Henry Kissinger's career reveals a ruthless "moral calculus" where bargaining power stems from inflicting pain, leading him to support false missile gap theories and escalate Vietnam despite knowing it was unwinnable. By leaking secret bombing halts to sabotage peace talks, he prolonged the war for five years to secure Nixon's presidency, resulting in millions of deaths and atrocities like Operation Speedy Express. Ultimately, his reputation as an intellectual titan masks a history of treasonous manipulation, exposing how elite consensus enabled war crimes driven by political ambition rather than moral integrity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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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.
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Kissinger's Nuclear Patterns00:14:44
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.
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You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.
Oh, welcome back to what is either Behind the Dollop or Dollop the Bastards, a podcast that no matter what name we choose for it, is about tickling.
Absolutely.
This finally is.
That's how you make us feel at home.
Thank you.
Do you think anyone has ever tickled Kissinger?
I can't imagine.
I cannot picture it in my head.
This is the way he would laugh.
Stop it.
I'm going to wet my pants.
Not my experience.
That might be a lot of fun.
Just try to imagine him whispering into the ears of a sexual partner something.
I'm about to finish.
I'm about to finish.
I'm going.
No, it'd be more like, I'm going to end this.
Say I'm a fan of the world.
This brings me to the same.
Only one of us makes it out alive.
I actually did, while we were taking a break in between episodes, I had a moment where I actually did, for the first time in my life, I felt a profound sense of solidarity with Henry Kissinger.
My cat is named Saddam Hussein.
And as I was feeding him during the break, I realized, like Kissinger did at one point, he's gotten much bigger.
Saddam has gotten much larger than I ever thought he would.
I did not anticipate this.
Yeah.
Well, that's because you named him Saddam.
There's a lot to love in what you just said.
Kissinger and I both made the same mistake.
Oh.
So let's get right back down.
Let's what is for Kissinger Memory Lane and is what for everyone else is Nightmare Avenue.
Because this is the story about why Vietnam lasted an extra half decade.
It's a good time.
We're going to have a fun one here.
So one of the many downsides of an intellectual upbringing like the one Henry Kissinger experienced is that he spent a lot of time surrounded by people you might call political technologists.
Now, this is a term I first heard in Ukraine from civilians describing Paul Manafort.
That's what they called them, political technology.
Oh, that's where I heard it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
These like hired guns who come in and help anybody who just happens to like have government money, like do literally anything, right?
They're guys like his mentor, Professor Elliott, and like Harvard economist Thomas Schnelling, who advised powerful elected leaders.
And like they, they, all of the way in which they think about the mechanisms of government are very mathematic and inhuman, right?
Those are the people that Kissinger patterns himself off of.
Now, Schnelling, who or Schelling, who we just, Thomas Schelling, who's a Harvard economist we just introduced, was one of Kissinger's other mentors.
And Schelling, at the same time as he's working at Harvard and mentoring Kissinger, is advising the Eisenhower administration on moral calculus in the early stages of the Cold War.
Schelling argues that...
Moral calculus.
Moral calculus.
Have you never, maybe you never talked about that with anybody?
Isn't that a common conversation?
No, no, sorry, no.
I mean, I was terrible at calculus.
I was always moral.
Well, you can't be moral and no calculus, which is why, you know, like Pol Pot, I'm going to eventually set all of my listeners after people who know math.
That's the end goal for this.
Bobby right there.
How many did we get?
We're not sure, sir.
No idea.
No, it's impossible to say.
No way.
Incalculable.
People keep trying to tell us, and we just kill them at him to the pile.
Someone had two numbers, but we were unable to.
We can't negotiate it.
So Schelling is advising the Eisenhower administration on moral calculus in the Cold War.
And Schelling's argument is that whether you were, quote, deterring the Russians or your own children, the proper tactic was to figure out the right ratio of threat to incentive.
So already, Schelling might be the quickest I've ever described a person and had it be clear, like, well, that's a bastard.
Like, that's a piece of shit.
That's not okay, obviously.
So since I have no human feelings, I have to figure out this.
And children and murderers are the same.
Yeah, children and the Soviet government only understand one thing, threats.
Can I have more ice cream, Dad?
Put your hand in the drawer and find out.
No.
There you go.
I'm going to tell you something, Jimmy.
You go for that ice cream.
I have a loaded 38 on the table.
Now, one of the chambers is empty, Jimmy.
So if you get that ice cream, maybe the hammer goes down in the empty chamber.
I'm going to go to bed.
I just want to go to bed.
I don't like dessert.
There you go.
Honey, you just feel like moral calculus is not the way to go with the ice cream.
Maybe you could just say no if you don't want him to have dessert.
Any dad can say no.
I'm learning.
So while Henry was teaching at Harvard, and this is before he gets, we ended the last episode of him getting that gig with the Council on Foreign Relations writing about nuclear policy.
Right.
In the period before that, when like Schelling is his mentor, Henry learns a lot from him, and he walks away from their relationship with the belief that, quote, bargaining power comes from the capacity to hurt, to cause, quote, sheer pain and damage.
Jesus fucking Christ.
You're just kind of waiting for this person to step into the vacuum, essentially, right?
Like you're waiting for someone to be like, you know, there's actually a bottom that's under the bottom.
Oh, oh, my lord.
It's like this shit.
Like, if that were true, we're all watching this situation unfold between Russia and Ukraine where you've got like a lot of people with the ability to hurt a lot of people on both sides.
And you know what?
It doesn't seem like negotiations are going great.
Yeah.
Not really.
Maybe that's not a good basis to proceed from anything with.
Yeah.
I mean, I just, I can't believe that it's, it's the craziest fucking idea.
It's nuts.
It's not negotiating.
Yeah.
You, you go into negotiations, you're like, I'm probably not going to get what I want.
We're going to try and get the best we can.
And he's just like, how much can I fucking hurt you and what will you give me?
If you spend enough time like I do around like gun culture people on the right in particular, there's these folks who like usually have never done anything like in the military themselves, but they read a bunch of like books by Navy SEALs and shit.
And they'll say shit like, you should have a plan to kill everyone in every room you walk into.
And like their frame is that like the world's dangerous.
You got to be ready.
And I think any reasonable person is like, well, you are someone who should not have a gun.
Absolutely.
You should not have a gun.
You are out of your entire damn mind.
This is a guy who should never be negotiating.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Ready to kill someone.
It's like, you know what?
Don't go into rooms.
That's just going to be your thing.
Don't go anywhere.
Stay in your house.
You go to one room.
I could tear your throat.
I could reach across the table, tear your throat out, and stab you in the eyes with ice picks.
Sir, I'm just, we're just talking about what's going on.
He just wants ice cream, Dan.
He just asked you for some ice cream, Dan.
So Henry gets his gig at the at the CFR.
And so he's the thing he's producing for the Council on Foreign Relations for his buddy, the Rockefeller.
It's supposed to be like a report on how the U.S. is, like, should use nuclear weapons, different ways in which they could approach it, right?
And while he's writing this report, because it's with this thing that's a very, very long process getting this out, he also starts working privately on a book of his own titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
And this book is a version of the stuff he wants to write in this thing.
He's like fighting to get out with the CFR.
Yeah, kind of.
But also, it's actually very smart what he does.
Well, it'll take us a second to get there.
So this book that Kissinger writes, that's his own project, criticizes U.S. threats of full scale nuclear attack in response to Soviet aggression.
Niall Ferguson sums it up in this way.
Quote, with his skill for simplifying and expressing complex ideas, Kissinger put the issue starkly.
The dilemma of the nuclear period can, therefore, be defined as follows.
The enormity of modern weapons makes the thought of war repugnant, but the refusal to run any risks would amount to giving Soviet rulers a blank check.
Kissinger's conclusions were not original.
The study group at the council was almost unanimous in its desire to find some alternative to Eisenhower's stated policy.
And many defense intellectuals, most notably Bernard Brody and Basil Little Hart, had also written on the subject of limited nuclear war.
Kissinger's book demonstrated his talent as a creative synthesizer of their ideas, drawing out the implications of their work and arguing that for America's Cold War diplomacy to have any real substance, the U.S. had to accept the possibility of the limited use of nuclear weapons.
That Kissinger's own solution of limited nuclear war was also highly problematic, was less important to many contemporary observers than that it broke free from the straitjacket of the Eisenhower administration's policy.
So, but where does he describe like where you would use it?
Is it like a tactical battlefield?
Yeah, it's like to win battlefield victories to like in Vietnam, he will briefly flirt.
Well, not even all that briefly, but he will consider using nuclear weapons to cut off train access between Vietnam and China.
Like, which isn't insane, isn't it?
Like, as a layman, you can cut off trains in another way, presumably, right?
I mean, I've seen the general with Buster Keat, and you can throw some logs on it.
There are these other things called bombs, just bombs that resolve.
You know what they are, Kissinger.
Yeah, so it really, I mean, it is kind of just itchy trigger finger.
And it is like, if you live in the realm of this sort of dark thinking, how are you not going to start thinking of ways that are just even more vicious, brutal?
He's basically saying they need to think we're a chained mad dog.
And if we, you let the dog off the leash once and he attacks the postman, and then and then everyone's going to fucking know, go.
Then you don't get mail anymore.
Yeah, but then you stop receiving your mail.
We've bombed Japan already.
Like, everyone gets it.
We're already out of the fucking mindset.
Of course.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, it's not like it's this theoretical weapon that's never been used, Him.
And it worked pretty well as far as making people be like, God damn, they are out of their minds.
Yeah, these people are crazy.
Holy shit.
But it's also, there's a factor here.
A part of me wonders if he even really believed about this or cared about whether or not nukes should be used tactically.
And if it was more a matter of this is a big debate of the day.
And if I publicly take the most contrarian thing, intellectuals who don't really care about what works, but who care about who's thinking creatively, like, right?
Like, that's the thing.
He's like, well, it's not about whether or not his plan would work.
It's about we're getting out of this straitjacket Eisenhower's put us in.
And it's like, no, that's not all that matters.
Finally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what's really funny?
