Henry Kissinger, born in 1923 to Orthodox Jewish parents in Nazi Germany, fled persecution in 1938, later earning US citizenship in 1943 after excelling in an Army training program where he met influential refugee Fritz Kramer. Serving in Germany post-war, Kissinger held absolute authority over former Nazis and studied realpolitik under William Yandel Elliott at Harvard, eventually critiquing the Eisenhower administration's "massive retaliation" nuclear policy by advocating for tactical use to secure battlefield victories against communists. This strategic divergence from John Foster Dulles' advice secured him a pivotal role at the Council on Foreign Relations, establishing his lifelong belief that statesmen must shape destiny through intuition rather than accepting inevitable civilizational decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:05
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcohol.
Without this probe, I'm going to die.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, everybody.
Robert Evans here, and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org.
Now, if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution, just google akpress.org, After the Revolution.
You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
And if you pre-order now from either these independent bookstores or from AK Press, you'll get a custom signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool.
You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold.
So please Google AK Press After the Revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it.
You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.
Heavy Plate of Dollop00:15:41
Oh, Sophie, this plate of behind the bastards is so heavy as we walk through this hallway.
Oh my gosh, is that David Anthony and Gareth Reynolds with a heavy plate of the dollop?
Oh no.
Oh no, I'm losing control.
Oh God, you guys are slipping too.
How was that?
So bad.
So bad.
I couldn't disagree more.
That was the most organic, just real thing I think I've ever heard.
Yeah, like you're really.
The only thing I'm noticing is you didn't have plates.
So I'm wondering how I was wondering as I started it, are they going to join in or am I going to just have to commit fully to this?
And now that's something where if it's me, I just let you go and then let you hang inside I was a dog in a yard that wanted to leave it, but was like, I'll get it.
I'm not supposed to leave.
So I was on the other end.
I wanted to join.
Oh, gosh.
Well, this is just a wonderful time.
Obviously, again, you are Dave Anthony, Gareth Reynolds, hosts of The Dollop, the podcast that invented being funny about history on the internet.
Thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
Thank you.
We've always, for a long time, I've wanted to do something with you.
And we've talked about this, but yeah.
We have.
This has been like bouncing back and forth for a while.
And it was just one of those things where it's like, well, when we finally do our six-part series on Henry Kissinger, it's going to be the worst thing we've ever had to do.
I have a therapy session set up right afterwards.
Dave married a therapist in preparation.
That's good.
Really putting in the deep work to make this series a success.
So my working title for this, which they probably won't let us use, is Henry Kissinger, a big sack of donkey balls.
What's wrong with that?
Can we do that so fast?
I perfectly find that.
What are you talking about?
What do you guys know?
I kind of think maybe it's a good idea to start with like, what's your Cliff's notes?
We'll have you do it, Dave, because you're the one who reads things normally.
I mean, I think that's the same thing.
What's your Cliff's notes of Kissinger?
Yeah.
You know, Kissinger, the thing that obviously stands out is Vietnam and Cambodia.
And, you know, that's just reprehensible beyond all words, but he's really been a part of just so many horrific foreign policy decisions and had his, he's always getting in there.
He's always a part of the business.
Really was.
I don't know if he is now, but for a long time, he was always a guy who would come in and go, why don't you do the worst thing?
Yeah.
And that's the thing that's interesting and even a little bit difficult about talking about him because he's not one of these guys.
He's not like, you can't say with him like you can with, I don't know, Saddam Hussein, like, oh, he ordered, he started this war on this date, you know, or he ordered this man.
I mean, you can, actually.
But he's not on paper supposed to be a warlord or an elected leader.
The thing that he is good at doing is getting the ability to do stuff that warlords and dictators do by sitting in the back rooms with people who are the ones who on paper hold the power and convincing them to let him do stuff.
And he's the best at that there's ever been.
We've had a couple figures on our podcast who I would relate to, like, and I would say maybe Kissinger is like the war crimes Forrest Gump, where it's like, yes, this time you're like, oh, yeah, he was there.
He invented shit happens.
I didn't know he invented that frame.
Yeah.
That's incredibly...
I mean, that's honestly a better title than the one I gave up.
That is the favorite title.
I mean, it obviously Forrest Gump is blameless and Kissinger is not, but it does get at the fact that he's just like, he's just there.
He's just in every fucking photo of like guys doing a war crime.
Like it is baffling the number of things he's connected to.
I should probably just start, stop selling it.
But I do kind of want to talk about the fact that he is this kind of backroom figure in a lot of the worst things that happened in the 20th century.
Because we're going to spend episode one.
By the time this episode's over, he's not, you know, in the White House.
He's not running shit.
This is an episode where we talk about like his early life and his ideological roots because that's what underpins all of the things that he does.
He's not a guy.
People talk about like what Kissinger believes.
And Kissinger himself has written a bunch of books about what he believes.
My opinion, as an amateur guy studying this dude, is that I don't think he believes things as much as he beliefs and ideas are weapons that he uses in order to get people to let him do horrible things.
And he is the master of using beliefs and moving between different groups of people who on paper are ideologically opposed and getting them all to agree with whatever bullshit he wants to do because he's really good at talking about ideas like a fucking philosopher.
Like, that's his superpower.
They might just have trouble understanding him.
I know I have.
Sure, whatever.
What did we agree to?
Oh, God.
I was going to ask, Gareth, before we get started here, is your German accent locked and loaded?
I mean, listen, as to the disgust of the German people, it is.
That's fine.
That's fine.
I think we can all agree after the 20th century, the Germans lost the right to be angry when people, you know, everyone can do a Texan.
Yeah, that's how I'm sure.
I don't think I can.
I can make any accent sound kind of English and sort of Spanish at the same time.
And yet can't do English.
It's really just sort of this amazing ability.
See, whenever I do a non-American accent, it just drifts Russian at some point, like 100% of the time.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Well, this is your time.
Now you can shine with what's going on.
I know, I know.
I'm ready to just yuck it up over.
Speaking of which, there's a number of roots of what's happening between Ukraine and Russia right now that you can tie back to Henry Kissinger.
I mean, that's a little bit less the area that he fucked around in, but he did some fucking around there.
Like one of the things, we are spending six episodes talking about Henry Kissinger, and we're leaving some shit out.
Wow.
Yeah, you have to.
I mean, he's been around so many years.
I mean, just the fact that he was still paling around with Hillary Clinton in the election.
And you're like, what is that guy doing there?
Don't you know he's bad?
And he's, the thing that is so interesting about Kissinger is that he does have this equal, he's equally good at talking to like people who would call themselves liberals and progressives as he is to like far-right neocons.
Like he's, he's, he's, I mean, you could, I think you could say that part of what that reveals is that the ruling class in this country are all in agreement about things more often than they disagree about things.
But part of it is just that like he is so charming.
We will be talking a bit about Kissinger as a sex symbol, which is a thing that happens.
And I am so sorry that we have to discuss it.
No, I was hoping that he would say this because I've wanted to fuck him for so long.
Like that's one of the main things.
He's hot.
I call him Henry Fuckinger.
I've always wanted to be a kiss is not enough kisses.
That's just a taste of what I'm after.
Oh boy.
We'll A-B test the Forrest Gump and the Fuckinger title.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll just see what plays best in Powkepsy.
So Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27th, 1923, in the city of Firth, Germany.
The Kissingers were a Jewish family.
And so given that this is Germany in the early 20s, you can tell we're not off to a great start already, right?
This is not going to be a story that begins in a particularly pleasant place.
He was born in a very chaotic world.
The great year was like five years past when he comes onto the planet.
Everything is falling apart in Germany and a lot of other places.
The year he's born, Primo de Rivera seized power as the dictator of Spain.
Mustafa Kemal took power in Turkey.
The Bulgarian prime minister was assassinated in a coup.
Like it was a troubling time to be a baby.
But Heinz's mother and father had some reasons for optimism.
While Firth was not an attractive city, in fact, one contemporary described it as stifling in its narrow dreariness, our unguarded city, city of soot.
You know, it's a city.
It's city.
It's city.
It's a working class factory town.
Because of that, and this is the period in which the working class is a lot more left-wing than folks tend to give it credit for being today.
It's a very, it's like a haven for Democrats, not like our Democrats, but people who support democracy as opposed to want to go back to having a Kaiser, you know?
So Firth is.
Who would want to go back to having a Kaiser?
He was so.
Yeah, it worked so good.
Yeah, I want to have a king who gets us into World War I and like whacks off about his mom's hands.
That sounds great again.
Well, now that I know what we're talking about, let's dance.
I'm in.
I want a Kaiser.
So Firth is, in some ways, you could see it.
Its reputation in Germany is being kind of like Portland today.
It's a very left-wing town.
It's seen as a haven for socialists.
