Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were offered the Nobel prize for ending the Vietnam War. I'm not sure when this is; 1973? Le Duc Tho said no, South Vietnam didn't have peace yet. 60 Harvard and MIT professors wrote a letter protesting that the prize was more than anyone with a sense of justice could take. Kissinger's son, David, at Cambridge, was told by his friends that some people said his father didn't deserve the prize. David Kissinger: So what? My mother says the same thing. Kissinger didn't take his prize in person, and donated the money to the New York Community Trust to set up scholarships for the kids of servicemen who had died in Vietnam. When Saigon fell in 1975, he wrote to the Nobel authorities offering to return the prize and money, and they said no, keep it.
oh! -- look --
And, to put it delicately, Kissinger was even less lucky in most of his political colleagues in Washington than in some of those abroad. Truman had been a moral tower of strength for Acheson, brave and politically astute even when at odds with Congress. As to the general quality of Mr Nixon’s moral leadership, silence is the only possible charity, though one can say he had the courage to make decisions in foreign policy which better men and better Presidents had failed to make. And as to Mr Ford, it is difficult to see that he had much to contribute to foreign policy save his amiable and direct personality. (Bell 1977)
argh when you descend into kissinger trivia