Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Kissinger
Aired: 2022-03-22
Duration: 01:31:06


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (03:32) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
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[00:00:44]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:00:47]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:00:48]  That's so funny.
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[00:01:06]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:07]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:01:08]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:01:12]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:15]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:16]  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.
[00:01:23]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:26]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:33]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:35]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:36]  There's a lot of life.
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[00:01:45]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
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[00:02:15]  Hi, everybody.
[00:02:16]  Robert Evans here, and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org.
[00:02:22]  Now, if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution, just google akpress.org after the revolution.
[00:02:28]  You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
[00:02:32]  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.
[00:02:40]  You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold.
[00:02:46]  So please Google AK Press After the Revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it.
[00:02:54]  You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.
[00:03:00]  Oh, I don't.
[00:03:04]  How do I, Sophie?
[00:03:05]  How do I introduce part three of the Kissinger series?
[00:03:09]  You just did it.
[00:03:10]  Gareth and Dave are right here.
[00:03:12]  They're waiting for something good.
[00:03:13]  And I just, I'm just, I'm fucking it up, Sophie.
[00:03:16]  I mean, yeah, but you did, you, you accidentally introduced the podcast, which is Behind the Bastards.
[00:03:22]  Behind the dollops, Dollop the Bastards.
[00:03:24]  Dollop the Bastards, Dollop the Bastards.
[00:03:26]  It's a hybrid podcast.
[00:03:28]  And like all hybrids, it is incapable of procreating.

=== The Tunnel to Vietnam (14:59) ===

[00:03:32]  That's right.
[00:03:33]  But better at getting up steep mountain passes.
[00:03:36]  It's getting a little goady now.
[00:03:37]  We can multiply by cell division, but not through sexual matters.
[00:03:45]  Yeah.
[00:03:45]  We've tried.
[00:03:46]  Yeah, we have.
[00:03:47]  We're in that process.
[00:03:48]  Gareth Doddy have we tried.
[00:03:51]  So since we last recorded a podcast, war has broken out and Eastern Europe.
[00:03:57]  Oh, God, three days.
[00:03:59]  Well, we like ended it, and then it was like, oh, wow, it's happening.
[00:04:02]  And now it feels like it's been two months since then.
[00:04:05]  Had a brief conversation.
[00:04:07]  What do you think's going to happen?
[00:04:08]  And then immediately checked our phones to be like, oh, okay.
[00:04:11]  So they're shelling all over the place.
[00:04:13]  Okay.
[00:04:14]  Oh, so, y'all, are we ready to learn about Henry Kissinger and a little country you might have heard of called Cambodia?
[00:04:23]  Oh, God.
[00:04:24]  And also a separate country you might have heard of called Lao.
[00:04:27]  And also Vietnam still.
[00:04:29]  So that energy.
[00:04:30]  I am.
[00:04:31]  Let's go.
[00:04:31]  Let's do it.
[00:04:32]  Yeah.
[00:04:33]  So on February 14th, Valentine's Day, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder.
[00:04:41]  This was a long-term campaign of aerial bombing against North Vietnam.
[00:04:45]  Its primary aims were to help the morale of the South Vietnamese and the Saigon government, to persuade North Vietnam to stop supporting the Viet Cong, and to destroy the North Vietnamese transportation infrastructure and industrial base so as to stop them from sending men and equipment south.
[00:04:59]  It did not succeed as a spoiler.
[00:05:03]  None of this works.
[00:05:04]  Like, it's just amazing that you have all this firepower, you have all these planes.
[00:05:11]  And really, you're talking about destroying like railroads and shipping stuff.
[00:05:16]  And like underground tunnels, too.
[00:05:17]  This is the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you know?
[00:05:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:20]  I mean, is that what we're talking about?
[00:05:20]  The Ho Chi Minh Trail?
[00:05:22]  Yes.
[00:05:22]  Okay.
[00:05:23]  They were never going to do that.
[00:05:25]  No.
[00:05:25]  This is like a lesson that no one ever learns in warfare because you can also point to like the saturation bombing of Germany, which had a minimal effect on German industrial production.
[00:05:34]  You could talk about like what's happening right now in Ukraine, which has not succeeded in its strategic aims.
[00:05:39]  You could talk about a number of wars the U.S. has been involved in.
[00:05:42]  You could talk about like World War I, where the British would drop a million shells in a couple of hours on a chunk of trench line and then all get killed by machine gun fire because the shells didn't do enough.
[00:05:52]  Like military leaders always have this idea that we can just bomb our problems away, and it just never really works.
[00:05:59]  Yeah, no, it doesn't.
[00:06:01]  You know what it does?
[00:06:02]  It terrifies the civilian population.
[00:06:05]  It sure does.
[00:06:05]  Yes.
[00:06:07]  It helps the Pentagon a lot, I think.
[00:06:08]  It does help the Pentagon.
[00:06:09]  It makes money for people.
[00:06:10]  So I guess to that extent it succeeds in its goal.
[00:06:12]  And Operation Rolling Thunder did make some people a lot of money.
[00:06:16]  It continued for three straight years until November of 1968.
[00:06:20]  During this period, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps planes threw more than 300,000 attack sorties, which dropped more than 864,000 tons of bombs.
[00:06:29]  For reference, the United States dropped half a million tons of bombs in the Pacific theater during all of World War II.
[00:06:34]  Jesus Christ.
[00:06:35]  Yeah, it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which we bombed the shit out of North Vietnam to no notable effect.
[00:06:42]  According to our trustworthy friends at the CIA, the raids did $500 million in damage, killed 21,000 people, and injured more than 30,000 more.
[00:06:50]  The CIA says that 75% of all casualties were people involved in military operations.
[00:06:56]  U.S. government estimates, not by the CIA, however, estimate at least 30,000 civilian fatalities.
[00:07:02]  Other estimates place the civilian death toll much higher at close to 200,000 civilians.
[00:07:08]  Probably fair to say north of 100,000.
[00:07:11]  A lot, a lot of folks.
[00:07:14]  By the time Kissinger and Nixon took office, it was clear that Rolling Thunder had failed miserably.
[00:07:19]  This was due in part to the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
[00:07:22]  In 1959, this is before U.S. soldiers had officially entered the country.
[00:07:26]  The trail had been created under order by the Lao Dong, which is the Communist Party of Vietnam, to aid them in what was at that point a building conflict with South Vietnam.
[00:07:34]  At the start, it led across just the demilitarized zone into Khe Son and South Vietnam.
[00:07:39]  Porters would carry boxes of ammunition and rifles on their body, which they would then hand to insurgents in the south.
[00:07:45]  Over time, the trail was expanded to a vast underground transit network, more than 12,000 miles in size, capable of moving more than 10,000 troops and thousands of trucks per year.
[00:07:55]  As the fighting escalated, the trail veered into Lao, where the government was engaged fighting its own insurgency and unable to stop the transit of weapons.
[00:08:02]  The Ho Chi Minh Trail allowed North Vietnam to smuggle equipment south and to evade the U.S. naval blockade that sought to choke it out.
[00:08:08]  Today, even Defense Department sources recognize it as one of the greatest logistical successes of 20th century warfare.
[00:08:15]  It works pretty good.
[00:08:17]  This trail.
[00:08:18]  It's amazing to think of the number of bombs you're talking about, and then they made a tunnel.
[00:08:25]  Yeah, not only did they make a tunnel, they dug a hole.
[00:08:27]  Yeah.
[00:08:28]  Like a really good hole.
[00:08:30]  It's like El Chapa.
[00:08:33]  It's not just a tunnel.
[00:08:34]  It's in a jungle.
[00:08:36]  Like, we're talking about a very difficult sort of environment to make a tunnel.
[00:08:41]  It's not that like it's incredible what they did.
[00:08:45]  Yeah.
[00:08:46]  So LBJ's administration sent planes into Lao to bomb the trail and to escort Laotian planes while they bombed the trail.
[00:08:53]  When U.S. airmen were killed or captured over Lao, their families were told they'd gone down in Southeast Asia to allow LBJ to claim he'd abided by his 1964 election promise to avoid a wider war.
[00:09:05]  Cambodia was bombed as well, but during LBJ's administration, Lao was considered a more important target.
[00:09:10]  They thought more stuff was getting into Vietnam through Lao.
[00:09:12]  This changed in 1968 when the Tet Offensive made it clear that North Vietnam had gotten very good at running troops in and out of Cambodia.
[00:09:19]  Johnson hadn't been willing to escalate the bombing campaign against a neutral country, though, especially since, again, there was this big election going on and he was kind of having his vice president run on the promise that like we're really going to end this thing.
[00:09:30]  So, you know, LBJ, when he's trying to tease North Vietnam with a bombing halt, isn't going to just start laying into Cambodia.
[00:09:37]  Right.
[00:09:38]  In the spring of 1969, after Kissinger and Nixon took office, they approved the expanded use of U.S. special forces in Lao, along with a campaign of sustained airstrikes.
[00:09:47]  This was called Operation Steel Tiger.
[00:09:51]  All of these stupidest names.
[00:09:55]  They're always so dumb.
[00:09:58]  The marketing that we have gone for in this country for so long has been so absurd.
[00:10:03]  Steel Tiger.
[00:10:05]  Well, I mean, they're just taking YNT album names at this point.
[00:10:08]  Yeah.
[00:10:13]  If only they'd gone with like Prince, Operation Purple Rain, but it's like the defoliant that gives everyone cancer.
[00:10:22]  So I should note here that all secret operations carried out by any U.S. forces anywhere in the world during the Nixon administration were approved personally by Henry Kissinger.
[00:10:33]  Henry was the chairman of something called the 40 Committee.
[00:10:36]  Hell.
[00:10:37]  Oh, sorry.
[00:10:39]  Yes.
[00:10:40]  This was a semi-secret body that had been set up to provide management and oversight to CIA covert operations.
[00:10:46]  The committee was made up of members of the National Security Council.
[00:10:49]  They concerned themselves regularly with the question of how to stop weapons from flowing into Vietnam.
[00:10:54]  By this point, trails ran through parts of Lao and Cambodia, but also from the Vietnam-Chinese border.
[00:10:59]  So Kissinger, as the head of this committee, considers a number of ways to stop weapons from getting into North Vietnam, including the use of thermonuclear weapons to annihilate the railways between North Vietnam and China.
[00:11:12]  Jesus Christ, out of its entire damn mind.
[00:11:15]  And to be fair, is nuts enough that even Kissinger is like, no, that's a little too far.
[00:11:23]  Let's sleep on this.
[00:11:24]  He also considered bombing the dikes that kept North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding all of its fields.
[00:11:30]  Both of these would have been war crimes on a Titanic scale.
[00:11:34]  Thankfully, Kissinger declined to do either in favor of a completely different set of war crimes.
[00:11:38]  So that's good.
[00:11:39]  That's nice.
[00:11:41]  Yeah.
[00:11:42]  Let's do a different thing.
[00:11:43]  He decides which war crimes to commit.
[00:11:45]  Like we decide, like jeans or sweatpants in the morning.
[00:11:49]  I mean, I think that would go really well with what we're doing now.
[00:11:51]  That'll really tie the whole thing together.
[00:11:54]  That's quite a life.
[00:11:56]  So immediately after taking office, Henry helps his new boss put together a menu of bombardment targets in Cambodia.
[00:12:03]  This is literally called Operation Menu.
[00:12:06]  No!
[00:12:07]  Yeah.
[00:12:07]  What?
[00:12:08]  Have you bombed us before?
[00:12:12]  Try the specials.
[00:12:13]  We've got some great ideas on specials.
[00:12:14]  Be sure to tip your bombardier.
[00:12:23]  I actually don't recall off the top of my head which bombing Operation McCain was involved in, but there's a good tip joke to be made there.
[00:12:29]  Somebody will figure it out.
[00:12:31]  We'll do it in post.
[00:12:32]  Yeah, we'll figure it out.
[00:12:34]  Different parts of Operation Menu had code names.
[00:12:37]  Different targets had code names like breakfast, lunch, snacks.
[00:12:40]  Gosh, dessert.
[00:12:42]  What?
[00:12:44]  I mean, it is one thing to be like so sadistic, and it's just another thing to tie it into.
[00:12:52]  Do you want to try brunch?
[00:12:54]  Yeah.
[00:12:54]  Should we lambosa?
[00:12:57]  Yeah, we're going back to brunch finally under the watchful eye of the next one.
[00:13:01]  They'll never take this away from us.
[00:13:05]  It's nice that slaughter can be fun.
[00:13:07]  Like you can find fun.
[00:13:09]  Yeah, it's the love what you do, Dave.
[00:13:12]  Otherwise, it's just going to feel like work, you know?
[00:13:18]  So before they began this series of bombings, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they warned the White House, quote, some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation, and the surprise effectiveness could tend to increase casualties.
[00:13:30]  So they're like, the fact that we're not warning anyone and that we're keeping this a secret means more civilians will die.
[00:13:35]  Like, heads up, so you know what you're doing.
[00:13:39]  This is what's going to happen.
[00:13:41]  Now, as they approached the question of bombing Cambodia, Kissinger and Nixon had a choice.
[00:13:45]  They could either tell Congress or they could hide what they were doing and use the presidential power over the armed services to appropriate funds from other places in order to carry out the bombing in secret.
[00:13:54]  Nixon had been elected with Kissinger's help in part due to the LBJ administration's failure to end the war.
[00:14:00]  He didn't want to go into 1972's re-election campaign, having to defend the fact that he expanded it.
[00:14:05]  Henry Kissinger worked with Colonels Alexander Haig and Ray Sitton to figure out a way for the president to direct bombing operations in a private manner.
[00:14:13]  And I'm going to quote from Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Randon.
[00:14:16]  Sitton, based on recommendations he received from General Creighton Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam, would work up a number of targets in Cambodia to be struck.
[00:14:25]  Then he would bring them to Kissinger and Haig in the White House for approval.
[00:14:28]  Kissinger was very hands-on, revising some of Sitton's work.
[00:14:31]  I don't know what he was using as his reason for varying them, Sitton later recalled.
[00:14:35]  Strike here in this area, Kissinger would tell them, or strike there in that area.
[00:14:38]  Once Kissinger was satisfied with the proposed target, Sitton would back channel the coordinates to Saigon, and from there, a courier would pass them on to the appropriate radar stations, where an officer would make a last-minute switch.
[00:14:49]  The B-52 would be diverted from its cover target in South Vietnam into Cambodia, where it would drop its bomb load on the real target.
[00:14:56]  When the run was complete, the officer in charge of the deception would burn whatever documents, maps, computer printouts, radar reports, messages, and so on, that might reveal the actual flight.
[00:15:05]  Then he would write up false post-strike paperwork indicating that the South Vietnam sortie was flown as planned.
[00:15:10]  It's so much work.
[00:15:13]  It reminds me of when I used to skip school, that like the lengths I would go to to get away with cutting class.
[00:15:19]  And the point would be made always to me, if you put this focus towards studying, you'd spend less time and it would be more effective.
[00:15:28]  But instead, you just waste so much, instead of just stopping, you do all this gymnastics just to continue the thing that is the problem, that makes the problem compound.
[00:15:40]  Yeah, they really are going through a lot of work to illegally bomb a neutral country.
[00:15:46]  To look like they're not bombing.
[00:15:47]  Yeah, to look like they're not.
[00:15:49]  It's gaslighting, you know?
[00:15:51]  That's what this is, Kissinger.
[00:15:53]  You know, we're finally going to get him canceled.
[00:15:55]  This is going to be what tonight.
[00:15:57]  I command it would be, imagine uncancelable.
[00:16:03]  We're going to do to Kissinger what Hannibal Burris did to Cosby.
[00:16:07]  Oh, man.
[00:16:09]  Oh, come on.
[00:16:10]  Come on.
[00:16:13]  So, you know, obviously, this is very illegal.
[00:16:17]  There's a lot of, and there's a lot of parts of it that are illegal.
[00:16:20]  For example, the military has a chain of command, and Sitton was bypassing his bosses in the Department of Defense because he's just a colonel, right?
[00:16:27]  Like, colonels don't get to that's not their, like, you're not at that level, right?
[00:16:31]  So, he is bypassing the normal chain of command in order to directly orchestrate an illegal bombing campaign with the White House and kind of cutting out a chunk of the Pentagon.
[00:16:42]  Sitton knew at the time that it was weird to cut his commanding officers out and report directly to Henry Kissinger.
[00:16:47]  He later recalled, I kind of felt I was way out on a limb and skating on some pretty thin ice with all my trips to the West Basement of the White House, where he's meeting with.
[00:16:55]  Yeah.
[00:16:56]  I mean, yeah.
[00:16:58]  Yeah, I'm going to a secret basement.
[00:17:00]  Yeah.
[00:17:01]  To talk about bombing.
[00:17:02]  Like, maybe, maybe this isn't how it's supposed to be done.
[00:17:05]  He'll seem like a democracy.
[00:17:08]  Yeah.
[00:17:10]  I feel like we shouldn't be doing things like this in a basement.
[00:17:14]  You come to secret democracy basement.
[00:17:16]  Yeah.
[00:17:19]  The people voted for this basement.
[00:17:24]  I noted here that they kind of cut out a large chunk of like the military command apparatus to do this, which doesn't mean that those guys were against what they were doing.
[00:17:32]  And in fact, all of Sitton's superiors knew what he was doing.
[00:17:35]  They just didn't want to be involved because, again, it was a crime.
[00:17:38]  You know, like, so they, so they're like, they're down with the cutout because they're just like, yeah, you do it.
[00:17:45]  I don't want my name on this show.
[00:17:46]  She's fucking crazy, but go with it for sure.
[00:17:48]  I love it.
[00:17:50]  Keep me out of the loop.
[00:17:51]  But I love it.
[00:17:52]  Yeah, they didn't know about the bombing of Cambodia the same way I have never known a pot dealer.
[00:17:57]  Right.
[00:18:00]  So Sitton would regularly, like, I don't know, I'm not going to say this is to his credit, but he was like, this is weird.
[00:18:05]  And he would go, he did on a couple of occasions go to his superiors and was like, are you okay with this?
[00:18:11]  And his exact phrasing of what they responded was, just do just what you're doing.
[00:18:15]  When you get a call to go to the White House, go because you don't really have a choice, which is great.
[00:18:20]  Oh, my God.
[00:18:20]  It feels so good.
[00:18:22]  It's straight out of the show snowfall.
[00:18:24]  Like, it's just like this shit just happens all the time.
[00:18:28]  Yeah, this is what happened with Iran-Contra.
[00:18:30]  It was the same fucking shit.