But it's also kind of like Selma, Alabama during the civil rights era because Firth has a very large Jewish population.
And the period in like the late 1800s, is when a lot of like there's a there's essentially apartheid against Jewish people in Germany for a long time.
So Firth is the city that has Germany's first Jewish lawyer and it has a bunch of their other first Jewish you know exes person who does this job?
Because it's it's this very progressive city with a very integrated Jewish community.
So it's this mix of the Nazis aren't going to like this town, right?
Yeah, like Portland.
Yeah, like Portland.
Yeah, it's.
It's got some similarities between a couple of things.
So Heinz's parents, Paula and Lewis, had grown up in imperial Germany where Jews were restricted from holding certain jobs, going to certain schools, living in certain homes, and this had ended by the time the Kaiser had.
So Lewis Kissinger, Henry's dad, came of age in a period in which a Jewish boy could actually build a professional life for the first time in mainstream German society.
He was a member of the first and almost the last generation that this would be true of.
Why what happens?
Oh day, we may need to do it a separate podcast series.
I never read any German history.
Oh my god, it's so exciting.
So he starts work Lewis, as a teacher in a secular private school when he's 18 and he holds the job for 14 years and he was a very patriotic person.
Um, he's.
He's also an like.
He is an Orthodox Jew, so he's very religious, but he considers himself a German for first and foremost, and his family is very patriotic.
His brother fights in World War, I so does his wife's dad.
Two of his cousins die fighting for the Kaiser and when the war ends in German defeat.
You know, there's all these rumors spread throughout the far right that the nation's been stabbed in the back by an alliance of Jewish boogeymen.
Um Heinz, or sorry Lewis, kind of he sees this as happening, but he doesn't think that it's ever going to like take hold.
He's Henry would later recall that his father would regularly say, we live in an age of tolerance, so his dad is not right.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Are you talking about America in 2022 or are you talking about Germany?
Yeah, we are talking about this on the day that Texas just announced a fun new law?
Um yeah, this is.
This is like.
You know.
Henry's wrong about a lot of stuff.
His father is also wrong, but for a much sadder reason.
Sounds like there is a psychic gene in the family.
I see us being tolerant.
For a generation Germany will A watchword for tolerance.
We would be a bastion for all types.
Oh, poor buddy.
Yeah, so he's, it's interesting because, like, the Zionist movement is rising in this time.
And Kissinger's family rejects this wholeheartedly because they're so German, right?
Like, they don't want to ever leave.
So, obviously, the Nazi party rises consistently through Henry's childhood.
Firth was initially safe from this just a few months after Heinz is born in September of 23.
The Nazis and other far-right organizations hold a German Day in Nuremberg.
Several caravans of them pass through Firth, sort of like Nazis do today in a lot of places.
And, you know, they were looking for a fight when they drove through.
They went through Firth because it's the town where you can get a fight.
And they got one.
This is like right after Henry is born.
A mob of brown shirts are assaulted by a hundred strong crowds screaming, kill them and down with Hitler.
Which is pretty much.
Let's end the story there.
I love it.
It's a great end.
And that's the tale of Henry Kissinger.
A kid who was a baby when some dudes did some rad stuff.
All right.
So Firth was integrated enough that Heinz initially attended a public school with Christian classmates, which was not common for Jewish kids in this time.
Yeah, he's like going to school with other kids who are not Jewish.
Eventually, his dad puts him in a private school, but that's also an integrated private school.
So while his education is secular, his family's very strict Orthodox.
He attended Hebrew school, which he hated.
I found a quote from another Jewish guy who grew up in Firth at the same time that gives an idea as to why Henry was not a big fan of his early religious education.
Quote: Religion was a study and not a pleasant one, a lesson taught soullessly by a soulless old man.
Even today, I see his evil, conceited old face in my dreams.
He thrashed formulas into us, antiquated Hebrew prayers that we translated mechanically without any actual knowledge of the language.
What he taught was paltry, dead, mummified.
And that, I think, is broadly in line with how Henry feels because he's not, doesn't grow up very religious.
So Henry is a little kid.
You know, he does a lot of religion stuff, but as he grows older, he rejects his father's passion for faith and his dad's interests in classical music and theater.
Instead, Henry Kissinger falls in love with soccer.
He is a huge soccer head.
What the fuck is happening?
I know, right?
Oh, wow.
Firth has like a locally renowned team.
They're one of the best teams in Germany.
And so, like, their kids' teams, which are feeders into this whatever team, are very competitive too.
Henry starts playing in a youth league when he's six years old.
And he later recalled, I wasn't really very good, though I took the game seriously.
Now, what about soccer?
We should talk about that.
Oh, sorry.
Never mind.
So his real prowess early on was in strategy.
As this quote from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, a book named Kissinger, like the guy, makes clear.
Though no great athlete, Heinz Kissinger was already a shrewd tactician, devising for his team a system that, as it turns out, is the way the Italians play soccer.
The system was to drive the other team nuts by not letting them score, by keeping so many people back as defenders.
It's very hard to score when 10 players are lined up in front of the goal.
So immediately, Henry Kissinger as a kid is like, you know what will help us win and also make this game no fun at all?
Yeah, we need to poison their water.
Henry, what are you talking about?
We must firebomb the homes.
We know what to do.
I know we are six, but we will park the bus.
There will be no joy in soccer.
Remove the keeper's hands.
He is as a six-year-old doing the soccer equivalent of carpet bombing.
Poison Their Water00:13:46
So he gets so into soccer that he starts to neglect his studies, and his father actually bans him from playing for a while.
The older he gets, Henry has more and more conflicts with his dad, a thing that no one else has ever experienced.
Um, and yeah, he would regularly, after fighting with his father, bicycle over to the home of a friend who later recalled.
He liked he liked being with us.
It seems to me he had a problem with his father.
If I'm not mistaken, he was afraid of him because he was a very pedantic man.
His father was always checking Heinz's homework and kept a close watch on him.
Heinz told me more than once that he couldn't discuss anything with his father, especially not girls.
So his dad's not like hitting him or anything.
He's just like really, really annoying to him.
And just like, and just like pay attention to your studies beyond anything else.
Like, yeah, I think I like this girl.
Like, well, she doesn't, she's not going to the same school.
Focus, Henry.
Focus.
Well, and he's, he's clearly a dick who's like, you know, you can't be a professional soccer player at eight.
You have to go to school.
Like, he's clearly an asshole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he's definitely the villain of the story.
No doubt.
No doubt.
So Henry is magnetic to women from a well, girls at this point, from a very young age.
What in the fuck is happening?
I know.
It's really weird.
It's weird.
And this is the quotes about girls really liking him at this age come from his father.
But like, this also happens when he's in his 40s and the Secretary of State.
So I'm going to say his father's probably telling the truth.
I mean, at no point have I seen any version of Henry Kissinger where you're like, man, I mean, it is weird.
That got memory hold because there were New York Times stories about how much women like Henry Kissinger.
Because he looks like a lump of clay you could mold into anything, potentially.
That would be good.
No, yeah, no, no, no.
But it's weird.
I mean, yeah, he's the guy.
Like, yeah, we'll talk about some of the things he said about sexuality later.
I know you're all getting real excited for that episode.
Yeah.
That's too worse than Cambodia.
At one point, one of his friends was actually ordered not to hang out with him because he had, quote, earned a reputation as a skirt chaser.
And this is like when he's nine.
Wow.
Early.
Little, little Henry, come rocket Kissinger.
First time I sex was nine.
So, you know, like at this point, he's rebelling against the family religion.
He's hanging out with girls.
He's playing a hell of a lot of soccer, which seems like a decent childhood.
But obviously, you know, the Nazis.
So in the mid-20s, the German nation goes on strike against some shit France was doing, Versailles stuff.
We don't need to get into it.
Inflation goes crazy, right?
This is the wheelbarrows full of cash time.
This hurts the Kissinger family badly because if you're a private laborer, if you're working for a private company, you can generally like strike and organize to get your salary adjusted to deal with inflation somewhat.
Like it's still bad, but it's less bad.
If you're a public servant, you don't get shit.
Your salary stays the same while inflation jumps up.
So this is really a disaster for the Kissinger family.
And of course, economic trouble coincides with a constant acceleration of far-right violence.
Later as an adult, Kissinger would note without emotion that he was somewhat regularly chased through the streets and beaten up by Nazi thugs as a child.
That's tough.
Yeah, that's tough.
No punchlines.
No, no punchlines, but there is something weird about that because he's talked about this a few times.
But every time he talks about this, it is so that he can emphatically state that this part of his life had no impact on him.
Yeah, it's really weird.
It's very strange.
The literal impact of fists had no impact upon him.
Yeah, in 1958, he declared, quote, my life in Firth seems to have passed without leaving any deeper impressions.