Well, just ironic about this is that places like the Heritage Foundation for years have been have been saying that Putin would use tactical battlefield nukes, and that's why he's unhinged.
That's one of the reasons.
Yeah.
Can you imagine?
He's the one doing that.
I would say anyone who would do that is crazy.
Yeah.
Imagine.
And now I'd know, man.
I'll keep him on as an advisor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That I, I, that, that's my feeling on nukes.
Um, don't shoot them at people ever.
Yeah, yeah, they seem bad.
They seem bad.
Uh, maybe an Independence Day kind of situation.
I'll be honest, when I watch Independence Day, I think, yeah, I might shoot some nuke.
I might at that point try a nuke or two.
Yeah, but you have Randy Quaid.
I do.
I do.
I do hang out with him a lot.
That's my main plan if things go wrong.
Randy, get in the plane.
He lives in my basement.
That actually tracks from the Instagram videos I've been seeing.
So Kissinger's book was published in 1957, and it almost immediately sold 17,000 copies, which is a lot for a wonky book on nuclear warfare.
It is on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks.
Wow.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it's not great.
Now, his timing is perfect.
He puts this book out right as the Soviets make two big advances.
In Hungary, there's like a revolution that they kind of crush.
And then in the Suez, we're like the British and the French are like fucking around in the Suez Canal, and the Soviets are like, stop or we'll do something bad.
And NATO like backs the fuck off, right?
So, the Soviets have like two big kind of foreign policy wins in this period.
And Americans can't look at this as like, well, you know, maybe NATO shouldn't have been fucking around in the Suez.
And yeah, that shit in Hungary is fucked up, but like, maybe we can't do anything about it.
They're like, we should listen to the guy who says, what if we nuked them?
You know, that's where people go, right?
They don't, they're Americans.
They don't take the rational route.
No, no.
They hate us for our nuclear freedom.
Yeah, they listen to the craziest person in the room about this.
That's right.
There's a lot of things that you can say about both what happened in Hungary and the Suez crisis that are not, why don't we use nukes more often?
But by God, Kissinger knows his audience, you know?
Kissinger writes this book.
And the New York Times, in their review of it, write, for the first time since President Eisenhower took office, officials at the highest government levels are displaying interest in the theory of the little or limited war.
The theory of massive retaliation is re-examined.
I love that those are that those go together.
Those are the options.
Yeah, and then it's like the little war is the nuclear war.
Like, it's the baby war for us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hear me out.
Hear me out.
Baby nukes.
Little tiny nukes.
The Theory of Retaliation00:10:49
Well, yeah.
It's like if someone's like, look, we got to decide if one of which of these is going to be legal.
Serenerve gas bombs for civilians or chlorine gas bombs for civilians.
One type of poison gas bomb has to be legal.
Like we have to have access.
Everyone has to be able to have one kind of poison gas.
Two is crazy.
Taste great.
What if nobody has those?
Oh, God.
That's not, you know, that's not where things go here.
So President Eisenhower is given a summary of Kissinger's book.
You know, he's the president.
They don't read books.
Yeah, it's the Cliff Notes.
Yeah, he gets a Cliff Notes and he recommends it to his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who we have talked about quite a lot already.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
I mean, who, like, if he's the rational mind.
If Dulles is being like, this dude seems a little out of his mind.
Big problem.
That's not great.
Because John Foster Dulles, fucking lunatic.
Yeah.
Complete lunatic.
So the vice president at this point is a little dude you might have heard of called Richard Milhouse Nixon.
He gets photographed with a copy of Henry Kissinger's book, which is not great.
I mean, it's actually great foreshadowing.
Writing a screenplay, this is great.
Yeah.
Really?
This is like season one of the Nixon show, and you just like see him with Kissinger's book.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Good television, you know?
So the book is successful enough that it provokes Rockefeller, who'd gotten him the job at the CFR, to rush out the report that Nixon had been, or that Kissinger had been making.
And Jesus Christ.
Yeah, the report from the CFR concludes: the willingness to engage in nuclear war when necessary is part of the price of our freedom.
Wow.
I mean, the price of our freedom is pretty goddamn pricey, isn't it?
That seems expensive.
Yeah.
Man.
How can we live if we're not dead?
Yeah, how can we live without nuclear fallout?
It's and it's amazing that it like it all like I, if it was part of his plan or not, like you said, the timing is just pretty remarkable to release this book, and then it actually shifts the way that they view this.
Yeah, you know, it's actually, he's got a really good point in his best-selling book about how nukes are cool.
How nukes are sweet.
You know, I am excited for Ben Shapiro's book on the same subject to lead to the annihilation of all life on earth.
I'm going to live underground soon.
That's a good idea.
So this report is a weird, like weirdly popular, like, again, this is a report from the CFR, from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is like, not, you don't expect that to go viral.
Right.
You know, have you read this pamphlet?
Have you read this link study by the CFR?
Yeah, I mean, America never lets you down when you're like, oh, that won't happen.
No, that's what happens.
That won't go.
Yeah, right.
It does.
Yeah.
So Rockefeller actually goes on the Today Show to talk about this report the CFR wrote with Mike with Kissinger.
I know it's amazing.
An amazing macaroni casserole.
So next.
So he gives people on the Today Show an address where they can write for a copy of this report.
No.
They get 45,000 requests the first day and 200,000 requests the next.
God.
Hell's post office is overwhelmed.
Yeah.
The media, the U.S. media call this report, quote, the answer to Sputnik, which is like, hey, the Russians sent an unarmed ball into space to further exploration.
We should, this book about how everyone should be nuking everyone is the answer to that.
We're thinking that this report on nuclear weapons will actually show the Russians how to not go to space.
Yeah, that space.
If you get rid of Russia, they can't go to space.
Do you understand?
Yeah.
And it's worth noting because I think in our popular history, the answer to Spudnik is the Apollo missions and its framework is beautiful.
Which, you know, did eventually happen.
But no, the first answer to Spudnik was a report about how we should be nuking each other more often.
Yep.
They put a ball in the orbit, so we should blow up St. Petersburg.
We should be ready to drop 13 nuclear warheads on Berlin at a second's notice.
That will show them.
Jesus, what?
So this makes Henry Kissinger famous.
He is all over the place.
This is how he becomes famous.
Some guys watch the Today Show and he buys the book so he can tell everybody at the Elks Club that we need to use nukes.
Someone's happening?
Give this accountant a soccer ball.
Some people get famous because their dad is one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers.
It's true.
Some people get famous because they write a book about how nuclear warfare is not that bad.
You know, it's just fame.
It's a crap shoot.
Absolutely.
Fuck.
I mean, imagine being an anti-nuke person at this point.
You're just like, wait, what is going on?
No, have you read the report?
It's so good.
We're going to show them if they should not be going to space.
Yeah.
Next time they put a satellite up, we're going to kill everyone in Paraguay.
What we need to do is a radiated country.
So on July 14th, 1958, Mike Wallace gives Henry Kissinger his first big break into the public sphere.
Man, sorry, Jesus Christ.
It really is.
It really is just fucking disgusting because I go through this all the time on our show where I'm like, it is the same shit.
But again, it's just media using its platform irresponsibly to normalize things that are fucking batship.
Yeah, it's great.
Like 60 minutes having a fucking whole segment on the Havana fucking sound.
It's a whale.
It's not a whale.
Come on, Dave.
You know that's real.
I suffered from that for two years.
Those crickets.
Oh, man.
I will say, like, the stupidest joke that I laugh at every time is, yeah, I got Havana syndrome.
Having another beer.
Never doesn't get a chuckle out of me.
But we've done, we've had 60 minutes come on.
60 Minutes did the satanic scare shit.
Oh, yes.
They were big.
Brock and Gamble.
They just run with ideas that are crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, because for people who are at the level Mike Wallace's, the definition of journalist is not afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
It's be a giant shithead.
Yeah, right.
Be a huge shithead.
Man.
Oh, man.
So Mike Wallace introduces Henry Kissinger, the guy whose one achievement is a book about how nukes are cool, by saying this.
In the field of foreign policy and military affairs, Dr. Kissinger, you're acknowledged to be one of the most penetrating minds in the country.
Oh, he's penetrating.
He is.
Penetrating like an Atlas missile penetrates the cloud cover above a city full of women and children.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now, during the interview, Kissinger expressed that, quote, a capitalist society, or what is more interesting to me, a free society, is a more revolutionary phenomenon than 19th century socialism.
I think we should go on the spiritual offensive.
Yeah, the spiritual with a nuclear extension.
With nukes.
So he's connecting, he's connecting.
You know the two options, 19th century socialism or capitalism, or current day capitalism.
And nukes.
Those are the options.
And Mike Wallace just empty-headedly sits there and goes like, I really love your property.
Yeah.
Just smiles and behind his eyes is a dial tone.
Oh my God.
So this earns him finally the job at Harvard that he'd coveted.
This is why they give him up.
It's so simple.
I cannot get over how fucking evil Harvard is.
It's so good.
It is monstrous from its beginning.
It is a horrific thing.
Some of us went there, asshole.
Anti-Harvard action.
So he gets his Harvard job and he keeps writing.
In 1961, he published a lot of people.
What's he doing at Harvard?
He's like teaching some shit, you know, Kissinger stuff type classes.
Yeah, talking about Spangler a lot.
Yeah.
Nukes are awesome, too.
Nukes are awesome.
Freedom requires an absence of morality.
Teaching kids good stuff, you know, teaching kids good things.
So in 1961, he publishes a book titled The Necessity of Choice, which is his manifesto on how the United States should approach foreign policy in the 1960s.
It is not an optimistic piece of writing.
Quote, the United States cannot afford another decline like the one which has characterized the past decade and a half.
15 years of more of a deterioration of our position in the world, such as we have experienced since World War II, would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.
Our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.
What in the fuck is he talking about?
I mean, anyway, America invented not losing influence.
No, this is like the height of American power, obviously, to anyone who's not.
But Kissinger is, he knows this is bullshit.
He is part of a group of people who are pushing.
Have you guys heard the term missile gap?
No.
No.
