On August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon deviated from his usual health-conscious breakfast of wheat germ, cottage cheese and fruit and instead ordered up an unctuous spread of corned beef hash with a poached egg. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep — he had spent the night calling old friends and fine-tuning his farewell speech — he decided to indulge one final time. Then he traded his fork for a pen and signed his last document as president, a one-line note that read, “I hereby resign the office of President of the United States.”

Henry Kissinger—revered and reviled—savored the hot soup of conflict.

Yet in his century of celebrated and criticized years of orchestrating foreign policy to contain Russia and what he avidly argued were America’s other belligerents, Kissinger’s first face-to-face with absolute power perhaps best illustrates his guarantee that “it’s not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”

The death of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and one of most divisive political figures in U.S. history, brought a mixture of tributes and contempt for his legacy from people around the world.

Kissinger, who was 100, died at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates Inc., confirmed. A public memorial service will be held in New York at a date yet to be announced.

At a dinner recently with friends, Henry Kissinger was, at the invitation of his host as usual, holding forth on various world crises when he was asked what gave him reason for optimism. He replied that he had confidence in the wisdom of the American people, though at the current moment he worried about a dearth of U.S. leadership.

They were two men in Manhattan who craved the same thing: validation. One was a brash, young real estate developer looking to put his stamp on New York, the other a disgraced elder statesman bent on repairing his reputation.

That’s how a thirty-something Donald Trump and a seventy-ish Richard Nixon struck up a decade-long, fulsome correspondence in the 1980s that meandered from football and real estate to Vietnam and media strategy.

Jan Ehrlichman remembers the summer of 1973 as if it were yesterday.

Her dad, John Ehrlichman, was knee-deep in the Watergate scandal. He had recently been fired as a top adviser to President Richard Nixon, and was now testifying before the Senate’s special Watergate committee.

Ms. Ehrlichman, then a college student, and her mom would drive her dad to Capitol Hill, drop him off, and go watch the Senate hearings on TV at a friend’s house to avoid the press. Afterward, they’d go pick him up and talk about how it went.

The U.S. House’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s interactions with the president of Ukraine comes more than two decades after the last presidential impeachment crisis – the one that engulfed President Bill Clinton in 1998 and early 1999. The circumstances – factual, political and societal – were very different back then, and so was U.S. public opinion about the push for impeachment.

Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the nation’s highest office, making that decision in the face of almost certain impeachment by the House and plummeting public support, as a majority of Americans called for his removal from office. But it happened in stages.