=== Nonsense Escalation Logic (04:35) ===

[00:18:32]  Yeah.
[00:18:33]  It's all crimes.
[00:18:33]  And it's worth noting that, like, the United States is going to war with a neutral country in secret under the personal direction of a guy who several months ago had been a Harvard professor.
[00:18:42]  Like, Kissinger is not even a year distant from being a fucking teacher.
[00:18:46]  And now he is orchestrating a secret war in Cambodia.
[00:18:50]  I mean, and like, I love the, I love the beginning thing where you said there's like a guy whose job it is to pick targets and he's picking targets and Kissinger's taking the maps and going, no, I like this.
[00:19:02]  Oh, you should bomb here.
[00:19:03]  Like, just totally random.
[00:19:05]  He doesn't have any fucking idea what he's doing.
[00:19:07]  He's just like, that hill looks like it should go away.
[00:19:10]  He has not even begun to micromanage this war crime, Dave.
[00:19:16]  So the purpose of this illegal bombing campaign was not just to stop the movement of Vietnamese troops and materiel, it also played a role in advancing what Nixon called his madman theory.
[00:19:28]  Now, the president had shared this with close confidants prior to the 1968 election.
[00:19:32]  He told his future chief of staff that in order to negotiate an end to the war with favorable terms, he felt he had to make the North Vietnamese, quote, believe I've reached a point where I might do anything to stop the war.
[00:19:43]  We'll just slip the word to them that, for God's sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed about communists.
[00:19:48]  We can't restrain him when he's angry.
[00:19:49]  And he has his hand on the nuclear button.
[00:19:51]  And Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.
[00:19:55]  Which is like the idea: someone's like, so you want us to try to convey that you're crazy?
[00:19:59]  Okay, that seems, I think it's coming across her, honestly.
[00:20:03]  I think that's already baked into this whole thing a little bit.
[00:20:07]  It's also very funny that, like, they are trying to scare Ho Chi Minh, who at this point is fighting his second winning war against a major world power with like a very, very small number of people.
[00:20:19]  You know, like North Vietnam, not a big country compared to, say, the French imperial forces or the United States.
[00:20:27]  He's not a kind of, you're not going to scare Ho Chi Minh, right?
[00:20:31]  He's not a guy who gets spooked.
[00:20:33]  No, it's over.
[00:20:34]  That's just absolutely not happening at this point.
[00:20:36]  Yeah.
[00:20:37]  Now, Kissinger either believed in his boss's plan or understood that he had to play along.
[00:20:42]  Greg Grandin argues that Nixon's madman theory was actually just an extension of the foreign policy arguments that Kissinger himself had been making for years.
[00:20:49]  Quote, toughness, after all, was a late motif that ran through much of his statecraft.
[00:20:54]  The idea that war and diplomacy are inseparable, and that, to be effective, diplomats need to be able to punish and persuade an equal, unrestricted measure.
[00:21:02]  In fact, the madman theory was an extension of Kissinger's philosophy of the deed, that power wasn't power unless one was willing to use it, that the purpose of action was to neutralize the inertia of inaction.
[00:21:13]  I mean, it like it's not even, I mean, it's not a double down.
[00:21:17]  It's like you've, it's 18 double downs, but at some point, you just I at least in my lifetime had a moment where I did believe that there were there were people who were who would like point out the crazy shit.
[00:21:34]  And the more you learn, the more you go, no, there's just, there's not.
[00:21:37]  They are just all like, it's like a bunch of junkies figuring out how to get more junk.
[00:21:42]  Yeah.
[00:21:42]  I mean, it's just like, it's just how do you get through the day?
[00:21:45]  It's not long-term anything.
[00:21:47]  Yep.
[00:21:47]  You know, there's a degree to which, and this is like one of the things that's most frustrating about this.
[00:21:53]  Part of how this always gets justified is there's legitimate logic in that, yeah, Hitler gobbled up a bunch of little chunks of Western Europe and nobody stopped him and they should have.
[00:22:03]  Like something should have been done like when he decided to take Czechoslovakia, you know, or during the Angelus or certainly, you know, like there, and they take this logic of like, yeah, if you have this like massive militarized nation gobbling up its neighbors, you can't just necessarily do nothing.
[00:22:19]  And they apply that to like, well, okay, we've got to bomb Cambodia because some dudes are hiking through it with guns on their back.
[00:22:25]  Like Chamberlain.
[00:22:27]  Nonsense escalation.
[00:22:29]  Chamberlain also is always in play there too, because it's like everyone's like, oh, you don't want to be Chamberlain.
[00:22:34]  Yeah.
[00:22:34]  We're appeasing North Vietnam if we don't drop more bombs than were dropped in all of World War II on Cambodia.
[00:22:40]  Yeah, it's in Cambodia.
[00:22:42]  It's this nonsense escalation of logic, of historical logic that's like...
[00:22:48]  Like someday Nixon's just going to look in the mirror and be like, sometimes I think I'm just fighting a war inside of myself.
[00:22:55]  There actually are some quotes from Kissinger that aren't all that far off here.