Well, you don't get to say that, by the way.
I feel like you don't.
Like, I feel like you don't.
I feel like I said that to a shrink once about my parents' divorce and then wept.
Yeah.
It didn't do anything.
I didn't do anything.
I mean, what's this?
What's this fluid coming out of me?
And it's like, yeah, in 1974, when discussing the times he was beaten in the streets by Nazis, he insisted to a reporter, quote, that part of my childhood was not a key to anything.
I was not consciously unhappy.
I was not acutely aware of what was going on.
For children, these things are not that serious.
It is fashionable now to explain everything psychoanalytically.
But let me tell you, the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life, which is really interesting, right?
What the fuck?
I know, right?
Like, I'm sure the reporter's like, I'm ready to ask follow-ups whenever he stops talking.
Anyway, you're not supposed to remember from before 10.
Anyway.
I mean, I went numb.
That's how I can kill.
I went numb at nine.
I don't feel anything.
It is.
It's like, you know, I got assaulted by a Nazi when I was 33 and it left a mark here.
But anytime, just growing up in that environment without being assaulted is going to leave psychological damage.
If your parents had kept you completely safe from street violence, it couldn't not.
Yeah.
And it's like, Henry, this is the only time I'm going to speak sympathetically to you, but it's fine if being beaten by Nazis as a child left a mark on you.
It's the only time you want to Matt Damon him with your Robin Williams arm.
Yeah, like, it's okay, man.
It's okay, bud.
It happens.
It's interesting.
The ways he explains why this didn't leave any mark on him are very interesting.
And I want to quote from Henry Kissinger in 2004 now.
I experienced the impact of Nazism, and it was very unpleasant, but it did not interfere in my friendship with Jewish people of my age, so that I did not find it traumatic.
I have resisted the psychiatric explanations, which argue that I developed a passion for order over justice and that I translated it into profound interpretations of the international system.
I wasn't concerned with the international system.
I was concerned with the standing of the football team of the town in which I lived.
Yeah, you can't do both.
You can't pay attention to soccer.
Obviously, no one thinks, Henry, that as an eight-year-old, you are like, well, this is going to impact the way that I believe state power should be used when I'm secretary of state in several decades when I'm in a voluntary addiction.
Just like if you have a car accident as a kid, you're not thinking, well, this is going to make me unable to let other people touch me when I'm 33.
Right.
You know, like, I'll hate freeway merging.
Like, obviously, man.
And I don't know, like, there's a degree to which in terms of this is the period in which you can be sympathetic to him.
I do think there's probably something to be said that if you have this childhood, maybe you don't want to give the Nazis anything.
You know, even the, like, this left an impact on me, right?
Because, like, fuck them.
I don't want to say that it had an influence on me, which I get.
No, having grown up in a traumatic, you know, sort of childhood, you, you can shut it down and tell yourself that you're fine.
Like, you, he, he, the way he survived it was to shut his emotions down a little bit and tell himself that he was fine, when it actually is by far probably the most traumatic thing that and created a fucking monster because he didn't get any psychological help.
I'm a monster naturally.
It is not nature versus nurture.
I would have killed just as many people if it weren't for the Nazi.
It was a despicable piece of shit either way.
Don't judge my family.
So as the 20s roll to an end, the political situation in the Weimar Republic gets correspondingly more dire.
In 1925, during a Nazi rally in Firth, Hitler himself had called it the citadel of the Jews.
The local response at that point in 25 is overwhelmingly negative.
And in 1927, only 200 people in Firth were members of the Nazi Party.
Hitler visited the city again in 1928 to little effect.
The party just got 6.6% of the vote in local elections that year.
But the Great Depression rescues, the end of the 20s, rescues the Nazis flagging poll numbers.
As Firth's economy collapses, people grow more willing to listen to the fascists.
In the 1930 elections, Nazis surged from 2.6% of the vote nationwide to 18.3%.
In Firth, they won 23.6% of the vote, which is four times better than they'd done two years earlier and very frightening for a lot of relevant reasons to today.
Yeah.
Nazi electoral successes continue to pace the next year, and by 1933, more than 22,000 Firthers were Nazi voters.
I want to quote from Niall Ferguson's book again.
On April 9th, 1932, 15 SA men were set upon by Iron Front members as they left the pro-Nazi Yellow Lion pub.
Two months later, Nazi supporter Fritz Rheingruber was beaten up for being a swastikist.
The same fate befell another Nazi caught selling the NSDAP newspaper, the Volkeschebeobachter.
The police watched helplessly on the evening of July 30th as a mob threw potatoes and stones at a Nazi motorcade going from the Firth airport to the Nuremberg Stadium.
The car carrying Hitler himself was among the vehicles.
But just a year after Hitler's car gets pelted, after the Nazis begin to consolidate power, when Hitler's the chancellor, the mood is very different.
On March 3rd, there's another torchlit parade by the Nazis through Firth, and on the evening of March 9th, a crowd of between 10 and 12,000 people gathers outside one of the bars there to watch the raising of the red Nazi flag.
So, you know, it gets bad pretty fast.
Can I just flag the person who brought the potatoes to the rock throwing event?
Yeah!
I feel like he turned first.
Yeah.
Oh, we're doing rocks.
Oh, I know.
That was a drawing of a rock.
Those look like potatoes, Al.
Good lord.
You know what?
I'm going to say it right now.
If that guy had brought rocks, he might have killed Hitler.
We could have avoided that.
That's the guy.
For want of a rock, World War II happened.
Oh, did you guys see my potato hit that car?
It really smushed it.
And the mash!
I do love the idea that he also boiled it before.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't want to look weird.
So Lewis Kissinger lost his job teaching once the Nazis came to power.
Henry, again, who'd never gotten along with his dad, watches his father collapse into what biographer Thomas Allen Schwartz describes as a, quote, state of immobility and psychological depression.
Lewis withdrew into his study, according to Henry's brother Walter, while the world outside veered closer to nightmare.
In his book, Henry Kissinger and American Power, Schwartz writes, Kissinger and his brothers saw the progressive segregation, isolation, and humiliation the Jews of Firth experienced.
Even their attempt to watch soccer games came with the risk of their being beaten by young Nazi thugs.
The world of Heinz's childhood rapidly collapsed, and his parents and the older generation of Firth's Jews could not protect their young from the hatred around them.
After the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935, Kissinger's mother began to look for a way to leave Germany.
A cousin in the United States was willing to provide the financial support that would allow the Kissingers to immigrate.
In August of 1938, after a last visit with Paula's elderly parents in Lüderschausen, where Heinz saw his father cry for the first time, the family headed to New York.
Only three months later, during Kristallnacht, the synagogue in Firth, like hundreds of others throughout Germany, burned to the ground in a night of orchestrated violence.
Three months.
Yeah, I mean, that is crazy.
When Henry leaves Firth, there are 2,000 Jews in the Jewish community.
At the end of World War II, there are 40.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
And three months is so...
I mean, that is...
Barely.
I mean, really.
That's like...
Yeah.
They stay as late as they possibly can.
Right, yeah.
At least 13 members of Kissinger's family would perish in the Holocaust.
Obviously, being what it is, I don't know that you can, it's easy.
It's not super easy to get exact numbers, but like his family is as devastated as you would expect of a German Jewish family.
And he does acknowledge for the first time he likes admits that some part of this had an influence on him.
It was moving away from Germany and going across the world to the United States.
And he says, and this is, I think, him being somewhat honest, that the deepest impact of all this was: quote, all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed.
And many of the people that once had that one had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities.
People will say, we'll talk about this later.
He's very much an order-obsessed guy.
And like, okay, yeah, I get it.
Like, I get where that came from, you know?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's very common for that happen in Chile and other places where it all falls apart into authoritarianism.
There's a lot of people who are like, I just want it to be the same.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you hear that all the time here, too.
I mean, not like that, obviously, it's far, it was far more dire, but there are a lot of people I know who keep saying that shit here, who keep being like, I just wanted to go back to normal.
And you're just like, that ship never fucking sailed.
That is not, you know.
Yeah, it never does.
It never can.
But we all do it.
Like, even the kind of like obsession with 90s nostalgia is evidence of that.
And not because the 90s were like a perfect time, but because like, yeah, you didn't, you weren't aware of how fucked, like, like Henry, like your dad hadn't collapsed into like an unable to handle his life.
You're just like, Lip Biscuit's too aggressive.
And now you're like, oh my God, we don't have money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You went from, oh my gosh, you know, the O.J. Simpson trial, what a mess, to, well, now a plague has killed a million people.
Ship Never Sailed00:05:15
Oh, my God.
It's very better.
Give me that time capsule.
It's so funny the parallels because I literally am writing a dollop right now, and the guy turns into an authoritarian and his dad shut himself in his house and isolated.
