Henry Kissinger emerges as a master manipulator whose career was defined by moral relativism and political opportunism rather than justice. Born in 1923 Germany, his worldview was shaped by Nazi trauma and conservative mentors like Fritz Kramer, leading him to prioritize order over human rights. He championed Thomas Schelling's "moral calculus," arguing that bargaining power stems from the capacity to inflict pain, a philosophy that drove his advocacy for limited nuclear war and sabotage of 1968 Paris peace talks to secure Nixon's presidency. Through Operation Menu, he authorized secret B-52 bombings in Cambodia and Laos, causing thousands of civilian deaths while suppressing dissent through wiretaps. Ultimately, Kissinger's actions extended the Vietnam War by millions of lives, illustrating how elite technocrats can orchestrate devastation without accountability, leaving a legacy of war crimes disguised as strategic necessity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Forrest Gump War Crimes00:14:52
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Hey, everyone.
Robert Evans here.
It's the end of the year.
A couple of big heavy hitter holidays coming in a row, and we have them off both with the company and as a team.
So since there's not a new Bastards episode this week, and also since Henry Kissinger just died, we figured this would be a nice time to rerun the original six Henry Kissinger episodes.
These are great.
I think are a useful introduction if you or perhaps your friends and family don't know why a lot of people are happy that Henry's no longer in the world.
I want to thank again the dollop guys, Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds for being wonderful guests for this.
I checked in with them before we did this just to see if they had anything to plug.
Dave Anthony has an album out that you can find.
It's a hothead by Dave Anthony.
You can go to daveanthony.bandcamp.com.
I probably don't need to spell Dave Anthony for you, right?
That's a simple enough one.
And then we've got Gareth Reynolds, who is going to be touring, quote, all over the place in February and March of 2024.
They have too many links to promote as one, but if you go to GarethReynolds.com, that's G-A-R-E-T-H-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S dot com, you could find their schedule for live shows.
Gareth is wonderful.
Check those out too.
Anyway, nothing else to say.
Here are the episodes.
Oh, Sophie, this plate of behind the bastards is so heavy as we walk through this hallway.
Oh my gosh, is that David Anthony and Gareth Reynolds with a heavy plate of the dollop?
Oh no.
Oh no, I'm losing control.
Oh God, you guys are slipping too.
How was that?
So bad.
So bad.
I couldn't disagree more.
That was the most organic, just real thing I think I've ever heard, which was.
Yeah, like you're really.
The only thing I'm noticing is you didn't have plates.
So I'm wondering how I was wondering as I started it, are they going to join in or am I going to just have to commit fully to this?
And now, that's something where if it's me, I just let you go and then let you hang inside.
I would say I was a dog in a yard that wanted to leave it, but was like, I'll get it.
I'm not supposed to leave.
So I was on the other end.
I wanted to join.
Oh, gosh.
Well, this is just a wonderful time.
Obviously, again, you are Dave Anthony, Gareth Reynolds, hosts of The Dollop, the podcast that invented being funny about history on the internet.
Thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
Thank you.
We've always, for a long time, I've wanted to do something with you.
And we've talked about this, but yeah.
This has been like bouncing back and forth for a while.
And it was just one of those things where it's like, well, when we finally do our six-part series on Henry Kissinger, it's going to be the worst thing we've ever had to do.
I have a therapy session set up right afterwards.
Dave married a therapist in preparation.
That's good.
Really putting in the deep work to make this series a success.
Yeah.
So my working title for this, which they probably won't let us use, is Henry Kissinger, a big sack of donkey balls.
What's wrong with that?
Can we do that, Sophie?
I perfectly fine with that.
What are you talking about?
What do you guys know?
Like, I kind of think maybe it's a good idea to start with, like, what's your cliff's notes?
We'll have you do it, Dave, because you're the one who reads things normally.
I mean, I think that's the first time.
What's your cliff's notes of Kissinger?
Yeah.
You know, Kissinger, the thing that obviously stands out is Vietnam and Cambodia.
And, you know, that's just reprehensible beyond all words, but he's really been a part of just so many horrific foreign policy decisions and had his, he's always getting in there.
He's always a part of the business.
Really was.
I don't know if he is now, but for a long time, he was always a guy who would come in and go, why don't you do the worst thing?
Yeah.
And that's the thing that's interesting and even a little bit difficult about talking about him because he's not one of these guys.
He's not like, you can't say with him like you can with, I don't know, Saddam Hussein, like, oh, he ordered, he started this war on this date, you know, or he ordered this man.
I mean, you can, actually.
But he's not on paper supposed to be a warlord or an elected leader.
The thing that he is good at doing is getting the ability to do stuff that warlords and dictators do by sitting in the back rooms with people who are the ones who on paper hold the power and convincing them to let him do stuff.
And he's the best at that there's ever been.
We've had a couple figures on our podcast who I would relate to, like, and I would say maybe Kissinger is like the war crimes Forrest Gump, where it's like, yes, this time you're like, oh, yeah, he was there.
He invented shit happens.
I didn't know he invented that frame.
Yeah.
That's incredibly...
I mean, that's honestly a better title than the one I gave up.
That is the favorite title.
I mean, it obviously Forrest Gump is blameless and Kissinger is not, but it does get at the fact that he's just like, he's just there.
He's just in every fucking photo of like guys doing a war crime.
Like it is baffling the number of things he's connected to.
I should probably just start, stop selling it.
But I do kind of want to talk about the fact that he is, he is this kind of backroom figure in a lot of the worst things that happened in the 20th century.
Because we're going to spend episode one.
By the time this episode's over, he's not, you know, in the White House.
He's not running shit.
This is an episode where we talk about like his early life and his ideological roots because that's what underpins all of the things that he does.
He's not a guy.
People talk about like what Kissinger believes, and Kissinger himself has written a bunch of books about what he believes.
My opinion as an amateur guy studying this dude is that I don't think he believes things as much as he believes and ideas are weapons that he uses in order to get people to let him do horrible things.
And he is the master of using beliefs and moving between different groups of people who on paper are ideologically opposed and getting them all to agree with whatever bullshit he wants to do because he's really good at talking about ideas like a fucking philosopher.
Like that's his superpower.
They might just have trouble understanding him.
I know I have.
Sure, whatever.
What did we agree to?
Oh, God.
I was going to ask, Gareth, before we get started here, is your German accent locked and loaded?
I mean, listen, as to the disgust of the German people, it is.
That's fine.
That's fine.
I think we can all agree after the 20th century, the Germans lost the right to be angry when people.
It's like Texans, you know, everyone can do a Texan.
Yeah, that's how I'm sure.
I don't think I can.
I can make any accent sound kind of English and sort of Spanish at this point.
And yet can't do English.
It's really just sort of this amazing ability.
See, whenever I do a non-American accent, it just drifts Russian at some point, like 100% of the time.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Well, this is your time.
Now you can shine with what's going on.
I know, I know.
I'm ready to just yuck it up over.
Speaking of which, there's a number of roots of what's happening between Ukraine and Russia right now that you can type back to Henry Kissinger.
Jesus.
Quirk clearance.
I mean, that's a little bit less the area that he fucked around in, but he did some fucking around there.
Like one of the things, we are spending six episodes talking about Henry Kissinger, and we're leaving some shit out.
Wow.
Yeah, you have to.
I mean, he's been around so many years.
I mean, just the fact that he was still paling around with Hillary Clinton in the election, and you're like, what is that guy doing there?
Don't you know he's bad?
And he's, the thing that is so interesting about Kissinger is that he does have this equal, he's equally good at talking to like people who would call themselves liberals and progressives as he is to like far-right neocons.
Like he's, he's, he's, I mean, you could, I think you could say that part of what that reveals is that the ruling class in this country are all in agreement about things more often than they disagree about things.
But part of it is just that like he is so charming.
We will be talking a bit about Kissinger as a sex symbol, which is a thing that happens.
And I am so sorry that we have to discuss it.
No, I was hoping that you would say this because I've wanted to fuck him for so long.
Like that's one of the main things.
He's hot.
I call him Henry Fuckinger.
I've always wanted to be a kiss is not enough kiss.
That's just a taste of what I'm after.
Oh boy.
We'll A-B test the Forrest Gump and the Fuckinger title.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll just see what plays best in Powkepsy.
So Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May 27th, 1923 in the city of Firth, Germany.
The Kissingers were a Jewish family.
And so given that this is Germany in the early 20s, you can tell we're not off to a great start already, right?
This is not going to be a story that begins in a particularly pleasant place.
He was born in a very chaotic world.
The great year was like five years past when he comes onto the planet.
Everything is falling apart in Germany and a lot of other places.
The year he's born, Primo de Rivera seized power as the dictator of Spain.
Mustafa Kemal took power in Turkey.
The Bulgarian prime minister was assassinated in a coup.
Like, it was a troubling time to be a baby.
But Heinz's mother and father had some reasons for optimism.
While Firth was not an attractive city, in fact, one contemporary described it as stifling in its narrow dreariness, our ungardened city, city of soot.
You know, it's a city.
It's sooty.
It's city.
It's a working class factory town, but because of that, and this is the period in which the working class is a lot more left-wing than folks tend to give it credit for being today, it's a very, it's like a haven for Democrats, not like our Democrats, but people who support democracy as opposed to want to go back to having a Kaiser, you know?
So Firth is...
Who would want to go back to having a Kaiser?
He was so.
Yeah, we're so good.
Yeah, I want to have a king who gets us into World War I and like whacks off about his mom's hands.
That sounds great again.
Well, now that I know what we're talking about, let's dance.
I'm in.
I want a Kaiser.
So Firth is, in some ways, you could see it, its reputation in Germany as being kind of like Portland today.
It's a very left-wing town.
It's seen as a haven for socialists.
But it's also kind of like Selma, Alabama during the civil rights era, because Firth has a very large Jewish population.
And the period in like the late 1800s is when a lot of, like there's a, there's essentially apartheid against Jewish people in Germany for a long time.
So Firth is the city that has Germany's first Jewish lawyer, and it has a bunch of their other first Jewish, you know, exes, person who does this job, because it's this very progressive city with a very integrated Jewish community.
So it's this mix of, the Nazis aren't going to like this town, right?
Like Portland.
Yeah, like Portland.
Yeah, it's got some similarities between a couple of things.
So Heinz's parents, Paula and Lewis, had grown up in imperial Germany where Jews were restricted from holding certain jobs, going to certain schools, living in certain homes.
And this had ended by the time the Kaiser had.
So Lewis Kissinger, Henry's dad, came of age in a period in which a Jewish boy could actually build a professional life for the first time in mainstream German society.
He was a member of the first and almost the last generation that this would be true of.
Why?
What happens?
Oh, Dave.
We may need to do a separate podcast series today.
I've never read any German history.
Oh my God, it's so exciting.
So he starts work, Lewis, as a teacher in a secular private school when he's 18.
And he holds the job for 14 years.
And he was a very patriotic person.
He's also an Orthodox Jew, so he's very religious, but he considers himself a German first and foremost.
And his family is very patriotic.
His brother fights in World War I.
So does his wife's dad.
Two of his cousins die fighting for the Kaiser.
And when the war ends in German defeat, you know, there's all these rumors spread throughout the far right that the nation's been stabbed in the back by an alliance of Jewish boogeymen.
Heinz, or sorry, Lewis kind of, he sees this as happening, but he doesn't think that it's ever going to like take hold.
Traumatic Nazi Assaults00:14:37
Henry would later recall that his father would regularly say, we live in an age of tolerance.
So his dad is not right.
I'm sorry.
Are you talking about America in 2022 or are you talking about Germany?
Yeah, we are talking about this on the day that Texas just announced a fun new law.
Yeah, this is like, you know, Henry's wrong about a lot of stuff.
His father is also wrong, but for a much sadder reason.
Sounds like there is a psychic gene in the family.
I see us being tolerant for a generation.
Germany will be a watchword for tolerance.
We will be a bastion for all types.
Oh, poor buddy.
Yeah, so he's, it's interesting because like the Zionist movement is rising in this time.
And Kissinger's family rejects this wholeheartedly because they're so German, right?
Like they don't want to ever leave.
So obviously, the Nazi party rises consistently through Henry's childhood.
Firth was initially safe from this.
Just a few months after Heinz is born in September of 23, the Nazis and other far-right organizations hold a German Day in Nuremberg.
Several caravans of them pass through Firth, sort of like Nazis do today in a lot of places.
And, you know, they were looking for a fight when they drove through.
They went through Firth because it's the town where you can get a fight.
And they got one.
This is like right after Hintnery is born, a mob of brown shirts are assaulted by a hundred strong crowd screaming, kill them and down with Hitler.
Let's end the story there.
I love it.
It's a great end.
And that's the tale of Henry Kissinger.
A kid who was a baby when some dudes did some rad stuff.
All right.
So Firth was integrated enough that Heinz initially attended a public school with Christian classmates, which was not common for Jewish kids in this time.
Yeah, he's like going to school with other kids who are not Jewish.
Eventually, his dad puts him in a private school, but that's also an integrated private school.
So while his education is secular, his family's very strict Orthodox.
He attended Hebrew school, which he hated.
I found a quote from another Jewish guy who grew up in Firth at the same time that gives an idea as to why Henry was not a big fan of his early religious education.
Quote: Religion was a study and not a pleasant one, a lesson taught soullessly by a soulless old man.
Even today, I see his evil, conceited old face in my dreams.
He thrashed formulas into us, antiquated Hebrew prayers that we translated mechanically without any actual knowledge of the language.
What he taught was paltry, dead, mummified.
And that, I think, is broadly in line with how Henry feels, because he's not, well, he doesn't grow up very religious.
So Henry is a little kid.
You know, he does a lot of religion stuff, but as he grows older, he rejects his father's passion for faith and his dad's interests in classical music and theater.
Instead, Henry Kissinger falls in love with soccer.
He is a huge soccer head.
What the fuck is happening?
I know, right?
Oh, wow.
Firth has like a locally renowned team.
They're one of the best teams in Germany.
And so, like, their kids' teams, which are feeders into this whatever team, are very competitive too.
Henry starts playing in a youth league when he's six years old.
And he later recalled, I wasn't really very good, though I took the game seriously.
Now, what about soccer?
We should talk about that.
Oh, sorry, never mind.
So, his real prowess early on was in strategy.
As this quote from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, a book named Kissinger, like the guy, makes clear.
Though no great athlete, Heinz Kissinger was already a shrewd tactician, devising for his team a system that, as it turns out, is the way the Italians play soccer.
The system was to drive the other team nuts by not letting them score, by keeping so many people back as defenders.
It's very hard to score when 10 players are lined up in front of the goal.
So, immediately, Henry Kissinger as a kid is like, you know what will help us win and also make this game no fun at all?
Yeah, we need to poison their water.
Henry, what are you talking about, Poison?
We must firebomb the homes.
We know what to do.
Send dynamite under their keeper.
I know we are six, but we will park the bus.
There will be no joy in soccer.
Remove the keeper's hands.
He is as a six-year-old doing the soccer equivalent of carpet bombing.
So he gets so into soccer that he starts to neglect his studies, and his father actually bans him from playing for a while.
The older he gets, Henry has more and more conflicts with his dad, a thing that no one else has ever experienced.
And yeah, he would regularly, after fighting with his father, bicycle over to the home of a friend who later recalled, he liked being with us.
It seems to me he had a problem with his father.
If I'm not mistaken, he was afraid of him because he was a very pedantic man.
His father was always checking Heinz's homework and kept a close watch on him.
Heinz told me more than once that he couldn't discuss anything with his father, especially not girls.
So his dad's not like hitting him or anything.
He's just like really, really annoying to Henry.
And just like, and just like pay attention to your studies beyond anything else.
Like, I think I like this girl.
Like, well, she doesn't.
She's not going to the same school.
Focus, Henry.
Focus.
Well, he's clearly a dick who's like, you know, you can't be a professional soccer player at eight.
You have to go to school.
Like, he's clearly an asshole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he's definitely the villain of the story.
No doubt.
No doubt.
So Henry is magnetic to women from a, well, girls at this point, from a very young age.
What in the fuck is happening?
I know.
It's really weird.
It's weird.
And this is the quotes about, you know, girls really liking him at this age come from his father.
But like, this also happens when he's in his 40s and the Secretary of State.
So I'm going to say his father's probably telling the truth.
I mean, at no point have I seen any version of Henry Kissinger where you're like, man, I mean, it is weird.
That got memory hold because there were New York Times stories about how much women like Henry Kissinger.
Because he looks like a lump of clay you could mold into anything, potentially.
He looks good.
No, yeah, no, no, no.
But it's weird.
I mean, yeah, he's the guy.
Like, yeah, we'll talk about some of the things he said about sexuality later.
I know you're all getting real excited for that episode.
Yeah.
That's too much worse than Cambodia.
At one point, one of his friends was actually ordered not to hang out with him because he had, quote, earned a reputation as a skirt chaser.
And this is like when he's nine.
Wow.
Early.
Little Henry come rocket Kissinger.
First time I sex was nine.
So, you know, like at this point, he's rebelling against the family religion.
He's hanging out with girls.
He's playing a hell of a lot of soccer, which seems like a decent childhood.
But obviously, you know, the Nazis.
So in the mid-20s, the German nation goes on strike against some shit France was doing, Versailles stuff.
We don't need to get into it.
Inflation goes crazy, right?
This is the wheelbarrows full of cash time.
This hurts the Kissinger family badly because if you're a private laborer, if you're working for a private company, you can generally like strike and organize to get your salary adjusted to deal with inflation somewhat.