In the early stages of the Kennedy administration, there is suddenly this huge, and this is both like in conversations that people are having in D.C. and in like the media, there's this constant talk of a missile gap, this idea that the Soviets have outpaced us in missile development and in the number of missiles they have.
And there's talk about like there's bomber gaps, there's tank gaps, there's talk about like these gaps between it's this idea that is totally bullshit.
Like not that the Soviets have not made a lot of weapons.
Soviet Union makes plenty of weapons, but the United, there is no point in the Cold War in which the United States is like outfucking gunned to any degree that like has could be anyone reasonable could call like a missile gap.
It just does not happen.
It feels like we're still responding to that today to be like, do first buy a long shot.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's, it's, it's this, it's, it's this, it's not, I would say unhinged, but it's very reasonable because the, the argument comes primarily out of the Defense Department and the growing defense industry, who it's great for them if everyone thinks there's a missile gap.
Like, of course.
Yeah, you got to build a lot more weapons.
We'll sell them to you.
I thought it was the place you could get khakis on your rockets, but thank you.
You're welcome.
And we'll be right back.
Am I about to give a question?
Luck and Missile Gaps00:03:13
I'm sorry.
You know what?
Yes, actually, this is time for an ad break.
So, you know, if you're looking for a way to dress up your R9X knife missile before fighting it into some guy's car, check out the missile gap.
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.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
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.
Why We Need Fewer Nukes00:15:30
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 and sells, 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 Gillespie 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.
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This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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We are back.
So it's bullshit, the idea of the missile gap.
And Kissinger is smart enough to know this, but he is one of the major proponents.
He's not one of the, there's other guys who are more influential pushing it, like actually within the halls of power, right?
Because he's not super within the halls of power yet.
But he is, he's, he's all over TV and shit.
Like he's a guy that you call now.
Like once you get in the Rolodex of media people, you stay there, you know?
He's the nuke guy.
You want to be a positive nuke guy.
There's people that you get like the negative nuke guy and the positive nuke guy.
And he's the guy who says, we don't have enough.
You know, the thing we've ever not had enough of, nuclear weapons.
He is a big part of why we have so many fucking nukes and why the Russians have so many fucking nukes.
Because once the U.S., like once you start this, like, we have to build a lot more nukes, they're going to build even more nukes.
And like, then you're going to get to build any more nukes because you can say they've built so many more nukes.
We don't have enough nukes now.
And then you wind up with like 12,000 of them in the world.
I have a name for that.
I'm coming over right now.
Nuclear arms race.
That's cool.
And that's a neat one.
I'm glad there's finally a term for it.
We should nuke him.
I mean, that would just be like the one thing I would look at.
It is just one of the nuke.
One of those Davy Crockett handheld missile launchers with the nuke.
Yeah, whatever we can do.
What about just a little tiny nuke that we shoot into him and it explodes?
But it's just a little guy.
A little baby nuke.
Just enough to take out Kissinger.
Yeah.
Just the Kissinger Son Jr. nuclear weapon.
Yeah.
But he would just ingest it and go, I am now more old.
Now I am bigger.
I'm not more upset.
It is amazing to think about how seriously this guy gets treated by everyone immediately and how much influence he's allowed to have on an incredibly dangerous thing.
And this is the same guy who got tricked by Theranos.
This is the same nude who gets hoodwinked by the fake blood lady in the turtleneck.
It's really amazing.
Yeah.
It's so funny.
It's so funny.
So Kissinger is not, again, he doesn't come up with the idea of the missile gap, but he's like a very influential voice in pushing this idea, right?
He's a part of this.
So he doesn't get there.
We could honestly do a whole episode on like why there's so many fucking nukes that this would be a part of.
But he's a factor in this massive arms buildup.
And he also starts, but he's also like, he's just doing this for careerism reasons because it like gets him in good with people who are in power.
And part of how you know that is that Kennedy, not a guy I'll give a lot of credit to, but one of the things Kennedy says is that like limited nuclear war is insane.
Like fuck you, Henry Kissinger.
He doesn't say that, but it gets made clear the connections that Kissinger has in the Kennedy administration, make it clear that like JFK does not buy your attitudes on limited nuclear war.
And so he stops talking about that.
Oh my God.
He wants to become part.
He doesn't believe in shit, but he wants to be in the JFK administration, right?
So he stops pushing this thing that makes him famous and saying other shit because it'll get him closer to power.
And that's all Henry Kissinger really cares about.
Yeah.
So I wonder if like the Today Show is calling up and he's like, yo, I'm not really doing nukes anymore.
No, he comes on.
Yeah, I'm going to quote actually from Niall Ferguson here.
He explains like what he starts doing on the Today Show.
Yeah.
Kissinger now advocated a conventional arms buildup since the dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is more familiar and therefore easier to maintain.
He continued to insist that the United States develop smaller nuclear weapons, but he moved his own position to where he thought Kennedy's was.
In effect, the necessity of choice was something of a job application.
And Kissinger hoped Kennedy would make an offer.
So like, again, doesn't believe in shit.
I mean, it's just Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I mean, it is the same shit essentially.
And it's like, you know, the sensationalism that gets you the headlines.
And then once you're fan, and it's any, it's really any form of our pop culture entertainment now.
Just make get your name in the fucking headlines and then define who you are.
And then you can like figure out what you actually think and actually believe or how you're going to ride that to power.
But just make a bang.
It is like the political equivalent of a comedian like saying a racial slur and then listening to the audience to determine whether or not they're joking.
Yeah.
Like that's what he's doing.
He's.
It's yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, show up to a club, take your dick out, and then write your hour.
Yeah.
It's called the Louis C.K. Backwards.
It's the Casey.
I'm not going to figure out what the back is.
No, you're close.
It's Casey.
It's Casey Sewell.
It's Casey Sewell.
So this, he does not get exactly what he wants, but he gets part of what he wants.
His buddy Nelson Rockefeller is able to give him a part-time consulting gig for the National Security Advisor.
So it's not, but it's not everything he wants, but he is now, he has like, he's cracked his way in, you know?
Like you start your way in, and it's unless you really fuck up, and by fuck up, I mean don't get a lot of people killed, you'll just get closer and closer to power because that's how our system works.
So, you know, Kissinger is obviously very conservative.
Rockefeller is not, again, he's part of the Kennedy administration.
This is what I don't understand.
Yeah, well, we'll talk, we're actually, we're going to talk a shitload about that over the next couple of episodes because this is like a consistent weird thing about him.
But like one of the things Kissinger does is he oils Rockefeller with effusive claims that Kennedy's inaugural speech, which Rockefeller had helped with, was so good, he quote, might become a registered Democrat.
Right?
That's the kind of shit he says that like, I'm almost a Democrat now because of how good JFK's speech was.
So good.
Again, he doesn't believe in shit.
Like, he just can't overemphasize that.
Other than that, Henry Kissinger should be very close to power.
He believes strongly in that.
Yeah.
And he believes in that as much as anyone's ever believed in the Bible.
He does not believe in ideas.
I'd like to sing happy birthday to the president if all were possible.
I saw what Marilyn did.
It was sort of a testament to love earth Kennedy McKinley.
Sometimes they call me.
Happy birthday, Mr. President.
Would you like to see where they call me Kissinger?
Oh, no, I'm standing over this vent and look at what they're doing to my sportbook.
See, that's the fan art I want of Henry Kissinger.
Just like trying to fuck JFK with every bit of charm in his German body.
Oh, dear.
Nobody told me Subway go over vent.
Oh, look at this.
You're going to see everything.
There goes my nuke.
So JFK is eventually assassinated by Bernard Montgomery Sanders.
And LBJ takes over.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, history is a banquet.
I've got a pamphlet for you.
I printed it home myself.
That's my length.
So LBJ is the president now.
And LBJ is like between LBJ and JFK, it's like a decade, you know, that the Democrats are in power.
And LBJ is very good at exercising power, right?
And he's also not super into Henry Kissinger.
He's not against Henry Kissinger either, but Henry kind of is kept in this weird, like, he's on the margins of power during this period of time, right?
Finally.
Which is well, not really.
Because while he's, there's no breath.
There's no breathers, Karen.
Good to hear.
While he's kind of on the, not, you know, on the margins, he's able to build connections with as many Republican lawmakers in their aids as he does with Democrats, right?
Like, that's what he's doing while he's doing these like part-time gigs with the NSC and stuff is he's making friends with everybody he can.
There is nobody.
He's just a fucking networker.
Like he is just a supreme networker.
Yeah.
Right.
There is so much.
When I was a kid in speech and debate, one of the other kids in the debate team with me was obsessed with Kissinger, like read his books and stuff.
And this was this thing that I heard too from like family members and stuff that like, well, he was, you know, he wasn't always right, but it was, he was doing the hardest job anyone's ever had.
And he was just this really genius man.
And you can't really argue with him if you read about what he was saying.
And it's like, no, he didn't believe in shit.
He was, he was a genius at making people like him.
And that allowed him to do a lot of horrible things.
Yeah.
Which I guess like anyone who's really dangerous in politics is that's as a version of that guy, right?
Like yeah, like that's that's all of them.
But he's he's an interesting kind of that guy.
And as a result, probably the most toxic kind of that guy we've ever had in the United States.
Wow.
Which is saying something.
I mean, there's a lot of really bad people in Charchier.
Yeah.
But yeah.
So yeah, he makes all these connections.
He cultivates them and he keeps his name in the news, right?
That's a big part of why he's able to do what he does later.
He keeps going on TV, keeps being on the radio.
He keeps being quoted and like cited and interviewed by journalists for articles.
Henry makes it known that like, if you're a journalist, I'm easy to reach.
I will give you, always give you a quote.
You can always reach Henry Kissinger for like a line or two on this thing, you know?
Which is very smart of him.
It's very dumb and shameful and horrible for the journalists.
Fuck him.
But like it's great for Henry.
Thank God that they've learned.
Thank God that doesn't happen anymore.
Now I turned to the New York Times story published today that described Nazis assaulting a book club as men with a swastika flag.
Someone pointed out, well, the article calls them Nazis.