=== Chamberlain's Fatal Mistake (03:16) ===

[00:23:07]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:23:11]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:23:15]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:23:17]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:23:21]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:23:25]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:23:31]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:23:36]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:23:37]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:23:39]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:23:41]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:23:44]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:23:46]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:23:48]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:23:53]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:23:54]  Trust me, babe.
[00:23:55]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:05]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:24:11]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:24:15]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:24:21]  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.
[00:24:31]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:24:36]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:24:39]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:24:42]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:24:44]  That's so funny.
[00:24:45]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:24:54]  Say you love me.
[00:24:56]  You know I.
[00:24:58]  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.
[00:25:06]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:25:11]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:25:18]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:25:25]  From power to parenthood.
[00:25:27]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:25:30]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:25:32]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:25:34]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:25:39]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:25:45]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:25:48]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:25:54]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:25:56]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:25:59]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:26:07]  What's up, everyone?
[00:26:08]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:26:10]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:26:18]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.

=== Both Countries Have Too Many Nukes (15:47) ===

[00:26:24]  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.
[00:26:29]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:26:31]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:26:33]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:26:35]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:26:40]  Yeah.
[00:26:41]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:26:44]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:26:45]  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.
[00:26:54]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:26:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:27:02]  Just hang in there.
[00:27:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:27:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:27:06]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:27:08]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:27:17]  We're back.
[00:27:18]  So the first bombing mission in this operation was launched on March 18th, 1969.
[00:27:25]  Kissinger was in conversation at the time when he was interrupted with a note telling him that the bombing run had been a success.
[00:27:31]  He smiled and then sent the information on to the president.
[00:27:34]  Nixon's chief of staff later recalled, historic day.
[00:27:36]  Kissinger really excited.
[00:27:38]  He came in beaming with the report.
[00:27:40]  Now, it was noted by people who were around the White House that Kissinger seemed to enjoy, quote, playing the bombardier, taking great pains to direct the destruction.
[00:27:50]  Seymour Hirsch wrote that, quote, when the military men presented a proposed bombing list, Kissinger would redesign the missions, shifting a dozen planes, perhaps, from one area to another and altering the timing of the bombing runs.
[00:28:04]  He has no fucking expertise in this area.
[00:28:06]  Absolutely none.
[00:28:08]  He's a fucking nerd who reads books.
[00:28:11]  Like, you don't know anything about what to bomb, Henry?
[00:28:13]  It's like me showing up at a hospital and being like, all right, give me the surgical schedule.
[00:28:18]  I need to start working these surgeries and getting them in order.
[00:28:21]  Like, it's fucking crazy.
[00:28:24]  It is.
[00:28:26]  I mean, there's a human impulse here, right?
[00:28:28]  We're seeing it in Ukraine where all these like random people are being like, here's how you disable a tank.
[00:28:33]  And it's like, you've never disabled a tank.
[00:28:34]  You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
[00:28:36]  Like, you're not going to, like, throwing paint on it isn't going to stop it.
[00:28:39]  You're going to get people killed if anyone's stupid enough to listen to you.
[00:28:42]  Shut up.
[00:28:43]  It's just like Kissinger is actually in a power to really do that.
[00:28:47]  And there's this, I don't know what it is.
[00:28:49]  I don't know what it is that makes some people certain that like they know how to prosecute an entire war based on their experience reading a lot of books at a school.
[00:28:58]  And it doesn't sound like there's anybody who's going like, well, that doesn't make any sense.
[00:29:02]  Is this out of its mind?
[00:29:04]  Yeah.
[00:29:04]  Yeah.
[00:29:05]  So it's just like, it is.
[00:29:06]  It's just people being like, okay, sure.
[00:29:08]  Because there's a lot.
[00:29:09]  Obviously, the unrestricted drone warfare that escalated during the Obama administration and continued at an even higher pace under Trump is indefensible morally.
[00:29:19]  But also the way that it tended to work was like you would get, you know, these guys, the administration, whichever one it was, would say like, these are the things we are going to target with drones.
[00:29:29]  And then the military would bring them like, well, here are the different options for strikes that we have.
[00:29:33]  And they would like pick which one to do.
[00:29:35]  Kissinger is literally taking the maps from them, erasing their plans and like writing in his own, which is like...
[00:29:44]  It's a coach in the huddle with an action, like with Coach K. He's drawing a play on a whiteboard and then a fan just scribbles it out and like rubs it all down with his arm and then he's like, instead, why don't we all run up the court at the same time and then we pass the ball a bunch and try to do it.
[00:29:58]  That would make someone head the ball into the net.
[00:30:02]  I think, yeah.
[00:30:04]  I'm just upset because I bought 40 gallons of paint.
[00:30:07]  Because you were going to try to knock out a couple of tanks.
[00:30:11]  Now the whole fucking thing is shot.
[00:30:14]  Yeah.
[00:30:16]  There are some things paint is good at when it comes to conflict.
[00:30:20]  There were some very funny moments in one of the big chud fights we had up in Portland where kids filled a fire extinguisher with paint and like ruined thousands of dollars in tactical gear.
[00:30:29]  That was nice.
[00:30:30]  That was good.
[00:30:31]  Wow.
[00:30:33]  Yes.
[00:30:33]  Look, that's not to say that amateurs never have good ideas, but no.
[00:30:38]  They were not amateurs at that point, though.
[00:30:40]  Those kids had been fighting those proud boys for a minute.
[00:30:43]  So Kissinger's extraordinary degree of control over the situation was possible because he had literally reformed the entire national security apparatus around himself.
[00:30:52]  Nixon wanted a buffer from his own Secretary of State, which provided Henry with the opportunity to take as much power and centralize it around the National Security Advisor.
[00:31:01]  And he could do this as long as he kept Nixon happy.
[00:31:03]  Under Kissinger, the National Security Council, which he headed, became the center of U.S. foreign policy.
[00:31:09]  A massive bureaucracy fed piles of information, embassy cables, cables, intelligence reports, et cetera, straight to Henry Kissinger.
[00:31:16]  He decided.
[00:31:17]  He's again, Henry is where all of the information from this vast apparatus that the U.S. has to gather information, right?
[00:31:23]  The eyes and ears of the president, you know, all of the things that are supposed to provide the president with information, all of that comes directly to Henry, and he decides what to give the president.
[00:31:33]  And he was a teacher.
[00:31:34]  And he was a president.
[00:31:35]  A year before.
[00:31:37]  He was a guy whose primary claim to fame before this was: we need more nukes.
[00:31:41]  We don't have enough fucking nukes.
[00:31:43]  And also, we should use them whenever.
[00:31:47]  I was just watching.
[00:31:47]  There's a great documentary called Command and Control that's about a nuclear disaster in the U.S. in 1980 that nearly killed half of the people on the East Coast that enough folks don't know about.
[00:31:56]  A guy accidentally dropped a bolt and it ignited part of a nuclear missile and it nearly killed everyone on the Eastern seaboard.
[00:32:03]  Yeah, it was a big old, it was a big kerfuffle.
[00:32:07]  Nazis, guys, there's a screw fell in the thing.
[00:32:11]  That's nuts about it.
[00:32:12]  But one of the things that pointed out, I think we have, Sophie can Google this for me.
[00:32:16]  I think we have about 6,000 nuclear weapons right now, which is way too many.
[00:32:19]  But as a result, we have, yeah, we have the Soviet Union.
[00:32:24]  Russia has around 6,000.
[00:32:26]  We have around 4,800, I think.
[00:32:28]  4,800.
[00:32:29]  So that's too much.
[00:32:30]  Both countries have too many nukes.
[00:32:31]  I think we can all say that's fair.
[00:32:33]  It's a lot.
[00:32:34]  I'm not sad enough on that.
[00:32:35]  As a result, in part of Kissinger's, we have a missile gap and we need to build more.
[00:32:39]  By this point in the mid-60s, there are 32,000 nuclear weapons in the United States.
[00:32:46]  That's even an aside because it's like a Kardashian with shoes.
[00:32:50]  Well, I feel my thing has always been every person who owns property should be allowed to have a nuke.
[00:32:58]  Your own nuke.
[00:32:59]  Look, I think we can all agree.
[00:33:01]  You know what?
[00:33:02]  You know what there wouldn't be if everyone had a nuke, Dave?
[00:33:05]  No knock raids by the cops.
[00:33:06]  That's true.
[00:33:07]  If you're not going to have any of that shit, they ain't going to be busting down doors.
[00:33:11]  Yeah.
[00:33:12]  No, come on in, guys.
[00:33:14]  It's fine.
[00:33:16]  Doors open, asshole.
[00:33:20]  Real different situation, Ari the cops, if everybody's got a nuke.
[00:33:24]  Other problems, though.
[00:33:25]  There would be some other problems.
[00:33:26]  I don't see any other problems.
[00:33:29]  So, anyway, Kissinger is the Kissinger has effectively turned himself into the eyes and ears of the United States military apparatus.
[00:33:38]  He decides what the fucking crazy you can argue he's one of the two or three most powerful people who's ever lived at this point.
[00:33:47]  An argument could be made.
[00:33:49]  So Marvin and Bernard Kolb, who are both diplomats at this point, describe what Henry builds here as Henry's wonderful machine.
[00:33:56]  Quote, since Kissinger, Mr. Magorium's nuclear emporium.
[00:34:06]  Since Kissinger controlled the system, he controlled the decision-making process.
[00:34:10]  Everyone reports to Kissinger, and only Kissinger reports to the president.
[00:34:13]  This setup allowed Henry to micromanage bombing campaigns, order covert arms deals, and engage in secret diplomacy at will.
[00:34:20]  He was not merely executing the president's orders.
[00:34:22]  He himself was free to make national policy as long as Nixon was happy with him.
[00:34:27]  From Kissinger's shadow, quote, Kissinger, according to Marvin and Bernard Kolb, knew almost instinctively that he would be able to control the bureaucracy and thus help reorder American diplomacy only to the degree that he became indistinguishable from the president and his policies.
[00:34:42]  Rogers at State was opposed to the idea of escalating the war into Cambodia.
[00:34:45]  Laird at the Pentagon was for it, but thought it needed to be done aboveboard, legally and publicly, through the normal chain of command.
[00:34:51]  This gave Kissinger an opening, letting him stake out a nay-plus ultra position.
[00:34:55]  He wanted to bomb.
[00:34:56]  He wanted to bomb in a way that inflicted the most pain.
[00:34:59]  And he wanted to bomb in absolute secrecy, completely off the books.
[00:35:03]  Fuck yeah.
[00:35:03]  As a result, every war crime committed by the United States during the Nixon administration, every bad thing U.S. forces do, particularly under the ages of special operations, at least, right?
[00:35:15]  Has to be considered one of Henry Kissinger's crimes because it is his job to personally sign off on all of them.
[00:35:21]  And he is not just a rubber stamper.
[00:35:24]  He is actively pushing for things.
[00:35:27]  So we are going into very specific detail about one specific crime.
[00:35:31]  If you find a bad thing that the U.S., that U.S., the CIA or special forces did from 1969 to 1973, Henry Kissinger gave that the old thumbs up.
[00:35:40]  So again, we're going to have to leave out a lot.
[00:35:44]  It doesn't even sound like it's, I mean, it's like ego-based.
[00:35:49]  Yeah.
[00:35:50]  It's not even, I mean, there's so little actual, and it just shows you like what happens when you're in a bubble.
[00:35:56]  Yeah.
[00:35:57]  But I mean, I just don't think most people would.
[00:36:00]  would be capable of this, but it is.
[00:36:03]  It's just like, it's not really from anything other than he is just feels great being at the helm of this.
[00:36:09]  And it's an extremely powerful position.
[00:36:11]  It's such a bad idea.
[00:36:13]  Like, if you proceed, like a moment, get ourselves in the headspace of someone who thinks all of this is morally justified, it's a bad idea because a person can't competently manage all of this.
[00:36:24]  Right.
[00:36:24]  Like, they would be like, look, I need help.
[00:36:28]  I mean, this is what you're doing.
[00:36:29]  What we came to do.
[00:36:30]  Like, a reasonable warlord would be like delegated, rational, level-headed.
[00:36:36]  Yeah.
[00:36:37]  Yeah.
[00:36:37]  I mean, yeah.
[00:36:39]  So when he was signing off on bombing runs, Kissinger poured over raw intelligence documents, which included information on exactly, in many cases, down to the number, how many civilians lived in a certain target area.
[00:36:52]  Now, sometimes it was a little bit less specific in this.
[00:36:54]  For example, Area 704, which had, quote, sizable concentrations of civilians, didn't have an exact number, but was bombed 247 times on Henry Kissinger's orders.
[00:37:04]  And since we're going to be talking a lot about bombing, we should discuss exactly what that meant in this case, because all bombings are not created equal.
[00:37:10]  The bombings Kissinger directed were carried out by B-52 bombers.
[00:37:14]  These are massive planes.
[00:37:15]  These are like the size of the big international commercial aircraft, roughly, right?
[00:37:19]  These are not like fighter jets and stuff.
[00:37:22]  These fly too high to be seen from the ground, and they are incapable of meaningful discrimination between civilian and military targets.
[00:37:29]  This is not an era in which there's much at all in the way of precision-guided bombing.
[00:37:33]  And with a B-52, you cannot even attempt precision.
[00:37:36]  You are dropping explosives blindly from like a mile up.
[00:37:40]  I want to quote now from a write-up by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan for Yale.
[00:37:44]  Quote, a single B-52D big belly payload consists of up to 108 225 kilogram or 42 340 kilogram bombs, which are dropped in a target area of approximately 500 by 1500 meters.
[00:37:58]  In many cases, Cambodian villages were hit with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours.
[00:38:03]  The result was near total destruction.
[00:38:05]  One U.S. official stated at the time, we had been told, as had everybody, that those carpet bombing attacks by B-52s were totally devastating, that nothing could survive.
[00:38:13]  It's like a sturgeon with eggs.
[00:38:16]  Yeah.
[00:38:16]  Yeah.
[00:38:16]  It is completely indiscriminate.
[00:38:20]  Yeah.
[00:38:21]  One Cambodian survivor, because people did live, as we've stated, these are never as good at killing people as the military likes to claim, which is not to minimize the horror.
[00:38:30]  It's just like, it's also not, it doesn't work.
[00:38:33]  Except, I mean, one Cambodian survivor of U.S. bombing described it this way.
[00:38:38]  Three F-111s bombed right center of my village, killing 11 of my family members.
[00:38:43]  My father was wounded but survived.
[00:38:44]  At that time, there was not a single soldier in the village or in the area around the village.
[00:38:48]  27 other villages were also killed.
[00:38:50]  They had to run into a ditch to hide, and then two bombs fell right into it.
[00:38:54]  Oh, for fuck's sake.
[00:38:55]  Yeah, it is.
[00:38:56]  Yeah.
[00:39:02]  You cannot exaggerate the extent to which this is indiscriminate.
[00:39:06]  Yeah, it's just total madness on top of madness.
[00:39:09]  Yeah.
[00:39:09]  I mean, there's no...
[00:39:10]  Yeah.
[00:39:11]  People are rightly furious about bombing in Ukrainian cities right now.
[00:39:17]  What the United States is doing in Cambodia is eliminating grid squares on a map of all life.
[00:39:24]  Right.
[00:39:25]  Yeah.
[00:39:26]  Which is a country that has nothing to fucking do.
[00:39:29]  Yeah, some dudes are walking through it, you know?
[00:39:31]  Like, it's cop logic.
[00:39:32]  We're like, well, a guy who stole a car was seen in this neighborhood, so we had to shoot anyone, someone we saw in the window of their house, you know?
[00:39:39]  Like, it's that kind of shit.
[00:39:41]  Which I guess it makes sense that cops act the way they do because this has always been the way people with guns and power act everywhere through all time.
[00:39:49]  Yeah.
[00:39:49]  Yeah.
[00:39:50]  So that's good.
[00:39:50]  Yeah.
[00:39:51]  Yeah.
[00:39:52]  So the ostensible purpose of all this carnage was to put an end to North Vietnam's ability to wage war.
[00:39:57]  But a huge factor for both Kissinger and Nixon, even larger than any actual like impact on the war itself, was to preserve their personal power.
[00:40:05]  Right after the bombing of Cambodia began, Nixon sent Kissinger to talk with the Soviet ambassador, a fellow named Dubrinian.
[00:40:12]  In Henry Kissinger in American Power, Thomas Schwartz writes, quote, Kissinger put forth a straightforward domestic political account for Nixon's motivation and thinking, noting that Nixon is not seeking a military victory, but he cannot go down in American history as the first U.S. president to have lost a war in which the U.S. participated.
[00:40:33]  Oh, I mean, the honest, like, you'd think you'd at least lie about it.
[00:40:38]  No, no.
[00:40:39]  Just the, oh, my God.
[00:40:42]  Look, murdering democide is one thing, Gareth.
[00:40:47]  But dishonesty, to friends?
[00:40:50]  It's just, it's disgusting.
[00:40:52]  That's, I feel like a parent.
[00:40:53]  Look.
[00:40:53]  The Soviet ambassador is someone Kissinger drinks with, you know?
[00:40:56]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:40:57]  You gotta lie to him.
[00:40:58]  I mean, I just, I would love to see a version where he just keep up an appearance.
[00:41:03]  Look, you can't, we just, Nixon hates losing.
[00:41:05]  That's what this is about.
[00:41:07]  We can't take the people.
[00:41:09]  Yeah.
[00:41:09]  It's.
[00:41:10]  So between March of 1969 and May of 1970, more than 3,630 raids were flown across the Cambodium border.
[00:41:18]  Each was approved personally by Henry Kissinger.
[00:41:20]  The New York Times broke this story to the American public for the first time in May of 1969.
[00:41:26]  So that's pretty good, right?
[00:41:28]  Like the New York Times actually is pretty shocking on this and reveals what has happened.
[00:41:33]  This prompts protests and international outcry.
[00:41:36]  That's one of the frustrating things about the New York Times because there's a million things to be angry at them all the time.
[00:41:40]  And then it's like, oh, and they also were the first people to reveal this horrific crime against humanity.
[00:41:45]  There are these bright spots where you're like, oh, you fuckers.
[00:41:49]  It's like a broken clock, though.
[00:41:50]  It's, you know, every now and then.
[00:41:51]  It's like a broken clock, but when it's right, it's about like the massacre of civilians on an industrial scale.
[00:41:58]  But also when it's wrong, it's about the massacre of civilians on an industrial scale.
[00:42:04]  So mixed bag.
[00:42:08]  So there's immediately protest and international outcry.