Like it's still bad, but it's less bad.
If you're a public servant, you don't get shit.
Your salary stays the same while inflation jumps up.
So this is really a disaster for the Kissinger family.
And of course, economic trouble coincides with a constant acceleration of far-right violence.
Later as an adult, Kissinger would note without emotion that he was somewhat regularly chased through the streets and beaten up by Nazi thugs as a child.
That's tough.
Yeah.
That's tough.
No punchlines.
No, no punchlines, but there is something weird about that because he's talked about this a few times, but every time he talks about this, it is so that he can emphatically state that this part of his life had no impact on him.
Yeah.
It's really weird.
It's very strange.
Literal impact of fists had no impact upon him.
Yeah, in 1958, he declared, quote, my life in Firth seems to have passed without leaving any deeper impressions.
Well, you don't get to say that, by the way.
I feel like you don't.
Like, I feel like you don't.
I feel like I said that to a shrink once about my parents' divorce and then wept.
Yeah.
It didn't do anything.
I didn't do anything.
I mean, what's this?
What's this fluid coming out of me?
And it's like, yeah, in 1974, when discussing the times he was beaten in the streets by Nazis, he insisted to a reporter, quote, that part of my childhood was not a key to anything.
I was not consciously unhappy.
I was not acutely aware of what was going on.
For children, these things are not that serious.
It is fashionable now to explain everything psychoanalytically.
But let me tell you, the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life, which is really interesting, right?
What the fuck?
I know, right?
Like, I'm sure the reporter's like, I'm ready to ask follow-ups whenever he stops talking.
Yeah, anyway, I did.
You're not supposed to remember from before 10.
Anyway.
I mean, I went numb.
That's how I can kill.
I went numb at nine.
I don't feel anything.
It is.
It's like, you know, I got assaulted by a Nazi when I was 33 and it left a mark here.
But anytime, just growing up in that environment without being assaulted is going to leave psychological damage.
If your parents had kept you completely safe from street violence, it couldn't not.
Yeah.
And it's like, Henry, this is the only time I'm going to speak sympathetically to you, but it's fine if being beaten by Nazis as a child left a mark on you.
It's the only time you want to Matt Damon him with your Robin Williams arm.
Yeah, like, it's okay, man.
It's okay, Dad.
It happened.
It's interesting.
The ways he explains why this didn't leave any mark on him are very interesting.
And I want to quote from Henry Kissinger in 2004 now.
I experienced the impact of Nazism, and it was very unpleasant, but it did not interfere in my friendship with Jewish people of my age so that I did not find it traumatic.
I have resisted the psychiatric explanations, which argue that I developed a passion for order over justice and that I translated it into profound interpretations of the international system.
I wasn't concerned with the international system.
I was concerned with the standing of the football team of the town in which I lived.
Yeah, you can't do both.
You can't pay attention to soccer.
Obviously, no one thinks, Henry, that as an eight-year-old, you were like, well, this is going to impact the way that I believe state power should be used when I'm secretary of state in several decades when I'm an advanced addiction.
Just like if you have a car accident as a kid, you're not thinking, well, this is going to make me unable to let other people touch me when I'm 33.
Right.
I'll hate freeway merging.
Like, obviously, man.
And I don't know.
Like, there's a degree to which in terms of this is the period in which you can be sympathetic to him.
I do think there's probably something to be said that if you have this childhood, maybe you don't want to give the Nazis anything.
You know, even the, like, this left an impact on me, right?
Because, like, fuck him.
I don't want to say that it had an influence on me, which I get.
No, having grown up in a traumatic, you know, sort of childhood, you, you can shut it down and tell yourself that you're fine.
Like, you, he, he, the way he survived it was to shut his emotions down a little bit and tell himself that he was fine, when it actually is by far probably the most traumatic thing there and created a fucking monster because he didn't get any psychological help.
I'm a monster naturally.
It is not nature versus nurture.
I would have killed just as many people if it weren't for the Nazi.
I'm not a despicable piece of shit either way.
Don't judge my family.
So as the 20s roll to an end, the political situation in the Weimar Republic gets correspondingly more dire.
In 1925, during a Nazi rally in Firth, Hitler himself had called it the citadel of the Jews.
The local response at that point in 25 is overwhelmingly negative.
And in 1927, only 200 people in Firth were members of the Nazi Party.
Hitler visited the city again in 1928 to little effect.
The party just got 6.6% of the vote in local elections that year.
But the Great Depression rescues, the end of the 20s, rescues the Nazis flagging poll numbers.
As Firth's economy collapses, people grow more willing to listen to the fascists.
In the 1930 elections, Nazis surged from 2.6% of the vote nationwide to 18.3%.
In Firth, they won 23.6% of the vote, which is four times better than they'd done two years earlier and very frightening for a lot of relevant reasons to today.
Yeah.
Nazi electoral successes continue to pace the next year, and by 1933, more than 22,000 Firthers were Nazi voters.
I want to quote from Niall Ferguson's book again.
On April 9th, 1932, 15 SA men were set upon by Iron Front members as they left the pro-Nazi Yellow Lion pub.
Two months later, Nazi supporter Fritz Rheingruber was beaten up for being a swastikist.
The same fate befell another Nazi caught selling the NSDAP newspaper, the Volkeschebeobachter.
The police watched helplessly on the evening of July 30th as a mob threw potatoes and stones at a Nazi motorcade going from the Firth airport to the Nuremberg Stadium.
The car carrying Hitler himself was among the vehicles.
But just a year after Hitler's car gets pelted after the Nazis begin to consolidate power when Hitler's the chancellor, the mood is very different.
On March 3rd, there's another torchlit parade by the Nazis through Firth, and on the evening of March 9th, a crowd of between 10 and 12,000 people gathers outside one of the bars there to watch the raising of the red Nazi flag.
So, you know, it gets bad pretty fast.
Can I just flag the person who brought the potatoes to the rock throwing event?
Yeah.
I feel like he turned first.
Yeah.
Oh, we're doing rocks.
Oh, I know.
That was a drawing of a rock.
Those look like potatoes, Al.
Good Lord.
You know what?
I'm going to say it right now.
If that guy had brought rocks, he might have killed Hitler.
We could have avoided that.
That's the guy.
For want of a rock, World War II happened.
Oh, did you guys see my potato hit that car?
It really smushed it.
I look mad.
I do love the idea that he also boiled it before.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't want to look weird.
For Want of a Rock00:02:18
So Lewis Kissinger lost his job teaching once the Nazis came to power.
Henry, again, who'd never gotten along with his dad, watches his father collapse into what biographer Thomas Allen Schwartz describes as a, quote, state of immobility and psychological depression.
Lewis withdrew into his study, according to Henry's brother Walter, while the world outside veered closer to nightmare.
In his book, Henry Kissinger and American Power, Schwartz writes, Kissinger and his brothers saw the progressive segregation, isolation, and humiliation the Jews of Firth experienced.
Even their attempt to watch soccer games came with the risk of their being beaten by young Nazi thugs.
The world of Heinz's childhood rapidly collapsed, and his parents and the older generation of Firth's Jews could not protect their young from the hatred around them.
After the passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935, Kissinger's mother began to look for a way to leave Germany.
A cousin in the United States was willing to provide the financial support that would allow the Kissingers to immigrate.
In August of 1938, after a last visit with Paula's elderly parents in Ludershausen, where Heinz saw his father cry for the first time, the family headed to New York.
Only three months later, during Kristallnacht, the synagogue in Firth, like hundreds of others throughout Germany, burned to the ground in a night of orchestrated violence.
Three months.
Yeah, I mean, that is crazy.
When Henry leaves Firth, there are 2,000 Jews in the Jewish community.
At the end of World War II, there are 40.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
And three months is so...
I mean, that is...
Barely.
I mean, really.
That's like...
Yeah.
They stay as late as they possibly can.
Right, yeah.
At least 13 members of Kissinger's family would perish in the Holocaust.
Obviously, being what it is, I don't know that you can, it's easy.
It's not super easy to get exact numbers, but like his family is as devastated as you would expect of a German Jewish family.
And he does acknowledge for the first time he likes admits that some part of this had an influence on him.
Was moving away from Germany and like going across the world to the United States.
And he says, and this is, I think, him being somewhat honest, that the deepest impact of all this was, quote, all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed.
And many of the people that once had, that one had considered the steady examples, suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities.
People will say, we'll talk about this later.
He's very much an order-obsessed guy.
Superficial New Peers00:08:09
And like, okay, yeah, I get it.
Like, I get where that came from, you know?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, that's very common for that happen in Chile and other places where it all falls apart into authoritarianism.
There's a lot of people who are like, I just want it to be the same.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, you hear that all the time here, too.
I mean, not like that, obviously, it's far, it was far more dire, but there are a lot of people I know who keep saying that shit here, who keep being like, I just wanted to go back to normal.
And you're just like, that ship just fucking sailed.
That is not, you know.
Yeah, it never does.
It never can.
But we all do it.
Like, even the kind of like obsession with 90s nostalgia is evidence of that.
And not because the 90s were like a perfect time, but because like, yeah, you didn't, you weren't aware of how fucked, like, like Henry, like your dad hadn't collapsed into like an unable to handle his life.
You're just like, Lip Biscuit's too aggressive.
And now you're like, oh my God, we don't have money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You went from, oh my gosh, you know, the O.J. Simpson trial, what a mess, to, well, now a plague has killed a million people.
Right.
Oh, my God.
Is there a better?
Give me that time capsule.
Yeah.
It's so funny that parallels because I literally am writing a dollop right now, and the guy turns into an authoritarian and his dad shut himself in his house and isolated.
It's so weird how these things.
I mean, just to continue off of that, Dave, Hitler's dad dies when he's a little kid, plunges the family finances and situation into insecurity and chaos.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When something that seemed stable from your early childhood collapses, perhaps it has an influence.
Oh, my God.
Yes, me.
Despite what Kissinger said.
Despite what Kissinger said.
But you know what Henry Kissinger loves?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Oh, gosh, Robert.
No.
Look, Henry is one of the few VIPs on this island where you can hunt children.
Anytime he wants, he gets a free three-bedroom apartment on the child hunting island, Sophie, that known.
Yeah, because for some fucking reason, he is still alive.
Yes.
Well, let's be honest here.
This is essentially his eulogy because when we finish this podcast and it's published, Kissinger should die.
It's possible I'm planning a dark occult ritual using my own blood and a candle I bought in Mexico to deal with this.
I'm not going to say I'm not doing it.
It's a voodoo doll podcast.
Anyway, here's some ads.
Oh, we're back.
Have you guys gone to the island where you can hunt little kids for sports?
Yes.
It's amazing.
It's all so fresh.
It's very, yeah.
The Bristol.
Didn't expect him to be that fresh.
So good.
So Kissinger today has.
Sophie's just shaking her head.
Kissinger today has idyllic recollections of his early years in the United States.
He often talks about walking down the streets of his new neighborhood, seeing a group of boys walking towards him and crossing the street because he's, you know, he's afraid he's going to get beaten.
Yeah.
And then he would realize, like, oh, that doesn't happen here, which obviously it did in other parts of the world.
He's beating those boys.
Yeah.
They're just wearing brown shirts because they like brown.
Yes.
Yes.
Henry, this is a country where some people who wear brown aren't Nazis.
Some of them are.
Some of them are, Henry.
Different did not mean easy, though.
The Kissingers spent their first years in a crowded Bronx apartment living with family.
Lewis got sick and even more depressed.
Paula had to take control of the family and handle shit.
She became a caterer and started a business that became the family's lifeline.
The neighborhood they lived in was dominated by Orthodox Jewish families with a familiar background.
A lot of them were from other parts of Germany.
And so the Kissingers benefited from the help of several community organizations and getting back on their feet.
He benefits a lot from the fact that, you know, there's not really a government support network, but the other Jewish refugees who have come over from Europe have built support networks to make it easier for new folks coming in.
Henry's teen years were a mix of school and synagogue.
He failed his first driving test, but excelled at soccer, and he grew to admire many aspects of his new home, including, quote, American technology, the American tempo of work, and American freedom, which I might say is in direct opposition to the American tempo of work, but whatever.
Kissinger was frustrated by the casual approach to life that he saw in his new peers.
He thought they were superficial.
He wrote at the time that, quote, no youth my age has any kind of spiritual problem that he seriously concerns himself with.
Which, well, yeah.
Okay, Henry.
All right, Hank.
Fair.
If you come over from Nazi Germany and you're like, people here seem carefree and shallow.
Yeah, and your schooling was basically like some old dude being like, you didn't read these right.
You know, like, you're going to be like, geez, these guys are really not focused on what matters.
Yeah.
Look, I don't want to be too critical, but New York could use a little bit of Nazism.
You know what I mean?
It's a little loose.
Good lord.
So because of all of this, this is why one of his biographers, Schwartz, describes young Henry as socially inept.
He's not great at talking to, he's not great at dealing with his new peers.
He did start dating again, though.
First, a girl who was a refugee from nearby Niremberg, but most of his focus was on schoolwork and soccer.
Kissinger graduated George Washington High School and started at the City College of New York.
He took classes at night so he could work during the day at a brush cleaning factory some of his cousins owned.
These brushes are filthy, boys.
Keep going.
They still do this shit.
It's the most amazing, like, old-timey job ever.
I mean, she's basically like, all I can picture is just like the jobs are either like pressing sheets or washing brushes.
These brushes are not going to clean themselves, gentlemen.
How many times do I have to tell you?
Well, and the corollary is some mom being like, Billy, you didn't take your sister's brushes to the cleaning shop.
What's she going to do now?
It's very funny.
Everything old-timey is funny.
People are going to think this in the future about, I don't know, having water.
So at this point, Henry's ambition in life was to get, quote, a nice job, likely in accounting.
One biographer noted, quote, nothing that happened to Kissinger during those years encouraged him to read more widely.
His historical interests were as underdeveloped when he was 20 as when he arrived in New York as a boy of 15, which is the first normal thing about him.
That, like, yeah, dude, you're, you know, whatever.
Like, he's a kid.
Yeah.
We're about to get in the studio 54 years, I feel like.
Yes.
So World War II happens, starts for the United States at least.
It started elsewhere a bit earlier.
But for the U.S., we'll do it.
When Henry is 21, he did not initially feel called to volunteer for service, but when he got his draft notice in 1943, he complied and joined the roughly 16 million Americans who became soldiers during this period.
And if it weren't for this, Henry Kissinger probably never would have been a figure of historical importance.
Again, he just kind of wanted to be an accountant.
But being drafted successfully disrupted his plans for a quiet, boring life and thrust him into the world.
That says it all.
Yeah.
It's not.
Maybe don't draft this guy.
Right?
Yeah, or don't draft me.
Like, you don't, I did not actually see your Venmo this year, so it's not the process.
Yeah, there's a future where he just has really strong opinions on W-2s.
Yeah, exactly.
No, you put yourself as 1099, but I feel like it was actually more like W-4.
Concentration Camp Butler00:15:42
Yeah.
Or he does like a Bernie Madoff thing, but either way, it's a much better future than the one we got.
We'll take the Madoff ending for him for sure.
Yeah.
Fine.
So we have letters that Henry sent to his brother Walter during training.
He purported to like the quote middle Americans he met there, but warned his sibling, don't become too friendly with the scum you invariably meet there.
Well, hello.
So he did pick up a little something from the Nazis.
He did.
He's a little bit, right?
Yeah.
He also advised against having sex with the quote filthy syphilis-infected camp followers, which is too specific to have been random.
I think Henry Kissinger had a bad experience with a camp follower.
Everyone at camp has syphilis.
It's all about kidding and having your nose for free.
Every girl I fucked had syphilis.
I fucked one girl who got syphilis.
Every one of them has it.
That's what they are.
Patient zero of the syphilis epidemic.
So the Army administered a series of tests, which Kissinger excelled at, and he earned entrance into a special training program that sent particularly bright soldiers to college.
He received his American citizenship in 1943 while he was at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.
The program lasted just six months, and Henry finished 12 engineering classes.
During his off hours, he would hitchhike home and see his girlfriend.
He was a brilliant student, recognized by his roommates as the quote, brainiest of a very intelligent class.
One classmate recalled, he didn't read books.
He ate them with his eyes, his fingers, and with his squirming in the chair or bed, and with his mumbling criticism.
Use more salt if I'm being kicked.
Other than that, you did.
He sounds like a book.
It is a really weird way to describe a dude.
It's kind of what the way he looks now is like he eats books.
Yeah.
I do kind of.
Everyone had like a visual, like, ooh, reaction to that.
To that line, like, ooh, I now kind of want the story of that classmate.
Like, yeah.
What caused you to describe a dude reading books that way?
Well, in my college, I ate analogies.
I just would just devour them.
I'd eat them like a synonym, you know?
His professors would use Henry to explain complicated concepts to the other soldiers.
And for a brief period of time, he had status and respect, which he'd begun to crave as a young man.
His time in this program was cut short because, you know, D-Day, we decide America's like, we're going to do us a Normandy landing.
And the Army's like, well, we probably don't need smart people for that.
So let's pull these kids out of the class and show them how to get shot by the menu.
Hey, guys, we actually want to talk to you over here about something totally different.
No, no, not you.
Not you, Chad.
You stay right there, Chad.
Talk about these other guys.
Thank you.
Good luck.
So Henry and his classmates get sent back to basic training where the drill sergeants, according to Henry, took glee in tormenting the college kids, which, I don't know, probably true.