It's just all of the social media.
They describe them that way.
And I was like, oh, I can't explain to you why I feel worse about that, but I do.
Yeah, it was not just a dumb error.
It was calculated.
Moral calculus.
Yeah, moral calculus, right?
Good shit.
So the professor cultivates connections.
Yeah, he gets good.
He also, he goes to Vietnam at one point and he makes connections with a bunch of people in Vietnam who are able to talk to not just the South, but the North Vietnamese government.
Like, that's the thing he consciously does.
He's like, I want to be able to be able to take the temperature of guys, which is not, like, I would say actually the most reasonable thing he does.
If you think you're going to be in power, like, yeah, it's good.
You probably want to be able to talk to those guys, even though we're fighting with them.
That's not an unreasonable thing.
He will use it badly.
Right.
Who's he doing that on the part of?
Just himself?
Yeah.
Well, he is working.
He has a gig with the guy.
He's like an advisor to the National Security Council.
And he's a known academic.
He's probably being like, I'm an academic.
I'm trying to understand the dimensions of this.
And I want to talk to everybody.
I'm a very fair-minded man.
I don't let ideology get in the way, yada, yada, yada.
Like one of the things about Henry Kissinger, too, like, he's as good.
He can, he's, he, he's fucking his buddies with Mao.
Like, he's great at talking with people who are communists and stuff.
As long as you like Henry Kissinger and what he's selling, he'll sell it to anybody.
It's so crazy.
It's wild that, like, he must have eyes that just start spinning and hit.
Like, you just have to get close to notice that he's got hypnotic eyes.
You're like, he isn't so bad now that I've got him to him.
You know, let's think about Vietnam for a second, right?
If you're going to war in Vietnam, Gareth, right?
If you decide Gareth Reynolds, I'm going to go to war in Vietnam.
How long do you think it would take you to realize that was a bad idea?
It would be, I mean, I, Gareth Reynolds, it would be instantaneous.
It would be quickly.
Very quickly.
I mean, this is David.
Yeah.
Can I?
Okay, can I just ask a question?
Which side am I fighting on?
The not Vietnamese side.
Okay, then really quick.
Yeah, really quick.
I feel like you could, I feel like you could take Vietnam, David.
Dave could not see it.
They're not going to see it coming.
I would certainly be the guy who they'd be like, we broke him.
We broke him before we even shouted at him.
I'd be like, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to show up with pants that were already pissed in.
I know one thing about me, and that's that if things got really, really chaotic and bad, that I kind of thrive in that environment.
Yeah, Dave, you'd be like, Dave, we don't have time to eat their brains.
You'd be like, shut up.
I'm figuring out what they know.
It's like Dr. Manhattan ending the Vietnam War.
Both sides surrendered to Dave.
In the mid-60s, which is fairly early on considering how late the Vietnam War goes, it is clear to people, especially a lot of people protesting in the United States, they're like, oh shit, this ain't going great, right?
Like, it's not hard for people.
There are people who buy into the U.S. propaganda, but like people who are actually privy to information on the war are aware that it is not going well.
Kissinger still decides we should escalate things.
And I'm going to quote again from Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Randon.
Upon returning from his first visit to South Vietnam in late 1965, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to build public support for ongoing intervention.
In early December, he joined 189 other scholars from Harvard, Yale, and 15 other New England universities in an open letter expressing confidence that Johnson's policies would help, quote, people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny.
A Viet Cong victory will spell disasters, said the letter.
Then, later that month, he led a Harvard team against a group of Oxford opponents of the war in a debate held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally in the United States on CBS.
Kissinger passionately defended the bombing of northern Vietnam, insisting that it was not a violation of international law.
He invoked the analogy of World War II, saying Washington's actions in Indochina were as righteous and justified as they were in Nazi Germany.
Bob Schroom, who went on to become a Democratic political consultant, was on Kissinger's team and says that when he today watches a recording of the debate, he is, quote, amazed by two things: how young we look, even Kissinger, and how wrong we were.
So, first off, you don't feel bad enough.
I don't know how bad you feel about this.
It's not enough.
Defending the Nightmarish War00:10:27
Your first reaction would be like, God, we were kids.
Oh, we were young.
We were young.
There's like some Vietnamese dude next to him thinking about like bombs raining down on the jungle.
He's like, Damn, I have crow's feet back there.
Look at me, believe that.
Lead Kissinger.
Oh, my God, his jowls.
Look at him.
Hey, yeah, he's only got one jowl at that time.
That's before he got the eight.
Our hair looked so stupid.
Am I right?
Am I right?
Where did your legs go, by the way?
It's before Henry Kissinger looked like chip and weird science after things go wrong.
It's amazing.
There's a lot in that paragraph, both that, like, of course, when the debate starts to build, like, should we escalate this nightmarish war, the first thing, one of the first things that happens is that a bunch of fucking New England universities decide to have a debate about it.
Right.
That's the right thing.
Let's let everyone here.
Let's have the best arguments of both sides about whether or not the most experienced people.
Yeah.
Like, first off, fuck everyone involved with this, even the people arguing against the war a little bit.
Like, just don't do that's the premise.
Yeah, the premise.
The premise is bad.
Yeah.
Less so, certainly.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe, like, it made sense to me.
Here's a bunch of virgins debating which position is the best to fuck in.
Yeah.
What the hell?
Why is this a, instead of the debate, like, hey, why are we there?
Like, really?
Why?
Sorry.
We're not debating that.
We're not asking that.
That's not out of the question for the debate.
And it is.
Again, it's like, and you can see just about how comprehensively wrong these people are.
That, like, number one, this idea that this will help the people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny.
Which is the South Vietnamese government was a dictatorship the entire time the war was going on.
It was not any more democratic in any meaningful sense than the Northern Vietnam.
And also, like, a Viet Cong victory will spell disasters.
Like, there's plenty of things to criticize the Vietnamese government for, but, like, broadly on an international level, it's fine.
Like, the country seems to be doing all right.
Like, like, better than a lot of places.
It's fine, Steve.
Yep.
Did a pretty good job at COVID.
Like, you know, it didn't seem like a disaster.
Maybe if we hadn't killed 5 million people, things would be even better.
It seems like it couldn't hurt.
Yeah.
Again, they're wrong about everything.
Like, Kissinger in this period, everything that he said, like, that's the amazing.
He has this reputation as such an intellectual Titan.
And he's like so constantly fucking wrong.
But this is always like, yeah.
It's the same as today.
All of these people that are constantly fucking wrong just keep on getting positions of power and being in media and they're always fucking wrong.
And there's this shit, like people will bring up like, well, but there's this nuclear arms treaty he helped make.
And there's this like peace deal he negotiated in the Middle East and like all of these things.
Yeah, but that was like 2% of the shit that he did.
And it was largely because other people that he wanted to stay in good with were pushing for that kind of shit too.
Like Henry Kissinger, whenever he has expressed an idea that is his legitimate idea is like really, really disastrously wrong.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Fuck him.
Nobody cares.
Yeah.
Nobody cares.
He's got to get to invest in Theranos still as opposed to being the one victory.
The one victory we won.
That's why we should pardon her.
Yeah, right.
Look, you stole a lot of money, but you made Henry Kissinger look kind of sick.
We're going to release you to come up with another scheme to take more money from this bag of shit.
You don't get to make a company anymore, but we're going to have cameras follow you.
Think of the prank show.
Yeah.
Have you seen punked?
They're talking about there who knows punked, but it's just me.
Every week for him.
It's just Kissinger.
You're going to put on mustaches and like fake wigs and you're just going to try to fuck with it.
But they're telling me this is a way for me to get a blonger spine.
I mean, I'd love to get a little money.
This popcorn has zero calories.
I can't believe what I'm hearing.
You know what's awesome about that story is that she's a younger female Kissinger.
Yeah.
100%.
She's like bloodkissing.
Everyone's super into her and she was just saying whatever people wanted to hear and like it's amazing because there's the good grifters and the evil ones.
We just finished our four-parter on the czar and talked about the fact that like before Rasputin, there was another spiritualist grifter who pretended to talk to like ghosts and stuff named Philippe, who like got a bunch of money for them, tricked the Tsarina into thinking she was pregnant and then bounced with a bunch of their money.
And the last thing he did before he left was like, I'm going to come back in another form as another spiritual healer.
You should trust whatever I said.
Very funny.
Took all the money and ran.
And when he died, it was found out that he had been paying for the mortgages and rentals of like 52 impoverished families.
Like the perfect guy, like the opposite of Kissinger.
Like, yeah, just taking money from the czar to help poor people out.
What a dude.
It'd be great if he showed up again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's put that guy in front of Kissinger.
Let's see what he can do.
So in private, Kissinger admitted already while he is doing all this, while he's a part of this big debate, you know, while he's taking the side that we should escalate.
In private, in his conversations, he admits to his friends that Vietnam is an unwinnable disaster of a war.
Oh, my fucking God.
Yeah.
He defended it in public, though, because there was at least a 50% chance the Democrats were going to stay in power after the next election.
That is, and he just didn't want to give up on a chance of having a job.
You know, I think it a lot of times you just, you do, I guess he's a little different because he's such a shapeshifter.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think it's just the way we are.
You are like, they can't just be that base evil.
Yeah.
He sure can't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's something I, it's something I always think about with climate change is that people can't wrap their votes around the fact that there might be a significant portion of rich people in control who actually want everybody to die.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or at least don't care because what really matters is like maintaining their level of relative power to everyone else.
They know and it's just like, so what are they going to do?
Call themselves out?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's cool.
So obviously, it's one of those things.
I don't actually know that he really believed that Vietnam was a disaster because he may have been lying to his friends when he said because he wants to keep like he wants to keep a bridge to the other side open, you know?
Like it's impossible to say because he's fucking Henry Kissinger.
Is it possible there's two Kissingers?
Yes.
Okay.
What if there's six?
I'd be a man.
And if they ever touch Cambodia, we'll be, oh, yep, you know what?
All right.
So the fact that Kissinger in private would be like, yeah, Vietnam, what a fuck up.
