Comment by acdha

It’s not that consistent - the “ordinary citizens” include a lot of right-wingers who do not view him as a monster because they’ve been marinated in half a century of mythologizing around Vietnam (victory was stolen by anti war protesters!) and still think communism is a threat. The Bush era allowed a lot of that to become acceptable to say public again (a common argument was that Islamic terrorists were in league with communism, which still leaves me in disbelief) and Kissinger’s opposition to war crimes trials for e.g. Pinochet got a lot of support because even supporters knew that was a risk to the Bush torture cadre.