=== Revisiting the Massacre (02:02) ===

[00:42:12]  Armed students seize a building at Cornell University, which is very based.
[00:42:16]  Students at Kissinger's own Harvard engage in a two-week strike.
[00:42:19]  Ever PR savvy, Kissinger agreed to meet with student protesters in order to prop up his image among liberals.
[00:42:25]  He told them, if you come back in a year and things haven't changed, we won't have a morally defensible position.
[00:42:30]  So like, hey, you know, I know it's all fucked up.
[00:42:32]  I've got to fix this whole messed up.
[00:42:34]  It's been going on for years.
[00:42:35]  You know, I'm working on it.
[00:42:36]  If you come back in the world, I will figure it out.
[00:42:40]  I figure out.
[00:42:40]  Once I find out who's the problem, there's a cog in here.
[00:42:45]  Give me one year to kill all the babies.
[00:42:48]  And it also shows how fucking crazy you are.
[00:42:51]  Like, if you're doing this, you know, you'd be like, look, hide me.
[00:42:55]  I do not want to talk to the fact that he's like, I'll meet with them.
[00:42:58]  It seems like he can make it work.
[00:43:00]  Yeah.
[00:43:00]  In front of us.
[00:43:02]  Get me on front of it.
[00:43:03]  I'll just tell him what's up.
[00:43:05]  Like, look, we got to kill people for like a year.
[00:43:08]  Let's see how it goes.
[00:43:10]  Give me a year.
[00:43:11]  I'm going to bomb the shit out of just villages and shit and kill a bunch of babies and ladies.
[00:43:16]  You have no idea how to do it.
[00:43:18]  It's just nice.
[00:43:20]  Nice to be back in Harvard.
[00:43:21]  Look at the campus.
[00:43:22]  You guys already changed a couple of things, huh?
[00:43:25]  You guys are just like, you guys are like, oh, I heard something bad.
[00:43:30]  We're just getting started.
[00:43:31]  By the way, give me a year is an amazing thing to say when this, it's on this list.
[00:43:36]  Look, yeah.
[00:43:36]  If this is happening in the year, we'll revisit.
[00:43:39]  It's like, yeah, no, not a year.
[00:43:41]  You don't get to revisit this.
[00:43:43]  You know, we should revisit.
[00:43:45]  We should revisit where we are in the story after this break.
[00:43:52]  Yeah, let's revisit the sponsors of this show.
[00:43:55]  You know who else?
[00:43:57]  You know who else need a year to keep killing?
[00:44:00]  Yeah.
[00:44:00]  Look, if has not stopped the carpet bombing of Cambodia in a year, then you can cancel your subscription, you know?
[00:44:09]  By the way, talking, that's menus.
[00:44:11]  Those are menu options.

=== We Should Revisit Sponsors (03:54) ===

[00:44:14]  Yeah, it's very much like a White House visit with a hell of a...
[00:44:16]  Well, do you want to make a quesadillo or do you want to do this chickpea salad?
[00:44:21]  What do you want to do?
[00:44:23]  There's options.
[00:44:23]  You want to do a flatbread, Margaritas, though?
[00:44:35]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:44:39]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:44:43]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:44:45]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:44:49]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:44:53]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:44:56]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:44:58]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:45:03]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:45:05]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:45:07]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:45:09]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:45:12]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:45:14]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:45:16]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:45:21]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:45:22]  Trust me, babe.
[00:45:23]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:45:33]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:45:39]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:45:46]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:45:52]  From power to parenthood.
[00:45:54]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:45:58]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:46:00]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:46:02]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:46:07]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:46:13]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:46:16]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:46:22]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:46:24]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:46:27]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:46:35]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:46:41]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:46:46]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:46:51]  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.
[00:47:01]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:47:06]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:47:09]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:47:12]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:47:14]  That's so funny.
[00:47:15]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:47:24]  Say you love me.
[00:47:26]  You know.
[00:47:28]  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.
[00:47:35]  What's up, everyone?
[00:47:36]  I'm Ego Moda.
[00:47:37]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:47:45]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:47:48]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:47:52]  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.
[00:47:57]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:47:59]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:48:03]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Kissinger Staff Behind Desk (15:20) ===