And in public would be like, let me binge Shapiro about Vietnam team.
That really pissed off a lot of his friends, including the political scientist Hans Morgenthau.
Kissinger had admitted to Morgenthau that the war was unwinnable, unwinnable, even while he continued to go on in the media and advocate expanded saturation bombing.
Morgenthau found this deeply disappointing, but Henry was increasingly tailoring his public statements to the ear of a man who was already a fan of his work, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Can we get like some sound effects?
A lightning whips across the screen and a screen at Wolf House.
In comes the paradactyl.
Which we'll do a whole Nixon episode one of these days.
A lot of our Kissinger series will also be about Nixon because you can't unwrap the two men, you know?
You can't.
So there are two Kissingers.
Yeah, one of them is Richard Nixon.
So by the end of 1968, as the presidential race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Vice President Richard Nixon heats up, Kissinger's profile had raised enough that he was seen as the frontrunner for a serious foreign policy job in either potential administration.
As time went on, either, yeah.
He's got a gig no matter what, baby.
It's just unbelievable.
He's the Raytheon of people.
Can't lose.
So as time goes on, though, he increasingly leans towards Nixon, which surprises his friends, whom he had told, quote, Richard Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running to have as president.
But I want him to give me a gig.
I can't wait to work with him.
I need jobs.
Satan.
So he was heartbroken when his friend Rockefeller lost to Nixon.
And he commented, Now the Republican Party is a disaster and Nixon is not fit to be president.
Oh my God.
I am the same.
I'm just over and over.
And oh, this is what they said about Reagan.
Yeah, it's always the same calculus.
This is true, but Kissinger didn't let his complete contempt for Nixon stop him from trying to get a job with the man.
To explain why, here's the New Yorker.
It took Kissinger's close contemporary, the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, another son of Jewish immigrés who fought in the war and studied at Harvard with William Yandel Elliott, to fully dissect Kissinger's careerist instincts.
On the surface, Wollen observed, Kissinger would have appeared a mismatch for the anti-elitist Nixon, but the pairing was perfect.
Nixon needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him feel like a great figure in the drama of history.
As Wolin wrote, What could have been more comforting to that barren and inarticulate soul than to hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kissinger, who spoke so often and knowingly about the meaning of history?
I mean, so it's just an empty sack and an evil sack, and the evil sack's like, I can fill you.
Yeah, I'm not evil.
As long as someone can fill me, somebody's gonna fill me off.
Somebody's gonna load me with something.
Oh, that's right.
No, he's not gonna do it.
Put all that black pile down inside of me.
Thank you, Hank.
Oh boy, Gareth, he doesn't call him Hank, but we'll get to that later.
Come on, Spanky.
It's a lot worse than that, Gareth.
All right.
LBJ's Political Playbook00:05:07
So in 1968, the Johnson administration was carrying out an extensive series of negotiations between South and North Vietnam in an attempt to secure an end to the war.
LBJ wants credit for his legacy, right?
I'm not going to give LBJ credit for like caring about human death and suffering because he's also a monster.
Not trying to make him seem good by comparison.
But he sees ending the war both as a way to like, I want to go out on a good note, and also this is going to, if he could, if he could even secure a significant like ceasefire, that would help Humphrey get re-elected, right?
Because nobody's in the U.S. is very pro the Vietnam War, within the majority of most voters are very anti-it.
So that's kind of the play that LBJ is making.
He wants to end the war in order to help Humphrey win.
Over the course of the election year, his Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and his Secretary of Defense, Clark Gifford, became aware that something was amiss.
Some of the moves that the South Vietnamese government made, which threatened the negotiation, seemed bizarre.
They would like take these wild changes where it's like suddenly South Vietnam's not willing to negotiate.
Like, what the fuck?
We had worked all this out.
Why are you guys pulling out at the last minute?
North Vietnam's willing to come to the table.
In the trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens writes: quote, From his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford, who's again the Secretary of Defense, had actually been able to read the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he terms a secret personal channel between President Theu and Saigon in the Nixon campaign.
The chief interlocutor at the American end was John Mitchell, then Nixon's campaign manager and subsequently attorney general.
He was actively assisted by Madame Anna Chenau, known to all as the Dragon Lady, a fierce veteran of the Taiwan lobby and all-purpose right-wing intriguer.
She was a social and political force in the Washington of her day.
So, LBJ's administration, this is suspicious as fuck.
Let's bug the Nixon campaign, right?
Which is not illegal, obviously, like you have.
It is an act of fucking treason to try and extend a war by sabotaging negotiations.
This is one of the very few cases where, like, yeah, you should wiretap those people.
You should tap the fuck out of those phones.
But it's also, this is, they don't want this to get out.
LBJ doesn't want this shit to get out at all.
This would be, number one, a hanging crime.
You get executed for doing this kind of shit, like on paper, at least, right?
And so, LBJ's administration, while they're wiretapping Nixon and getting evidence about like this, what increasingly becomes clear as a conspiracy, keeps fucking quiet about it because they're worried that revealing this would create a crisis of confidence in the American government.
Oh my god.
Fucking fucking liberals.
I know.
Liberals.
This is how many times.
How many fucking times Bush stole two elections?
This is what they did.
This is what they fucking did.
It's really, it really is.
I mean, yes.
I mean, that is so fucking crazy to put the clubhouse.
Yeah.
I mean, above everybody.
It is like the one time where if a president had had his political opponents hanged, it would be like, yeah, that's what you should have done.
And the managing that one session of hangings really would have gone a long way with this country.
You would be in so much a better position if they'd hung Nixon and several other people we're about to talk about.
It would also have given Nixon good posture, finally.
Yeah, finally.
I knew about that Nixon had done.
I did not know that they knew.
I didn't know they knew at the time.
Oh, yes, David.
That's fucking insane.
The liberal mind.
I always think about this story about when the junta took over in Chile before Pinochet got into power and they asked all the, they said we want to have interviews with people.
And the liberals so believed in government that they went and lined up for the secret police interviews because they're like, well, this is what we do.
And they're like, no, they're taking your names down to possibly kill you.
But they lined up because they're like, well, this is, we don't want to mess up the system.
Like, we're supposed to go get interviewed by the government.
And you're like, it's a junta.
Like, it just the mindset of just this is how our constitution works and this is what we're supposed to do.
And you're like, no, it's literally not working.
The thing isn't working.
This is a great, this is one of the best examples ever of that.
Yeah.
And this is the germ of truth in Kissinger's whole ideology about conflict is that if you are in a conflict with someone who is willing to throw down and you aren't, they're going to win, right?
Like that is a truth of history, right?
It's a truth of fighting fascists, right?
It's not enough to say like punching them isn't the entirety of it, but if you're not willing to throw down, they will win, right?
And that is a thing that is often taken exactly the wrong way at the geopolitical level.
But like you see in this that like LBJ was not willing to throw down and Nixon was.
And everything we're going to talk about in the rest of this series happens as a result.
And it's like LBJ loved throwing down, but it's amazing that he doesn't in this.
Nixon Was Willing to Fight00:04:14
I think that's the craziest thing is that like that was the fucking big dick.
I'm going to take a shit and you're going to listen to me guy.
Like he gave no fucks and threw down with everybody.
You know what I think it is, Dave?
I think for all of his many, many, many flaws and evil acts committed, I think LBJ believed in things.
Yeah.
And Nixon and Kissinger don't.
He wouldn't throw down, but he would throw two ads.
I also agree with you.
Yeah, I would, because, you know, LBJ was famous for whipping his dick, which he called jumbo out at all times.
He once pissed on a Secret Service agent at a party because he couldn't get to the bathroom easily enough.
That's like, that's the secret.
Yeah.
All of our sponsors are the same and that their dicks are called jumbo and they do piss on the secret service.
Every one of our sponsors pisses on the secret service.
That's a promise.
So there's two golden rules that any man should live by.
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And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
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A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
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The cops didn't seem to care.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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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 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.
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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.
A Bombing Halt Offered00:15:37
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
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They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
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My mind was blown.
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Oh, boy, good times.
So South Vietnam pulls out of the negotiations, right?
I think they're happening in Paris.
And I haven't really gone to detail about what happened up to this point because those details are very obscure to the American people.
What is publicly known is that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are supposed to come to the table, have this big negotiation to try to come to some way in which the war can come to an end.
And South Vietnam, after a bunch of like throwing a bunch of like wrenches in the process, finally just backs out entirely, right?
And so the negotiations don't happen and the war continues.
That's what everybody sees.
You know, if you're just like a dude paying attention on the news, that's what you're aware of happening here.
LBJ's administration knows something sketchy is going on between Nixon and the South Vietnamese government, but even for them, they don't know precisely what happened.
Here's what happened.
As part of the negotiations, LBJ offered the North Vietnamese a bombing halt.
Now, you can see why this is very enticing for Hanoi, right?
Because being bombed is not pleasant and the U.S. was doing a lot of it.
So this is like what LBJ is like, hey, I will fucking stop bombing Vietnam if you guys will come to the table and talk about stuff.
And the North Vietnamese government, not being made entirely of soulless cockroaches, is like, well, okay, like that's a pretty good offer, actually.
Yeah.
We were bombing Zahar.
We actually dropped John McCain.
Yeah, we did drop John McCain.
You guys might have caught him.
You can keep him for a while.
He'll come back into the picture.
It'll be a big problem.
He'll also, weirdly enough, be the least objectionable Republican elected leader for a long time.
So it's a mess.
Just so you guys know, that's our future hero.
He and Jesse the body ventura will be the only conservative voices against torture.
So heads up.
It is amazing watching that old clip of Jesse Ventura on the view being the most reasonable American in the fucking early 2000s.
Yes.
Next to Gilbert Gottfried, at least.
It's actually not Gilbert Gottfried.
It's me in the alternative universe.
So, yeah, this is a very enticing offer for Hanoi, the bombing cessation.
And it's good enough if, like, if you won't bomb us anymore, yeah, maybe we can concede on some stuff if you're not murdering people in mass.
Like, yeah, of course we'll negotiate with you.