While he was preparing to go overseas, and this is what my grandpa was doing in World War II, and I hope he bullied Henry Kissinger.
I hope my grandpa got a chance to give Henry Kissinger some shit.
Fingers crossed.
He did, right?
He did.
Thank you.
He did.
He did.
Absolutely.
So while he was preparing to go overseas, his biographer Schwartz writes, even in the misery of Camp Clairborne, however, Kissinger stood out, selected by his commanders to provide soldiers with a weekly briefing on war news.
Although he did the job well, Kissinger was more impressed with another older German refugee in an American uniform, Fritz Kramer, who came to Camp Clairborne in May 1944 to speak about the meaning of war.
After Kramer's impassioned talk, Kissinger wrote him a note.
Dear Private Kramer, I heard yesterday.
Jack Yoso.
Sorry.
Basically, yeah.
Yeah, he literally, like, it's like, I liked what you had to say.
Can I help you?
Oh, like, that's literally what the note is, scare.
Jack Yoso no more.
Yeah.
Kramer responded almost immediately to the simple fan letter, returning a few days later to seek Kissinger out for conversation and dinner, insisting they speak in German, not English.
The Lutheran Kramer later said that he was taken with this, quote, little Jewish refugee he had met who, he believed, as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything.
Wow.
That's an interesting way to describe him.
I mean, he sounds like a guy who eats books.
Yeah.
And this guy, Kramer is, um, Kramer is a Prussian, which I don't know the degree to which that means anything to a lot of people.
The Prussians, so there was most of the resistance to the Nazis was from the left.
Once the Nazis got into power, the resistance to the Nazis that meant anything was Prussian, not because they were good dudes, but because they were way too conservative for Hitler.
They were like, well, we want to fight and take over all of Europe, but like with a Kaiser who has royal blood, not this like gross little corporal and stuff.
And it's complicated because like a lot of those Prussians got murdered by the Nazis.
And as a general rule, your sympathy is with the people who get murdered by the Nazis.
But it's also like, yeah, you got murdered by the Nazis for the wrong reasons.
Right, right, yeah, right.
They were like, we have one small note, but everything else is working great for us.
They were the guys who were like, Hitler's bad because he's not going to win the war against Russia.
Right.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
So this guy, Fritz Kramer, would be, in Henry's words, quote, the greatest single influence on my formative years.
Since Fritz was a Prussian conservative, so for an idea of how fucking German Fritz Kramer is, he wears a monocle to make his wow eye work harder, to make his weak eye work better.
Like, my God.
Oh, my God.
I am the craziest asshole ever.
Wow.
What the fuck?
And, you know, Fritz hated the Nazis, which good, good.
He also hated the communists, which you have to think there was some sus stuff there.
Yeah.
You know, communists are a mixed bag like everybody, but I don't think he's very nuanced about it.
Schwartz also credits Fritz with expressing, quote, a respect for international law and emphasis on the moral basis of civilization.
And what Fritz Kramer means by the moral basis of civilization is not the same as what I think maybe you or I might mean.
Now that, yeah, I think the most important influence Kramer had was he's, Kramer is very conservative, and he, Henry is kind of a natural conservative, and Kramer really reinforces this feeling in Henry, which is expressed by a growing sort of revulsion in Kissinger towards any ideas outside of the political median, right?
Which you get why he has a tendency towards this.
Your life, if your childhood is this like battle of extremes in your hometown, I get why you would kind of veer towards the middle.
And this guy, Kramer, really turns that up to 11 in him.
One write-up in the New Yorker notes, quote, he warned Kissinger not to emulate cleverling intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses.
Believing Kissinger to be musically attuned to history, he told him, only if you do not calculate will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.
So that's bad.
So that's going to go really bad.
I mean, you really are like, I mean, this is his Morpheus.
We're just starting to be like, okay, this is.
And by the way, have you thought about maybe just losing the glasses and just going with the wand?
That is so much like punish your weak eye.
You must punish the weak even when it comes to your eyes.
Yeah.
Yeah, he has found a kid who like has a problematic history of starting fires and is now teaching him how to build a fertilizer bomb.
Yeah, he's a bad influence.
He matches a so-so, but have you ever seen a Zippo?
Yeah.
He's a great.
So Kissinger finishes training and is deployed with the 84th Infantry Division as it moves towards Nazi Europe.
His division sees a decent amount of combat.
He does not.
He's a backranker.
He handles administrative and management tasks.
And he finds the power and authority he gets through his time in the service intoxicating.
Though he never, again, he doesn't fight directly.
He does earn a bronze star for valor because he helps catch and take out a Gestapo sleeper cell, primarily due to the fact that he's just, you know, a very observant dude.
In 1945, he participates in the liberation of a concentration camp, Alam, A-H-L-E-M.
I'm not 100% sure on how to pronounce it.
One prisoner at the camp remembered him as the young American who announced, you are free.
For Kissinger, the overwhelming memory of this experience was seeing inmates he described as being barely recognizable as humans and feeling the instinct to feed them before learning that some were so starved that solid food would kill them.
Shortly thereafter, yeah, I mean, one thing you got to say, he does not like, he's not a sheltered upbringing.
And I mean, like, you would be like, oh, maybe that could be the influence that made him be like, oh, you know, you can, there's, there's good.
You can provide the people who are tortured and starved some, you know, help.
You could take away from this, like, my God, war is evil and we should do everything we can to prevent it.
As opposed to, yeah, baby.
Well, let's see how it plays out, Dave.
Maybe this is the six part behind the bastards episode about a cool dude who does nice things.
I just brought you guys here to talk about a chill guy.
So shortly after liberating this concentration camp, Kissinger writes an essay on his experience where he asks, quote, who was lucky?
The man who draws circles in the sand and mumbles, I am free, or the bones that are interred in the hillside.
He concludes from the experience that this is humanity in the 20th century.
So, I mean, an understandably bleak take from liberating a concentration camp.
Like, that's fair.
You know what is a bad time to move to an ad plug?
I didn't think you were going to be brave enough to do this, but fair enough.
Oh, boy.
Wow.
Yeah.
You know what makes me hungry?
Probably shouldn't go too far down that road.
Let the ads do the talking.
Let the ads do the talking.
The ads are going to come and win the same way the Soviet Union did.
By throwing wave after wave of men into Nazi trenches.
Anyway.
I think we lost it.
We had it for a minute.
We had it for a second there.
I took it too far.
You know, I took it too far.
Here we go.
Oh, we're back.
So when the war ends, World War II, you know, that is, Sergeant Henry Kissinger finds himself as, quote, the absolute ruler of a small village named Bin Sheim.
He enjoys this experience.
He really starts to like having power.
One thing that we're getting here is that he adores having power over people.
Yeah.
He really likes it.
In his letters, he celebrates repeatedly to his family that he has, quote, absolute authority to arrest people.
Jesus.
And this is.
I'm a baby Kaiser.
This is problematic because of what he does later.
I will say, if you are a Jewish kid who has to flee Germany and then you come back and get made like the military head of a town that's full of former Nazis, I get reveling in it a little bit, you know?
For me, I'm having beheading Tuesdays, if that's me.
Yeah.
So again, he's not, because of what he does later, this is unsettling, but like it's understandable in the moment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He appropriates a luxury home and a fancy car, both of which had to have belonged to some Nazi, which is like it's what you do, right?
Yeah, fine.
He gets a butler.
He brags back to his family that he's a family.
He's a Nazi butler.
A fucking Nazi butler.
Madly, that's not arrested for not giving me butter.
Yeah.
That is obvious.
Now, that said, he's also, to his credit, really aware of not wanting the Germans in town to identify this guy who is absolute ruler as being Jewish.
I think because he doesn't want it to make things a problems for people whose Jewish people who stay behind in Germany.
He makes other soldiers refer to him as Mr. Henry rather than by his last name.
He's conscious.
He doesn't want them to think, quote, that the Jews were coming back to take revenge.
And he had a reputation in general as being more objective as a ruler in this kind of period than most Jewish veterans in similar positions.
In general, Henry counseled accommodation and rapprochement, with one exception, communists.
That's the civil war.
Of course.
Right, fucking.
I know, right?
We had this like understandable period.
I don't want to upset the Nazis, but these commies.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
And that's literally what happens.
So the Cold War, you know, early stages in 1946, but already in that period, Kissinger advocates strict surveillance of German civilians for left-wing sympathies.
Oh my God.
The fucking Nazis just did everything.
Like, it's the conservatives.
Yeah.
The left is due.
The left is due.
He doesn't want them.
He also wants to ban communists from teaching at the local schools, which again is like, what's right?
What the fuck happened?
How is he?
He went straight Nazi all of a sudden now.
Yeah, he's definitely, well, let's say fascist.
Let's say fascist.
Yeah, okay.
Fascist.
Now he's a fascist.
He does a bit.
He does a bit.
He starts dating a Gentile German girl during this period.
Because again, he's not very religious.
His letters home to his parents, though, because they don't like this at all.
They're like, you're losing your faith.
And Henry gets very combative with them.
He sees them as irrational, writing, quote, to me, there is not only right or wrong, but many shades in between.
The real tragedies in life are not choices between right and wrong.
Real difficulties bear difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can't begin to comprehend.
How's the dog?
How's the dog?
Love you, mom.
Love you, mom.
Also, how's Klaus?
Is Klaus good?
Is his tail better?
And his parents, his parents have the reaction we all did where they're like, hey, how are you?
Hey, it seems like the war may have.
Why are you making us call you Mr. May have had an effect on you?
I've said this ever since you met the monocle guy, but you're really intense.
Yeah.
Maybe all of the things you've seen have had an impact on you.
And Henry responds to this by getting enraged and saying not everybody came out of this war as a psycho-neurotic.
Oh, that shows him.
That'll teach him that.
That's fine.
That's fine.
That's exactly right.
That's the exact right reaction of a non-psycho neurotic.
When you're screaming, I'm not a psycho-neurotic in letters, you're a psycho-neurotic.
I got syphilis from Garland Kemp.
If all they're saying is like, hey, Henry, do you think maybe seeing a concentration camp has left some mental scars that you need to heal from?
Hey, maybe I should drown dad to the toilet.
Okay, all right, buddy.
All right, pal.
We're just writing letters here, buddy.
We're just writing some letters.
That's all we're doing.
Psychopathic Hunter-Gatherer00:15:52
It's one of those things.
This is a period of time, obviously, like every one of the things that causes what happens later in American history is that 16 million Americans go to war and a bunch of them get traumatized and they come back to a world where like their dad was always like, if you talk about your feelings, I'm going to hit you.
Henry's family doesn't seem to be like that.
His parents are like, hey, do you want to talk about your feelings?
And he's like, I'm not crazy.
Yeah.
Obviously, obviously the fact that this is a time in which like men don't fucking do therapy does have an impact on it.
But I think his family's probably more understanding than most of them.
Well, he also has no, I mean, even now he has no acknowledgement of like his trauma.
So he probably, even in the actual moment, I mean, you're probably even more defensive, you know?
Yeah.
In 1947, Kissinger finally decides to leave Germany for the second time.
On Fritz Kramer's advice, he applies late to Harvard and he was accepted, winning one of the two national scholarships the school gave New Yorkers each year.
Wow.
Now, Chapo and Traphouse did a tournament of evil people from Harvard.
It's awesome.
And Kissinger won.
So that's...
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Oh, boy.
The Ivy League.
Good at producing bad people.
Maybe we should look into that one.
So one of his classmates recalls, and obviously he does, like, it's Henry Kissinger.
He's very good at school.
One of his classmates recalls that he, quote, worked harder and studied more than anybody else on campus.
He ate school.
He ate school.
Couldn't stop him from shoving pencils in his mouth.
He made the campus like Godzilla would have.
He nearly died.
He almost died from lead.
His studies so absorbed him that he ignored the people around him.
He made, quote, no lasting friendships with other students.
He seemed scarcely aware of the extraordinary range of people gathered around him.
So Kissinger's ideology evolved along the lines Kramer had started him off on.
He agreed with Goethe, I believe is the name of the German philosopher, that if he, quote, had to choose between justice and disorder on the one hand and injustice and order on the other, I would always choose the latter.
So, well, there we go.
He's made his choice.
That's very telling.
Like, we know.
We know.
We get up.
Yeah, Henry.
It's just nice to know we're like around the time.
Like, okay, so he was pretty defined.
Okay.
So, Henry, you know some other people who thought that order was more important than justice?
Yeah.
They had an impact on your childhood.
Yeah, yeah.
No shit.
Yeah, right.
But it's just such a trauma works, too.
It's a strange thing that it's so conscious.
Like he's so completely aware of it.
Yeah.
Like he's like a psychopath.
He might be.
I mean, I think if you're, I try not to do too much like the psychoanalyzing people, but like, fucking maybe, right?
Well, psychopaths are very good at the stuff you talked about, winning people over in the room.
You know, ladies, man, like there is a they learn how to be a human and then they sort of and a lot of you got syphilis at camp, and a lot of them get syphilis at camp, like Henry Kissinger.
Yeah, well, Sophie, can we let's green light some Henry Kissinger, some t-shirts that are just Henry Kissinger with his face riding off from syphilis.
People are going to want to wear those.
He's making the kissy lips, and his lips are falling off.
Would you like a Kissinger?
Let me French Kissinger, you so he meets his second mentor at Harvard.
Henry Kissinger has a lot of mentors, and this is maybe a lesson to never mentor anybody.
You never know, they might become Henry Kissinger.
Yeah, don't teach people things, sabotage them at every step, right?
Next time you drive past a kindergarten, throw them a textbook that's all lies, you know?
Just slow them down.
So his second mentor is this guy, William Yandel Elliott.
And Elliot is a professor at Harvard.
He's also like very politically connected.
He had advised several U.S. presidents on international matters.
And Kissinger was drawn to this guy because not only is he a respected educator, but he's really well connected to people with power.
And Elliot, one of the things that he is famous for being a big advocate of is what's called realpolitik, as embodied by, you know, and particularly the guys that Kissinger grows up admiring and that Elliot helps teach him to admire are men like Klaus Witz and Bismarck, these guys who are like, Bismarck is the dude who makes Germany, right?
We have it, we get a Germany because Bismarck orchestrates over a period of, like, I think it's decades.
Gradually, he welds all these different German principalities and kingships together and then helps to orchestrate this war, which out of which emerges Germany.
Like, that's the kind of dude that Otto von Bismarck is.
And he is kind of the master of the kind of politics that Kissinger comes to respect.
And he, Kissinger calls Klauswitz and Bismarck philosophers of history.
That's how he sees this guy, these guys.
Which is not really what I would call Otto von Bismarck.
Like, he's very good at what he does, obviously, but not, I wouldn't call him a philosopher.
I want to quote now from the book Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin.
From these thinkers, Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how history operated.
It was not a story of liberal progress or of class consciousness or of cycles of history or of cycles of birth, maturity, and decline.
Rather, it was a series of meaningless incidents, fleetingly given shape by the application of human will.
As a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out historical causes of their misfortune.
So, yeah, yeah, you know, stuff.
It's maybe not, yeah, you can think about that however you want.
So, a lot of folks who analyze the Kissinger in this period seize on one sentence in Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, and his thesis is titled The Meaning of History.
I hope that's the thing.
That they think kind of explains a lot of what comes to be going down.
What a bold paper it is, right?
I mean, honestly, he's not a dude who makes like little leaps, right?
Yeah, right.
Why do we love?
This is the line: The realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an inward experience, which is you know, read it again.
The realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an inward experience.
Wow.
And this is this is a like a heavily influenced by French existentialism.
His thesis cites Jean-Paul Sartre a lot.
And both Sartre and Kissinger think that morality is not an inward thing.
It's determined by actions, which is not an unreasonable thing to believe, right?
That like what matters is what you do, you know?
There's that line from the Bible: you're not damned by what goes into your head, but like what comes out, right?
Like that's not an unreasonable thing to believe.
Sart, he believes that like action creates the possibility of individual and collective responsibility, right?
That morality is determined by action, but that our actions create this possibility of like individual and collective moral responsibility for things.
Kissinger does not come to that conclusion.
Kissinger believes that morality is determined by action, but he also thinks that like you moral indeterminacy is a condition of human freedom.
It's this idea that you can't be bound by morality and be free.
If you want to freely act, you have to be able to act above morality, right?
So that's just giving yourself an excuse to do heinous acts.
I mean, a lot of his intellectual development is him, and also a lot of this is obviously all of this.
One of the things that you have to account for is all of this analysis of like his development intellectually comes after he does all the horrible things.
Sure.
Right.
And including from him and from like the people who are sources who are saying this is what he was like as a kid, there is that degree of biasing, right?
Like that this is after he is the person that he is.
Because if he had gone on to like just be a professor, nobody would have given a shit about what Henry Kissinger is doing.
For example, if the accountant said that, we'd be like, yeah, look, just would you, what do I owe?
Yeah, yeah, tell me what the IRS gets, man.
I don't need another lecture on this.
And Kissinger's, the fact that he becomes so kind of moral relativism is the word I've used.
I don't even know if that's right, but like this idea that like freedom and morality are kind of like inherently opposed.
This upsets a lot of people around him, including people who are like his big supporters, including that Professor Elliott guy.
At his retirement party, Henry Kissinger, Elliott's retirement party, Henry Kissinger and a number of students gather to like bid him farewell.
And journalist David Halberstam wrote that Elliot had positive things to say about almost all of his students who had gathered there.