[00:48:08]  Yeah.
[00:48:09]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:48:11]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:48:13]  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.
[00:48:21]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:48:24]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:48:30]  Just hang in there.
[00:48:31]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:48:33]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:48:34]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:48:36]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:45]  Oh, we're back.
[00:48:47]  So there's congressional inquiries about the illegal carpet bombing of Cambodia.
[00:48:52]  What are they after?
[00:48:53]  What?
[00:48:53]  They smell some smoke?
[00:48:54]  I should also note, seizing Cornell offices with arms, dope.
[00:49:00]  Actually, sitting down with Henry Kissinger to let him talk about how things aren't really that bad.
[00:49:04]  Not dope.
[00:49:05]  Maybe throw a stapler at his face, you know, something.
[00:49:07]  Yeah.
[00:49:08]  Try to hit him.
[00:49:09]  You fucking hit him really hard.
[00:49:11]  Try to hit him, you know?
[00:49:12]  At least give him a shoe, you know.
[00:49:14]  You've got options.
[00:49:16]  Somebody from a fucking baseball team at Harvard had to have been able to hit him with a fastball.
[00:49:20]  There are people that, if you're around, you should.
[00:49:24]  Cheney, Bush, you get around certain people.
[00:49:27]  You get close to him.
[00:49:28]  You should fucking hit them.
[00:49:30]  Hit them hard.
[00:49:31]  Look, Dick Cheney is basically like a charging phone.
[00:49:34]  Just unplug him at this point and see what happens.
[00:49:36]  Just whatever his little plug is, just be like, turn on a microwave next to him.
[00:49:41]  Just have a microwave and an extension cord and put it on a popcorn and throw it in his lap.
[00:49:45]  Yeah, but look, we all know, everybody here knows that eventually Cheney and Kissinger shed their human skins to become one ball of energy.
[00:49:58]  I think Kissinger currently is shedding his human skin.
[00:50:00]  If you've seen him lately, it looks like he's halfway through the fingers crossed.
[00:50:04]  Yeah.
[00:50:04]  But the two of them merge and then wings pop.
[00:50:07]  Oh, yeah, I get it.
[00:50:08]  So they kind of become like a cerebral or something like that.
[00:50:12]  Yeah, then they're one.
[00:50:13]  It's like, come on, Henry, let's get out of here.
[00:50:15]  Finally, they got true form.
[00:50:17]  It's a good centipede of evil.
[00:50:19]  Then they locate and nuke microbiological life on Europa.
[00:50:27]  We are calling it.
[00:50:28]  This is a war crime no one has done yet.
[00:50:30]  Oh, I love calling my thing.
[00:50:33]  Didn't see this coming.
[00:50:35]  So there's congressional inquiries.
[00:50:36]  Kissinger gets brought before the Senate where he assures everyone that Cambodian territories bombed by the U.S. were all, quote, unpopulated.
[00:50:43]  He knew this was a lie at the time.
[00:50:44]  We know from briefing documents Kissinger received that he was warned in detail about such things.
[00:50:49]  The breakfast bombing target, he was told, was inhabited by 1,640 civilians.
[00:50:53]  Dessert had 350.
[00:50:56]  Nixon initially.
[00:50:57]  It's just like ice cream.
[00:51:00]  Yeah.
[00:51:02]  You wouldn't get angry at me for bombing a Baskin Robbins, would you?
[00:51:06]  There are no people there.
[00:51:08]  Senator, who hates cake?
[00:51:10]  It's called the magic shell.
[00:51:13]  So Nixon eventually initially blamed Kissinger for the leaks that had revealed the story of the bombing of Cambodia to the New York Times.
[00:51:20]  And this is because Kissinger brings in a lot of liberals.
[00:51:23]  Like a lot of Kissinger's staff are not Republicans.
[00:51:26]  They're not like right-wing guys.
[00:51:28]  They're like Northeastern liberals.
[00:51:30]  Yes, because he's charming.
[00:51:35]  They are not.
[00:51:37]  But Nixon is like, it must have been one of these East Coast liberals you brought in that leaked at the Times.
[00:51:41]  Oh, he right.
[00:51:42]  So he thinks it's an extension of Kissinger, not Kissinger himself.
[00:51:45]  No, no, no, he doesn't think Kissinger.
[00:51:47]  That would be someone's really up to something.
[00:51:50]  Somebody's fucking around.
[00:51:51]  Somebody's a big ass holiday.
[00:51:53]  I won't tell you who, though.
[00:51:54]  But Kissinger's like bringing Woody Allen in.
[00:51:56]  He's funny.
[00:51:58]  He's good.
[00:52:00]  This is some good context on how comprehensively shitty a person Kissinger is, how incapable of real loyalty he is.
[00:52:09]  Thomas Schwartz writes that in order to preserve his own position, Kissinger had to throw large numbers of his team members under the bus.
[00:52:15]  Quote, Kissinger called FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and gave him a list of those staffers in his office with access to the information, telling Hoover that he would destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is.
[00:52:26]  Among the first to be wiretapped was Morton Halperin, who had helped devise the NSC system, Helmut Sonnenfeld, Kissinger's fellow German Jewish refugee, and even Winston Lord, the man Kissinger later called his conscience on foreign policy issues.
[00:52:39]  And all there would be 17 FBI wiretaps up by the White House, 13 on government employees, including Kissinger's staff, and four on newsmen, among them Kissinger's British friend who was a reporter for the London Times.
[00:52:50]  It's a meteoric raw.
[00:52:52]  It's like American idol-level sudden impact as far as, I mean, as you pointed to, he wasn't like this crazy.
[00:53:04]  I mean, he was crazy, but now it's like he's just, it's on Reuts.
[00:53:09]  The level that he, the level he's gotten to and the level of insanity that he's gotten to is really, even for this country, historic.
[00:53:19]  Yeah, it's pretty cool.
[00:53:21]  And just like he's not capable of even like treating his very loyal friends well.
[00:53:29]  So, yeah, this would come back to bite Kissinger and Nixon in the ass in the not too distant future, but we're going to take a while to get to that because there's a lot in between there and now.
[00:53:38]  So let's return to Cambodia.
[00:53:40]  It is worth noting that Operation Minyu achieved nothing.
[00:53:43]  It was useless in a military sense.
[00:53:44]  The enemy command and control facilities they were ostensibly trying to destroy were never taken out.
[00:53:49]  And it was useless from a negotiating standpoint because North Vietnam did not bulge.
[00:53:54]  Budge.
[00:53:55]  Bulge.
[00:53:55]  In May of 1970.
[00:53:57]  They bulged, baby.
[00:53:58]  They fucking bulge.
[00:53:59]  In May of 1970, Nixon decided to escalate again by ordering a ground invasion of Cambodia.
[00:54:05]  He announced this with a typically unhinged speech.
[00:54:08]  And again, this is public because at this point, you know, the New York Times has revealed things.
[00:54:11]  So we live in an age of anarchy.
[00:54:14]  We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the past 500 years.
[00:54:20]  What's happening?
[00:54:22]  It's because kids are like protesting in colleges.
[00:54:25]  Yeah.
[00:54:26]  Like, yeah.
[00:54:27]  He framed it as a test of the nation's quote will and character.
[00:54:31]  Oh, seriously.
[00:54:32]  No, he's right.
[00:54:32]  When one of his staff members, when Kissinger's staff members balked at plans to illegally invade Cambodia with ground troops, troops, Henry told him, quote, your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern establishment.
[00:54:44]  This staff member, William Watts, tried to physically attack Henry Kissinger, who hid behind his desk.
[00:54:52]  It's just like, if he was only able to just kill him, imagine the ripple.
[00:54:57]  If only there'd been a sharper letter opener on the desk.
[00:55:00]  He could have just penned and put it like a pen through his neck.
[00:55:03]  Yeah.
[00:55:04]  It's very funny that Kissinger did at some point have to hide behind a desk to stop his staff from assaulting him.
[00:55:10]  So strong, bombing everywhere, and then he's hiding under his desk.
[00:55:14]  All right, relax.
[00:55:15]  So this staff member, Watts resigns right after this.
[00:55:19]  And when staff member Anthony Lake echoes Watts' concerns, Kissinger, presumably still hiding behind his desk, calls Lake not manly enough to do what was necessary.
[00:55:28]  And so Lake resigns too.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:31]  Bold words from hiding behind a desk.
[00:55:34]  Yeah, big tough guy.
[00:55:36]  Four days after Nixon's speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia, four students were shot dead at Kent State during a protest over the invasion.
[00:55:43]  Nine more were wounded.
[00:55:44]  Two weeks later, at Jackson State, police shot into a crowd of black students protesting the war.
[00:55:49]  Two were killed and 12 wounded.
[00:55:51]  The invasion prompted some of the first consequences and only consequences Kissinger ever faced.
[00:55:57]  Stern rebukes from fancy academics he respected.
[00:56:00]  A group of them, men who had often acted as his brain trust and advised him and other presidential advisors on issues, marched into his office after the invasion.
[00:56:09]  One of the men, Thomas Schelling, opened by saying that he supposed he should explain who they were.
[00:56:13]  Kissinger responded with confusion that I know who you are.
[00:56:16]  You're all good friends from Harvard.
[00:56:18]  Next, from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger.
[00:56:21]  No, said Schelling, we're a group of people who have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy, and we have come to tell you so.
[00:56:29]  We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisors.
[00:56:32]  Each of them then proceeded to berate him, taking five minutes apiece.
[00:56:36]  Now, this scene from Rudy when they all hand in their uniform to get ready to play.
[00:56:47]  It's like that.
[00:56:48]  And this is like Rudy.
[00:56:50]  If you have, oh, God, what's his fucking name?
[00:56:53]  I'm spacing.
[00:56:54]  The West Wing motherfucker.
[00:56:55]  Oh, Aaron Sorkin.
[00:56:56]  Aaron Sorkin.
[00:56:57]  If Aaron Sorkin is wrong.
[00:56:58]  The West Wing motherfucker.
[00:56:59]  That is the best description of him.
[00:57:02]  If Aaron Sorkin is writing this, this is like the heroic moment where the conscience of the American ruling class comes in and is like, this is not right, Henry.
[00:57:10]  And really, that's bullshit.
[00:57:12]  That's not what's happening.
[00:57:13]  And Ferguson goes on to note that these guys were kind of full of shit.
[00:57:17]  They are all Washington insiders.
[00:57:19]  They have advice.
[00:57:20]  Schelling advised LBJ to massively escalate violence throughout the war in Vietnam.
[00:57:25]  Ferguson continues, and this is his explanation of what they were really doing.
[00:57:28]  Quote, for these men, publicly breaking with Kissinger, with journalists briefed in advance about the breach, was a form of self-exculpation, not to say an insurance policy as student radicals back on the Harvard campus ran riot.
[00:57:40]  When Neustadt told The Crimson, I think it's safe to say we're afraid, he did not specify of what.
[00:57:44]  Others were more candid.
[00:57:46]  As Schelling put it, if Cambodia succeeds, it will be a disaster, not just because my Harvard office may be burned down when I get home, but it will even be a disaster in the administration's own terms.
[00:57:56]  It's amazing.
[00:57:58]  For fuck's sake.
[00:58:00]  Yeah.
[00:58:01]  I mean, honestly, this happens on the dollop a lot where I'm like, all right, we got a hero.
[00:58:05]  And then immediately I'm like, more villains.
[00:58:07]  God damn it.
[00:58:08]  I mean, to the extent that there's some heroes, the kids on these campuses who are actually like lighting buildings on fire and destroying things, they do make Henry Kissinger and his academic friends afraid and uncomfortable briefly, which is more than anyone else does.
[00:58:21]  Yeah, and wouldn't, I mean, this would kind of be the last time that that even happens, really, right?
[00:58:27]  That like people in that level of power do feel any sort of like threat from the regular folk.
[00:58:34]  Yeah, credit where it's due, they are the only people that I'm aware of who made Henry Kissinger briefly feel something that vaguely resembles shame.
[00:58:42]  Emotion.
[00:58:43]  Yeah, good, like seriously, good work.
[00:58:46]  But of course, you know, that doesn't stop anything, obviously.
[00:58:50]  No, he's got, yeah, he's got many desks.
[00:58:53]  Yeah.
[00:58:54]  So Cambodia falls into chaos as a result of the sad, as most places would when bombed on this level, right?
[00:59:00]  Hard to maintain a state with this level of things exploding.
[00:59:05]  It is unclear precisely how many people die in Operation Menu, the subsequent invasion of Cambodia, and the bombing campaigns that followed.
[00:59:11]  The low estimate is 50,000.
[00:59:14]  The high estimates are 150,000 to 200,000.
[00:59:17]  30 to 50,000 lotions die in the bombing campaign, which makes the sparsely populated nation the most densely bombed place on earth.
[00:59:24]  30% of these bombs failed to detonate, and in the years since the bombing, another 20,000 people have died from the estimated 80 million bombs left in the soil.
[00:59:33]  40% of the victims are children.
[00:59:35]  One aid worker said of the situation, there are parts of Lao where there is literally no free space.
[00:59:40]  There are no areas that have not been bombed.
[00:59:42]  And when you are in the villages now, you still see the evidence of that.
[00:59:45]  You see the bomb craters.
[00:59:47]  You still see an unbelievable amount of metal and wreckage and unexploded ordnance just lying around in villages.
[00:59:51]  And it's still injuring and killing people today.
[00:59:54]  What a legacy.
[00:59:54]  Now, if any of this concerned Nixon and Kissinger, I would like to just throw out there that I do feel that gardening should be more dangerous.
[01:00:04]  Yes, nobody's in disagreement about that.
[01:00:06]  And we have enough bombs in this country to make gardening a lot more dangerous.
[01:00:11]  Yeah.
[01:00:12]  That is my 24.
[01:00:16]  If there's not a one in three chance digging up a potato loses you a goddamn arm, you're not really a gardener.
[01:00:26]  How are the tomatoes?
[01:00:27]  Ken's dead.
[01:00:30]  Ken died.
[01:00:33]  If any of this concerned Nixon and Kissinger, we have no evidence of it.
[01:00:37]  We know that in 1972, Nixon asked, how many did we kill in Laos?
[01:00:41]  And the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, responded with a guess, maybe 10,000?
[01:00:46]  15?
[01:00:47]  Kissinger agreed.
[01:00:49]  In the lotion thing, we killed about 10, 15.
[01:00:52]  This is how they talk about...
[01:00:54]  It's the showcase showdown.
[01:00:56]  Three to five 9-11s worth of people.
[01:00:58]  I mean, it's the way you talk about it.
[01:01:01]  Did you get like one bag of grapes or two?
[01:01:03]  Yeah, I had two bags of grapes.
[01:01:05]  What's the cover fee to get into that, to get into that concert?
[01:01:08]  It's like 10 or 15 bucks, you know?
[01:01:10]  Yeah.
[01:01:12]  They're just complete and total fucking psychopaths.
[01:01:14]  And they're off by a half at least, you know.
[01:01:16]  It's hard to get accurate death tolls here.
[01:01:20]  And the bombs were not the only thing left behind by the campaign that Kissinger orchestrated.
[01:01:24]  Greg Grandon writes, Defoliation chemicals did their work.
[01:01:27]  Just over a two-week period, April 18th to May 2nd, 1969, U.S. dropped Agent Orange caused significant damage.
[01:01:34]  Andrew Wellsdang, who has long been involved in relief aid to Southeast Asia, writes, both the U.S. government and independent inspection teams confirmed that 173,000 acres were sprayed, 7% of Kompong Cham province, 24,700 of them seriously affected.
[01:01:49]  The rubber plantations totaled approximately one-third of Cambodia's total and represented a loss of 12% of the country's export earnings.
[01:01:56]  Washington agreed to pay over $12 million in reparations, but Kissinger tried to defer the payment to fiscal year 1972 when the money could be paid without a specific, without a special request that would have revealed U.S. cross-border activity.
[01:02:09]  Every effort, Kissinger wrote, should be made to avoid the necessity for a special budgetary request to provide funds to pay this claim.
[01:02:16]  Oh, my God.
[01:02:17]  Look, we're going to need the money.
[01:02:19]  You're going to get the money.
[01:02:20]  You're going to get the money.
[01:02:22]  I just need to get it.
[01:02:23]  It's like a tax thing.
[01:02:25]  Yeah, I need to move some stuff around.
[01:02:26]  But you're going to get it.
[01:02:28]  It's fine.
[01:02:29]  Let's just keep it on the deal.
[01:02:31]  You know what I mean?
[01:02:32]  Yeah.
[01:02:32]  Yeah, it is.
[01:02:33]  He service wasn't calling Trump Agent Orange, by the way.
[01:02:37]  If that wasn't his code name, that's a disappointment.
[01:02:40]  That is, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be disappointed in the Secret Service, but that is one of them.
[01:02:44]  That's my number one.
[01:02:46]  So the loss of life and economic damage caused Cambodia to spiral into chaos, or at least it was a factor.
[01:02:52]  Other stuff's going on.
[01:02:53]  We have a couple episodes about King Notadom Sahanuk, who was a real piece of shit in the king of Cambodia in this period.
[01:02:58]  A lot's happening.
[01:03:00]  But unrest caused by the bombings and the economic devastation helped to spark a right-wing coup, which was likely orchestrated with CIA help and thus with the direct input of Henry Kissinger.
[01:03:10]  You guys are looking to change things up here.
[01:03:12]  We've got a plan.
[01:03:13]  We got an idea.
[01:03:14]  Does it matter what happens?
[01:03:15]  Someone bomb you?
[01:03:16]  Why don't we provide some help?
[01:03:18]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:03:19]  And the coup, you know, overthrows the king, who then starts backing the Khmer Rouge, who then wins.
[01:03:26]  They're great.
[01:03:26]  Yeah, they're counter-revolution against the right-wing coup.