It's so weird how these things.
I mean, just to continue off of that, Dave, Hitler's dad dies when he's a little kid, plunges the family finances and situation into insecurity and chaos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's it when something that seemed stable from your early childhood collapses, perhaps it has an influence.
Oh, my God.
Yes, me.
Despite what Kissinger said.
Despite what Kissinger said.
But you know what Henry Kissinger loves?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Oh my gosh, Robert.
No.
Look, Henry is one of the few VIPs on this island where you can hunt children.
Anytime he wants, he gets a free three-bedroom apartment on the child hunting island, Sophie, that known.
Yeah, because for some fucking reason, he is still alive.
Yes.
Well, let's be honest here.
This is essentially his eulogy because when we finish this podcast and it's published, Kissinger should die.
It's possible I'm planning a dark occult ritual using my own blood and a candle I bought in Mexico to deal like this.
I'm not going to say I'm not doing it.
It's a voodoo doll podcast.
Anyway, here's some ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Monument.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Murder at City Hall00:15:36
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
Have you guys gone to the island where you can hunt little kids for sports?
Yes, it's amazing.
It's all so fresh.
It's very, yeah, the brisket.
You didn't expect it to be that fresh.
So good.
So, Kissinger today has Sophie's just shaking her head.
Kissinger today has idyllic recollections of his early years in the United States.
He often talks about walking down the streets of his new neighborhood, seeing a group of boys walking towards him and crossing the street because he's, you know, he's afraid he's going to get beaten.
Yeah.
And then he would realize, like, oh, that doesn't happen here, which obviously it did in other parts of the world.
He started beating those boys.
Yeah.
They're just wearing brown shirts because they like brown.
Yeah.
Yes.
Henry, this is a country where some people who wear brown aren't Nazis.
Some of them are.
Some of them are, Henry.
Different did not mean easy, though.
The Kissingers spent their first years in a crowded Bronx apartment living with family.
Lewis got sick and even more depressed.
Paula had to take control of the family and handle shit.
She became a caterer and started a business that became the family's lifeline.
The neighborhood they lived in was dominated by Orthodox Jewish families with a familiar background.
A lot of them were from other parts of Germany.
And so the Kissingers benefited from the help of several community organizations and getting back on their feet.
He benefits a lot from the fact that, you know, there's not really a government support network, but the other Jewish refugees who have come over from Europe have built support networks to make it easier for new folks coming.
Henry's teen years were a mix of school and synagogue.
He failed his first driving test, but excelled at soccer, and he grew to admire many aspects of his new home, including, quote, American technology, the American tempo of work, and American freedom, which I might say is in direct opposition to the American tempo of work, but whatever.
Kissinger was frustrated by the casual approach to life that he saw in his new peers.
He thought they were superficial.
He wrote at the time that, quote, no youth my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with.
Which, well, yeah.
Okay, Henry.
All right, Hank.
Fair.
If you come over from Nazi Germany and you're like, people here seem carefree and shallow.
It's like, yeah, probably.
Yeah, and your schooling was basically like some old dude being like, you didn't read these right.
You know, like, you're going to be like, geez, these guys are really not focused on what matters.
Yeah.
Look, maybe.
I don't want to be too critical, but New York could use a little bit of Nazism.
You know what I mean?
It's a little loose.
Good lord.
So because of all of this, this is why one of his biographers, Schwartz, describes young Henry as socially inept.
He's not great at talking to, he's not great at dealing with his new peers.
He did start dating again, though.
First, a girl who was a refugee from nearby Niremberg, but most of his focus was on schoolwork and soccer.
Kissinger graduated George Washington High School and started at the City College of New York.
He took classes at night so he could work during the day at a brush cleaning factory some of his cousins owned.
These brushes are filthy, boys.
Keep going.
Let's do this shit.
It's the most amazing, like, old-timey job ever.
He's just basically like, all I can picture is just like the jobs are either like pressing sheets or washing brushes.
These brushes are not going to clean themselves, gentlemen.
How many times do I have to tell you?
Well, and the corollary is some mom being like, Billy, you didn't take your sister's brushes to the cleaning shop.
What she got to do now.
It's very funny.
Everything old-timey is funny.
People are going to think this in the future about, I don't know, having water.
So at this point, Henry's ambition in life was to get, quote, a nice job, likely in accounting.
One biographer noted, quote, nothing that happened to Kissinger during those years encouraged him to read more widely.
His historical interests were as underdeveloped when he was 20 as when he arrived in New York as a boy of 15, which is the first normal thing about him.
That, like, yeah, dude, you know, whatever, like, he's a kid.
Yeah.
We're about to get in the studio 54 years, I feel like.
Yes.
So World War II happens, starts for the United States at least.
It started elsewhere a bit earlier.
But for the U.S. All right, we'll do it.
When Henry is 21, he did not initially feel called to volunteer for service, but when he got his draft notice in 1943, he complied and joined the roughly 16 million Americans who became soldiers during this period.
And if it weren't for this, Henry Kissinger probably never would have been a figure of historical importance.
Again, he just kind of wanted to be an accountant.
But being drafted successfully disrupted his plans for a quiet, boring life and thrust him into the world.
That says it all.
Yeah.
It's not.
Maybe don't draft this guy.
Right.
Don't draft him.
Right.
You don't.
I did not actually see your Venmo this year, so it's not the process.
Yeah, there's a future where he just has really strong opinions on W-2s.
Yeah, exactly.
Even though you put yourself as 1099, but I feel like it was actually more like W-4.
Yeah.
Or he does like a Bernie Madoff thing, but either way, it's a much better future than the one we got.
We'll take the Madoff ending for him for sure.
Yeah.
Fine.
So we have letters that Henry sent to his brother Walter during training.
He purported to like the, quote, middle Americans he met there, but warned his sibling, don't become too friendly with the scum you invariably meet there.
Well, hello.
So he did pick up.
He did pick up a little something from the Nazis.
He's a little bit, right?
Yeah.
He also advised against having sex with the, quote, filthy syphilis-infected camp followers, which is too specific to have been random.
I think Henry Kissinger had a bad experience with a camp followers.
Everyone at camp has syphilis.
It's all about kidding and having your nose follow.
Every girl I fucked had syphilis.
I fucked one girl that's syphilis.
Every one of them has it.
That's what they're doing zero of the syphilis epidemic.
That's right, yes.
That's right.
So you're surrounded by counselors.
So the Army administered a series of tests, which Kissinger excelled at, and he earned entrance into a special training program that sent particularly bright soldiers to college.
He received his American citizenship in 1943 while he was at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
The program lasted just six months, and Henry finished 12 engineering classes.
During his off hours, he would hitchhike home and see his girlfriend.
He was a brilliant student, recognized by his roommates as the, quote, brainiest of a very intelligent class.
One classmate recalled, he didn't read books.
He ate them with his eyes, his fingers, and with his squirming in the chair or bed and with his mumbling criticism.
Use more salt if I'm being cookie.
Other than that, you do.
He sounds like a book.
It is a really weird way to describe a dude.
It's kind of what, but the way he looks now is like he eats books.
Yeah.
I do kind of.
Everyone had like a visual, like, ooh, reaction to that line.
Like, ooh, I now kind of want the story of that classmate.
Like, yeah.
What caused you to describe a dude reading books that way?
Well, in my college, I ate analogies.
I just would just devour them.
I'd eat them like a synonym, you know?
His professors would use Henry to explain complicated concepts to the other soldiers.
And for a brief period of time, he had status and respect, which he'd begun to crave as a young man.
His time in this program was cut short because, you know, D-Day, we decide America's like, we're going to do us a Normandy landing.
And the Army's like, well, we probably don't need smart people for that.
So let's pull these kids out of the class and train them how to get shot by the people.
Hey, guys, we actually want to talk to you over here about something totally different.
No, no, not you.
Not you, Chad.
You stay right there, Chad.
Talk about these other guys.
Thank you.
Good luck.
So Henry and his classmates get sent back to basic training where the drill sergeants, according to Henry, took glee in tormenting the college kids.
Which, I don't know, probably true.
While he was preparing to go overseas, and this is what my grandpa was doing in World War II, and I hope he bullied Henry Kissinger.
I hope my grandpa got a chance to give Henry Kissinger some shit.
Fingers crossed.
He did, right?
He did.
Thank you.
He did.
He did.
Absolutely.
So while he was preparing to go overseas, his biographer Schwartz writes: Even in the misery of Camp Clairborne, however, Kissinger stood out, selected by his commanders to provide soldiers with a weekly briefing on war news.
Although he did the job well, Kissinger was more impressed with another older German refugee in an American uniform, Fritz Kramer, who came to Camp Clairborne in May 1944 to speak about the meaning of war.