Sounds pretty good.
Yeah.
Nixon cannot let this happen.
This would be a disaster.
Vietnam not getting bombed, he sees as like the worst case scenario, even though he is campaigning on ending the war, by the way.
But that's Nixon's promise.
I'm going to get us out of the war.
But yeah, on my watch, it happens before.
What am I campaigning on?
So Nixon uses his back channel to the South Vietnamese government to get them to torpedo their end of the negotiations because the government of South Vietnam is frightened, obviously, that the U.S. is going to stop bombing North Vietnam.
So if you're following along, something should be obvious at this point.
Since the Johnson administration was negotiating secretly with North Vietnam, there should have been no way for the government in Saigon to know that LBJ had proposed a bombing halt.
But obviously Saigon knew, which means there was a secret informant within the Johnson administration passing information to the Nixon administration and sharing a lot of top secret data with Saigon.
So the big question is, who could possibly be so deep into both camps that he could feed information from one to the other?
Forrest.
Oh, my God.
That's right, baby.
Should be executed for treason.
Absolutely should be executed for treason.
Oh, my God.
Slowly.
Yeah.
Slowly executed.
Yeah.
It should be that incompetent dude who hung the Nazis at Nuremberg and like kept fucking up and making it worse.
Bring that dude back.
Sorry, can I just do, let me try one more time before you guys get mad.
We should have frozen that motherfucker in carbonite to break out when the nation needed him.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Oh, God.
How are you guys waking me up to kill me?
No, we actually get drunk and do another hanging.
We are huge fans.
We've got you a handle of gin here.
And this is Henry Kissinger.
Oh, he's great.
Why would you say Kissinger?
Shout out.
Just do whatever you just kill him as fast as you can.
That's the only note.
But I took a lot of notes from him back in the day.
Like, he's great.
He's great.
Just kill him.
Okay.
I don't think he could die, though.
I will say, I don't think that guy could read.
So obviously, Kissinger is the back channel who is spreading this information.
Now, in his own memoirs, Nixon later admitted to hearing about the proposed bombing halt through what he termed as a highly unusual channel.
Christopher Hitchens continues.
It was more unusual even than he acknowledged.
Kissinger had until then been a devoted partisan of Nelson Rockefeller, the matchlessly wealthy prince of liberal republicanism.
His contempt for the person and policies of Richard Nixon was undisguised.
Indeed, President Johnson's Paris negotiators, led by Averill Harriman, considered Kissinger to be almost one of themselves.
He had made himself helpful as Rockefeller's cheap foreign policy advisor by supplying French intermediaries with their own contacts in Hanoi.
Henry was the only person outside of the government that we were authorized to discuss the negotiations with, says Richard Holbrook.
We trusted him.
It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.
So the likelihood of a bombing halt, wrote Nixon, came as no real surprise to me.
He added, I told Haldeman that Mitchell should stay a continuous liaison with Kissinger and that we should honor his desire to keep his role completely confidential.
So this is all out in the open now.
I also, I mean, Nixon really just never shut the fuck up.
I mean, he wasn't.
He really just was like the drunk guy at a party who would just sort of tell you whatever.
Like, honestly, he's the guy Donald Trump might put a hand on and be like, hey, man, you're insane.
You're saying some stuff that you probably shouldn't write down.
I think you might not.
I think you might regret this.
Jake Slowdown, you're saying a lot of stuff you probably shouldn't.
And I'm on Twitter.
Yeah.
That is just so crazy and just says it all, you know?
And it's gotten worse.
I mean, it's just fucking bonkers.
Now, the bombing halt was planned for October 23rd, but thanks to Kissinger, the Nixon campaign was able to lobby South Vietnam to increase their demands suddenly at the bargaining table, which wrecked attempted agreements being made with North Vietnam.
This, you know, there's a process.
This happens back and forth until the bombing halt is completely scuttled and peace negotiations fall apart.
Since all this was happening behind closed doors, Humphrey never got to present the possibility of a bombing halt to the American people.
Nixon avoided having to take any stance of any kind on the issue, because obviously, as the peace candidate, he couldn't say you shouldn't do it, right?
He didn't even want it to come up at all.
The Johnson administration made one final attempt to push through a bombing halt at the end of October, but the South Vietnamese government, warned by Kissinger via Nixon, preempted this with a surprise boycott of the peace talks.
Now, while all this is happening, Kissinger is also advising the Humphrey campaign and is so respected there that he was considered a shoe-in for a senior job if they'd managed to win.
There's three of them.
Democrats are so fucking stupid.
I know, right?
There's three of them.
There's three Kissingers.
No, you're.
No, fucking Humphrey walking around.
I got my buddy Henry's.
I'm going to give him a good old job.
That's our party you're talking about, mister.
And then I can never get over the fact that Hillary walked around with him during the fucking campaign.
It's really walking, to be fair, Dave.
He fucking is.
He's like one of those episodes of Frasier where he's dating two women at the same time and trying to keep it secret that there's the same restaurant.
Like, that sounds a jack tripper.
It's very funny, except for all of the millions and millions.
He does.
Well, let me ask you that.
So do you have the numbers on where the deaths were at in Vietnam?
Oh, you don't know where they ended up.
Yeah, I'll get you that in a minute.
Why did I ask?
Yeah, Nixon by also like grows convinced of Kissinger's value during this period of time too, and he becomes a shoe-in for a senior job there.
He was particularly impressed by the skill with which Kissinger protected his identity as the leaker from the Humphrey campaign.
Nixon later wrote: One factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy.
What a terrible act.
I mean, that's just not a good personality trait.
It's really not.
It's actually not.
My doubt is up it is, but not to me.
This guy, this guy is the best double agent.
He's so fucking great.
He'll this guy's an unbelievable shitbag liar.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, it makes sense that like Nixon would be super into that.
Oh, yeah.
Wow, this guy's a real piece of shit.
Oh, I'm Dick Nixon.
This guy could lie to you.
Let me tell you, as a liar.
Oh, fuck.
It's fucking amazing.
It's bad.
Clark Clifford, who would later, was again the Secretary of Defense at the time, would later blame the fact that the war did not end in 1968 and the loss of the Humphrey campaign in that election on the school duggery of the Nixon campaign, which was orchestrated in part by Henry Kissinger.
Quote: The activities of the Nixon team went far beyond the bounds of justifiable political combat.
It constituted direct interference in the activities of the executive branch and the responsibilities of the chief executive, the only people with authority to negotiate on behalf of the nation.
The activities of the Nixon campaign constituted a gross, even potentially illegal interference in the security affairs of the nation by private individuals.
Which is the polite political wonk way of saying it.
In the book Kissinger's Shadow, Greg Grandin is even more pointed.
The fact that Kissinger participated in an intrigue that extended the war for five pointless years, seven if you count the fighting between the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the 1975 fall of Saigon, is undeniable.
Adding to the evidence is Kissinger himself.
He's been caught on tape twice on recordings recently released, admitting he passed on useful information to Nixon.
Jesus Christ.
My God, it's like killing him isn't enough.
No, he should be gibbeted.
I say this.
We need to bring back gibbeting and just hang that motherfucker somewhere in a nice cage box.
Like, leave him out there.
Leave him out there.
Let people pelt him with stuff.
Yeah, fuck him.
Let's kill him by throwing potatoes at him.
You got to make sure they're soft, right?
Because he's not that strong anymore and you want it to last a while.
Yeah.
So we'll talk a bit later about how he got caught on tape and why we know about all of this, because that's a fun story, guys, and involves a different series of crimes.
But Grandin makes another point that's worth acknowledging here.
While Kissinger definitely had inside information from the Johnson campaign, which he passed on, he also didn't have as much information as he pretended to know when he talked to the Nixon campaign.
Oh, Jesus.
Quote, even with access to Johnson's negotiating instructions, he couldn't have had exact information about the decisions being made at the White House.
He had to have been winging it, at least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining what others would do with that guess, playing the angle, sussing out the chance, oh, well, giving the appearance of composure and certainty.
He was right-winging it.
I mean, Johnson wants it.
What an absolute fucking psychopath.
Like, that's the kind of shit, like he said, if you're dating two women, you're trying to figure it out and get through some stinky situation, but he's doing this with fucking Vietnam and two presidential campaigns.
I don't, yeah.
Craziness, the absolute lack of a soul is astounding.
He is pure blackness inside.
Yeah.
Dave, let me push back for a second.
I know.
Oh, God.
Wow.
Yeah.
You can't.
I mean, it's hard to even speak to it because it's like the to look, I'll kill five people for a job, but at some point you have to kill.
I think up to five is normal, sure.
Yeah.
That's regular.
Yeah.
But to let, I mean, to just, I don't know.
It is.
He killed.
He killed.
I mean, how many Vietnamese died after that?
Like, so many.
We're talking, you know, was it like a million died in the whole war or is it more than no?
I mean, it is because you also have to include the people who died in Cambodia and Mao and in Vietnam.
We're going to get into more of this in episode three, but conservatively, an additional couple of million deaths as a result of this.
In addition to an additional 20,000 U.S. dead.
It's kind of hard, the death toll to get precise, but like a couple million, like in the millions.
A couple additional dead.
Continuing to this day, by the way.
Yeah, I was just going to say.
Because he wanted a job.
Because he wanted a gig.
He's essentially lying in a job interview like you would if you were had no fast food experience and were dealt taco, except millions of people are dying.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
Holy crap.
He's such a bad person.
The crazy, the thing you've done here is you've humanized the situation for me.
Yeah.
Because like I can understand that there's evil people out there and they do stuff like they want to bomb Cambodia.
They want to do this other stuff.
But when you take it to a level where it's a guy winging it in a meeting, it takes on a whole different flavor of evil that is something, because now that's something we can all understand.
We've all been in a situation where like, ah, yeah, this guy did a thing and then I did a thing and you're just trying to get through a situation.
Yeah.
We've all experienced that.
None of us have experienced giving the green light to, you know, dropping bombs and killing people.
But that I get.
And I feel in my bones of like, well, holy shit, but you're doing that with millions of people's lives on the line.