=== Communism Will Kill People (06:04) ===

[01:03:29]  And this leads to the establishment of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government.
[01:03:33]  Yay!
[01:03:34]  Once the Rouge took over in 1975, Nixon had left office.
[01:03:38]  Kissinger, though, was still in power.
[01:03:40]  In November of 1975, he told Thailand's foreign minister, you should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them.
[01:03:46]  They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way.
[01:03:49]  We are prepared to improve relations with them.
[01:03:52]  I mean, we get it.
[01:03:53]  We get it.
[01:03:54]  Kissinger.
[01:03:56]  They're my people.
[01:03:57]  We're murdering.
[01:03:58]  I get it.
[01:03:59]  Murderous thugs.
[01:04:00]  I'm all about murderous thugs.
[01:04:01]  I think we could find common ground.
[01:04:04]  This man wants to kill a million people.
[01:04:06]  I think that is a cute start.
[01:04:08]  I feel adorable.
[01:04:10]  In 1988, when questioned on this, Kissinger explained that, quote, the Thai and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina.
[01:04:17]  We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate.
[01:04:19]  I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot, but I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot.
[01:04:25]  Of course, the United States attempted at least to provide direct military aid to the Khmer Rouge in order to help them oppose Vietnam.
[01:04:32]  And there's a lot of debate and uncertainty.
[01:04:33]  It seems that very little, if any, actually made it to the Khmer, but this is primarily because of difficulty getting shit into Cambodia at this point in time.
[01:04:42]  But it is fair to say that Kissinger and Nixon's actions were crucial in creating the circumstances that brought Pol Pot to power.
[01:04:49]  And once he was in charge and massacring people, they tacitly supported his government because they thought it would stymie the Vietnamese.
[01:04:55]  In total, from the killing that started when the U.S. bombing raids began, to the people killed by Pol Pot's regime, to those who died fighting in the fighting with Vietnam that finally brought the Rouge to an end, 1.7 million Cambodians died, more than a quarter of the population of the country pre-war.
[01:05:09]  It's so incredible how their ideology of just communism bad.
[01:05:17]  They're like, well, communism will kill a bunch of people.
[01:05:19]  And they're just fucking everything they can to save those people.
[01:05:24]  Well, and it's also like, they don't even really believe communism because the Khmer Rouge are communist as hell.
[01:05:29]  And they're fine with working with them because it's Vietnam as the ones who beat them.
[01:05:32]  And so they're angry at Vietnam.
[01:05:34]  And it's like, and Vietnam fights Cambodia.
[01:05:37]  Like, it's not, there's no, these people don't believe in anything.
[01:05:42]  Yeah.
[01:05:42]  There's not good lessons to take from this, but no, it's, it's really.
[01:05:47]  Someone should have stabbed Henry Kissinger.
[01:05:49]  That's for sure.
[01:05:50]  Oh, just if that guy stabbed him.
[01:05:52]  There's so many people we should have stabbed.
[01:05:54]  I mean, there's so many, but Kissinger's way up there.
[01:05:58]  And in this story, right?
[01:05:59]  Like, we're not, obviously, you can't blame all of the deaths in Cambodia on Kissinger a lot, just like you can't blame all of the deaths in Vietnam on Kissinger and Nixon, but like the degree to which he's central to a lot of the worst actions in these wars.
[01:06:12]  Well, and to the, I keep thinking about the point you made in the last episode where it, you know, the idea that LBJ that he broke up the LBJ plan to sort of end all of this and just for political reasons made that not happen.
[01:06:31]  And that just that the avenue that we are down now is just, I mean, it's unconscionable.
[01:06:39]  And there's so much.
[01:06:41]  We also, besides just the straight bombings, we destabilize areas.
[01:06:47]  We change the trajectory.
[01:06:50]  Look, Putin is our fucking doing.
[01:06:52]  Yeah.
[01:06:53]  We fucking took out the government.
[01:06:56]  Yeltsin, all that shit, that was a fucking option.
[01:06:58]  I'm not going to let you sit here and talk shit on Yeltsin.
[01:07:01]  He was very in control of what he was doing.
[01:07:03]  He definitely knew what was happening.
[01:07:05]  It wasn't like having a bottle of Smirnoff in charge.
[01:07:08]  Nothing that happens.
[01:07:09]  Everything we get involved with turns into a fuck pie.
[01:07:12]  I mean, it's just, we just create chaos.
[01:07:15]  Yeah.
[01:07:16]  We're murder Midas.
[01:07:18]  It's this thing where we're talking about how insane it is that Kissinger is micromanaging these bombings, which is not to say that the military men who were doing it before were particularly better.
[01:07:30]  And this is the problem that we're going to have, you know, with Ukraine and whatnot, too.
[01:07:34]  It's just that, like, well, now we have all of these people who are supposed to be, or the people we call experts who are now going to be doing things.
[01:07:41]  And like, if you actually look at their resumes, it is not a wide-ranging history of successes, you know?
[01:07:48]  And it is the same thing with Russia.
[01:07:49]  You could look at like Russian intervention in a bunch of places.
[01:07:51]  It's a nightmare.
[01:07:52]  The kind of people who are in a position to make calls when the conflicts get to this level are always ghouls.
[01:08:00]  And they're always bad at anything but causing devastation.
[01:08:05]  And that's why all of this keeps happening.
[01:08:07]  Because none of these people are any good at it.
[01:08:09]  And no one gets punished for failing.
[01:08:11]  And nobody ever gets punished.
[01:08:13]  I mean, the fact that Bill Crystal is still saying what anybody should do anywhere in the world, you're like, what in the fuck is going on?
[01:08:22]  Who gets to go?
[01:08:23]  Who goes away?
[01:08:24]  Whoever goes away.
[01:08:26]  Favoriting his tweet.
[01:08:27]  I imagine.
[01:08:29]  I know somebody who lost their job at a grocery store because they got arrested protesting for like protesting against police violence.
[01:08:35]  Oh my God.
[01:08:36]  Meanwhile, Bill Crystal's like a guest on media shows.
[01:08:42]  Yeah.
[01:08:42]  It's Bill.
[01:08:43]  What do you think?
[01:08:44]  Well, I mean, yeah, it's frustrating.
[01:08:48]  Every now and then, far too seldom, you get a story like that billionaire Russian arms dealer whose yacht got partially sunk.
[01:08:55]  But there's like three of those stories for every thousand Kissingers.
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:09:00]  And they don't ever mean anything because that guy can afford to fix his fucking yacht.
[01:09:04]  No, it's like when they were egging Bezos' boat when he was getting that bridge torn down.
[01:09:09]  Yeah.
[01:09:09]  You're like, I mean, it's like he's going to have someone hose it down.
[01:09:16]  And that's fine.
[01:09:18]  Everybody, look, yachts burn.
[01:09:20]  We know this.
[01:09:21]  We've seen it.
[01:09:22]  They burn.
[01:09:23]  That's the thing.
[01:09:24]  Yachts burn, and so do Bill Crystals.
[01:09:26]  Bill's crystal.
[01:09:27]  So I think it's like an eternal.
[01:09:29]  No, yeah.
[01:09:30]  Actually, when you burn him, he just turns into a few crystals.