After Kramer's impassioned talk, Kissinger wrote him a note: Dear Private Kramer, I heard you like me yesterday.
Check Yoso.
Oh, sorry.
Basically, yeah.
Yeah, he literally, like, it's like, I liked what you had to say.
Can I help you?
Oh, like, that's literally what the note is, scare.
Check yourself.
Yeah.
Kramer responded almost immediately to the simple fan letter, returning a few days later to seek Kissinger out for conversation and dinner, insisting they speak in German, not English.
The Lutheran Kramer later said that he was taken with this, quote, little Jewish refugee he had met who he believed, as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything.
Wow.
That's an interesting way to describe him.
I mean, sounds like a guy who eats books.
Yeah.
And this guy, Kramer, is Kramer is a Prussian, which I don't know the degree to which that means anything to a lot of people.
The Prussians, so there was most of the resistance to the Nazis was from the left.
Once the Nazis got into power, the resistance to the Nazis that meant anything was Prussian, not because they were good dudes, but because they were way too conservative for Hitler.
They were like, well, we want to fight and take over all of Europe, but like with a Kaiser who has royal blood, not this like gross little corporal and stuff.
And it's complicated because like a lot of those Prussians got murdered by the Nazis.
And as a general rule, your sympathy is with the people who get murdered by the Nazis.
But it's also like, yeah, you got murdered by the Nazis for the wrong reasons.
Right, right, yeah, right.
They were like, we have one small note, but everything else is working great for us.
They were the guys who were like, Hitler's bad because he's not going to win the war against Russia.
Right.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
So this guy, Fritz Kramer, would be, in Henry's words, quote, the greatest single influence on my formative years.
Since Fritz was a Prussian conservative, so for an idea of how fucking German Fritz Kramer is, he wears a monocle to make his weak eye work harder, to make his weak eye work better.
Like, oh my God.
I'm the craziest asshole ever.
Wow.
What the fuck?
And, you know, Fritz hated the Nazis, which is good, good.
He also hated the communists, which you have to think there was some sus stuff there.
Yeah.
You know, communists are a mixed bag like everybody, but I don't think he's very nuanced about it.
Schwartz also credits Fritz with expressing, quote, a respect for international law and emphasis on the moral basis of civilization.
And what Fritz Kramer means by the moral basis of civilization is not the same as what I think maybe you or I might mean.
Yeah.
Now that, yeah, I think the most important influence Kramer had was he's Kramer is very conservative.
And Henry is kind of a natural conservative.
And Kramer really reinforces this feeling in Henry, which is expressed by a growing sort of revulsion in Kissinger towards any ideas outside of the political median, right?
Which you get why he has a tendency towards this.
If your life, if your childhood is this like battle of extremes in your hometown, I get why you would kind of veer towards the middle.
And this guy Kramer really turns that up to 11 in him.
One write-up in the New Yorker notes, quote, he warned Kissinger not to emulate cleverling intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses.
Believing Kissinger to be musically attuned to history, he told him, only if you do not calculate will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.
So that's bad.
So that's going to go really bad.
I mean, you really are like, I mean, this is his Morpheus.
We're just starting to be like, okay, this is.
And by the way, have you thought about maybe just losing the glasses and just going with the wand?
That is so much like punish your weak eye.
You must punish the weak even when it comes to your eyes.
Yeah.
Yeah, he has found a kid who like has a problematic history of starting fires and is now teaching him how to build a fertilizer bomb.
Yeah, yeah, he's a bad influence.
He matches a so-so, but have you ever seen a Zippo?
Yeah, he's a great.
So Kissinger finishes training and is deployed with the 84th Infantry Division as it moves towards Nazi Europe.
His division sees a decent amount of combat.
He does not.
He's a backranker.
He handles administrative and management tasks.
And he finds the power and authority he gets through his time in the service intoxicating.
Though he never, again, he doesn't fight directly.
He does earn a bronze star for valor because he helps catch and take out a Gestapo sleeper cell, primarily due to the fact that he's just, you know, a very observant dude.
In 1945, he participates in the liberation of a concentration camp, Alam, A-H-L-E-M.
I'm not 100% sure on how to pronounce it.
One prisoner at the camp remembered him as the young American who announced, you are free.
For Kissinger, the overwhelming memory of this experience was seeing inmates he described as being barely recognizable as humans and feeling the instinct to feed them before learning that some were so starved that solid food would kill them.
Shortly thereafter, yeah, I mean, one thing you got to say, he does not like, he's not a sheltered upbringing.
And I mean, like, you would be like, oh, maybe that could be the influence that made him be like, oh, you know, you can, there's, there's good.
You can provide the people who are tortured and starved some, you know, you could take away from this, like, my God, war is evil and we should do everything we can to advantage as opposed to, yeah, baby.
Outsider With Secret00:05:07
Well, let's see how it plays out, Dave.
Settle down.
Maybe this is the six part behind the bastards episode about a cool dude who does nice things.
I just brought you guys here to talk about a chill guy.
So shortly after liberating this concentration camp, Kissinger writes an essay on his experience where he asks, quote, who was lucky?
The man who draws circles in the sand and mumbles, I am free, or the bones that are interred in the hillside.
He concludes from the experience that this is humanity in the 20th century.
So, I mean, an understandably bleak take from liberating a concentration camp.
That's fair.
You know what is a bad time to move to an ad plug?
I didn't think you were going to be brave enough to do this, but fair enough.
Oh, boy.
Wow.
Yeah.
You know what makes me hungry?
Probably shouldn't go too far down that road.
Let the ads do the talking.
Let the ads do the talking.
The ads are going to come and win the same way the Soviet Union did.
They're disrupting wave after wave of men into Nazi trenches.
Anyway, I think we lost it.
We had it for a minute.
We had it for a second there.
I took it too far.
You know, I took it there.
Here we go.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Love Trap Indictment00:15:46
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, who did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
So when the war ends, World War II, you know, that is, Sergeant Henry Kissinger finds himself as, quote, the absolute ruler of a small village named Bin Sheim.
He enjoys this experience.
He really starts to like having power.
One thing that we're getting here is that he adores having power over people.
Yeah, he really likes it.
In his letters, he celebrates repeatedly to his family that he has, quote, absolute authority to arrest people.
Jesus.
And this is problematic because of what he does later.
I will say, if you are a Jewish kid who has to flee Germany and then you come back and get made like the military head of a town that's full of former Nazis, I get reveling in it a little bit, you know?
For me, I'm having beheading Tuesdays, if that's you.
Yeah.
So again, he's not, because of what he does later, this is unsettling, but like, it's understandable in the moment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He appropriates a luxury home and a fancy car, both of which had to have belonged to some Nazi, which is like it's what you do, right?
Yeah, fine.
He gets a butler.
He brags back to his family that he's a family.
A Nazi butler.
A fucking Nazi butler.
Absolutely.
That's what I'm saying.
Someone arrested for not giving me butter.
Yeah.
That is obvious.
Now, that said, he's also, to his credit, really aware of not wanting the Germans in town to identify this guy who's absolute ruler as being Jewish.
I think because he doesn't want it to make things a problem for people who Jewish people who stay behind in Germany.
He makes other soldiers refer to him as Mr. Henry rather than by his last name.
He's conscious.
He doesn't want them to think, quote, that the Jews were coming back to take revenge.
And he had a reputation in general as being more objective as a ruler in this kind of period than most Jewish veterans in similar positions.
In general, Henry counseled accommodation and rapprochement, with one exception, communists.
That was the civil war.
Of course.
Fucking sounds like that.
I know, right?
This like understandable period.
I don't want to sent the Nazis, but this coming.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
And that's literally what happens.
So the Cold War, you know, early stages in 1946, but already in that period, Kissinger advocates strict surveillance of German civilians for left-wing sympathies.
And that's the God.
The fucking Nazis just did a thing.
Like, it's the conservatives.
Yeah.
The leftists do.
The leftists do.
He doesn't want them.
He also wants to ban communists from teaching at the local schools.
Which again is like, what the fuck?
How is he?
He went straight Nazi all of a sudden now.
Yeah, he's definitely fascist.
Let's say fascist.
Yeah, okay.
Fascist.
Now he's a fascist.
He does a bit.
He does a bit.
He starts dating a Gentile German girl during this period.
Because again, he's not very religious.
His letters home to his parents, though, because they don't like this at all.
They're like, you're losing your faith.
And Henry gets very combative with them.
He sees them as irrational, writing, quote, to me, there is not only right or wrong, but many shades in between.
The real tragedies in life are not choices between right and wrong.
Real difficulties bear difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you and your world of black and white can't begin to comprehend.
How's the dog?
How's the dog?
Love you, mom.
Love you, mom.
Also, how's Strauss?
