—brilliant, insecure, funny, gossipy, curious, devious, self-deprecating, cruel. In Martin Indyk’s book Master of the Game, about Kissinger’s successful efforts to end the 1973 Yom Kippur War, you meet a diplomat with a deep knowledge of the region’s history and personalities, operating with great subtlety and stamina to bring about a state of equilibrium that led to peace between Israel and Egypt. If you read Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram, about the 1971 Pakistani civil war that created Bangladesh, you meet a policy maker with a shocking indifference to human life, willing to aid Pakistan in committing genocide so that Islamabad would continue to be a conduit between Washington and Beijing.

The same worldview informed Kissinger’s actions in both wars. He valued order above all, and order was created in the relations between great powers. Small countries and the lives of ordinary people didn’t matter; America’s missionary idealism was an incorrigible threat to stability. This view led him to warn against humanitarian intervention, and to sacrifice millions of Indochinese and thousands of Americans in prolonging the Vietnam War well after it was lost, in the interest of maintaining “credibility.”

I met Kissinger half a dozen times, and at each encounter I struggled to square my hatred of the historical figure with the charming man in front of me. The first was in 1979, when I was in college; I mentioned that I knew his daughter, Liz. “Does she give you a hard time?” Kissinger intoned dryly. “She gives me a hard time.” I regret to say that I was too polite to ask, “About Cambodia?” The last time was in 2019, at a fundraiser for a library in Connecticut, where we were both selling books. A woman I quickly decided must be his wife, Nancy Kissinger, appeared at my table: “Henry would like to talk to you.” I looked over at an ancient man in shirtsleeves and suspenders, massively slouched in front of a stack of books and a line of autograph seekers. I could hardly believe he was still alive, let alone still publishing.

My biography of Richard Holbrooke—who admired, reviled, and mostly envied Kissinger—contained several unflattering references to the great man, and I wondered if I’d been summoned for one of his notorious chewings-out. Instead, Kissinger told me that he’d enjoyed my book, and added that he’d always considered Holbrooke a good friend. “But the vimin!” he exclaimed, his Bavarian guttural full of wonder. “I didn’t know about all the vimin!” To which I failed, again, to reply that Kissinger was a well-known womanizer himself, or to remind him that, in late 1976, in his last days as secretary of state in the Ford administration, he had called Holbrooke “the most viperous character I know around this town”—a kind of compliment, if you think about the source.

But my most memorable encounter was with a more public Kissinger. It was in the fall of 2015, at a dinner for Chancellor Angela Merkel at the German consul’s residence in Manhattan. I was a last-minute addition to the table and found myself seated next to Ruth Westheimer, the diminutive TV sex therapist, whose presence was a mystery to me. Kissinger was lecturing the chancellor about her decision to allow into Germany a million refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He could appreciate the humanitarian desire to save one person, but a million? That was like Rome opening its gates to the barbarians—it would irrevocably alter “German civilization,” said the author of a dissertation on Metternich, an admirer of Bismarck, and a Jewish refugee from German civilization.

Dr. Ruth, who had been silent throughout dinner, now spoke. Almost apologetically, she told us the story of how, when she was 10, shortly after Kristallnacht, the Gestapo had taken her father away from their home in Frankfurt, and she had never seen him again. Two months later, she was put on a train to Switzerland—part of the rescue of Jewish children just before the start of the war. “If not for the Kindertransport, I would not be here today,” Dr. Ruth said. Kissinger could not have missed her point. They had both been refugees, but only one of them seemed to remember what it had been like. The conversation moved on, but it was now clear why Merkel had wanted Dr. Ruth there.

The problem of Kissinger is not simply the paradox of a man with appealing personal qualities who did some terrible things. After all, he did some good things, too. His diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China remade the world for the better, at least for a time (the world is always un-remaking itself). But the gifts that allowed him to see three or four steps ahead in great-power relations also occluded his vision, sometimes resulting in a strategic myopia. “If you disregard the human costs and the human reality of your decisions, you’re missing not just the moral consequences but the reality of the situations with which you’re dealing,” one of Kissinger’s former colleagues told me upon the news of his death. “In the long run, that reality shapes the policies of nations like our own, and the strategic moves then fail.”

The impersonality of Kissinger’s view of international relations led him to believe that the great powers could order the world’s affairs long after that was possible. He didn’t anticipate that Vietnamese nationalism would defy Soviet control after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. He didn’t see, or perhaps care, that the U.S.-China relationship (which made him rich) could damage America’s manufacturing base and empower Chinese authoritarians. When Russia invaded Ukraine, his analysis seemed to come out of the late Austro-Hungarian period.

The brilliance of Kissinger’s diplomacy in the early ’70s was the last flare of a dying Westphalian light. His heroes were 19th-century statesmen, and he brought their approach to the 20th. He understood world leaders far better than he did the people they led or the rising problems that transcended states. Neither ideological movements nor social conflicts nor human lives were as real to him as the international game of chess.

“Imagine a chessboard in which each piece was actually a king or queen, or the pawns were children, and every time you sacrificed a pawn, a child was killed,” the former colleague said. “You might play chess differently.”