It is, it is this thing where the idea I had always had before I really got into him was that like, well, he did, you know, he was involved in all of these horrible things that I knew he was involved in.
But like, I assumed it was from a wonky perspective of like he believed strongly in the need to fight these wars and that anything was justified.
And so he did these horrible things because he believed we were in this like civilizational struggle and certain things were necessary in that.
And like he had all of these different kind of very complex moral beliefs that he wrote dozens of books about explaining why he did the things.
Kissinger's Control Freak Side00:13:22
At the end of the day, no motherfucker wanted a gig.
Yeah.
And by the way, it's not like he would have been out of politics.
Like even in his downtime, he was like, you know, he was gigging.
Like, it's just like he would have been patiently waiting for another administration or he would have been working in LBG, whatever.
No, he didn't want to work at Uncle Chucklefox.
He didn't want to work at Uncle Chucklefox.
He wanted to gig at Charlie Goodnight's.
Like he's not want to work at a premier club.
He literally like did the, like, that's the thing.
He didn't just do this for a job.
He did this for like one of the two jobs and the one he kind of didn't want as much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The guy, yeah.
Un fucking conscriptable.
Yeah.
It's really hard to like, it is hard in like, it's, I think it's easier to understand now what he did.
It's hard to like judge him adequately in moral terms that are even like comprehensible because it's so much out there.
Yeah, it's hard to process.
It really is one of those like, say what you will about the tenets of nihilism, dude, at least it's an ethos moments where it's like, I'm thinking about like people like fucking Saddam or whatever, where it's like, yeah, that was a piece of shit.
There were definitely some things he believed though.
Like there's pieces of shit out like fucking out there who like there are things they believe.
And Kissinger just believes he should be close to power.
Kissinger.
Yeah.
Political doctrine was Kissinger.
He's like, I'm really smart.
I should be in the top game.
And I just want to be there.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
I like how he thinks his childhood didn't fuck with him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, dude.
Bro.
Bro.
Yeah.
You know, it would be even better if all of this was happening and it was just because he was like, I know I can get so many more chicks if I'm.
in the White House.
Yeah.
Because that was the whole reason for it.
He's just like, I just want to get laid.
Look, it is not a non-factor.
Wait, is he married right now or is he single?
Oh, Lord.
Who knows?
He's, I mean, I think he gets married at some point, but he's also like, you know, well, I don't know, actually.
He's kind of like a bachelor dude.
We'll talk about that later.
I'm still working on those episodes because there's a whole thing to be said about Kissinger and women and sex appeal.
He gets married.
Yeah, he definitely was married at points, but he's also like kind of a playboy.
Oh, God.
We'll go back in time a little bit and talk about some of that later.
He was married.
His first marriage was 1949 to 1964.
So I don't think he's...
And then he's not remarried again until 74.
So that sounds right.
He's married in this little hall.
I wonder why she left him.
Yeah.
I wonder who he is.
No idea.
He's the only guy who comes black.
I haven't written the episode yet, but I have several pages of people talking about Henry Kissinger's sex appeal on the news that are real, real black pilling, as the kids say.
Oh, my God.
Not good.
So Nixon wins the 68 election.
Obviously, he gets inaugurated in 1969.
The Vietnam War continues on for half a decade-ish.
This was an almost incalculable humanitarian tragedy, as well as disastrous for the future stability and cohesion of the United States.
But it was dope as hell for Henry Kissinger, who was swiftly appointed Nixon.
Like to put out there that my uncle went to Vietnam and Natalie, you know, he had to kill a lot of people and Natalie fucking ruined his life and he watched James die and stuff.
So thank you, Richard Nixon.
Thank you, Richard Nixon.
Everybody who went to Vietnam after 68, say a thank you to Richard for Nixon and Kissinger for, you know, all of the trauma and the trauma that in some cases some of you passed on to your family members and the trauma that has been passed on societally based on our attitudes towards war because of how Vietnam went and the ways in which some people were always looking for a rematch and it got us into other, you know, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Good stuff.
Imagine if like that had been the end of Vietnam, that like there was actually a president realized, you know, the foolishness of a conflict and we went to the table and like negotiations were made.
I don't think the first Iraq war happens.
The invasion of Panama doesn't happen.
You would think that for how long Vietnam dragged on that that would have actually been a lesson to not go into conflicts, you know, aimless conflict.
But so no.
I guess the problem is we're thinking people should learn lessons when leaving countries.
Well, that war is in any way like a moral decision or like actually comes from a place of actual, you know, save your mentality, anything like that.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
It's great.
Getting this appointment as national security advisor required a lot more politicking from Kissinger, including spreading rumors to Nixon before his inauguration that Johnson planned to either depose or kill the president of South Vietnam before he left office.
Kissinger pushed this rumor to the president-elect via regular Bastards Pod side character and Rhodesia enthusiast William F. Buckley.
Buckley's his middleman, Delida Nixon.
Rhodesia the translator.
Yeah, William F. Buckley.
Whose son went on to write honestly a pretty fun book.
But we don't need to think too much about that.
Wow.
Great Aaron Eckhart performance in the movie.
So Nixon appreciated Kissinger's chutzpah and connections enough that when he put him at the head of the National Security Council, he ordered the professor to reorganize it in order to take foreign policy control away from the state and defense departments.
This means that Nixon gave Kissinger what was very close to a blank check to take total control of U.S. foreign policy.
Obviously, Nixon wanted this because he was a paranoid control freak.
He did not want any kind of separation of powers.
He certainly did not want to have a Secretary of State who could like do things that Nixon might not be explicitly ordering.
But the result of this was that Kissinger found himself in a position where he could exercise near absolute power in foreign policy as long as the president kept liking him.
Now, just as Kissinger had little love for Nixon, our buddy Dick Milhouse was not particularly warm to his new right-hand man.
Now, you had given a couple of Spanky Hank.
Yeah, you want to know what his real nickname for Kissinger was?
Jewboy.
Oh, my God.
Jesus Christ.
It is Nixon, but it's like, I mean, I thought we would be jumping off of the name a little bit.
He's just like, what am I going to call you?
Spanky Hank?
No, little Jew boy.
Jeez.
Good lord.
Right.
And again, it says a lot about Henry Kissinger that he's like, yeah, right.
That's pretty good.
He's a Kissinger.
Very funny, sir.
Very funny.
The dimension of childhood has no effect on me today.
Nah, whatsies?
So there must have been an element of Nixon then who knew what an ass-kissing little bitch he was.
Oh, yeah.
Because he's belittling him to his face.
Oh, yeah.
And knowing he'll stick around.
It's why you get hired for these jobs because it's just like it's not, you know, an empty vacuum who is going to be your right-hand man is still, you know, there's security in that.
There's secrecy in that.
He's like a vacuum, Gareth, in that he'll suck Nixon's dick, but he's also like a toilet in that he'll take Nixon's shit.
You know, that's Henry Kissinger.
He's a blunt.
He's a dick-sucking.
He's a human.
He's one of those human bloodkins.
Yeah.
He's like the Toto toilet is pretty effective, but have you ever had a dick-sucking toilet?
Shit or come either way.
I'm ready for it, baby.
Henry Kissinger.
Soviet, can the title be Henry Kissinger Dick-Sucking Toilet?
It's also pretty okay.
We got it, Nick.
I do draw.
Speaking of dick-sucking toilets, it is time for a commercial break.
That is who sponsors our podcast.
Raytheon's new dick-sucking toilet.
Well, it is going to fire a missile at a busload of children, but that's just the Raytheon.
We can't avoid it.
We're contractually obligated.
Yeah, it's how it works.
So Nixon announced Kissinger's appointment as the National Security Advisor before he had even picked a Secretary of State, which is an unprecedented move.
He announced Henry as, quote, and this is again in his public announcement to the country, as quote, a man who is known to all people who are interested in foreign policy is perhaps one of the major scholars in America and the world in this area.
And he acknowledged that while Kissinger had never held a full-time government job before, he had Nixon's confidence to bring in a whole new foreign policy team, quote, new men to develop new ideas.
Now, the conservative media of the day immediately roared into gear, hailing Henry Kissinger as an unprecedented policy genius, the man necessary to get America back on track after nearly a decade of disastrous war under Democratic presidents.
William F. Buckley wrote, Not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure received such universal acclamation.
Why are you going to ruin her?
Fucking William F. Buckley piece of shit.
Compared to Florence Doctor.
Florence Nightingale.
Yeah, it's amazing.
But even ostensibly liberal figures were wooed by Kissinger's horse, Titanic intellect.
In Henry Kissinger and American Power, Thomas Schwartz writes, The liberal historian Arthur Schleshinger Jr. simply referred to it as the best appointment so far.
The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker noted the collective sigh of relief that went up from the liberal Eastern establishment and the Ivy League, fearing Nixon's Cold War year image, most shared in the sentiment of Kissinger's Harvard colleague Adam Yarmolinsky.
We'll all sleep a little better each night, knowing Kissinger is down there.
You mean in the toilet getting ready to suck dick.
You know, again, it's exactly what happened with Trump.
Yes, and it's like, it's the way that, I mean, again, it's people's natural reaction is normally kind of there.
It's just the fears are assuaged by people who they consider to be, you know, the compass and they're just not.
And so when you're told that there are the good guys inside the bad camp, it's like, it's just never fucking true.
It is rot from the core.
Yeah.
And it is, these liberals are also impressed by him and so comforted by him because they think he's smart because he's good at quoting smart dead people, right?
It is the same thing that happened with Mattis.
Mattis, thankfully, is not nearly as toxic a person as Henry Kissinger.
But like, if you actually look at Mattis's background, one of the things he did in the Iraq war was cover up a war crime.
Like he's not a man to be like, I mean, and he was like, he was very popular among like people who served under him, which is part of like why there was this kind of collective relief.
But it's this idea that he's like the warrior monk, right?
They love the idea that like, well, this guy who's president is a maniac, but this dude reads books that he hired.
So it'll be okay.
And it's like, no, it's never okay.
