Kissinger demanded, and Nixon granted him, absolute sway in foreign policy, first as National Security Adviser and after 1973 as Secretary of State Which was fine, as long as things did not go wrong. But when they did, there was no blaming errant aides; either he or Nixon was responsible. Kissinger’s singular achievement thus far has been to preserve his reputation as Nixon’s has crumbled.In America, the 37th president still languishes in posthumous limbo Not Henry the K. Network anchors continue to interview him as if his views were carved on tablets brought down from Sinai. Kissinger was, and remains, a statesman for the ages – the man who initiated d?nte with the Soviet Union, co-plotted Nixon’s opening to China, and whose diplomatic shuttles after the 1973 Middle East war paved the way to Israel’s subsequent peace treaty with Egypt.Even on Vietnam, the majority of Americans still remember him not as the cynic who secretly bombed Cambodia in defiance of the Constitution, but as the negotiator who won the 1973 Nobel Peace prize for the Paris talks with North Vietnam.

(With a modesty that hindsight reveals to have been even wiser, his opposite number from Hanoi, the fellow laureate Le Duc Tho, declined the award.) Finally, for his admirers, Kissinger was the man who single-handedly kept American foreign policy on the rails as Watergate engulfed the Nixon presidency.Such is Kissinger as he would like to be remembered in the autumn of his years; and the great volumes of memoirs, the weighty ruminations on statecraft, and the op-ed pieces in The New York Times are all designed to reinforce this image.Nor has he lost his sense of the value of theatrics in his current role as a star catch for New York socialites, to whom he dispenses aphorisms with heavy, but not disagreeable wit. “The main advantage of being famous is that when you bore people at dinner parties, they think it is their fault,” is one much-recycled Kissingerism.No other Secretary of State could have featured in an advertisement to lure tourists back to New York City after 11 September. And it wasn’t bad – Henry (or rather a double) diving headfirst to score a run at Yankee stadium, then rising to dust off his uniform and exhort the world in his Teutonic baritone to come and sample the sundry thrills of the Big Apple.So much, though, for Kissinger, the listed national monument. There is another and darker vision of the man, summoned by judges Garzon and Ch?au, which increasingly threatens to wreck his carefully nurtured historical reputation.The case against him is not new.

Back in 1979 the British journalist and author William Shawcross, in his acclaimed book Sideshow, told the story of Kissinger and Nixon’s secret bombings, which destroyed Cambodia and paved the way for the terrible regime of Pol Pot. An even more devastating portrait emerged a few years later in Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power. Most recently, in 2001 another British journalist, Christopher Hitchens, published The Trial of Henry Kissinger, arguing that he was no less a war criminal than Pinochet or Milosevic.Hitchens’s charge sheet is long. Not just Cambodia and Vietnam, but also the Pakistan army’s genocidal depredations in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971, the Greek military junta’s invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor one year later. In these last three instances, Hitchens argues persuasively, Kissinger gave the green light to brutal regimes that were allies of the US to embark on savage adventures in which hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed.

But it is the charges relating to Latin America that are hardest for Kissinger to shrug off Not only must Spanish and French magistrates be kept at bay. The widow of Charles Horman, an American journalist, is trying to force Kissinger to testify in Chile about her husband’s murder after he had revealed the US military’s hand in the 1973 coup. In Washington, meanwhile, Kissinger faces a criminal suit over his alleged involvement in the assassination in 1970 of General Rene Schneider, the Chilean army chief of staff who insisted on the legality of Allende’s election.The evidence is increasingly hard to dispute. Material recently released by the US government shows that Kissinger sent signed documents to the American embassy in Paris informing the ambassador that his city was to be the headquarters of Operation Condor in Europe, the French lawyers say.Few dispute Hitchens’s assertion that dissidents from Chile and other Latin American countries who had sought refuge in the US were kept under surveillance by American intelligence, under an agreement made with Condor’s organisers.