But when he reached Kissinger, he said this: Henry, he began, you're brilliant, but you're arrogant.
In fact, you're the most arrogant man I've ever met.
Kissinger became ashen-faced.
Mark my words, Elliot continued.
Your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.
Oh, that is amazing on so many levels.
Like at your retirement party, to be like, hey, and you, listen, shitbag, chill out.
And then for that also to be totally incorrect.
Like, you know, I saw this like clip of some guy in like Atlantic City talking to Trump when Trump is going, like, well, what is made, what makes a Native American?
And the guy just goes, sir, I'm glad you're never going to get into any real power.
And you're like, no, dude.
Oh, dude.
Well, and one of the things, like, this, the Professor Elliott is like one of the guys who helps get him his first big gigs and shit.
Like, he's a major bass.
And I think this is kind of him belatedly being like, whoops, no.
Oopsie boopsy.
Oopsie poopsy.
I'm going to go patronize a Cambodian restaurant just to make myself feel a little better.
Yeah, right.
Tipped real well, Everett, when he went to like, I don't even need food.
Just give me the tip slip.
I don't even need the food.
Just give me the tip slip.
I owe you guys.
I'm not going to tell you why.
There you go.
Don't worry about it.
Take my, take everything.
Here's my point.
I got to go.
Do you know if there's a Bangladeshi restaurant nearby?
I'm actually hitting a lot of spots tonight and not eating.
I'll be honest.
It's a long list.
I'm going to a lot of places.
No, no, not German.
No, not German.
No, no, not German.
You know what?
They're actually fine.
I don't think I need.
Yeah.
So his thesis.
That thing that he says to Kissinger, it should be what happens, but our society rewards psychopaths above anybody else.
And so most societies.
Yeah.
So what he thinks should be is the opposite.
What he's talking about is a just world, which isn't what this is.
And it's one of those things.
This is something like that get kind of more into anthropological thinking, but like one of the reasons people will say is like why we have psychopaths is that if you're in a band of 70 people who are like hunter-gatherers starving through the winter, it's helpful to have a guy like Henry Kissinger can say, like, well, these six people are too old and sick, and we have to let them die.
Otherwise, we'll all starve, right?
That's a situation in which it's good to have a psychopath because you need someone who just doesn't give a shit about certain things.
When you have a society of billions that's global, it becomes a problem because that kind of thinking is not so useful and tends to just get millions and millions of people killed.
It's not great.
Anyway, Henry's thesis is published in 1950 at roughly the same time Harry Truman decides to send troops to Korea and to aid French forces in Vietnam.
Professor Elliott told Kissinger that the Korean War was an example of the East, quote, testing the civilization of the West.
Yeah, people doing their own thing in their own country is a test to us.
Like the Koreans and the Vietnamese having completely their own shit going on as a test of us in the United States.
How dare you?
You know, Ho Chi Minh not wanting to be ruled over by the French is really a test of American power.
It's very insulting, huh?
I mean, and obviously they see that like the Soviet Union is orchestrating all this and the Soviet Union is involved too.
But like, they're looking us in the eyes.
They've got their own shit going on, dude.
Dude, they are on the same level.
How dare they do this?
So as the U.S. increased its commitments to a growing series of wars in Southeast Asia, Kissinger grew more dedicated to the work of a guy named Oswald Spengler.
Spangler's book, The Decline of the West, is not something I am well equipped to describe or explain in detail, but Greg Brandon is.
So I'm going to quote from him again.
Spangler waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality.
He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct and creativity reigned.
We have, Spengler thought, hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression.
To get behind image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests, and grasp what Spingler called destiny, one needed not information, but intuition, not facts, but hunches, not reason, but a soul sense, a world feeling.
Often enough, a statesman does not follow, does not know what he is doing, Spingler wrote.
But that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success.
Oh my God.
And now does George W. Bush crawl out of a pile of goo now?
I mean, this is for our freedom.
George Bush like pops out of Henry's Kissinger's back as a polymer.
Yeah, right, right.
It's like Dr. Pimple Popper or pop-headed Rumsfeld Bush-like thing.
We know where they are.
They're in the East, West, North, and South.
Kissinger finds this logic intoxicating, but he did disagree with Spingler about Spengler's primary contention, which is that civilizational decay was inevitable.
Spengler argued that civilizations had springs, summers, autumns, and winters, right?
That they proceed through kind of like inevitable stages, and there's not really any way to stop this procession, right?
Which is, I think, a pretty reasonable, like, yeah, any civilization is going to have like a life cycle, right?
That's a thing like historically, you can argue pretty well.
Kissinger doesn't believe this.
Everything dies.
Yeah.
Of course.
That's actually not what Kissinger is.
And of course, the man who is like living way beyond his shelf life is like, told you so.
Doesn't die.
So here's Grandin again talking about Kissinger, how Kissinger grapples with this aspect of Spangler.
Having lost a sense of purpose, civilizations lurch outward to find meaning.
They get caught up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by history's cosmic beat, power for power's sake, blood for blood.
Imperialism is the inevitable product of this final stage, Kissinger wrote, summing up the decline of the West's argument, an outward thrust to hide the inner void.
Kissinger accepted Spengler's critique of past civilizations, but rejected his determinism.
Decay was not inevitable.
Spengler, Kissinger said, merely described a fact of decline and not its necessity.
There is a margin, he would write in his memoirs, between necessity and accident, in which the statesman, by perseverance and intuition, must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people.
So Spengler's like, yeah, it seems like when civilizations lose their purpose and start to age, they lurch outward and engage in wars of imperial conquest in a search for meaning, and that leads to disaster, which destroys them.
Spengler's Civilization Decline00:12:24
And Kissinger's like, but what if you did the wars right?
Yeah.
But what if you were good at it?
But what if I was involved in everyone?
What if I was like Mickey in the corner of Rocky?
Yeah, it isn't amazing, like this guy being like, here is what happens to empires every single time there's an empire.
This is a thing you can go through history and see constantly occurs through thousands of years.
And Kissinger's like, no, I can do it right.
But to be like, no, you're pretty close.
You're pretty close.
Bye.
I'm just thinking, kill more.
Like, I heard what you said, ups and downs, but I think you wipe everybody out.
You know, you try drinking their blood.
It is the same logic I have seen.
Every time I've seen more than one person get stuck in the mud, it's always either one person gets stuck in the mud or 50 do, because one person gets stuck in the mud and the other 49 go, well, I saw what happened to that guy, but I think I can figure it out.
I can get around.
Yeah, yeah.
It's almost like when you enter Congress.
I've got a plan.
I've got a plan.
Oh, I get money.
Oh, never mind.
I don't have a plan.
Well, I have a plan, but it's a different one, and you are not going to like it.
More about a pool.
In 1951, Henry got a gig working as a consultant with the army on psychological warfare while he finished his graduate studies.
Kissinger's doctoral thesis on the Congress of Vienna did not seem overly relevant to politics, but its first sentence had discussed nuclear weapons and proposed to readers that the efforts of British and Australia, that the efforts the British and Austrians made to contain Napoleon might be useful in handling the Soviet Union.
I might argue, did Napoleon have a way to end all life on Earth if things went badly with containment?
Was that a factor in Napoleon?
A sword.
Kissinger believes he sees that containment is a failure, which it is, because people do not like being colonies.
And if the opposition to being a colony is communism, they'll be like, well, let's try communism.
Being a colony seems to suck.
So Kissinger sees that containment is a failure, but he also believes not that, like, well, why don't we just let people do things and just take care of our own shit?
He's like, no, because containment's a failure, war with the Soviet Union is inevitable.
Now, in Kissinger's view, this has nothing to do with the actions of the United States, but is instead, quote, because of the existence of the United States as a symbol of capitalist democracy.
It is literally the early extent of like, well, they hate us for our freedoms.
Right, right.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, like that's that's that's where he's starting down.
Obviously, a lot of people are saying shit like this, right?
This is not a Kissinger invention.
You know, you've got the John Birch Society, all sorts of shit going on in this period.
I don't want to give him too much credit there.
It's clear by this point that Henry was going to get into politics.
Although law enforcement was a possibility, too, because when God, he starts being a professor at Harvard, right?
Like after he graduates and stuff, he starts like helping out his stuff and teaching some classes.
And at one point, the school hosts an international seminar.
And when he hears that, like a bunch of foreign academics are coming to Harvard, he calls the FBI and volunteers to spy on people for a while.
That's amazing.
I mean, honestly, it is so amazing with his background to be like, to have that attitude.
It just is, it really is, it's hard.
It's hard to get there.
You got to give him credit.
The man covers some ground.
The man is a Batman villain.
He really is.
So, yeah, his love of politics and his first attempt to build influence at Harvard is by starting a journal named Confluence.
Now, this is ostensibly a journal that exists to create what he calls an international forum for discussion, right?
I just want to get good people talking from all around the world.
Let the ideas fly.
It's like a TED Talk kind of pitch.
But he's really vague about, he doesn't really seem to care about what particular discussions he encourages.
And his critics would later claim that this journal was, quote, a fake, primarily an enterprise designed to make Kissinger known to powerful people, right?
Like he's just letting powerful people write articles because then he gets them in, he gets their phone number, right?
He gets their mailing.
He's networking.
Yeah, he's networking.
Confluence leads to Henry's first mention in the pages of the New York Times.
And despite what his critics claim, which is probably broadly accurate, the journal did also publish some really significant figures, including Reinhold Neighbor and Hannah Arendt.
But while he claimed commitment to free discourse, Kissinger had a real tendency to publish right-wing shitheads, including Enoch Powell, a conservative British politician famous for comparing immigration to, quote, rivers of blood.
Well, that's fair.
I mean, I've always agreed with that.
I mean, that is just a lot of people.
But you like blood rivers.
I love a blood river.
Oh, my God.
That's the laziest of rivers.
Yeah, because you float real good.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's molasses.
But that's freedom.
If you can say immigrants are like a river of blood, that's the freedom he's talking about.
That's the freedom.
You want to know what other kind of freedoms he's interested in publishing?
Oh, my God.
I'm going to quote from Niall Ferguson from the book Kissinger here.
An article by Ernst von Solomon, a right-wing German writer who had been convicted for his role in the assassination of Walter Rathenau, a German foreign minister in the Weimar Republic.
The article provoked an angry letter from Shepherd Stone of the Ford Foundation, who had provided money for both the international seminar and the journal.
So first note, he publishes a guy who's basically pretty close to a Nazi, a far-right German terrorist in the Weimar years.
And it's so upsetting that a representative of the Ford Foundation complains.
Oh, my God.
I mean, if you can upset the Ford Foundation.
You're crossing that line.
If the Ford Foundation is like, your connection to a Nazi worries me.
And that's coming from us, who are really clear.
You know who we are.
We're like super into that.
Look, I have the protocols of the Elders of Zion tattooed on my chest.
But I'm also Ford Foundation employees.
I'm about to throw a flag on the play.
I'm still a flag in the play.
And our new car is coming out, the Ford swastika.
Oh, man.
So, quote, Stone was appalled that Kissinger would publish an article by a criminal and a Nazi sympathizer like Solomon.
Kissinger told Stone he disliked Solomon and opposed what he stood for, considering him a damned soul driven by the furies.
Demonstrating a remarkable self-confidence for a graduate student, Kissinger defended himself for publishing the article.
I may err occasionally on the side of too great tolerance, partly because I believe our readers sufficiently mature to make their own judgments.
Kissinger argued that what Solomon represented was a symptom of certain tendencies of our age, but that by appearing in a liberal journal like Confluence, Solomon was the one who was compromised.
Kissinger was not simply defending free speech.
He had solicited the article from Solomon telling the German about, quote, having long admired your writings, even if I could not share your point of view.
What?
So it gets better and more relevant to today because when there's an outcry against this, Kissinger writes a letter to his friend Kramer and says, I have now joined you as the cardinal villain in liberal demonology.
Oh my God.
I know.
He's just doing it now.
He's just doing it now.
He's got the monocle now, too.
It's like you hear Glenn Greenwald talk to Joe Rogan.
Yes.
It's like, what the?
How?
How is this still happening?
How are you the pioneer of this, Henry Kissinger?
How are you the pioneer of this?
By the way, his explanation: if you're me just listening to like, uh, okay.
Not sure what he's saying, but all right.
Okay.
So we got to hear from this Nazi who shot a dude.
Okay.
All right.
Well, it'll anger the libs.
As long as you said it's cool.
And next month we have Ed Gein who's doing a little number.
Ed Gein's going to walk us through lamp workings.
And then we're having the Zodiac killer on to teach us about proper parking techniques.
Pentagramming.
And coding.
He'd actually be pretty good at that.
So once he had finished his dissertation and graduated, Henry found himself in need of like a steady gig.
He's doing like, he wasn't a professor at that point.
But he was like doing like graduate students, you know, helping to teach whatever.
I didn't do a college, so, but you know how grad students teach shit and stuff.
But he wants like a full-on gig.
He's trying to get an actual full-time job as an assistant professor, but he's not able to because most people don't like Henry Kissinger.
I wonder any reason why a lot of people at Harvard are not loving it.
Not a huge fan.
They're not loving the Nazi publishing Jew from Germany.
Yeah.
They consider him slightly problematic.
I don't want to know.
He drifts for a bit.
He's unable to find work.
And he's still doing some stuff at Harvard, but he's not.
He's kind of adrift in his career until in 1954, he runs into a friend, Arthur Schleshinger Jr., at Harvard.
Schleshinger had a letter in his possession from a former secretary of the Air Force defending Eisenhower, the Eisenhower administration's standard of threatening massive retaliation to the Soviets.
Now, the gist of this idea that the Eisenhower administration really kicked off was that if we promise the Soviets that if there's ever a confrontation, we will immediately send out a world-ending hail of nukes, right?
Then those lines won't get crossed, right?
We won't have any kind of fight at all.
If everyone knows those are the stakes, then nothing will happen, right?
That's the idea.
Kissinger disagrees with this take, right?
Which is reasonable to disagree with, right?
There's a lot of problems with the we will end the world if there's any kind of issue.
I'm worried where he's going to take it.
He's going to make it worse.
He's going to make it worse.
You know what, guys?
He sure does.
That's exactly what he does, Gareth.
Because Kissinger's, yeah, we'll talk about what he does in a bit, but he writes a letter kind of writing out some critiques to this, and he has his friend Nelson Rockefeller send it to Eisenhower.
He's friends with Nelson Rockefeller, by the way.
Sure, of course.
Everyone is in this period.
All the cool people.
When the president rejects Kissinger's analysis at the advice of John Foster Dulles, Rockefeller resigns, and he resigns from his job with the administration, which like temporarily closes a door to Henry.
But the letter that Kissinger had received was well enough, like popular enough among other thinkers in Washington that it earns him a job offer, heading a study group at the Council on Foreign Relations, studying nuclear weapons and foreign policy.
But of course, Henry's problem with massive retaliation wasn't that using nuclear weapons was unconscionable.
It was that the world-ending nature of the threats the Eisenhower administration was making meant they would never nuke anybody.
And Kissinger thought this was a terrible idea.
He thought that nuclear weapons should be used tactically to secure battlefield victories against the communists.
What's happening?
He thinks it's bad to have nukes and not use them.
He's...
Yeah, that's his ass.
That's his angle.
What in the fuck?
Yeah, it's wild that in this argument between if there's a fight, we'll kill everybody, or what if we just try using nukes a little bit, the kill everybody guys have the more reasonable take.
I mean, really?
You're close.
You're close together.
All right.
Yeah, we can get off a couple of ticks much faster.
It's incredible.
And also, but like, again, this is this, he's, the people he's arguing with is the Eisenhower administration.
Nelson Rockefeller is not a right-winger who's like, this guy's got some shit going on.
You know, we should listen to him.
And like, he's a lot of people who are not like, you know, hard right dudes are like, yeah, maybe it makes sense.
We got to be using these like tactical nuclear weapons.
We should at least consider the possibility.
You know, he makes a good point.
He uses smart words and he quotes.
He talks about nuking folks.
You got a lot of words.
So that is part one of our epic series, Henry Kissinger.
Jesus Christ, dude, maybe become an accountant.
What a guy.
What a guy.
In part two, we'll talk about how he gets into power.
Tickling the Bastards00:04:49
So that's got to be a hoot for everybody.
But I feel like before we do that, you guys, do you guys like do like a like a giant influential popular podcast that maybe this podcast is heavily influenced by?
Is that something you guys do?
Are you talking about Rogan?
Yes, yes.
You are both Joe Rogan, right?
Yeah.
The dollop.
Yes.
The dollop.
It is your podcast.
We believe in using the nukes.
Yes, that was your six-part series, The Dollops, Why We Need to Nuke People.
Go for it, Aison.
Check out The Dollop if you have not already.
Just a fucking very, very funny podcast.
You guys want to plug anything else before we roll out into part two?
I mean, my ears a couple times during this, but I don't know.
Well, you can go to dolloppodcast.com.
We're on a tour all over the place in Australia and domestically soon.
That will be very exciting.
I am excited for touring to exist again in our lives.
Yeah.
Fingers crossed.
So until part two, go home and read some Oswald Spangler and then disagree with it in a way that makes you much, much worse.
Yep.
Yes.
Put the monocle in the bad eye.
All right.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, welcome back to what is either Behind the Dollop or Dollop the Bastards, a podcast that, no matter what name we choose for it, is about tickling.
Absolutely.
This finally is.
That's how you make us feel at home.
Thank you.