As you continue to lower the bar more and more, you're obvious, like the people that you're bringing back are part of a lower bar.
But because the bar is even lower, it seems and feels a little higher.
But it is all just exactly what happened with Colin Powell.
He was a fucking evil.
We did the dollop on the bus.
That's exactly an evil fucking person.
Yeah.
Covering up fucking the massacres in fucking Vietnam.
That's like when he started out, like terrible human being, but the press did the same shit.
If you can quote old books and smile and you're willing to give journalists time, they will talk about you as being the secret reasonable person within the war crimes party.
You know, like that's all it takes.
It's great.
It's just the same thing as if you're a Nazi who reads books, you can get a New York Times profile.
Or dress nicely.
Yeah, or you'll get on 60 minutes or whatever, you know?
It's don't trust people who want you to think they're smart.
That's never a good sign.
Smart people, it's the same thing.
It's the same thing with people who want you to believe they're dangerous.
If they want you to believe something specific about them, they're lying about it.
That's how people work.
And if a doctor wants to get on the news to talk about COVID and be famous on the news, that's actually not a doctor you should listen to.
Not a great guy.
Also, I mean, it's, you know, it's from the same publications and the same networks.
The idea that you continue to listen to these sources about what is right and what is wrong just because they have fancy terms like senior policy advice.
It's like, it's all fucking, it's days of our lives.
They're actors.
These are teleprompters.
Yeah, and they don't know any more than you about anything that matters as a general rule.
Every now and then you get, but like even like within agencies that are heavily like medical oriented, like the CDC, where you would expect them to have a lot of specialized knowledge, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do a good job.
A My Lai a Month00:07:41
But like, can you say that much?
The New York Times comfortably lied about Iraq.
Yeah, it's not great.
So during the transition from the Johnson to Nixon administration, U.S. military command began to act under what General Creighton Abrams described as a total war mindset against the infrastructure of the Viet Cong insurgency.
This began with a six-month operation to clear the Mekong Delta, codenamed Operation Speedy Express.
This would prove to be the first major military operation that both Nixon and Kissinger oversaw, and it was a titanic bloodbath.
There is a good article on this operation in The Nation, and the title of the article is A My Lai a Month.
Oh my God.
Yeah, so it's bad.
Oh my God.
Now, the My Lai Massacre had occurred in 1968, before Nixon or Kissinger were in power.
You know, that ain't on them.
And Seymour Hirsch didn't like break the story until 69, which is the year that they come to power.
And this slaughter of 500 civilians by U.S. troops was horrific enough.
But within a few months of taking power, Speedy Express had exceeded it many times.
Quote from the nation.
An inkling that something terrible had taken place in the Mekong Delta appeared in a most unlikely source, a formerly confidential September 1969 senior officer debriefing report by none other than the commander of the 9th Division, then Major General Julian Ewell, who came to be known inside the military as the Butcher of the Delta because of his single-minded fixation on body count.
In reports, copies of which were sent to Westmoreland's office and to other high-ranking officials, Ewell candidly noted that while the 9th Division stressed the discriminate and selective use of firepower in some areas of the Delta, where this emphasis wasn't applied or wasn't feasible, the countryside looked like the Verdun battlefields, the site of a notoriously bloody World War I battle.
That December, a document produced by the National Liberation Front sharpened the picture.
It reported that between December 1st, 1968 and April 1st, 1969, primarily in the Delta provinces of Qianhoa and Dinh Tuang, the 9th Division launched an express raid and mopped up many areas, slaughtering 3,000 people, mostly old folks, women, and children, and destroying thousands of houses, hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards.
But like most NLF reports of civilian atrocities, this one was almost certainly dismissed as propaganda by U.S. officials.
A United Press International report that same month in which U.S. advisors charged the division with having driven up the body count by killing civilians with helicopter gunships and artillery was also largely ignored.
And it because they're saying they're soldiers that they're shooting from a distance on helicopters.
They justify, like Colin Powell justified it by saying, well, they're providing food for the enemy, so there's no difference.
Yeah.
By the time Speedy Express comes to an end, U.S. forces had killed more than 10,000 people.
The vast majority of these were claimed to have been insurgent fighters, but extensive mop-up operations after the fact found less than 800 weapons on all these bodies.
Hey, they shared.
That is fucking crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, like, we can't even frame them competently.
No.
No.
And also, remember, you're taking guys that you drafted.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right.
You know, to do this.
Yeah.
I mean, like you said with your uncle, I mean, it is.
It's like the generational ripple through that and the lifetime, you know, what it does, it ruins.
I mean, it just pretty.
Beyond who dies, who doesn't live again?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And what do people take back with them?
Now, it is fair and necessary to note that this began in the December before Nixon and Kissinger took office.
This is not entirely on them.
Some of the blame for this goes on the LBJ administration as well, obviously.
But it continued under them.
This paragraph written by Christopher Hitchens gives you some idea of the savagery of what occurred in the early days of the Nixon administration's control of the Vietnam War.
The people who still live in pacified Kian Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in early 1969.
Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way.
There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in 1970, one village elder told me.
The Americans destroyed every house with artillery, airstrikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters.
About 100 people were killed by bombing.
Others were wounded and others became refugees.
Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs, which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground.
So Nixon's plan at the beginning, you know, when his people had derailed the peace negotiations in 68, was that he would win election and then make peace with Vietnam, right?
Then he's going to do the thing that he promised to do.
But it swiftly became clear that peace was a messy prospect.
One of the things he's worried about is that like, well, if we withdraw from Vietnam, the Saigon government's probably going to fall, right?
Because we're just barely propping up this shitty dictatorship.
And it'll make me look weak, right?
And so I can't do it because it'll make me look weak.
Give me one beer and then I'll quit drinking.
Yeah.
And then I won't win re-election in 1972.
And that's unacceptable.
And that, I mean, obviously keeps going over and over.
You get into office and then you're like, well, what about re-election instead of going like the best direction for...
It is one of the few things I'll give Biden some credit for because he had the same calculus with Afghanistan.
A lot of criticisms to make about the pull-up from Afghanistan, but he did not make the same decision Nixon and Kissinger did.
He did fucking get out.
It would have been easy.
I would like to be, I have a much more darker outlook on that.
He knew that Ukraine was kicking off because that's been kicking off since he actually won election.
But, you know, Zelensky was largely for peace until all of a sudden Biden got elected and then he flipped and now he's like, I want ADO and all this shit.
So, you know, if you can pull out of Afghanistan if you know there's another area cooking up negative on that ship.
Yeah, it's probably too complicated to want to get into here because that's a whole another several episodes worth of stories.
It's a shithole of just unbelievable garbage all over the place.
Yeah, so withdrawing from Vietnam means Saigon is going to fall.
The government's going to fall.
And that will be bad in the 72 elections.
And it might push Kissinger and Nixon out of power.
Neither of them can accept this.
And this description of a meeting from December 1970 by H.R. Haldeman shows Kissinger's role in pulling back from peace.
Kissinger came in and the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam and the president's big peace plan for the next year, with Kissinger later, which Kissinger later told me he does not favor.
He thinks that any pullout from next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the 72 elections.
He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of 72 so that if any bad results follow, they will be too late to affect the election.
Ah, yeah.
And it's you know that's what our wars always are.
They're all about elections.
They fucking always are.
It's, you know.
Yeah.
This led to Republicans thinking that, you know, they had to get war back on track at some point.
Yeah.
But you know, it's always, it never works.
Like, it's, it's just such a crazy idea.
And you also, like, people are watching body bags go home.
Like, no one's happy about anything that's going on.
No.
And it this, they just kind of, I mean, that's part of why it keeps going is this kind of craven knowledge that, like, well, the worst thing that could happen is we don't get re-elected.
The Body Bag Reality00:02:50
Yeah.
At no point is he thinking about any of the human beings involved, even any of the American human beings involved.
It's just like, well, we can't be losing re-election, you know?
Imagine if Kissinger was damaged from his childhood how bad things would get.
It could be really bad.
It's like, you know, actually, when we talk about the story of like American presidents making craven political decisions, one of the reasons FDR did not approve more effort being taken to evacuate Jewish refugees from Germany is he did not want to be seen as pro-Jew.
Oh, jeez.
Because of the socialist policies and stuff that we're going through, he knew that that could hurt him.
There were a number of other reasons, but like, yeah, like they did not, that is, like, there is, there were things that were done that led to the U.S. government saving fewer Jewish people from the Holocaust that were done for craven political reasons by the FDR administration.
Let me hear this Kaiser pitch again.
It actually big hat.
I love the hat.
Biggest hat you've ever seen.
Very spiky.
Now, loves his mom's hands, but oh, God.
So the fun thing about this episode is that everything we're going to talk about in part three is even worse because in part three, we're going to talk about fucking Cambodia.
So you guys want to plug anything after my ears?
Three hours?
Yeah.
I'm going to be in a toilet trying to get clean after this.
You can go to the dollar, go to dollopodcast.com for tour information.
And my website's JaredReynolds.com.
I'm on tour.
But not like tours of duty, just like stand-up and podcast tours with the aim of bringing joy to people.
I don't want to talk like that anymore, Dave.
Dave, shut your fucking mouth and you can just listen to the dollar.
Last time I saw you do a set, you just fucking murdered the whole fucking shit.
Shut your fucking face.
Like not only did you kill that crowd, you left unexploded ordinance in the crowd.
No, even tripped over late.
It should have been over 15 minutes earlier.
And like with unexploded ordinance in Lao, 40% of the people who loved your jokes after the set ended were children.
There'll be no more relating.
There'll be no more correlating.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's part two.
You got two more weeks of Henry Kissinger ahead of you folks.
So strap in.
Gets a lot uglier.
But also, we'll be talking about his sex life.
So, you know, a lot of people are.
I was going to say something to look forward to, but like, not really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Come back next week for more of the dick-sucking toilet, Henry Kissinger.
Part Two Gets Ugly00:03:08
That's a pretty good title.
Sophie's not happy with it.
No, Sophie's not on board.
I don't love it, but you know.
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 assigned a copy and you'll make me very happy.
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