Is Skrafs good?
Is his tail better?
And his parents, his parents have the reaction we all did where they're like, hey, how are you?
Hey, bud.
It seems like the war may have...
Why you make this call you Mr. May have had an effect on you, right?
I've said this ever since you met the monocle guy, but you're really intense.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe all of the things you've seen have had an impact on you.
And Henry responds to this by getting enraged and saying, not everybody came out of this war as a psycho-neurotic.
Oh, that shows him.
That'll teach him that.
That's fine.
That's fine.
That's exactly right.
That's the exact right reaction of a non-psycho neurotic.
When you're screaming, I'm not a psycho neurotic in letters.
You're a psycho neurotic.
I got syphilis from Garland Kemp.
If all they're saying is like, hey, Henry, do you think maybe seeing a concentration camp has left some mental scars that you need to like heal from?
Hey, maybe I should drown dad to the toilet.
Okay, all right, buddy.
All right, pal.
We're just talking.
We're just writing letters here, buddy.
We're just writing some letters.
That's all we're doing.
It's one of those things.
This is a period of time, obviously, like every one of the things that causes what happens later in American history is that 16 million Americans go to war and a bunch of them get traumatized and they come back to a world where, like their dad was always like, if you talk about your feelings, I'm going to hit you.
Yeah, Henry's family doesn't seem to be like that.
His parents are like, hey, do you want to talk about your feelings?
And he's like, I'm not crazy.
Yeah um obviously, obviously the fact that this is a time in which like, men don't do therapy does have an impact on it, but I think his family's probably more understanding than most people.
He also has.
No, I mean, even now he has no acknowledgement of, like his trauma.
So he probably even in the, in the actual moment, I mean you're probably even more defensive, you know?
Yeah um, in 1947, Kissinger finally decides to leave Germany for the second time.
On Fritz Kramer's advice, he applies he applies late to Harvard and he was accepted, winning one of the two national scholarships the school gave New Yorkers each year.
Now, Chapo and Traphouse did a tournament of evil people from Harvard.
It's awesome then, and Kissinger won.
So that's, yeah, that makes sense.
Oh boy, the Ivy League good at producing bad people.
Maybe we should look into that one.
So one of his classmates recalls, and he, obviously he does.
Like it's Henry Kissinger.
He's very good at school.
One of his classmates recalls that he quote, worked harder and studied more than anybody else on campus.
He hates school.
He ate school couldn't stop him from shoving pencils in his bank the campus like Godzilla would have.
He nearly died.
He almost died from lead.
His studies so absorbed him that he ignored the people around him.
He made, quote, no lasting friendships with other students.
He seemed scarcely aware of the extraordinary range of people gathered around him.
So Kissinger's ideology evolved along the lines Kramer had started him off on.
He agreed with Goethe, I believe is the name of the German philosopher, that if he, quote, had to choose between justice and disorder on the one hand and injustice and order on the other, I would always choose the latter.
So, well, there we go.
He's made his choice.
That's very telling.
Like, we know.
We know.
We get it.
Yeah, Henry.
It's just nice to know we're like around the time.
Like, okay, so he was pretty defined.
Okay.
So, Henry, you know, some other people who thought that order was more important than justice.
Yeah.
They had an impact on your childhood.
Yeah, yeah.
No shit.
Yeah, right.
But it's just such a trauma works, too.
It's a strange thing that it's so conscious, like he, he's so completely aware of it.
Yeah.
Like he's like a psychopath.
He might be.
I mean, I think if you're, I try not to do too much like the psychoanalyzing people, but like, fucking maybe, right?
Well, psychopaths are very good at the stuff you talked about, winning people over in the room.
You know, ladies, man, like there is a they learn how to be a human and then they sort of and a lot of them got syphilis at camp.
And a lot of them get syphilis at camp, like Henry Kissinger.
Well, Sophie, can we let's green light some Henry Kissinger, some t-shirts that are just Henry Kissinger with his face riding off from syphilis.
People are going to want to wear those.
Just Jason.
He's making the kissy lips and his lips are falling off.
Would you like a Kissinger?
Let me French Kissinger you.
So he meets his second mentor at Harvard.
Henry Kissinger has a lot of mentors, and this is maybe a lesson to never mentor anybody.
You never know.
They might become Henry Kissinger.
Don't teach people things.
Sabotage them at every step, right?
Next time you drive past a kindergarten, throw them a textbook that's all lies.
Just slow them down.
So his second mentor is this guy, William Yandel Elliott.
And Elliot is a professor at Harvard.
He's also very politically connected.
He had advised several U.S. presidents on international matters.
And Kissinger was drawn to this guy because not only is he a respected educator, but he's really well connected to people with power.
And Elliot, one of the things that he is famous for being a big advocate of is what's called realpolitik.
As embodied by, you know, and particularly the guys that Kissinger grows up admiring and that Elliot, you know, helps teach him to admire are men like Klauswitz and Bismarck, these guys who are like, Bismarck is the dude who makes Germany, right?
We have it, we get a Germany because Bismarck orchestrates over a period of, like, I think it's decades.
Gradually he welds all these different German principalities and kingships together and then helps to orchestrate this war, which out of which emerges Germany.
Like, that's the kind of dude that Otto von Bismarck is.
And he is kind of the master of the kind of politics that Kissinger comes to respect.
And he, Kissinger calls Klausvitz and Bismarck philosophers of history.
That's how he sees this guy, these guys.
Which is not really what I would call Otto von Bismarck.
Like, he's very good at what he does, obviously, but not, I wouldn't call him a philosopher.
I want to quote now from the book Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin.
From these thinkers, Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how history operated.
It was not a story of liberal progress or of class consciousness or of cycles of history or of cycles of birth, maturity, and decline.
Rather, it was a series of meaningless incidents, fleetingly given shape by the application of human will.
As a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out historical causes of their misfortune.
So, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, stuff it's maybe not, yeah, yeah, you can think about that however you want.
So, uh, a lot of folks who analyze the uh, the Kissinger in this period seize on one sentence in Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, and his thesis is titled The Meaning of History, that they think it kind of explains a lot of what comes to be going down.
What a bold paper it is, right?
I mean, honestly, he's not a dude who makes like little leaps, you're right, yeah, right.
Why do we love?
This is the line: the realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an inward experience, which is you know, read it again.
The realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an inward experience.
Wow, and this is this is a like a heavily influenced by French existentialism.
His thesis cites Jean-Paul Sartre a lot, and both Sartre and Kissinger think that morality is not an inward thing, it's determined by actions, which is not an unreasonable thing to believe, right?
That like what matters is what you do, you know?
Here's that line from the Bible: you're not damned by what goes into your head, but like what you know comes out, right?
Like, that's not an unreasonable thing to believe.
Sartre, um, he believes that like action creates the possibility of intellectual individual and collective responsibility, right?
That morality is determined by action, but that our actions create this possibility of like individual and collective moral responsibility for things.
Kissinger does not come to that conclusion.
Kissinger believes that morality is determined by action, but he also thinks that like you moral indeterminacy is a condition of human freedom.
It's this idea that you can't be bound by morality and be free.
If you want to freely act, you have to be able to act above morality.
So, that's that's just giving yourself an excuse to do heinous acts.
I mean, a lot of his intellectual development is him, and also a lot of this is obviously all of this.
One of the things that you have to account for is all of this analysis of like his development intellectually comes after he does all the horrible things.
Like, so sure, right?
Including from him and from like the people who are sources who are saying this is what he was like as a kid, there is that degree of biasing, right?
Like, that this is after he is the person that he is.
Because if he had gone on to like just be a professor, nobody would have given a shit about what Henry Kissinger is.
If the accountant said that, we'd be like, Yeah, look, just would you, what do I owe?
Yeah, yeah, tell me what the IRS gets, man.
I don't need another lecture on it.
Um, and Kissinger's the fact that he becomes so kind of moral relativism is the word I've used.
I don't even know if that's right, but like this idea that like freedom and morality are kind of like inherently opposed.
This upsets a lot of people around him, including people who are like his big supporters, um, including that Professor Elliot guy.
At his retirement party, Henry Kissinger, Elliott's retirement party, Henry Kissinger and a number of students gather to like bid him farewell.
And journalist David Halberstam wrote that Elliot had positive things to say about almost all of his students who had gathered there.
But when he reached Kissinger, he said this: Henry, he began, you're brilliant, but you're arrogant.
In fact, you're the most arrogant man I've ever met.
Kissinger became ashen-faced.
Mark my words, Elliot continued.
Your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.
Oh, that is amazing on so many levels.
Like at your retirement party to be like, hey, and you, listen, shitbag, chill out.
And then for that also to be totally incorrect.
Like, you know, I saw this like clip of Some guy in like Atlantic City talking to Trump when Trump is going like, well, what makes a Native American?