Advising Eisenhower00:07:01
Do you think anyone has ever tickled Kissinger?
I can't imagine.
I cannot picture it in my head.
This is the way he would laugh.
Stop it.
I'm going to wet my pants.
Not my experience.
That might make me want to kill you.
Just try to imagine him whispering into the ears of a sexual partner something.
I'm about to finish.
I'm about to finish.
I'm going.
No, it'd be more like, I'm going to end this.
Say I'm about to say that.
This brings me to the ball.
I cannot say that.
I'm a burned corpse.
Only one of us makes it out alive.
I actually did while we were taking a break in between these episodes.
I had a moment where I actually did, for the first time in my life, I felt a profound sense of solidarity with Henry Kissinger.
My cat is named Saddam Hussein.
And as I was feeding him during the break, I realized, like Kissinger did at one point, he's gotten much bigger.
Saddam has gotten much larger than I ever thought he would.
You know, this is, I did not anticipate this.
Yeah.
Well, that's because you named him Saddam.
There's a lot to love in what you just said.
Kissinger and I both make the same mistake.
Oh.
So let's get right back down.
Let's see what is for Kissinger Memory Lane, and it is what for everyone else is Nightmare Avenue.
Because this is the story about why Vietnam lasted an extra half decade.
It's a good time.
We're going to have a fun one here.
So, one of the many downsides of an intellectual upbringing like the one Henry Kissinger experienced is that he spent a lot of time surrounded by people you might call political technologists.
Now, this is a term I first heard in Ukraine from civilians describing Paul Manafort.
That's what they called them, political technology.
Oh, that's where I heard it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
These like hired guns who come in and help anybody who just happens to like have government money, like do literally anything, right?
Um, they're guys like his mentor, Professor Elliott, uh, and like Harvard economist Thomas Schnelling, who advised powerful elected leaders, and like they, they, all of the way in which they think about the mechanisms of government are very mathematic and inhuman, right?
Um, those are the people that Kissinger patterns himself off of.
Now, Schnelling, who or Schelling, who we just, Thomas Schelling, who's a Harvard economist we just introduced, was one of Kissinger's other mentors.
Um, and Schelling, at the same time as he's he's working at Harvard and mentoring Kissinger, is advising the Eisenhower administration on moral calculus in the early stages of the Cold War.
Schelling argues moral calculus.
Yeah, have you never talked about that with anybody?
Isn't that a common conversation?
No, no, sorry, no.
I mean, I was terrible at calculus, but I was always moral.
So yeah, well, you can't be moral and no calculus, which is why, you know, like Pol Pot, I'm going to eventually set all of my listeners after people who know math.
That's that's the end of the day.
How many did we get?
We're not sure, sir.
No idea.
No, it's impossible to say.
No way, incalculable.
People keep trying to tell us, and we just kill them at him to the pile.
Someone had two numbers, but we were unable to, we can't negotiate it.
So Schelling is advising the Eisenhower administration on moral calculus in the Cold War.
And Schelling's argument is that whether you were, quote, deterring the Russians or your own children, the proper tactic was to figure out the right ratio of threat to incentive.
So already, Schelling might be the quickest I've ever described a person and had it be clear, like, well, that's a bastard.
Like, that's a piece of shit.
That's not okay, obviously.
So, since I have no human feelings, I have to figure out this.
And children and murderers are the same.
Yeah, children and the Soviet government only understand one thing: threats.
Can I have more ice cream, Dad?
Put your hand in the drawer and find out.
No.
There you go.
I'm going to tell you something, Jimmy.
You go for that ice cream.
I have a loaded 38 on the table.
Now, one of the chambers is empty, Jimmy.
So if you get that ice cream, maybe the hammer goes up in the empty chamber.
I just want to go to bed.
I don't like dessert.
There you go.
You just feel like moral calculus is not the way to go with the ice cream.
Maybe you could just say no if you don't want him to have dessert.
Any dad can say no.
I'm learning.
So while Henry was teaching at Harvard, and this is before he gets, we ended the last episode of him getting that gig with the Council on Foreign Relations running about nuclear policy.
Right.
In the period before that, when like Schelling is his mentor, Henry learns a lot from him and he walks away from their relationship with the belief that, quote, bargaining power comes from the capacity to hurt, to cause, quote, sheer pain and damage.
Jesus fucking Christ.
You're just kind of waiting for this person to step into the vacuum, essentially, right?
Like you're waiting for someone to be like, you know, there's actually a bottom that's under the bottom.
You're like, oh, oh, my lord.
It's like this shit.
Like, if that were true, we're all watching this situation unfold between Russia and Ukraine where you've got like a lot of people with the ability to hurt a lot of people on both sides.
And you know what?
It doesn't seem like negotiations are going great.
Not really.
Maybe that's not a good basis to proceed from anything with.
Yeah.
I mean, I just, I can't believe that it's the craziest fucking idea.
It's not.
It's not negotiating.
Yeah.
You go into negotiations.
You're like, I'm probably not going to get what I want.
We're going to try and get the best we can.
And he's just like, how much can I fucking hurt you and what will you give me?
If you spend enough time like I do around like gun culture people on the right in particular, there's these folks who like usually have never done anything like in the military themselves, but they read a bunch of like books by Navy SEALs and shit.
And they'll say shit like, you should have a plan to kill everyone in every room you walk into.
And like their frame is that like the world's dangerous.
You got to be ready.
And I think any reasonable person is like, well, you are someone who should not have a gun.
Absolutely.
You should not have a gun.
You are out of your entire damn mind.
Yeah, this is a guy who should never be negotiating.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Ready to kill someone.
It's like, you know what?
Don't go into rooms.
That's just going to be your thing.
Don't go anywhere.
Stay in your house.
You go to one room.
I could tear your throat.
I could reach across the table, tear your throat out, and stab you in the eyes with ice picks.
So I'm just, we're just talking about what he just wants ice cream, Dan.
He just asked you for some ice cream, Dan.
So Henry gets his gig at the CFR.
Nukes Are Cool00:15:45
And so the thing he's producing for the Council on Foreign Relations for his buddy, the Rockefeller, is supposed to be like a report on how the U.S. is, like, should use nuclear weapons, different ways in which they could approach it, right?
And while he's writing this report, because it's with this thing, it's a very, very long process getting this out.
He also starts working privately on a book of his own titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
And this book is a version of the stuff he wants to write in this thing.
He's like fighting to get out with the CFR.
Yeah, kind of.
But also, it's actually very smart what he does.
Well, it'll take us a second to get there.
So this book that Kissinger writes, that's his own project, criticizes U.S. threats of full scale nuclear attack in response to Soviet aggression.
Niall Ferguson sums it up in this way.
Quote, with his skill for simplifying and expressing complex ideas, Kissinger put the issue starkly.
The dilemma of the nuclear period can, therefore, be defined as follows.
The enormity of modern weapons makes the thought of war repugnant, but the refusal to run any risks would amount to giving Soviet rulers a blank check.
Kissinger's conclusions were not original.
The study group at the council was almost unanimous in its desire to find some alternative to Eisenhower's stated policy.
And many defense intellectuals, most notably Bernard Brody and Basil Little Hart, had also written on the subject of limited nuclear war.
Kissinger's book demonstrated his talent as a creative synthesizer of their ideas, drawing out the implications of their work and arguing that for America's Cold War diplomacy to have any real substance, the U.S. had to accept the possibility of the limited use of nuclear weapons.
That Kissinger's own solution of limited nuclear war was also highly problematic was less important to many contemporary observers than that it broke free from the straitjacket of the Eisenhower administration's policy.
So, but where does he describe like where you would use it?
Is it like a tactical battlefield?
Yeah, it's like to win battlefield victories to like in Vietnam.
He will briefly flirt, well, not even all that briefly, but he will consider using nuclear weapons to cut off train access between Vietnam and China.
Like, which isn't that much?
Isn't it?
Like, as a layman, you can cut off trains in another way.
Presumably, right?
I mean, I've seen the general with Buster Keat, and you can throw some logs on it.
There are these other things called bombs, just bombs that were built.
You know what they are, Kissinger?
Yeah.
So it really, I mean, it is kind of just itchy trigger finger.
And it is like, if you live in the realm of this sort of dark thinking, how are you not going to start thinking of ways that are just even more vicious, brutal?
He's basically saying they need to think we're a chained mad dog.
And if we, you let the dog off the leash once and he attacks the postman and then and then everyone's going to fucking know go.
Then you don't get mail anymore.
Yeah, but then you stop receiving your mail.
We've bombed Japan already.
Like everyone gets it.
We're already out of the fucking mind.
Nice.
Of course.
Oh my God.
Yeah, it's not like it's this theoretical weapon that's never been used.
And it worked pretty well as far as making people be like, God damn, they are out of their minds.
Yeah, these people are crazy.
Holy shit.
But it's also, there's a factor here.
A part of me wonders if he even really believed about this or cared about whether or not nukes should be used tactically.
And if it was more a matter of this is a big debate of the day.
And if I publicly take the most contrarian thing, intellectuals who don't really care about what works, but who care about who's thinking creatively, like, right?
Like, that's the thing.
He's like, well, it's not about whether or not his plan would work.
It's about we're getting out of this straitjacket Eisenhower's put us in.
And it's like, no, that's not all that matters.
Finally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what's really funny?
Well, just ironic about this is that places like the Heritage Foundation for years have been have been saying that Putin would use tactical battlefield nukes, and that's why he's unhinged.
That's one of the reasons.
Yeah.
Can you imagine he's the one doing that?
I would say anyone who would do that is crazy.
Yeah.
Imagine.
And now I'd know, man, I'd keep him on as an advisor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's my feeling on nukes.
Don't shoot them at people ever.
Yeah, yeah, they seem bad.
They seem bad.
Maybe an Independence Day kind of situation.
I'll be honest, when I watch Independence Day, I think, yeah, I might shoot some nuke.
I might at that point try a nuke or two.
Yeah, but you have Randy Quaid.
I do.
I do hang out with him a lot.
That's my main plan if things go wrong.
Randy, get in the plane.
He lives in my basement.
That actually tracks from the Instagram videos I've been seeing.
So Kissinger's book was published in 1957, and it almost immediately sold 17,000 copies, which is a lot for a wonky book on nuclear warfare.
It is on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks.
Wow.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it's not great.
Now, his timing is perfect.
He puts this book out right as the Soviets make two big advances.
In Hungary, there's like a revolution that they kind of crush.
And then in the Suez, we're like, the British and the French are like fucking around in the Suez Canal and the Soviets are like, stop or we'll do something bad.
And NATO like backs the fuck off, right?
So the Soviets have like two big kind of foreign policy wins in this period.
And Americans can't look at this as like, well, you know, maybe fucking NATO shouldn't have been fucking around in the Suez.
And yeah, that shit in Hungary is fucked up, but like maybe we can't do anything about it.
They're like, we should listen to the guy who says, what if we'd nuked them?
You know, don't run.
Yeah, that's, that's where people go, right?
They don't, they, they're, they're Americans.
They don't take the rational route.
No, no.
They hate us for our nuclear freedom.
Yeah, they listen to the craziest person in the room about this.
That's right.
There's a lot of things that you can say about both what happened in Hungary and the Suez crisis that are not, why don't we use nukes more often?
But by God, Kissinger knows his audience, you know?
Kissinger writes this book.
And the New York Times, in their review of it, write, for the first time since President Eisenhower took office, officials at the highest government levels are displaying interest in the theory of the little or limited war.
The theory of massive retaliation is re-examined.
I love that those go together.
Those are the options.
Yeah, and then it's like, the little war is the nuclear war.
Like, it's the baby war for us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hear me out.
Hear me out.
Baby nukes.
Little tiny nukes.
Oh, yeah.
It's like if someone's like, look, we got to decide which of these is going to be legal.
Serenerve gas bombs for civilians or chlorine gas bombs for civilians.
One type of poison gas bomb has to be legal.
Like we all have to have access.
Everyone has to be able to have one kind of poison gas.
Two is crazy.
Taste great.
What if nobody has those?
Oh, God.
That's not, you know, that's not where things go here.
So President Eisenhower is given a summary of Kissinger's book.
You know, he's the president.
They don't read books.
Yeah, it's not Cliff Notes.
Yeah, he gets a Cliff Notes and he recommends it to his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who we have talked about quite a lot.
Oh my God.
I mean, who, like, if he's the rational mind.
If Dulles is being like, this dude seems a little out of his mind.
Big problem.
Yeah, that's not great.
Because John Foster Dulles, fucking lunatic.
Yeah.
Complete lunatic.
So the vice president at this point is a little dude you might have heard of called Richard Milhouse Nixon.
He gets photographed with a copy of Henry Kissinger's book, which is not great.
I mean, it's actually great foreshadowing.
He's not writing a screenplay.
This is great.
Yeah.
Really?
This is like season one of the Nixon show, and you just like see him with Kissinger's book.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Good television, you know?
So the book is successful enough that it provokes Rockefeller, who'd gotten him the job at the CFR, to rush out the report that Nixon had been, or that Kissinger had been making.
And Jesus Christ.
Yeah, the report from the CFR concludes, the willingness to engage in nuclear war when necessary is part of the price of our freedom.
Wow.
I mean, the price of our freedom is pretty goddamn pricey, isn't it?
That seems expensive.
Yeah.
Man.
How can we live if we're not dead?
Yeah, how can we live without nuclear fallout?
And it's amazing that it like it all, like, if it was part of his plan or not, like you said, the timing is just pretty remarkable to release this book, and then it actually shifts the way that they view this.
Yeah, you know, it's actually, he's got a really good point in his best-selling book about how nukes are cool.
How nukes are sweet.
I am excited for Ben Shapiro's book on the same subject to lead to the annihilation of all life on earth.
I'm going to live underground soon.
That's a good idea.
So this report is a weird, like weirdly popular, like, again, this is a report from the CFR, from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is like, you don't expect that to go viral.
Right.
You know?
Have you read this pamphlet?
Have you read this lengthy study by the CFR?
I mean, America never lets you down when you're like, oh, that won't happen.
No, that's what happens.
That won't go.
Yeah, right.
It does.
Yeah.
So Rockefeller actually goes on the Today Show to talk about this report the CFR wrote with Kissinger.
I know it's amazing.
An amazing macaroni casserole.
So next.
So he gives people on the Today Show an address where they can write for a copy of this report.
No.
They get 45,000 requests the first day and 200,000 requests the next.
God.
Hell's post office is overwhelmed.
Yeah.
The media, the U.S. media call this report, quote, the answer to Sputnik, which is like, hey, the Russians sent an unarmed ball into space to further exploration.
We should, this book about how everyone should be nuking everyone is the answer to that.
We're thinking that this report on nuclear weapons will actually show the Russians how to not go to space.
Yeah, that space.
If you get rid of Russia, they can't go to space.
Do you understand?
Yeah.
And it's worth noting because I think in our popular history, the answer to Spudnik is the Apollo missions and its framework is beautiful.
Which, you know, did eventually happen.
But no, the first answer to Spudnik was a report about how we should be nuking each other more often.
Yep, that's a very put a ball in the orbit so we should we should blow up safe.
We should be ready to drop 13 nuclear warheads on Berlin at a second's notice.
That will show them.
Jesus, what do you think?
So this makes Henry Kissinger famous.
He is all over the planet.
This is how he becomes famous.
Sounds like some guys watch the Today show and he buys the book so he can tell everybody at the Elks Club that we need to use nukes.
Someone's happening?
Give this accountant a soccer ball.
Some people get famous because their dad is one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers.
It's true.
Some people get famous because they write a book about how nuclear warfare is not that bad.
You know?
It's just fame.
It's a crapshoot.
Absolutely.
Fuck.
I mean, imagine being an anti-nuke person at this point.
You're just like, wait, what is going on?
No, I'm not sure.
Have you read the report?
It's so good.
We're going to show them they should not be going to space.
Yeah.
Next time they put a satellite up, we're going to kill everyone in Paraguay.
What we need to do is a radiated country.
So on July 14th, 1958, Mike Wallace gives Henry Kissinger his first big break into the public sphere.
Man, sorry, Christian.
It really is just fucking disgusting because I go through this all the time on our show where I'm like, it is the same shit.
But again, it's just media using its platform irresponsibly to normalize things that are fucking batship.
Yeah.
It's great.
Like 60 minutes having a fucking whole segment on the Havana fucking sound.
It's not a whale.
It's the whale.
Come on, Dave.
You know that's real.
I suffered from that for two years.
Those crickets.
Oh, man.
I will say, like, the stupidest joke that I laugh at every time is, yeah, I got Havana syndrome.
Having another beer.
Never doesn't get a chuckle out of me.
But we've done, we've had 60 minutes.
Come on.
60 Minutes did the satanic scare shit.
Oh, yeah.
They were big.
Dr. Gamble.
They just run with ideas that are crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, because for people who are at the level Mike Wallace's, the definition of journalist is not afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
It's be a giant shithead.
Yeah, right.
Be a huge shithead.
Man.
Oh, man.
So Mike Wallace introduces Henry Kissinger, the guy whose one achievement is a book about how nukes are cool, by saying this.
In the field of foreign policy and military affairs, Dr. Kissinger, you're acknowledged to be one of the most penetrating minds in the country.
Oh, he's penetrating.
He is.
Penetrating like an Atlas missile penetrates the cloud cover above a city full of women and children.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now, during the interview, Kissinger expressed that, quote, a capitalist society, or what is more interesting to me, a free society, is a more revolutionary phenomenon than 19th century socialism.
