It stands to reason he must have been doing something right to have stayed so close to the halls of power.
I was a toddler when he was carpet bombing Cambodia, never knew him as anything but “an important person” that was sometimes on the TV. Only learned of his crimes in the past decade.
How did an in-your-face war criminal retain such influence for so long?
There’s a very good podcast called Behind the Bastards that did an extremely expansive profile on him covering (iirc) his childhood to his retirement.