And the guy just goes, sir, I'm glad you're never going to get into any real power.
And you're like, no, dude.
Oh, dude.
Well, and one of the things, like, this, Professor Elliott is like one of the guys who helps get him his first big gigs and shit.
Like, he's a major bat.
And I think this is kind of him belatedly being like, whoops.
Arrogance Gets You Trouble00:14:57
Oh, no.
Oopsie boopsy.
Oopsie poopsie.
I'm going to go patronize a Cambodian restaurant just to make myself feel a little better.
Yeah, right.
Real well, Everett, when he went to like, I don't even need food.
Just give me the tip slip.
I don't even need the food.
Just give me the tip slip.
I owe you guys.
I'm not going to tell you why.
There you go.
Don't worry about it.
Take my, take everything.
Here's my point.
I got to hang.
I got to go for it.
Do you know if there's a Bangladeshi restaurant nearby?
I'm actually hitting a lot of spots tonight and not eating.
I'll be honest.
I got a long list.
I'm going to a lot of places.
No, no, not German.
No, not German.
No, no, not German.
You know what?
They're actually fine.
I don't think I need.
Yeah.
So his thesis.
That thing that he says to Kissinger, it should be what happens, but our society rewards psychopaths above anybody else.
And so most societies.
Yeah.
So what he thinks should be is the opposite.
What he's talking about is a just world, which isn't what this is.
And it's one of those things.
This is something like that get kind of more into anthropological thinking, but like one of the reasons people will say is like why we have psychopaths is that if you're in a band of 70 people who are like hunter-gatherers starving through the winter, it's helpful to have a guy like Henry Kissinger who can say like, well, these six people are too old and sick and we have to let them die.
Otherwise we'll all starve, right?
That's a situation in which it's good to have a psychopath because you need someone who just doesn't give a shit about certain things.
When you have a society of billions that's global, it becomes a problem because that kind of thinking is not so useful and tends to just get millions and millions of people killed.
It's not great.
Anyway, Henry's thesis is published in 1950 at roughly the same time Harry Truman decides to send troops to Korea and to aid French forces in Vietnam.
Professor Elliott told Kissinger that the Korean War was an example of the East, quote, testing the civilization of the West.
Yeah, people doing their own thing in their own country is a test to us.
Excuse me.
Like the Koreans and the Vietnamese having completely their own shit going on as a test of us in the United States.
How dare you?
You know, Ho Chi Minh not wanting to be ruled over by the French is really a test of American power.
It's very insulting, huh?
I mean, and obviously they see that like the Soviet Union is orchestrating all this and the Soviet Union is involved too.
They're just like, they're looking us in the eyes.
They've got their own shit going on, dude.
Do you think they are on the same level?
How dare they do this?
So as the U.S. increased its commitments to a growing series of wars in Southeast Asia, Kissinger grew more dedicated to the work of a guy named Oswald Spangler.
Spangler's book, The Decline of the West, is not something I am well equipped to describe or explain in detail, but Greg Grandon is.
So I'm going to quote from him again.
Spangler waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality.
He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct and creativity reigned.
We have, Spengler thought, hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression.
To get behind image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests, and grasp what Spingler called destiny, one needed not information, but intuition, not facts, but hunches, not reason, but a soul sense, a world feeling.
Often enough, a statesman does not follow, does not know what he is doing, Spingler wrote.
But that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success.
Oh my god.
And now does George W. Bush crawl out of a pile of goo now?
Like, yes, is he for our?
I mean, this is haters for our freedom.
George Bush pops out of Henry's Kissinger's back as a polymer.
Yeah, right, right.
It's like Dr. Pimple Popper.
We know where they are.
They're in the East, West, North, and South.
Kissinger finds this logic intoxicating, but he did disagree with Spingler about Spengler's primary contention, which is that civilizational decay was inevitable.
Spengler argued that civilizations had springs, summers, autumns, and winters, right?
That they proceed through kind of like inevitable stages, and there's not really any way to stop this procession, right?
Which is, I think, a pretty reasonable, like, yeah, any civilization is going to have like a life cycle, right?
That's a thing like historically, you can argue pretty well.
Kissinger doesn't believe this.
Everything dies.
Yeah.
Of course.
That's actually not what Kissinger is.
Yeah, and of course the man who is like living way beyond his shelf life is like, told you so.
Doesn't die.
So here's Grandin again talking about Kissinger, how Kissinger grapples with this aspect of Spengler.
Having lost a sense of purpose, civilizations lurch outward to find meaning.
They get caught up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by history's cosmic beat, power for power's sake, blood for blood.
Imperialism is the inevitable product of this final stage, Kissinger wrote, summing up the decline of the West's argument, an outward thrust to hide the inner void.
Kissinger accepted Spengler's critique of past civilizations, but rejected his determinism.
Decay was not inevitable.
Spingler, Kissinger said, merely described a fact of decline and not its necessity.
There is a margin, he would write in his memoirs, between necessity and accident, in which the statesman, by perseverance and intuition, must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people.
So Spingler's like, yeah, it seems like when civilizations lose their purpose and start to age, they lurch outward and engage in wars of imperial conquest in a search for meaning, and that leads to disaster, which destroys them.
And Kissinger's like, but what if you did the wars right?
Yeah.
But what if you were good at it?
But what if I was involved in everyone?
What if I was like Mickey in the corner of Rocky?
Yeah, it isn't amazing, like this guy being like, here is what happens to empires every single time there's an empire.
This is a thing you can go through history and see constantly occurs through thousands of years.
And Kissinger's like, no, I can do it right.
But to be like, no, you're pretty close.
You're pretty close.
Bye.
I'm just thinking, kill more.
Like, I heard what you said, ups and downs, but I think you wipe everybody out.
You know, if you try drinking their blood.
It is the same logic I have seen.
Every time I've seen more than one person get stuck in the mud, it's always either one person gets stuck in the mud or 50 do, because one person gets stuck in the mud and the other 49 go, well, I saw what happened to that guy, but I think I can figure it out.
I can get around.
Yeah, yeah.
It's almost like when you enter Congress.
I've got a plan.
I've got a plan.
Oh, I get money?
Oh, never mind.
I don't have a plan.
I get bumped with my plan.
Well, I have a plan, but it's a different one, and you are not going to like it.
I'm going to have to do it a lot more about a pool.
In 1951, Henry got a gig working as a consultant with the Army on psychological warfare while he finished his graduate studies.
Kissinger's doctoral thesis on the Congress of Vienna did not seem overly relevant to politics, but its first sentence had discussed nuclear weapons and proposed to readers that the efforts of British and Australia, that the efforts the British and Austrians made to contain Napoleon might be useful in handling the Soviet Union.
I might argue, did Napoleon have a way to end all life on Earth if things went badly with containment?
Was that a factor in Napoleon?
A sword.
Kissinger believes he sees that containment is a failure, which it is, because people do not like being colonies.
And if the opposition to being a colony is communism, they'll be like, well, let's try communism.
Being a colony seems to suck.
So Kissinger sees that containment is a failure.
But he also believes not that, like, well, why don't we just let people do things and just take care of our own shit?
He's like, no, because containment's a failure, war with the Soviet Union is inevitable.
Now, in Kissinger's view, this has nothing to do with the actions of the United States, but is instead, quote, because of the existence of the United States as a symbol of capitalist democracy.
It is literally the early extent of like, well, they hate us for our freedoms.
Right, right.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Like, that's where he's starting down.
Obviously, a lot of people are saying shit like this, right?
This is not a Kissinger invention.
You know, you've got the John Birch Society, all sorts of shit going on in this period.
I don't want to give him too much credit there.
It's clear by this point that Henry was going to get into politics.
Although law enforcement was a possibility, too, because when he gets, he starts being a professor at Harvard, right?
Like after he graduates and stuff, he starts like helping out of stuff and teaching some classes.
And at one point, the school hosts an international seminar.
And when he hears that like a bunch of foreign academics are coming to Harvard, he calls the FBI and volunteers to spy on people for that.
That's amazing.
I mean, honestly, it is so amazing with his background to be like, to have that attitude.
It just is, it really is, it's hard.
It's hard to get there.
You got to give him credit.
The man covers some ground.
The man is a Batman villain.
He really is.
So, yeah, his love of politics and his first attempt to build influence at Harvard is by starting a journal named Confluence.
Now, this is ostensibly a journal that exists to create what he calls an international forum for discussion, right?
I just want to get good people talking from all around the world.
Let the ideas fly.
It's like a TED Talk kind of pitch.
But he's really vague about, he doesn't really seem to care about what particular discussions he encourages.
And his critics would later claim that this journal was, quote, a fake, primarily an enterprise designed to make Kissinger known to powerful people, right?