I think we should go on the spiritual offensive.
Yeah, the spiritual with a nuclear extension.
With nukes.
So he's connecting, he's connecting.
You know the two options, 19th century socialism or capitalism, or current day capitalism.
And nukes.
Those are the options.
And Mike Wallace just empty-headedly sits there and goes like, I really love your property.
Yeah.
Just smiles and behind his eyes is a dial-tone.
Oh my God.
So this earns him finally the job at Harvard that he'd coveted.
This is why they give him up.
It's so simple.
I cannot get over how fucking evil Harvard is.
It's so good.
It is monstrous from its beginnings.
It is a horrific thing.
Some of us went there, asshole.
Anti-Harvard action.
So he gets his Harvard job and he keeps writing.
In 1961, what's he doing at Harvard?
He's like teaching some shit, you know, Kissinger stuff type classes.
Yeah, talking about Spangler a lot.
Yeah.
Nukes are awesome, too.
Nukes are awesome.
Freedom requires an absence of morality.
Teaching kids good stuff, you know, teaching kids good things.
So in 1961, he publishes a book titled The Necessity of Choice, which is his manifesto on how the United States should approach foreign policy in the 1960s.
Freedom Requires No Morality00:14:56
It is not an optimistic piece of writing.
Quote, the United States cannot afford another decline like the one which has characterized the past decade and a half.
15 years of more of a deterioration of our position in the world, such as we have experienced since World War II, would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.
Our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.
What in the fuck is he talking about?
I mean, anyway, America invented not losing influence.
No, this is like the height of American power, obviously, to anyone who's not.
But Kissinger is, he knows this is bullshit.
He is part of a group of people who are pushing.
Have you guys heard the term missile gap?
No.
No.
In the early stages of the Kennedy administration, there is suddenly this huge, and this is both like in conversations that people are having in D.C. and in like the media, there's this constant talk of a missile gap, this idea that the Soviets have outpaced us in missile development and in the number of missiles they have.
And there's talk about like there's bomber gaps, there's tank gaps, there's talk about like these gaps between it's this idea that is totally bullshit.
Like not that the Soviets have not made a lot of weapons.
Soviet Union makes plenty of weapons, but the United, there is no point in the Cold War in which the United States is like outfucking gunned to any degree that like has could be anyone reasonable could call like a missile gap.
It just does not happen.
It feels like we're still responding to that today to be like, do first buy a long shot.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's, it's, it's this, it's, it's this, it's not, I would say unhinged, but it's very reasonable because the, the argument comes primarily out of the Defense Department and the growing defense industry, who it's great for them if everyone thinks there's a missile gap.
Like, of course.
Yeah, you got to build a lot more weapons.
We'll sell them to you.
I thought it was the place you could get khakis on your rockets, but yeah, the missile gap.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
And we'll be right back.
Am I allowed to go?
I'm sorry.
You know what?
Yes, actually, this is time for an ad break.
So, you know, if you're looking for a way to dress up your R9X knife missile before firing it into some guy's car, check out the missile gap.
We are back.
So it's bullshit, the idea of the missile gap.
And Kissinger is smart enough to know this, but he is one of the major proponents.
He's not one of the, there's other guys who are more influential pushing it, like actually within the halls of power, right?
Because he's not super within the halls of power yet.
But he is, he's, he's all over TV and shit.
Like he's a guy that you call now.
Like once you get in the Rolodex of media people, you stay there, you know?
He's the nuke guy.
You want to be the nuke guy.
A positive nuke guy.
There's people that you get like the negative nuke guy and the positive nuke guy.
And he's the guy who says we don't have enough.
You know, the thing we've ever not had enough of, nuclear weapons.
He is a big part of why we have so many fucking nukes and why the Russians have so many fucking nukes.
Because once the U.S., like once you start this, like, we have to build a lot more nukes, they're going to build even more nukes.
And like, then you're going to get to build any more nukes because you can say they've built so many more nukes.
We don't have enough nukes now.
And then you wind up with like 12,000 of them in the world.
I have a name for that.
I'm coming up with right now: nuclear arms race.
That's cool.
And that's that's a neat one.
I'm glad there's finally a term for it.
We should nuke him.
I mean, that would just be like the one thing I would like to do.
It is just go fund me to just nuke him.
What if those Davy Crockett handheld missile launchers?
Yeah, whatever we can do.
What about just a little tiny nuke that we shoot into him and it explodes?
But it's just a little guy.
A little baby nigga.
It's just enough to take out Kissinger.
Yeah.
Just the Kissinger son.
Yeah.
But he would just ingest it and go, I am now more old.
Now I'm bigger than the more upset.
It is amazing to think about how seriously this guy gets treated by everyone immediately and how much influence he's allowed to have on an incredibly dangerous thing.
And this is the same guy who got tricked by Theranos.
This is the same nude who gets hoodwinked by the fake blood lady in the turtleneck.
It's really amazing.
Yeah.
It's so funny.
It's so funny.
So Kissinger is not, again, he doesn't come up with the idea of the missile gap, but he's like a very influential voice in pushing this idea, right?
He's a part of this.
So he doesn't get there.
We could honestly do a whole episode on why there's so many fucking nukes that this would be a part of.
But he's a factor in this massive arms buildup.
And he also starts, but he's also like, he's just doing this for careerism reasons because it gets him in good with people who are in power.
And part of how you know that is that Kennedy, not a guy I'll give a lot of credit to, but one of the things Kennedy says is that limited nuclear war is insane.
Like fuck you, Henry Kissinger.
He doesn't say that, but it gets made clear the connections that Kissinger has in the Kennedy administration make it clear that like JFK does not buy your attitudes on limited nuclear war.
And so he stops talking about that.
Oh my God.
He wants to become part.
He doesn't believe in shit, but he wants to be in the JFK administration, right?
So he stops pushing this thing that makes him famous and saying other shit because it'll get him closer to power.
And that's all Henry Kissinger really cares about.
Yeah.
So I wonder if like the Today Show is calling up and he's like, yo, I'm not really doing nukes anymore.
No, he just comes on.
Yeah, the quote, I'm going to quote actually from Niall Ferguson here.
He explains like what he starts doing on the Today Show.
Yeah.
Kissinger now advocated a conventional arms buildup since the dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is more familiar and therefore easier to maintain.
He continued to insist that the United States develop smaller nuclear weapons, but he moved his own position to where he thought Kennedy's was.
In effect, the necessity of choice was something of a job application.
And Kissinger hoped Kennedy would make an offer.
So like, again, it really is.
I mean, it's just Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I mean, it is the same shit, essentially.
And it's like, you know, the sensationalism that gets you the headlines.
And then once you're fan, and it's really any form of our pop culture entertainment now, just make get your name in the fucking headlines and then define who you are.
And then you can like figure out what you actually think and actually believe or how you're going to ride that to power.
But just make a bang.
It is like the political equivalent of a comedian like saying a racial slur and then listening to the audience to determine whether or not they're joking.
Yeah.
Like that's what he's doing.
He's.
It's yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, show up to a club, take your dick out, and then write your hour.
Yeah.
It's called the Louis C.K. Backwards.
It's the Casey.
I'm not going to figure out what the back is.
No, you're close.
It's Casey.
It's Casey Sewell.
It's Casey Sewell.
So this, he does not get exactly what he wants, but he gets part of what he wants.
His buddy Nelson Rockefeller is able to give him a part-time consulting gig for the National Security Advisor.
So it's not, but it's not everything he wants, but he is now, he has like, he's cracked his way in, you know?
Like you start your way in, and it's unless you really fuck up, and by fuck up, I mean don't get a lot of people killed, you'll just get closer and closer to power because that's how our system works.
So, you know, Kissinger is obviously very conservative.
Rockefeller is not, again, he's part of the Kennedy administration.
This is what I don't understand.
Yeah, well, we'll talk, we're actually, we're going to talk a shitload about that over the next couple of episodes because this is like a consistent weird thing about him.
But like one of the things Kissinger does is he oils Rockefeller with effusive claims that Kennedy's inaugural speech, which Rockefeller had helped with, was so good, he quote, might become a registered Democrat.
Right?
That's the kind of shit he says that like, I'm almost a Democrat now because of how good JFK's speech was.
It was so good.
Again, he doesn't believe in shit.
I can't overemphasize that.
Other than that, Henry Kissinger should be very close to power.
He believes strongly in that.
And he believes in that as much as anyone's ever believed in the Bible.
He does not believe in ideas.
I'd like to sing happy birthday to the president if all possible.
I saw what Marilyn did.
Let me talk about it to a sort of testament to lover Kennedy Nick.
Sometimes they call me.
Happy birthday, Mr. President.
Would you like to see why they call me Kissinger?
Oh, no, I'm standing over this vent and look at what they're doing to my sport coat.
See, that's the fan art I want of Henry Kissinger.
Just like trying to fuck JFK with every bit of charm in his German body.
Oh, dear.
Nobody told me Subway go over vent.
Oh, look at this.
You're going to see everything.
Oh, there goes my nuke.
So JFK is eventually assassinated by Bernard Montgomery Samuels.
And LBJ takes over.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, history is a banquet.
I've got a pamphlet for you.
I printed it home myself.
That's my length.
So LBJ is the president now.
And LBJ is like, between LBJ and JFK, it's like a decade, you know, that the Democrats are in power.
And LBJ is very good at exercising power, right?
And he's also not super into Henry Kissinger.
He's not against Henry Kissinger either, but Henry kind of is kept in this weird, like, he's on the margins of power during this period of time, right?
Finally.
Which is yeah.
Well, not really, because while he's, yeah, there's no breathers.
There's no breathers, Karen.
Good to hear.
While he's kind of on the, not, you know, on the margins, he, he's, he's able to build connections with as many Republican lawmakers in their aids as he does with Democrats, right?
Like, that's what he's doing while he's doing these like part-time gigs with the NSC and stuff is he's he's making friends with everybody he can.
There is nobody.
He's just a fucking networker.
Like he is just a supreme networker.
Yeah.
Right.
There is so much.
When I was a kid in speech and debate, one of the other kids in the debate team with me was obsessed with Kissinger, like read his books and stuff.
This was this thing that I heard too from like family members and stuff that like, well, he was, you know, he wasn't always right, but it was, he was doing the hardest job anyone's ever had.
And he was just this really genius man.
And you can't really argue with him if you read about what he was saying.
And it's like, no, he didn't believe in shit.
He was, he was a genius at making people like him.
And that allowed him to nuclear horrible things.
Yeah.
Which I guess like anyone who's really dangerous in politics is that as a version of that guy, right?
Like yeah, like that's that's all of them.
But he's he's an interesting kind of that guy.
And as a result, probably the most toxic kind of that guy we've ever had in the United States.
Wow.
Which is saying something.
I mean, there's some really bad people on Chuck Chair.
Quite an honor.
But yeah.
So yeah, he makes all these connections.
He cultivates them and he keeps his name in the news, right?
That's a big part of why he's able to do what he does later.
He keeps going on TV, keeps being on the radio.
He keeps being quoted and like cited and interviewed by journalists for articles.
Henry makes it known that if you're a journalist, I'm easy to reach.
I will give you, always give you a quote.
You can always reach Henry Kissinger for like a line or two on this thing, you know?
Which is very smart of him.
It's very dumb and shameful and horrible for the journalists.
Fuck him.
But like it's great for Henry.
Thank God that they've learned.
Thank God that doesn't happen anymore.
Now I turned to the New York Times story published today that described Nazis assaulting a book club as men with a swastika flag.
Someone pointed out, well, the article calls them Nazis.
It's just all of the social media.
They describe them that way.
And I was like, oh, I can't explain to you why I feel worse about that, but I do.
Yeah.
It was not just a dumb error.
It was calculated.
Moral calculus.
Yeah, moral calculus, right?
Good shit.
So the professor cultivates connections.
Yeah, he gets good.
And he also, he goes to Vietnam at one point, and he makes connections with a bunch of people in Vietnam who are able to talk to not just the South, but the North Vietnamese government.
Like, that's the thing he consciously does.
He's like, I want to be able to be able to take the temperature of guys, which is not, like, I would say actually the most reasonable thing he does.
If you think you're going to be in power, like, yeah, it's good.
You probably want to be able to talk to those guys, even though we're fighting with them.
That's not an unreasonable thing.
He will use it badly.
Right.
Who's he's doing that on the part of?
Just himself?
Yeah.
Well, he is working.
He has a gig with a guy.
He's like an advisor to the National Security Council.
And he's a known academic.
He's probably being like, I'm an academic.
I'm trying to understand the dimensions of this.
And I want to talk to everybody.
I'm a very fair-minded man.
I don't let ideology get in the way, yada, yada, yada.
Like one of the things about Henry Kissinger, too, like he's as good.
He's fucking his buddies with Mao.
Like, he's great at talking with people who are communists and stuff.
As long as you like Henry Kissinger and what he's selling, he'll sell it to anybody.
It's so crazy.
It's wild that like.
He must have eyes that just start spinning.
You just have to get close to notice that he's got hypnotic eyes.
You're like, he isn't so bad now that I've talked into him.
You know, let's think about Vietnam for a second, right?
If you're going to war in Vietnam, Gareth, right?
If you decide Gareth Reynolds, I'm going to go to war in Vietnam.
How long do you think it would take you to realize that was a bad idea?
It would be, I mean, I, Gareth Reynolds, it would be instantaneous.
Very quickly.
Very quickly.
I mean, this is a good idea.
Yeah.
Can I?
Okay, can I just, can I ask a question?
Which side am I fighting on?
The not Vietnamese side.
Okay, then really quick.
Yeah, really quick.
I feel like you could, I feel like you could take Vietnam, David.
Dave couldn't.
They're not going to see it coming.
I would certainly be the guy who they'd be like, we broke him.
We broke him before we even shouted at him.
I'd be like, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to show up with pants that were already pissed in.
I know one thing about me, and that's that if things got really, really chaotic and bad, that I kind of thrive in that environment.
Yeah, Dave, you'd be like, Dave, we don't have time to eat their brains.
You'd be like, shut up.
I'm figuring out what they know.
It's like Dr. Manhattan ending the Vietnam War.
Both sides surrendered to Dave.
In the mid-60s, which is fairly early on considering how late the Vietnam War goes, it is clear to people, especially a lot of people protesting in the United States, they're like, oh, shit, this ain't going great, right?
Like, it's not hard for people.
Dr. Manhattan Ends War00:11:48
There are people who buy into the U.S. propaganda, but like people who are actually privy to information on the war are aware that it is not going well.
Kissinger still decides we should escalate things.
And I'm going to quote again from Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Randon.
Upon returning from his first visit to South Vietnam in late 1965, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to build public support for ongoing intervention.
In early December, he joined 189 other scholars from Harvard, Yale, and 15 other New England universities in an open letter expressing confidence that Johnson's policies would help, quote, people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny.
A Viet Cong victory will spell disasters, said the letter.
Then, later that month, he led a Harvard team against a group of Oxford opponents of the war in a debate held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally in the United States on CBS.
Kissinger passionately defended the bombing of northern Vietnam, insisting that it was not a violation of international law.
He invoked the analogy of World War II, saying Washington's actions in Indochina were as righteous and justified as they were in Nazi Germany.
Bob Schrom, who went on to become a Democratic political consultant, was on Kissinger's team and says that when he today watches a recording of the debate, he is, quote, amazed by two things, how young we look, even Kissinger, and how wrong we were.
So first off, you don't feel bad enough.
I don't know how bad you feel about this.
It's not enough.
Your first reaction would be like, God, we were kids.
Oh, we were young.
We were young.
There's like some Vietnamese dude next to him thinking about like bombs raining down on the jungle.
He's like, oh, that's Damon F crow's feet back there.
Look at me, Believe that.
Leon Kissinger.
Oh, my God, his jowls.
Look at him.
Hey, yeah, he's only got one jowl at that time.
That's before he got the eight.
Our hair looked so stupid.
Am I right?
Am I right?
Where did your legs go, by the way?
It's before Henry Kissinger looked like chit and weird science after things go wrong.
It's amazing.
There's a lot in that paragraph, both that, like, of course, when the debate starts to build, like, should we escalate this nightmarish war, the first thing, one of the first things that happens is that a bunch of fucking New England universities decide to have a debate about it.
Right.
That's the right thing.
Let's let everyone here.
Let's have the best arguments of both sides about whether or not we should experience minds.
Yeah.
Like, first off, fuck everyone involved in this, even the people arguing against the war a little bit.
Like, just don't do that's bad.
The premise.
The premise is bad.
Yeah.
Less so, certainly.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe like it made sense to me.
Here's a bunch of virgins debating which position is the best to fuck in.
Yeah.
What the hell?
Why is this a debate?
Instead of the debate, like, hey, why are we there?
Like, really?
Why?
Sorry, that's, we're not, we, we're not debating that.
We're not asking that.
That's not a question for the debate.
And it is.
Again, it's like, and you can see just about how comprehensively wrong these people are.
That, like, number one, this idea that this will help the people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny, which is the South Vietnamese government was a dictatorship the entire time the war was going on.
It was not any more democratic in any meaningful sense than the Northern Vietnam.
And also, like, a Viet Cong victory will spell disasters.
Like, there's plenty of things to criticize the Vietnamese government for, but like, broadly, on an international level, it's fine.
Like, the country seems to be doing all right.
Like, like, better than a lot of places.
It's fine.
Yep.
Did a pretty good job at COVID.
Like, you know, it didn't seem like a disaster.