=== Nixon Cooks Up a Plan (15:35) ===

[01:09:34]  So, Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger's Shadow, sees the bombing campaign in Cambodia and Laos as the terminal phase in what he calls the crackup of America's domestic consensus, which had begun under Johnson.
[01:09:45]  Kissinger considered conditions in the country at the time of Kent State to be, quote, near-Civil War conditions.
[01:09:51]  The paranoia Nixon had felt led him to push for illegal expansions of domestic surveillance, which eventually led to his ouster from office.
[01:09:58]  The Senate investigation into the Watergate scandal concluded: quote, Kent State marked a turning point for Nixon, the beginning of his downhill slide towards Watergate.
[01:10:06]  Nixon grew increasingly unhinged, which is a story for another time.
[01:10:11]  Exactly.
[01:10:12]  Hey, Nixon's starting to lose it, gang.
[01:10:14]  It is worth noting that for all of the things happening at this point, Nixon is, as a rule, anytime I quote him and Kissinger talking, Nixon is, as a rule, drunker than you have ever been.
[01:10:24]  Right.
[01:10:24]  Like than you have ever been.
[01:10:26]  I don't care how drunk you've gotten.
[01:10:28]  You have never gotten Nixon in the White House hammered.
[01:10:32]  So with Kissinger's help, Nixon cooks up a plan to pursue an arms control treaty in order to discredit his political rivals.
[01:10:40]  Kissinger agreed that attacking the left was the right way to distract from the disaster they'd created in Southeast Asia.
[01:10:46]  He told his boss, We've got to break the back of this generation of democratic leaders.
[01:10:51]  Nixon responded in agreement: We've got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.
[01:10:56]  Good news on that one, buddy.
[01:10:58]  Yeah, I mean, honestly.
[01:11:00]  You know what?
[01:11:01]  A rare swish.
[01:11:04]  And he's drunk, and he's right.
[01:11:05]  Yeah, that is a hole in one for you, my friend.
[01:11:09]  No notes.
[01:11:10]  So prescient.
[01:11:11]  Yeah.
[01:11:11]  Yeah.
[01:11:12]  Re-election in 1972 was always going to be dicey for Nixon and Kissinger.
[01:11:16]  Nixon's plan was the infamous Southern strategy, cultivating racial resentment in order to turn whites into a reliable Republican voting bloc.
[01:11:24]  There's a lot to be said about this.
[01:11:25]  Obviously, we're just kind of breezing past it.
[01:11:27]  But part of the strategy, part of his strategy for doing this, to get these southern whites on his side, was to continue carpet bombing huge chunks of Southeast Asia, even though this had no impact on the war's course and he knew it.
[01:11:39]  Grandin described the continued bombing as, quote, blood tribute paid to the growing power of the American right.
[01:11:46]  And as, yeah, just and it, I mean, it is like, I mean, you, it's, it's what our politics is now, which is just constantly the optics on how to get re-elected.
[01:11:57]  It's just the number crunch on how do you get re-elected by doing things illegally or, you know, shifting priority, whatever it is.
[01:12:04]  But unmasking, yeah, yeah, or change, yeah, whatever it is.
[01:12:08]  I mean, you know, like we all know that war helps poll numbers.
[01:12:12]  So well, some of them do.
[01:12:14]  Yeah, right.
[01:12:16]  But I mean, in the short term, it seems like it's, it's a short, there's a short-term gain to be made.
[01:12:21]  Certainly, if you're on the right, for sure.
[01:12:22]  Yeah.
[01:12:23]  And it's worth noting because I always had this idea, even past the point where I stopped believing Henry Kissinger was a hero, that he was doing what he was doing in Southeast Asia because there were like very specific, wonky things he believed about the conduct of the war and how to win it.
[01:12:43]  He was just like willing to do these horrible things.
[01:12:45]  But like, no, they know it's not winning the war.
[01:12:48]  This is for votes.
[01:12:49]  Yeah.
[01:12:50]  And Kissinger.
[01:12:52]  So, I mean, you're basically just saying it is just a white supremacist thing.
[01:13:00]  They're killing people of color to make whites in the South happy.
[01:13:06]  Yeah.
[01:13:06]  That's all we're saying.
[01:13:07]  Yeah.
[01:13:09]  Yeah.
[01:13:10]  White supremacist, the country.
[01:13:11]  But that doesn't fit on a lawn placard.
[01:13:14]  Yeah.
[01:13:15]  You're one of those like in this in this house, we believe in the Nixon administration.
[01:13:20]  We believe in covering up the right war crimes with doubling down on racism.
[01:13:25]  And so it's worth noting, too.
[01:13:27]  Kissinger isn't just micromanaging the actual racist bombing campaign that they're doing to get votes.
[01:13:32]  He is also the front man Nixon sends out to talk to right-wing leaders to try and like pump them up about this.
[01:13:39]  Nixon sent him to talk to Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California.
[01:13:44]  Kissinger sat down on Nixon's behalf with Billy Graham, with William F. Buckley, with Bob names.
[01:13:49]  Oh, God.
[01:13:50]  His patter went like this: The president wanted me to give you a brief call to tell you that with all the hysteria on TV and in the news on Lau, we feel we have set up everything we set out to do, destroyed more supplies than in Cambodia last year, set them back many months.
[01:14:05]  We achieved what we were after.
[01:14:06]  Well, I tell you, I really can't wait to go out there and rally those troops, Sir Hank.
[01:14:11]  Having just been doing some research, he is friends with Frank Sinatra.
[01:14:16]  Frank would call him on the phone.
[01:14:18]  Yeah, that sounds right.
[01:14:19]  That fucking sounds right.
[01:14:20]  Can I get a nuclear weapon?
[01:14:22]  Is that possible?
[01:14:25]  Frank Sinatra with a nuke.
[01:14:26]  That's, yeah, there's no people left if that had happened.
[01:14:29]  I put some agent on and Dean Martin's drink and I didn't notice, baby.
[01:14:34]  Kissinger spent a particularly long time bragging to Ronald Reagan about the administration's achievements.
[01:14:39]  Quote, we wouldn't have had Cambodia.
[01:14:41]  We wouldn't have had Laos, and we wouldn't have had an $80 billion defense budget, you know, without Nixon getting elected.
[01:14:47]  He also told Reagan, we wouldn't have had Amchitka.
[01:14:50]  Now, Amchitka is an island off the coast of Alaska.
[01:14:53]  In the early 1970s, the White House wanted to nuke it for a lot of complicated reasons.
[01:14:57]  Oh, I get that.
[01:14:59]  This is one thing I'm actually with them on.
[01:15:02]  Not other islands, but specifically Amchitka.
[01:15:05]  We're like, Amchitka.
[01:15:11]  So the White House wants to nuke this island off the coast of Alaska.
[01:15:14]  And a lot of environmentalists and indigenous people are just folks whose brains aren't.
[01:15:21]  Why the fuck can I do that?
[01:15:22]  Why do they hate freedom?
[01:15:24]  They hate freedom.
[01:15:26]  Here's Greg Grandon again.
[01:15:27]  The test had no military or scientific benefit, but was seen as something of a ritual by the right.
[01:15:32]  Fireworks to celebrate the end of Johnson's presidency when many hawks like Curtis LeMay felt the United States had fallen behind on nuclear development.
[01:15:40]  Then, when public opposition to the detonation began to grow, Nixon had a chance to show conservatives that he would stand up to liberals.
[01:15:47]  He let it be known that were the Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the test, he would go forward anyway.
[01:15:52]  The court didn't block the test, but Haldeman told Kissinger to play it for politics anyway.
[01:15:57]  Tell Reagan we're taking an unmitigated heat in order to keep that thing going.
[01:16:01]  We need all the support of the right.
[01:16:02]  Later, after the test was conducted, Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater and mocked the fears of environmentalists.
[01:16:08]  The SEALs are still swimming, the president said.
[01:16:10]  I'm damn proud of you, Goldwater told him.
[01:16:15]  I need to get a bucket to Barfin.
[01:16:18]  When people think like, oh, we've become dumb recently, we've always been so fucking stupid.
[01:16:25]  It cannot be emphasized enough.
[01:16:27]  We're just really dumb.
[01:16:28]  I honestly, I definitely thought that we've...
[01:16:34]  I mean, it is a shocking level of dumb.
[01:16:36]  It's the fact that it's just this dumb.
[01:16:40]  It's just been going on.
[01:16:41]  It's like Newcastle Island because he wanted a fireworks show.
[01:16:46]  Yeah, because he wanted fireworks.
[01:16:48]  And it's just so they could tell Reagan.
[01:16:51]  It's like his gender reveal fucking party.
[01:16:54]  Right, right.
[01:16:55]  Jesus Christ.
[01:16:57]  It is worth noting for the sake of talking about how dumb we still are today.
[01:17:03]  Curtis LeMay, who was one of the people cheering on the bombing of this random island, is essentially the hero of Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Bomber Mafia, which talks about how cool the bombing apparatus we set up was and how it helped keep things peaceful and built the wonderful Pax Americana.
[01:17:20]  I'm sure these Cambodian civilians we've talked about appreciate it.
[01:17:24]  Well, that's the one where you need to, once you have 10,000 bombs, you're an expert.
[01:17:27]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:17:28]  That's right.
[01:17:29]  If you drop 10,000 bombs, you're an expert.
[01:17:32]  Yeah, that's exactly.
[01:17:34]  So in order to be able to do it right, you have to do it wrong, Volta.
[01:17:38]  Log those bombs.
[01:17:39]  You got to log the bombs.
[01:17:40]  That's exactly right, Gareth.
[01:17:43]  So part of what made Kissinger remarkable, though, was his ability to rope conservatives in line for mass murder while also charming the entire liberal establishment of the East Coast.
[01:17:52]  Nixon's chief of staff later recalled, we knew Henry as the hawk of hawks in the Oval Office.
[01:17:57]  But in the evenings, a magical transformation took place.
[01:18:00]  Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove, and the press, beguiled by Henry's charm and humor, bought it.
[01:18:08]  They just couldn't believe that the intellectual, smiling, humorous Henry Vick was a hawk like that bastard, Nixon.
[01:18:15]  It really is all about, like, if Donald Trump had talked like an Aaron Sorkin character and like quoted books that people don't read, but know are smart books, he would have been the most popular president in a generation.
[01:18:30]  Well, and I mean, that'll happen.
[01:18:32]  Yeah, no, they'll figure it out.
[01:18:33]  One of them will figure it out.
[01:18:34]  Yeah.
[01:18:34]  Yeah.
[01:18:34]  It'll get cracked.
[01:18:36]  And you got to dial the racism down a little and you got to dial the polite up and then kind of equalize them.
[01:18:44]  And then you can get the right access to the right people and media.
[01:18:50]  Yeah.
[01:18:50]  You know.
[01:18:51]  I mean, we already saw that.
[01:18:52]  I mean, even under Trump, where you've got all these fucking reporters who had these like bombshells about horrible crimes being committed that they like didn't release for a year and change because they got a book deal.
[01:19:01]  Yeah.
[01:19:02]  Yeah, right, right.
[01:19:03]  Yeah.
[01:19:03]  Yeah.
[01:19:04]  I mean, John Bolton was basically just there to write a book.
[01:19:07]  Yeah, everyone was.
[01:19:08]  The whole administration was.
[01:19:09]  Yeah.
[01:19:10]  They're like fucking Navy SEALs with the books.
[01:19:12]  Yeah.
[01:19:14]  So Kissinger's reputation was as a brilliant computer-brained policy wonk, but his success came from his charm.
[01:19:19]  He was able to win reporters over with a mix of leaks and effusive praise for their work, something that made them feel like insiders and thus sympathetic.
[01:19:27]  He had a regular series of lunches with Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal historian, whom he made sure to confidentially inform, I have been thinking a lot about resignation after the invasion of Cambodia.
[01:19:38]  Schleshinger was not privy to the information that proved Kissinger had planned the whole thing, so he believed Kissinger when Henry said that he'd only kept working for Nixon to prevent more damage to, quote, institutions of authority.
[01:19:49]  Kissinger would warn his liberal friends that if he resigned, Spiro Agnew would run foreign policy.
[01:19:55]  He was basically threatening, if I'm not here, the far right's going to be totally in power in foreign policy.
[01:20:00]  I'm the only one keeping things from going crazy.
[01:20:03]  It's like sessions with Trump.
[01:20:05]  I mean, there are multiple people like that, but the amount of times that people would be like, oh, McMasters, you know, these are the good guys inside of the, you know, hates this too as he's drawing on a map where to annihilate.
[01:20:16]  Yeah.
[01:20:16]  Yeah.
[01:20:18]  And it works.
[01:20:18]  It always works.
[01:20:20]  And it works.
[01:20:20]  And it works over and over and over again.
[01:20:23]  As a rule, if their job is to be a journalist who spends their time face to face with powerful people, they're bad at their job.
[01:20:32]  As a rule.
[01:20:34]  Every now and then you get an exception.
[01:20:36]  But as a rule.
[01:20:37]  No, it's like when Chomsky points out to that reporter that why he's sitting in that seat.
[01:20:42]  Yeah.
[01:20:43]  You get the odd people who are willing to report on the Pentagon papers or whatever.
[01:20:46]  And like, do you know, you get, or the Afghanistan papers, the Washington Post, not to downplay the fact that there are people in those institutions who do damning reports on power, but also the level of complicity within the broader media apparatus means that even when you get a damning report on, for example, the war in Afghanistan, which the Washington Post, if you've read that, it's utterly damning.
[01:21:09]  It didn't do anything.
[01:21:10]  Doesn't matter.
[01:21:11]  It doesn't stop anything.
[01:21:12]  They're very, I mean, you know, and then the reason why people do it less and less is because you're attacked.
[01:21:18]  So, I mean, it works.
[01:21:20]  The public attacks discredit you, and then you are what you are.
[01:21:25]  You no longer get access to that information.
[01:21:27]  Yeah, it's great.
[01:21:28]  So a good example of how Kissinger used his charm is a speech he gave at MIT in January of 1971.
[01:21:34]  He started off by feigning a confidential air and telling the students that Nixon had not been his, quote, first choice, but that in time he'd come to see the bombing of Cambodia as the only quote sensible path towards Vietnamization.
[01:21:46]  Vietnamization is like the process of the U.S. getting out and South Vietnam taking over, right?
[01:21:50]  That's the big buzzword Nixon and Kissinger are using.
[01:21:53]  When one student asked him what it would take to make him resign from the Nixon administration, Kissinger said he wouldn't, quote, unless gas chambers were set up or some horrendous moral outrage.
[01:22:05]  Wait, wait, what is it?
[01:22:06]  What does that mean exactly?
[01:22:07]  He wouldn't get out unless unless Nixon was setting up gas chambers.
[01:22:12]  I mean, what the fuck?
[01:22:13]  The dude who said like his childhood to an audience.
[01:22:16]  His childhood didn't affect him in any way.
[01:22:18]  Yeah, outrageous.
[01:22:20]  And it's confidence.
[01:22:22]  The student, and it's interesting because the student who asked this question of Kissinger later realized, like, is there really a difference between forcing people into a gas chamber and incinerating them from the sky with a bombing campaign?
[01:22:35]  I guess not.
[01:22:36]  But at the moment, this doesn't really occur to him.
[01:22:38]  And at the moment, he writes, quote, he had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one of us.
[01:22:44]  And right, I'll blame the journalists.
[01:22:45]  Like, I'm not going to blame a student for falling for Henry because he's essentially still a child.
[01:22:50]  And Henry Kissinger is the most powerful man in the world.
[01:22:53]  Of course, he's good at talking circles around these fucking kids.
[01:22:57]  The week after that speech, Kissinger and Nixon sent ground troops into Lao after another massive round of aerial bombardment.
[01:23:03]  This involved 17,000 South Vietnamese troops supported by U.S. air power.
[01:23:08]  It was a catastrophe.
[01:23:09]  8,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed or wounded.
[01:23:12]  The United States lost 215 men.
[01:23:14]  Nixon considered it a victory because it played well with conservatives.
[01:23:18]  When the media fucking gone, and he's drunk.
[01:23:22]  And he's drunk.
[01:23:23]  And he's pretty good, isn't it?
[01:23:26]  That's not too bad, bro.
[01:23:28]  He just pounded back an entire bottle of vodka before saying that.
[01:23:32]  When the media savaged Lau as a pointless bloodbath, Kissinger ran to his boss and complained about vicious coverage, saying, if Britain had pressed like this in World War II, they would have quit in 42.
[01:23:43]  Both Kissinger and Nixon saw Lau as a win because it benefited their domestic chances of re-election.
[01:23:48]  As Nixon told his right-hand man, the main thing, Henry, on Lau, I don't care what happens there.
[01:23:53]  It's a win.
[01:23:54]  See?
[01:23:54]  Oh, a win to see you.
[01:23:56]  So he's a little gangster.
[01:23:57]  That's right, Henry.
[01:23:58]  It's a win, see?
[01:23:59]  It's incredible.
[01:24:00]  Dirty coppers.
[01:24:01]  Oh, and as the re-election campaign turned forward, Kissinger was about to help his boss engineer another win.
[01:24:08]  And this one, boy, howdy, you think we've seen a body count so far?
[01:24:14]  My God, what the fuck?
[01:24:16]  I'm still.
[01:24:17]  That's still mourning that island off of Melask.
[01:24:20]  Now they're in sweeps.
[01:24:21]  Yeah, yeah, now they're hitting sweeps.
[01:24:23]  And if you think hundreds of thousands of Cambodian dead plus eighting and the deaths of another million or so was bad, it was.
[01:24:31]  It's really bad.
[01:24:31]  It's a historic crime.
[01:24:33]  But also, Henry Kissinger's just getting started.
[01:24:36]  So, you guys want to plug anything?
[01:24:42]  My ears.
[01:24:43]  Just death.
[01:24:47]  I remember because when I did an episode on our podcast about Tim Leary, and there's a lot of the Nixon law and order president stuff in there and how drunk he was, but also his lunch every day was pineapple circles with cottage cheese in the middle.
[01:25:06]  And so that was his, that was his daily drunk lunch.

