Henry Kissinger Was Denied SNL Tickets Because of Vietnam War: Al Franken

Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state who died this week, was once denied tickets to Saturday Night Live because of the Vietnam War, according to SNL alum Al Franken.

"Kissinger called SNL once late on a Friday night looking for tix for his son. The [Rolling] Stones were playing that week. I told him that if it hadn't been for the Xmas bombing, he'd have the tickets," Franken wrote on X, formerly Twitter on Wednesday.

Franken played Kissinger on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s and served as a writer and performer on the show for a number of years. It's unclear when Kissinger made the call asking for tickets.

Newsweek reached out to Franken via email for comment.

As Franken mentioned in his post, Kissinger served as former President Richard Nixon's national security advisor when the United States bombed several areas of Vietnam during the Christmas holiday season. "We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions," Kissinger said following the bombing.

On December 18, 1972, the U.S. Military dropped over 200,000 tons of bombs across parts of Vietnam, resulting in the deaths of over 1,600 civilians in North Vietnam. The U.S. military continued to bomb parts of North Vietnam for several days until officials from North Vietnam agreed to discuss peace on December 29. A peace treaty was later signed by Kissinger in January 1973.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kissinger's consulting firm announced his death saying, "Dr. Henry Kissinger, a respected American scholar and statesman, died today at his home in Connecticut...Dr. Kissinger played central roles in the opening to China, negotiating the end of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and helping to bring America's role in the Vietnam War to a close."

Following Kissinger's death this week, a number of current and former world leaders issued statements about their experiences with the former secretary of state.

"America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices...I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army," former U.S. President George W. Bush said in a statement. "When he later became Secretary of State, his appointment as a former refugee said as much about his greatness as it did America's greatness."

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also responded to Kissinger's death by saying, "I myself had the privilege of meeting him in person a number of times since I was younger and had the honor of learning from his insights."

Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the daughters of former President Nixon, said Kissinger and their father had a partnership "that produced a generation of peace for our nation."

"In the Nixon administration, Dr. Kissinger conducted the lengthy and often frustrating negotiations in Paris to win peace with honor in Vietnam," the statement said.