Maybe if we hadn't killed 5 million people, things would be even better.
It seems like it couldn't have hurt.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, they're wrong about everything.
Like, Kissinger in this period, everything that he said, like, that's amazing.
He has this reputation as such an intellectual Titan, and he's like so constantly fucking wrong.
But there's always like, yeah.
It's the same as today.
All of these people that are constantly fucking wrong just keep on getting positions of power and being in media and they're always fucking wrong.
And there's this shit, like people will bring up like, well, but there's this nuclear arms treaty he helped make and there's this like peace deal he negotiated in the Middle East and like all of these things.
Yeah, but that was like 2% of the shit that he did.
And it was largely because other people that he wanted to stay in good with were pushing for that kind of shit too.
Like Henry Kissinger, whenever he has expressed an idea that is his legitimate idea is like really, really disastrously wrong.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Fuck him.
Nobody cares.
Yeah.
Nobody cares.
He's got to get to invest in Theranos still as opposed to being the one victory.
The one victory we won.
That's why we should pardon her.
Yeah, right.
Look, you stole a lot of money, but you made Henry Kissinger look kind of sick.
We're going to release you to come up with another scheme to take more money from this bag of shit.
You don't get to make a company anymore, but we're going to have cameras follow you.
Think of this.
Have you seen the prank show?
Yeah.
Have you seen punked?
They're talking about Therano's punked, but it's just every week.
It's Jack Kissinger.
You're going to put on mustaches and like fake wigs and you're just going to try to fuck with them.
But they're telling me this is a way for me to get a longer spine.
I mean, I'd love to get a little money.
This popcorn has zero calories?
I can't believe what I'm hearing.
You know what's awesome about that story is that she's a younger female Kissinger.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
100%.
She's like bloodkissing.
Everyone's super into her and she was just saying whatever people wanted to hear and like, it's amazing because there's the good grifters and the evil ones.
We just finished our four-parter on the czar and talked about the fact that like before Rasputin, there was another spiritualist grifter who pretended to talk to like ghosts and stuff named Philippe, who like got a bunch of money for them, tricked the Tsarina into thinking she was pregnant and then bounced with a bunch of their money.
And the last thing he did before he left was like, I'm going to come back in another form as another spiritual healer.
You should trust whatever I said.
Very funny.
Took all the money and ran.
And when he died, it was found out that he had been paying for the mortgages and rentals of like 52 impoverished families.
Like the perfect guy for like the opposite of Kissinger.
Yeah.
Just taking money from the czar to help poor people out.
What a dude.
It'd be great if he showed up again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's put that guy in front of Kissinger.
Let's see what he can do.
So in private, Kissinger admitted already while he is doing all this, while he's a part of this big debate, you know, while he's taking the side that we should escalate, in private, in his conversations, he admits to his friends that Vietnam is an unwinnable disaster of a war.
Oh my fucking God.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He defended it in public, though, because there was at least a 50% chance the Democrats were going to stay in power after the next election.
That is awful.
And he didn't want to give up on a chance of having a job.
You know, I think a lot of times you just, you do, I guess he's a little different because he's such a shapeshifter.
Yeah.
But, you know, I think it's just the way we are.
You are like, they can't just be that base evil.
Yeah.
He sure can't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's something I, it's something I always think about with climate change is that people can't wrap their votes around the fact that there might be a significant portion of rich people in control who actually want everybody to die.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or at least don't care because what really matters is like maintaining their level of relative power to everyone else.
No, and it's just like, what are they going to do?
Call themselves out?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's cool.
So obviously, it's one of those things.
I don't actually know that he really believed that Vietnam was a disaster because he may have been lying to his friends when he said because he wants to keep like he wants to keep a bridge to the other side open, you know?
Like it's impossible to say because he's fucking Henry Kissinger.
Is it possible there's two Kissingers?
Yes.
Okay.
What if there's six?
I'd be amazed.
And if they ever touch Cambodia, we'll be, oh, yep, you know what?
So the fact that Kissinger in private would be like, yeah, Vietnam, what a fuck up.
And in public would be like, let me binge Shapiro about Vietnam team.
That really pissed off a lot of his friends, including the political scientist Hans Morgenthau.
Kissinger had admitted to Morgenthau that the war was unwinnable, unwinnable, even while he continued to go on in the media and advocate expanded saturation bombing.
Morgenthau found this deeply disappointing, but Henry was increasingly tailoring his public statements to the ear of a man who was already a fan of his work.
Richard Milhouse Nixon.
Can we get like some sound effects?
A lightning whips across the screen in a screen at Wolf House.
In comes the paradactyl.
Which we'll do a whole Nixon episode one of these days.
A lot of our Kissinger series will also be about Nixon because you can't unwrap the two men, you know?
You can't.
So there are two Kissingers.
Yeah, one of them is Richard Nixon.
So by the end of 1968, as the presidential race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Vice President Richard Nixon heats up, Kissinger's profile had raised enough that he was seen as the frontrunner for a serious foreign policy job in either potential administration.
As time went on, either, yeah, he's got a gig no matter what, baby.
It's just unbelievable.
He's the Raytheon of people.
Can't lose.
So as time goes on, though, he increasingly leans towards Nixon, which surprises his friends, whom he had told, quote, Richard Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running to have his president.
But I want him to give me a gig.
I can't wake up with him.
I need jobs.
Say to me.
So he was heartbroken when his friend Rockefeller lost to Nixon, and he commented, now the Republican Party is a disaster, and Nixon is not fit to be president.
Oh my God.
I am Kelly Cobb.
I am over and over.
And oh, this is what they said about Reagan.
This is what they said about Bush.
This is what they said about Trump.
Okay.
Yeah, it's always the same calculus.
This is true, but Kissinger didn't let his complete contempt for Nixon stop him from trying to get a job with the man.
To explain why, here's the New Yorker.
It took Kissinger's close contemporary, the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, another son of Jewish immigrants who fought in the war and studied at Harvard with William Yandel Elliott, to fully dissect Kissinger's careerist instincts.
On the surface, Wollenart observed, Kissinger would have appeared a mismatch for the anti-elitist Nixon, but the pairing was perfect.
Nixon needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him feel like a great figure in the drama of history.
As Wolin wrote, what could have been more comforting to that barren and inarticulate soul than to hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kissinger, who spoke so often and knowingly about the meaning of history?
I mean, It's just an empty sack and an evil sack.
And the evil sack's like, I can fill you.
Yeah, as long as someone can fill me.
Somebody's going to fill me off.
Somebody's going to load me with something.
Oh, that's right.
No, he's not going to do it.
Put all that black pile down inside of me.
Thank you, Hank.
Oh, boy.
Gareth, he doesn't call him Hank, but we'll get to that later.
Come on, Spanky.
It's a lot worse than that, Gareth.
All right.
Executing Political Opponents00:15:45
So in 1968, the Johnson administration was carrying out an extensive series of negotiations between South and North Vietnam in an attempt to secure an end to the war.
LBJ wants credit for his legacy, right?
I'm not going to give LBJ credit for like caring about human death and suffering because he's also a monster.
Not trying to make him seem good by comparison.
But he sees ending the war both as a way to like, I want to go out on a good note and also this is going to, if he could, if he could even secure a significant like ceasefire, that would help Humphrey get re-elected, right?
Because nobody's in the U.S. is very pro the Vietnam War within the majority of most voters are very anti-it.
So that's kind of the play that LBJ is making.
He wants to end the war in order to help Humphrey win.
Over the course of the election year, his Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and his Secretary of Defense, Clark Gifford, became aware that something was amiss.
Some of the moves that the South Vietnamese government made, which threatened the negotiation, seemed bizarre.
They would take these wild changes where it's like suddenly South Vietnam's not willing to negotiate.
Like, what the fuck?
We had worked all this out.
Why are you guys pulling out at the last minute?
North Vietnam's willing to come to the table.
In the trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens writes, quote, from his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford, who's again the Secretary of Defense, had actually been able to read the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he terms a secret personal channel between President Theu and Saigon in the Nixon campaign.
The chief interlocutor at the American End was John Mitchell, then Nixon's campaign manager and subsequently attorney general.
He was actively assisted by Madame Anna Chenau, known to all as the Dragon Lady, a fierce veteran of the Taiwan lobby and all-purpose right-wing intriguer.
She was a social and political force in the Washington of her day.
So LBJ's administration, this is suspicious as fuck.
Let's bug the Nixon campaign, right?
Which is not illegal, obviously.
It is an act of fucking treason to try and extend a war by sabotaging negotiations.
This is one of the very few cases where like, yeah, you should wiretap those people.
You should tap the fuck out of those phones.
But it's also, this is, they don't want this to get, LBJ doesn't want this shit to get out at all.
This would be, number one, a hanging crime.
You get executed for doing this kind of shit, like on paper at least, right?
And so LBJ's administration, while they're wiretapping Nixon and getting evidence about like this, what increasingly becomes clear as a conspiracy, keeps fucking quiet about it because they're worried that revealing this would create a crisis of confidence in the American government.
Oh, my fucking fucking liberals.
I know.
Liberals.
This is how many times.
How many fucking times Bush stole two elections?
This is what they did.
This is what they fucking did.
It's honestly.
It really is.
I mean, it's just, I mean, that is so fucking crazy to put the clubhouse, I mean, above everybody.
It is like the one time where if a president had had his political opponents hanged, it would be like, yeah, that's what you should have done.
And no matter what, you'd have to, that one session of hangings really would have gone a long way with this country.
We would be in so much a better position if they'd hung Nixon and several other people we're about to talk about.
It would also give a Nixon good posture, finally.
Yeah, finally.
I knew about that Nixon had done.
I did not know that they knew.
I didn't know they knew at the time.
Oh, yes, David.
That's fucking insane.
The liberal mind.
I always think about this story about when the junta took over in Chile before Pinochet got into power and they asked all the, they said we want to have interviews with people.
And the liberals so believed in government that they went and lined up for the secret police interviews because they're like, well, this is what we do.
And they're like, no, they're taking your names down to possibly kill you.
But they lined up because they're like, well, this is, we don't want to mess up the system.
Like, we're supposed to go get interviewed by the government.
And you're like, it's a junta.
Like, it just, the mindset of just, this is how our constitution works and this is what we're supposed to do.
And you're like, no, it's literally not working.
The thing isn't working.
This is a great, this is one of the best examples ever of yeah.
Yeah.
And this is the germ of truth in Kissinger's whole ideology about conflict is that if you are in a conflict with someone who is willing to throw down and you aren't, they're going to win, right?
Like that is a truth of history, right?
It's a truth of fighting fascists, right?
It's not enough to say like punching them isn't the entirety of it, but if you're not willing to throw down, they will win, right?
And that is a thing that is often taken exactly the wrong way at the geopolitical level.
But like you see in this that like LBJ was not willing to throw down and Nixon was.
And everything we're going to talk about in the rest of this series happens as a result.
And it's like LBJ loved throwing down, but not in the, it's amazing that he does it in this.
I think that's the craziest thing is that like that was the fucking big dick.
I'm going to take a shit and you're going to listen to me guy.
Like he gave no fucks and threw down with everybody.
You know what I think it is, Dave?
I think for all of his many, many, many flaws and evil acts committed, I think LBJ believed in things.
Yeah.
And Nixon and Kissinger don't.
He wouldn't throw down, but he would throw two ads.
I also agree with you.
Yeah, I would, because, you know, LBJ was famous for whipping his dick, which he called jumbo out at all times.
He once pissed on a Secret Service agent at a party because he couldn't get to the bathroom easily enough.
And like, that's the secret.
Yeah.
All of our sponsors are the same and that their dicks are called jumbo and they do piss on the secret service.
Every one of our sponsors pisses on the secret service.
That's a promise.
So we're back.
Oh, boy.
Good times.
So South Vietnam pulls out of the negotiations, right?
I think they're happening in Paris.
And I'm being, I haven't really gone to detail about what happened up to this point because those details are very obscure to the American people.
What is publicly possible, like known is that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are supposed to come to the table, have this big negotiation to try to come to like some way in which the war can come to an end.
And South Vietnam, after a bunch of like throwing a bunch of like wrenches in the process, finally just backs out entirely, right?
And so the negotiations don't happen and the war continues.
That's what everybody sees.
You know, if you're just like a dude paying attention on the news, that's what you're aware of happening here.
LBJ's administration knows something sketchy is going on between Nixon and the South Vietnamese government, but even for them, they don't know precisely what happened.
Here's what happened.
As part of the negotiations, LBJ offered the North Vietnamese a bombing halt.
Now, you can see why this is very enticing for Hanoi, right?
Because being bombed is not pleasant and the U.S. was doing a lot of it.
So this is like what LBJ is like, hey, I will fucking stop bombing Vietnam if you guys will come to the table and talk about stuff.
And the North Vietnamese government, not being made entirely of soulless cockroaches, is like, well, okay, like that's a pretty good offer, actually.
Yeah.
We were bombing Saar.
We actually dropped John McCain.
Yeah, we did drop John McCain.
You guys might have caught him.
You can keep him for a while.
He'll come back into the picture.
It'll be a big problem.
He'll also, weirdly enough, be the least objectionable Republican elected leader for a long time.
So it's a mess.
Just so you guys know, that's our future hero.
He and Jesse the body Ventura will be the only conservative voices against torture.
So heads up.
It is amazing watching that old clip of Jesse Ventura on the view being the most reasonable American in fucking early 2000s.
Yes.
Next to Gilbert Gottfried, at least.
It's actually not Gilbert Gottfried's main alternative universe.
So, yeah, this is very enticing offer for Hanoi, the bombing cessation.
And it's good enough if, like, if you won't bomb us anymore, yeah, maybe we can concede on some stuff if you're not murdering people en masse.
Like, yeah, of course we'll negotiate with you.
Sounds pretty good.
Yeah.
Nixon cannot let this happen.
This would be a disaster.
Vietnam not getting bombed, he sees as like the worst case scenario, even though he is campaigning on ending the war, by the way.
But that's Nixon's promise.
I'm going to get us out of the, but yeah, on my watch.
If it happens before, what am I campaigning on?
So Nixon uses his back channel to the South Vietnamese government to get them to torpedo their end of the negotiations because the government of South Vietnam is frightened, obviously, that the U.S. is going to stop bombing North Vietnam.
So if you're following along, something should be obvious at this point.
Since the Johnson administration was negotiating secretly with North Vietnam, there should have been no way for the government in Saigon to know that LBJ had proposed a bombing halt.
But obviously, Saigon knew, which means there was a secret informant within the Johnson administration passing information to the Nixon administration and sharing a lot of top-secret data with Saigon.
So the big question is: who could possibly be so deep into both camps that he could feed information from one to the other?
Forrest.
Oh, my God.
That's right, baby.
Should be executed for treason.
Absolutely should be executed for treason.
Oh, my God.
Slowly.
Yeah.
Slowly executed.
Yeah.
It should be that incompetent dude who hung the Nazis at Nuremberg and like kept fucking up and making it worse.
Bring that dude back.
Sorry, can I just do?
Let me try one more time before you guys get mad.
We should have frozen that motherfucker in carbonite to break out when the nation needed him.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Oh, God.
Are you guys waking me up to kill me?
No, we actually get drunk and do another hang.
We are huge fans.
We've got you a handle of gin here.
And this is Henry Kissinger.
Oh, he's great.
Why would you say Kissinger?
Just do whatever you just kill him as fast as you can.
That's the only note.
But I took a lot of notes from him back in the day.
Like, he's great.
He's great.
Just kill him.
Okay.
I don't think he could die, though.
I will say, I don't think that guy could read.
So obviously, Kissinger is the back channel who is spreading this information.
Now, in his own memoirs, Nixon later admitted to hearing about the proposed bombing halt through what he termed as a highly unusual channel.
Christopher Hitchens continues.
It was more unusual even than he acknowledged.
Kissinger had until then been a devoted partisan of Nelson Rockefeller, the matchlessly wealthy prince of liberal republicanism.
His contempt for the person and policies of Richard Nixon was undisguised.
Indeed, President Johnson's Paris negotiators, led by Averill Harriman, considered Kissinger to be almost one of themselves.
He had made himself helpful as Rockefeller's cheap foreign policy advisor by supplying French intermediaries with their own contacts in Hanoi.
Henry was the only person outside of the government that we were authorized to discuss the negotiations with, says Richard Holbrook.
We trusted him.
It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.
So the likelihood of a bombing halt, wrote Nixon, came as no real surprise to me.
He added, I told Haldeman that Mitchell should stay a continuous liaison with Kissinger and that we should honor his desire to keep his role completely confidential.
So this is all out in the open now.
Yeah, I also, I mean, Nixon really just never shut the fuck up.
I mean, he sure didn't.
He really just was like the drunk guy at a party who would just sort of tell you whatever.
Like, honestly, he's the guy Donald Trump might put a hand on and be like, hey, man, you're insane.
You should ask.
You're saying some stuff that you probably shouldn't write down.
I think you might not, I think you might regret this.
Jake split out you're saying a lot of stuff you probably shouldn't.
And I'm on Twitter.
Yeah.
That's so that is just so crazy and just says it all, you know?
And it's gotten worse.
I mean, it's just fucking bonkers.
Now, the bombing halt was planned for October 23rd, but thanks to Kissinger, the Nixon campaign was able to lobby South Vietnam to increase their demands suddenly at the bargaining table, which wrecked attempted agreements being made with North Vietnam.
This, you know, there's a process.
This happens back and forth until the bombing halt is completely scuttled and peace negotiations fall apart.