Like he's just letting powerful people write articles because then he gets them in, he gets their phone number, right?
He gets their mailing.
He's networking.
Yeah, he's networking.
Confluence leads to Henry's first mention in the pages of the New York Times.
And despite what his critics claim, which is probably broadly accurate, the journal did also publish some really significant figures, including Reinhold Naber and Hannah Arendt.
But while he claimed commitment to free discourse, Kissinger had a real tendency to publish right-wing shitheads, including Enoch Powell, a conservative British politician famous for comparing immigration to, quote, rivers of blood.
Well, that's fair.
I mean, I've always agreed with that.
I mean, that is just social media.
But you like blood rivers.
I love a blood river.
Oh, my God.
Tommy's the laziest of rivers.
Yeah, because you float real good.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's molasses.
But that's freedom.
If you can say immigrants are like a river of blood, that's the freedom he's talking about.
That's the freedom.
You want to know what other kind of freedoms he's interested in publishing?
Oh, my God.
I'm going to quote from Niall Ferguson from the book Kissinger here.
An article by Ernst von Solomon, a right-wing German writer who had been convicted for his role in the assassination of Walter Rathenau, a German foreign minister in the Weimar Republic.
The article provoked an angry letter from Shepherd Stone of the Ford Foundation, who had provided money for both the international seminar and the journal.
So, first note, he publishes a guy who's basically pretty close to a Nazi, a far-right German terrorist in the Weimar years.
And it's so upsetting that a representative of the Ford Foundation complaints.
Oh, my God.
I mean, if you can upset the Ford Foundation.
You're crossing that line.
If the Ford Foundation is like your connection to a Nazi worries me.
And that's coming from us, who are really curious.
You know who we are.
We're like super into that.
Look, I have the protocols of the Elders of Zion tattooed on my chest.
But I call it Ford Foundation employees.
I'm going to throw a flag on the play.
I'm still a flag in the play.
And our new car is coming out.
The Ford Swastika.
Oh, man.
So, quote, Stone was appalled that Kissinger would publish an article by a criminal and a Nazi sympathizer like Solomon.
Kissinger told Stone he disliked Solomon and opposed what he stood for, considering him a damned soul driven by the furies.
Demonstrating a remarkable self-confidence for a graduate student, Kissinger defended himself for publishing the article.
I may err occasionally on the side of too great tolerance, partly because I believe our readers sufficiently mature to make their own judgments.
Kissinger argued that what Solomon represented was a symptom of certain tendencies of our age, but that by appearing in a liberal journal like Confluence, Solomon was the one who was compromised.
Kissinger was not simply defending free speech.
He had solicited the article from Solomon, telling the German about, quote, having long admired your writings, even if I could not share your point of view.
What?
So it gets better and more relevant to today because when there's an outcry against this, Kissinger writes a letter to his friend Kramer and says, I have now joined you as the cardinal villain in liberal demonology.
Oh my God, this is he's just doing it now.
He's just doing it now.
He's got the monocle now, too.
It's like hearing Glenn Greenwald talk to Joe Rogan.
Yes, it's like, what the how?
How is this still happening?
How are you the pioneer of this, Henry Kissinger?
How are you the pioneer of this?
That's why his explanation, if you're me just listening to like, uh, okay.
Not sure what he's saying, but all right, okay.
So we got to hear from this Nazi who shot a dude.
Okay.
All right.
Well, it'll anger the libs.
As long as you said it's cool.
And next month we have Ed Gein is doing a little number.
Ed Gein's going to walk us through lamp workings.
So.
And then we're having the Zodiac killer on to teach us about proper parking techniques.
Uh-huh.
Pentagram and coding.
He'd actually be pretty good at that.
Yeah.
So once he had finished his dissertation and graduated, Henry found himself in need of like a steady kick.
He's doing like, he wasn't a professor at that point.
But he was like doing like graduate students, you know, helping to teach whatever.
I didn't do a college, so, but you know how grad students teach shit and stuff.
But he wants like a full-on gig.
He's trying to get an actual full-time job as an assistant professor, but he's not able to because most people don't like Henry Kissinger.
I wonder any reason why that you couldn't.
A lot of people at Harvard are not loving it.
Not a huge fan of it.
They're not loving the Nazi publishing Jew from Germany.
Yeah.
They consider him slightly problematic.
Nukes vs Kill Everyone00:02:57
I don't know.
He drifts for a bit.
He's unable to find work.
He's still, he's still doing some stuff at Harvard, but he's like not, he's kind of adrift in his career until in 1954, he runs into a friend, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., at Harvard.
Schleshinger had a letter in his possession from a former secretary of the Air Force defending the Eisenhower administration's standard of threatening massive retaliation to the Soviets.
Now, the gist of this idea that the Eisenhower administration really kicked off was that if we promise the Soviets that if there's ever a confrontation, we will immediately send out a world-ending hail of nukes, right?
Then those lines won't get crossed, right?
We won't have any kind of fight at all.
If like that, if everyone knows those are the stakes, then nothing will happen, right?
That's the idea.
Kissinger disagrees with this take, right?
Which is reasonable to disagree with, right?
There's a lot of problems with the we will end the world if there's any kind of issue.
I'm worried where he's going to take it.
Yeah, he's going to make it worse.
He's going to make it worse.
You know what, guys?
He sure does.
That's exactly what he does, Gareth.
Because Kissinger's, yeah, we'll talk about what he does in a bit, but he writes a letter kind of writing out some critiques to this, and he has his friend Nelson Rockefeller send it to Eisenhower.
He's friends with Nelson Rockefeller, by the way.
Sure, of course.
Everyone is in this period.
All the cool people.
When the president rejects Kissinger's analysis at the advice of John Foster Dulles, Rockefeller resigns and he resigns from his job with the administration, which like temporarily closes a door to Henry.
But the letter that Kissinger had received was well enough, like popular enough among other thinkers in Washington that it earns him a job offer, heading a study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, studying nuclear weapons and foreign policy.
But of course, Henry's problem with massive retaliation wasn't that using nuclear weapons was unconscionable.
It was that the world-ending nature of the threats the Eisenhower administration was making meant they would never nuke anybody.
And Kissinger thought this was a terrible idea.
He thought that nuclear weapons should be used tactically to secure battlefield victories against the communists.
What's happening?
He thinks it's bad to have nukes and not use them.
He's yeah, that's his hand.
That's his angle.
What in the fuck?
Yeah, it's wild that in this argument between if there's a fight, we'll kill everybody, or what if we just try using nukes a little bit, the kill everybody guys have the more reasonable take.
I mean, really?
You're close.
You're close together.
All right.
We can get off a couple of ticks much faster.
It's incredible.
And also, but like, again, this is this, he's the people he's arguing with is the Eisenhower administration.
Nelson Rockefeller is not a right-winger who's like, this guy's got some shit going on.
You know, we should listen to him.
And like, he's a lot of people who are not like, you know, hard right dudes are like, yeah, maybe it makes sense.
We got to be using these like tactical nuclear weapons.
Tactical Nuclear Weapons00:02:36
You should at least consider the possibility.
You know, he makes a good point.
He uses smart words and he quotes from these smart people and he talks about nuking folks.
You got a lot of words.
So that is part one of our epic series, Henry Kissinger.
Jesus Christ, dude, maybe become an accountant.
What a guy.
In part two, we'll talk about how he gets into power.
So that's got to be a hoot for everybody.
But I feel like before we do that, you guys, do you guys like do like a like a giant influential popular podcast that maybe this podcast is heavily influenced by?
Is that something you guys do?
Are you talking about Rogan?
Yes, yes, you are both Joe Rogan, right?
Yeah.
The dollop.
Yes.
The dollop.
It is your podcast.
We believe in using the nukes.
Yes, that was your six-part series, The Dollops.
Why we need to nuke people.
Go for it, I'm not.
Check out The Dollop if you have not already.
Just a fucking very, very funny podcast.
Do you guys want to plug anything else before we roll out into part two?
I mean, my ears a couple times during this, but no.
Well, you can go to dollapodcast.com.
We're on a tour all over the place in Australia and domestically soon.
That will be very exciting.
I am excited to be touring to exist again in our lives.
Yeah.
Fingers crossed.
So until part two, go home and read some Oswald Spangler and then disagree with it in a way that makes you much, much worse.
Yep.
Yes.
Put the monocle in the bad eye.
Yeah.
All right.
Hi, everybody.
Robert Evans here, and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org.
Now, if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution, just google akpress.org after the revolution.
You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
And if you pre-order now from either these independent bookstores or from AK Press, you'll get a custom signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool.
You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold.
So please Google AK Press After the Revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it.
You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
Pre-Order Signed Copy00:02:06
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available, the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcohol.
Without this probe, I'm a dying.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.