=== Thirty People Deserve Death (02:59) ===

[01:25:10]  And then there's the one night where he's starting to feel the heat.
[01:25:14]  Well, maybe I don't know if you'll get into that.
[01:25:16]  Well, he basically goes out hammered with his valet and he goes and talks to some of the people protesting him.
[01:25:23]  And like one of the, he wakes one of these guys up and he's like, you really think I'm a bad guy?
[01:25:27]  And the guy's just like, the fuck is going on right now?
[01:25:31]  Nixon?
[01:25:34]  Drunk Nixon out, cow cruising.
[01:25:36]  Yeah, well, we'll, um, we, as you know, look, it sounds like the world loves America after hearing some of this stuff.
[01:25:43]  So we will be going to Australia on a tour.
[01:25:46]  You can go to dollopodcast.com for those tour dates.
[01:25:49]  We'll be touring America.
[01:25:51]  And even if we do badly, we won't bomb as hard as Kissinger and Nixon.
[01:25:56]  Yeah.
[01:25:56]  I mean, it would be hard to.
[01:25:58]  It would be pretty tough to bomb on that level.
[01:26:01]  I don't, I honestly, we still have a lot of bombs.
[01:26:04]  I don't know if we have enough bombs to bomb that hard anymore.
[01:26:07]  I don't think so.
[01:26:08]  I honestly think we could pull our pants down and fight with our penises and still people be like, that's not.
[01:26:14]  I've seen, I've heard of worse bombings.
[01:26:16]  I have seen a couple of cities leveled by American bombs at this point, and it's still not as much as fucking Lau got bombed.
[01:26:23]  Jesus Christ.
[01:26:24]  Yeah.
[01:26:25]  He cannot process it.
[01:26:27]  And it may as well.
[01:26:28]  I'm on the road to go to GarethReynolds.com for tour dates.
[01:26:31]  Yeah.
[01:26:32]  But it feels wrong to do that.
[01:26:36]  It's a hard promotion.
[01:26:38]  Well, I will put in a plug for the concept of death because as long as men die, you know, there's all of these ghouls eventually had to face the end of everything in the same way that those people in Cambodia did.
[01:26:55]  And one day it will come for Henry Kissinger and he will be frightened and alone and left with nothing but a lot of people.
[01:27:00]  I feel like he bombed the Reaper.
[01:27:02]  I mean, he like he is the level of melting.
[01:27:06]  I mean, he is.
[01:27:07]  I hope he dies.
[01:27:08]  I hope he just, I hope he shits himself and then slowly dies over eight hours.
[01:27:13]  Yes.
[01:27:13]  It needs to be like that.
[01:27:14]  He needs to be, it needs to be a letting.
[01:27:16]  There's a, you know, the one war criminal in all of history who got close to what he deserved is Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, who stupidly charged a bunch of assassins and got wounded by a bomb and shat into his own guts for several days until he died of sepsis over the course of a week and change.
[01:27:34]  That's that's the kind of death.
[01:27:36]  That's war.
[01:27:37]  And not just Kissinger.
[01:27:38]  There's like 30 people we've named in this story who deserve that kind of death.
[01:27:43]  There's a lot of folks who died old and relatively, you know, unpunished, you know?
[01:27:49]  They all, most of them do.
[01:27:50]  Not all of them.
[01:27:51]  That would be great to hear a judge sentence Kissinger to that.
[01:27:53]  Like it would sentence you to shitting in your own guts for about a week after a bomb disembowels you.
[01:27:59]  That's the right, that's the right punishment for this kind of stuff.
[01:28:04]  All right.
[01:28:06]  Yeah.
[01:28:06]  Yeah.

=== Pre-Order Your Signed Copy (02:56) ===

[01:28:10]  Hi, everybody.
[01:28:11]  Robert Evans here, and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org.
[01:28:17]  Now, if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution, just google akpress.org after the revolution.
[01:28:24]  You'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
[01:28:27]  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.
[01:28:35]  You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold.
[01:28:42]  So please Google AK Press After the Revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it.
[01:28:49]  You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.
[01:28:52]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:29:00]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:29:03]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:29:05]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:29:07]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[01:29:11]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:29:13]  Trust me, babe.
[01:29:14]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:29:23]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:29:28]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[01:29:31]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:29:34]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:29:36]  That's so funny.
[01:29:38]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:29:46]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:29:54]  What's up, everyone?
[01:29:54]  I'm Ego Modem.
[01:29:56]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:30:00]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:30:03]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:30:04]  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.
[01:30:11]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:30:14]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:30:21]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:30:23]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:30:24]  There's a lot of life.
[01:30:25]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts on the Ceno Show podcast.
[01:30:34]  Each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:30:39]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:30:46]  The entire season two is now available on the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:30:53]  I'll go home and bring out this program.
[01:30:56]  I'm a guide.
[01:30:57]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:31:02]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:31:05]  Guaranteed human.