Kurt Waldheim
Kurt Waldheim died today. He was 88. He was UN secretary general between 1972 and 1981, and president of Austria between 1986 and 1992. These achievements would have made him seem like a person who led an exceptionally successful life, but they will be forever marred by the revelation from 1986 that Waldheim was an active officer in the German Nazi army during WWII. There has never been any evidence that he himself was either responsible or complacent for any of the war crimes, but the guilt by association has never left him.
To someone like me who has been a life-long critic of the UN, there is a delightful irony in the fact that that holier-than-thou, give-peace-a-chance, war-is-not-an-answer was at one point led by a former Nazi. During my Sophomore year at Stanford, I lived in an internationally-themed co-op (I know) named after Dag Hammarskjöld, yet another UN secretary general (I know, I know). The Dag Hammarskjöld House attracted a lot of international students as eating associates (EAs), most of them graduate students. Needles to say, most of them were very, very liberal, and during my tenure there we even had one dyed-in-the-wool German communist. I did my share of irritating them, sometimes through genuine naiveté, and sometimes though good old conservative common sense. At one point, with a tongue in cheek, I suggested that we rename the house in honor of Kurt Waldheim. The suggestion did not pass. Presumably because Kurt was still alive at the time. Maybe, someone will renew the motion today.