Since all this was happening behind closed doors, Humphrey never got to present the possibility of a bombing halt to the American people.
Nixon avoided having to take any stance of any kind on the issue, because obviously, as the peace candidate, he couldn't say you shouldn't do it, right?
He didn't even want it to come up at all.
The Johnson administration made one final attempt to push through a bombing halt at the end of October, but the South Vietnamese government, warned by Kissinger via Nixon, preempted this with a surprise boycott of the peace talks.
Now, while all this is happening, Kissinger is also advising the Humphrey campaign and is so respected there that he was considered a shoe-in for a senior job if they'd managed to win.
There's three of them.
Democrats are so fucking stupid.
I know, right?
There's three of them.
There's three Kissingers.
No, you're fucking Humphrey walking around.
I got my buddy Henry's.
I'm going to give him a good old job.
That's our party you're talking about, mister.
And then I can never get over the fact that Hillary walked around with him during the fucking campaign.
It's not really walking, to be fair, Dave.
He fucking is.
He's like one of those episodes of Frasier where he's dating two women at the same time and trying to keep it secret that they're the same restaurant.
Like, that's how he's a jack tripper.
It's very funny, except for all of the millions and millions.
Yeah, well, let me ask you that.
So do you have the numbers on where the deaths were at in Vietnam?
Oh, you don't know where they ended up.
I'll get you that.
Yeah, I'll get you that in a minute.
Why did I ask?
Yeah, Nixon also grows convinced of Kissinger's value during this period of time, too, and he becomes a shoe-in for a senior job there.
He was particularly impressed by the skill with which Kissinger protected his identity as the leaker from the Humphrey campaign.
Nixon later wrote, One factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy.
What a terrible.
I mean, that's just not a good personality trait.
It's really not.
It's actually not.
But David is up in his, but not to me.
This guy is the best double agent.
He's so fucking great.
He'll fly.
Boy, this guy's an unbelievable shitbag liar.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, it makes sense that like Nixon would be super into that.
Oh, yeah.
Wow, this guy's a real piece of shit.
Oh, I'm Jick Nixon.
This guy could lie to you.
Let me tell you, as a liar.
Oh, fuck.
It's fucking amazing.
It's bad.
Clark Clifford, who would later was again the Secretary of Defense at the time, would later blame the fact that the war did not end in 1968 and the loss of the Humphrey campaign in that election on the school duggery of the Nixon campaign, which was orchestrated in part by Henry Kissinger.
Quote: The activities of the Nixon team went far beyond the bounds of justifiable political combat.
It constituted direct interference in the activities of the executive branch and the responsibilities of the chief executive, the only people with authority to negotiate on behalf of the nation.
The activities of the Nixon campaign constituted a gross, even potentially illegal interference in the security affairs of the nation by private individuals.
Which is the polite political wonk way of saying it.
Interfering with Executive Branch00:06:13
In the book Kissinger's Shadow, Greg Grandon is even more pointed.
The fact that Kissinger participated in an intrigue that extended the war for five pointless years, seven if you count the fighting between the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the 1975 fall of Saigon, is undeniable.
Adding to the evidence is Kissinger himself.
He's been caught on tape twice on recordings recently released, admitting he passed on useful information to Nixon.
Jesus Christ.
My God, it's like killing him isn't enough.
No, he should be gibbeted.
I say this.
We need to bring back gibbeting and just hang that motherfucker somewhere in a nice cage box.
Like, leave him out there.
Leave him out there.
Let people pelt him with stuff.
Yeah.
Fuck him.
Let's kill him by throwing potatoes at him.
You got to make sure there's saddles, right?
Because he's not that strong anymore and you want it to last a while.
Potatoes, yeah.
Yeah.
So we'll talk a bit later about how he got caught on tape and why we know about all of this, because that's a fun story, guys, and involves a different series of crimes.
But Grandin makes another point that's worth acknowledging here.
While Kissinger definitely had inside information from the Johnson campaign, which he passed on, he also didn't have as much information as he pretended to know when he talked to the Nixon campaign.
Oh, Jesus.
Quote, even with access to Johnson's negotiating instructions, he couldn't have had exact information about the decisions being made at the White House.
He had to have been winging it, at least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining what others would do with that guess, playing the angle, sussing out the chance, oh, well, giving the appearance of composure and certainty.
He was right-winging it.
I mean, what an absolute fucking psychopath.
Like, that's the kind of shit.
Like he said, if you're dating two women, you're trying to figure it out and get through some stinky situation, but he's doing this with fucking Vietnam and two presidential campaigns.
I don't, yeah.
Craziness, the absolute lack of a soul is astounding.
He is pure blackness inside.
Yeah.
Dave, let me push back for a second.
I know.
Oh, God.
Wow.
Yeah.
You can't.
I mean, it's hard to even speak to it because it's like the to look, I'll kill five people for a job, but at some point, you have to.
I think up to five is normal.
Sure.
Yeah.
That's regular.
Yeah.
But, but to let, I mean, to just, I don't know.
I, it's, it is.
He killed.
He killed.
I mean, how many Vietnamese died after that?
Like, so many.
We're talking, you know, was it like a million died in the whole war, or is it more than no?
I mean, it is because you also have to include the people who died in Cambodia and Wow and in Vietnam.
We're going to get into more of this in episode three, but conservatively, an additional couple of million deaths as a result of this.
In addition to an additional 20,000 U.S. dead.
It's kind of hard, the death toll to get precise, but like a couple million, like in the millions, a couple additional dead.
Continuing to this day, by the way.
Yeah, I was just going to say, Because he wanted a job.
He's essentially lying in a job interview like you would if you were had no fast food experience and were dealt taco, except millions of people are dying.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
Holy shit.
He's such a bad person.
The crazy thing.
The thing you've done here is you've humanized the situation for me.
Yeah.
Because like I can understand that there's evil people out there and they do stuff like they want to bomb Cambodia.
They want to do this other stuff.
But when you take it to a level where it's a guy winging it in a meeting, it takes on a whole different flavor of evil that is something, because now that's something we can all understand.
We've all been in a situation where we're like, ah, yeah, this guy did a thing and then I did a thing and you're just trying to get through a situation.
Yeah.
We've all experienced that.
None of us have experienced giving the green light to, you know, dropping bombs and killing people.
But that I get.
And I feel in my bones of like, well, holy shit, but you're doing that with millions of people's lives on the line.
It is, it is this thing where the idea I had always had before I really got into him was that like, well, he did, you know, he was involved in all of these horrible things that I knew he was involved in.
But like, I assumed it was from a wonky perspective of like he believed strongly in the need to fight these wars and that anything was justified.
And so he did these horrible things because he believed we were in this like civilizational struggle and certain things were necessary in that.
And like he had all of these different kind of very complex moral beliefs that he wrote dozens of books about explaining why he did the things.
At the end of the day, no motherfucker wanted a gig.
Yeah.
And by the way, it's not like he would have been out of politics.
Like even in his downtime, he was like, you know, he was gigging.
Like, it's just like he would have been patiently waiting for another administration or he would have been working in LBG, whatever.
No, he didn't want to work at Uncle Chucklefox.
He didn't want to work at Uncle Chucklefox.
He wanted to gig at Charlie Goodnight's.
Like he said, I want to work at the Premier Club.
He literally like did the, like, that's the thing.
He didn't just do this for a job.
He did this for like one of the two jobs and the one he kind of didn't want as much.
Yeah.
The guy, yeah.
Un fucking conscriptable.
Yeah.
It's really hard to like, it is hard in like, it's, I think it's easier to understand now what he did.
It's hard to like judge him adequately in moral terms that are even like comprehensible because it's so much out there.
Yeah, it's hard to process.
It really is one of those like, say what you will about the tenets of nihilism, dude, at least it's an ethos moments where it's like, I'm thinking about like people like fucking Saddam or whatever, where it's like, yeah, that was a piece of shit.
There were definitely some things he believed though.
Like there's pieces of shit out like fucking out there who like, there are things they believe.
Mattis and Collective Relief00:12:09
Yeah.
And Kissinger just believes he should be close to power.
Kissinger.
Yeah.
Political doctrine was Kissinger.
He's like, I'm really smart.
I should be in the top game.
And I just want to be there.
It's awesome.
Yeah.
I like how he thinks his childhood didn't fuck with him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, dude.
Bro, bro.
Yeah.
What, you know, it'd be even better if he, if all this was happening and it was just because like he he was like, I know I can get so many more chicks if I'm in the White House.
Yeah.
Because that was the whole reason for it.
He's just like, I just want to get laid.
Look, it is not a non-factor.
Wait, is he is he married right now or is he single?
Oh, who knows?
He's, I mean, I think he gets married at some point, but he's also like, you know, well, I don't know, actually.
He's kind of like a bachelor dude.
We'll talk about that later.
I'm still working on those episodes because there's a whole thing to be said about Kissinger and women and sex appeal.
He gets married.
Yeah, he definitely was married at points, but he's also like kind of a playboy.
Oh, God.
Go back in time a little bit and talk about some of that later.
He was married.
His first marriage was 1949 to 1964.
So I don't think he's.
And then he's not remarried again until 74.
So that's why he's married in this little hall.
I wonder why she left him.
Yeah.
No idea.
He's the only guy who comes black.
I haven't written the episode yet, but I have several pages of people talking about Henry Kissinger's sex appeal on the news that are real, real blackpilling, as the kids say.
Oh, my God.
Not good.
So Nixon wins the 68 election.
Obviously, he gets inaugurated in 1969.
The Vietnam War continues on for half a decade-ish.
This was an almost incalculable humanitarian tragedy, as well as disastrous for the future stability and cohesion of the United States.
But it was dope as hell for Henry Kissinger, who was swiftly appointed Nixon.
I like to put out there that my uncle went to Vietnam and Natalie, you know, he had to kill a lot of people and Natalie fucking ruined his life and he watched Samstai and stuff.
So thank you, Richard Nixon.
Thank you, Richard Nixon.
Everybody who went to Vietnam after 68, say a thank you to Richard for Nixon and Kissinger for, you know, all of the trauma and the trauma that in some cases some of you passed on to your family members and the trauma that has been passed on societally based on our attitudes towards war because of how Vietnam went and the ways in which some people were always looking for a rematch and it got us into other, you know, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Good stuff.
Imagine if like that had been the end of Vietnam, that like there was actually a president realized, you know, the foolishness of a conflict and we went to the table and like negotiations were made and I don't think I don't think the first Iraq war happens.
The invasion of Panama doesn't happen.
You would think that for how long Vietnam dragged on that that would have actually been a lesson to not go into conflicts, you know, no, aimless conflict.
But so no.
I guess the problem is we're thinking there people should learn lessons by leaving countries.
Well, that war is in any way like a moral decision or like actually comes from a place of actual, you know, save your mentality, anything like that.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
That's great.
Getting this appointment as national security advisor required a lot more politicking from Kissinger, including spreading rumors to Nixon before his inauguration that Johnson planned to either depose or kill the president of South Vietnam before he left office.
Kissinger pushed this rumor to the president-elect via regular Bastard's pod side character and Rhodesia enthusiast William F. Buckley.
Buckley's his middleman, Delida Nixon.
Rhodesia enthusiastic.
The translator.
Yeah, good old William F. Buckley.
Whose son went on to write honestly a pretty fun book.
But we don't need to think too much about that.
Wow.
Great Aaron Eckhart performance in the movie.
So Nixon appreciated Kissinger's chutzpah and connections enough that when he put him at the head of the National Security Council, he ordered the professor to reorganize it in order to take foreign policy control away from the state and defense departments.
This means that Nixon gave Kissinger what was very close to a blank check to take total control of U.S. foreign policy.
Obviously, Nixon wanted this because he was a paranoid control freak.
He did not want any kind of separation of powers.
He certainly did not want to have a secretary of state who could like do things that Nixon might not be explicitly ordering.
But the result of this was that Kissinger found himself in a position where he could exercise near absolute power in foreign policy as long as the president kept liking him.
Now, just as Kissinger had little love for Nixon, our buddy Dick Milhouse was not particularly warm to his new right-hand man.
Now, you had given a couple of Spanky Hank.
Yeah, you want to know what his real nickname for Kissinger was?
Jewboy.
Oh, my God.
Jesus Christ.
It is Nixon, but it's like...
I mean, I thought we would be jumping off of the name a little bit.
He's just like, what am I going to call you?
Spanky Hank?
No, little Jew boy.
Jeez.
Good lord.
Right.
And again, it says a lot about Henry Kissinger that he's like, yeah, right.
That's pretty good.
Very funny, sir.
Very funny.
The dimension of childhood has no effect on me today.
Not whatsies?
So there must have been an element of Nixon then who knew what an ass-kissing little bitch he was.
Oh, yeah.
Because he's belittling him to his face.
Oh, yeah.
And knowing he'll stick around.
It's why you get hired for these jobs because it's just like it's not, you know, an empty vacuum who is going to be your right-hand man is still, you know, there's security in that.
There's secrecy in that.
He's like a vacuum, Gareth, in that he'll suck Nixon's dick, but he's also like a toilet in that he'll take Nixon's shit.
You know, that's Henry Kissinger.
He's a bloodkin.
He's a dick-sucking.
He's a toilet.
He's a human kid.
He's one of the human bloodkin.
Yeah.
He's like the Toto toilet is pretty effective, but have you ever had a dick-sucking toilet?
Shit or come either way.
I'm ready for it, baby.
Henry Kissinger.
Sophie, can the title be Henry Kissinger Dick-Sucking Toilet?
It's also speaking of dick-sucking toilets.
It is time for a commercial break.
That is who sponsors our podcast.
Raytheon's new dick-sucking toilet.
Well, it is going to fire a missile at a busload of children, but that's just the Raytheon.
We can't avoid it.
We're tragically obligated.
Yeah, it's how it works.
So Nixon announced Kissinger's appointment as the national security advisor before he had even picked a Secretary of State, which is an unprecedented move.
He announced Henry as, quote, and this is again in his public announcement to the country, as quote, a man who is known to all people who are interested in foreign policy as perhaps one of the major scholars in America and the world in this area.
And he acknowledged that while Kissinger had never held a full-time government job before, he had Nixon's confidence to bring in a whole new foreign policy team, quote, new men to develop new ideas.
Now, the conservative media of the day immediately roared into gear, hailing Henry Kissinger as an unprecedented policy genius, the man necessary to get America back on track after nearly a decade of disastrous war under Democratic presidents.
William F. Buckley wrote, Not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure received such universal acclamation.
Why are you going to ruin her?
Fucking William F. Buckley, you piece of shit.
Compared with Florence Nick, Florence Nightingale.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, it's amazing.
But even ostensibly liberal figures were wooed by Kissinger's Titanic intellect.
In Henry Kissinger and American Power, Thomas Schwartz writes, The liberal historian Arthur Schleshinger Jr. simply referred to it as the best appointment so far.
The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker noted the collective sigh of relief that went up from the liberal Eastern establishment and the Ivy League, fearing Nixon's Cold Warrior image, most shared in the sentiment of Kissinger's Harvard colleague Adam Yarmolinsky.
We'll all sleep a little better each night, knowing Kissinger is down there.
You mean in the toilet getting ready to suck dick?
You know, again, it's exactly what happened with Trump.
Yes, and it's like, it's the way that, I mean, again, it's people's natural reaction is normally kind of there.
It's just the fears are assuaged by people who they consider to be, you know, the compass, and they're just not.
And so when you're told that there are the good guys inside the bad camp, it's like, it's just never fucking true.
It is rot from the core.
Yeah.
And it is, these liberals are also impressed by him and so comforted by him because they think he's smart because he's good at quoting smart dead people, right?
It is the same thing that happened with Mattis.
Mattis, thankfully, is not nearly as toxic a person as Henry Kissinger.
But like, if you actually look at Mattis's background, one of the things he did in the Iraq war was cover up a war crime.
Like, he's not a man to be like, I mean, he was like, he was very popular among like people who served under him, which is part of like why there was this kind of collective relief.
But it's this idea that he's like the warrior monk, right?
They love the idea that like, well, this guy who's president is a maniac, but this dude reads books that he hired.
So it'll be okay.
And that's like, no, it's never okay.
If you continue to lower the bar more and more, you're obvious, like the people that you're bringing back are part of a lower bar, but because the bar is even lower, it seems and feels a little higher.
But it is all just exactly what happened with Colin Powell.
He was insane.
Evil.
We did the dollop on the evil fucking person.
Yeah.
Cover up fucking the massacres in fucking Vietnam.
That's like when he started out, like terrible human being, but the press did the same shit.
If you can quote old books and smile and you're willing to give journalists time, they will talk about you as being the secret reasonable person within the war crimes party.
You know, like that's all it takes.
It's great.
It's just the same thing as if you're a Nazi who reads books, you can get a New York Times profile.
Or dress nicely.
Yeah, or you'll get on 60 minutes or whatever, you know?
It's, it's, don't trust people who want you to think they're smart.
Yep.
That's never a good sign.
Smart people, it's the same thing.
It's the same thing with like people who want you to believe they're dangerous.
If they want you to believe something specific about them, they're lying about it.
That's how people work.
And if a doctor wants to get on the news to talk about COVID and be famous on the news, that's actually not a doctor you should listen to.
Not a great guy.
No, also, I mean, it's, you know, it's from the same publications and the same networks.
The idea that you continue to listen to these sources about what is right and what is wrong just because they have fancy terms like senior policy advice.
It's like, it's all fucking, it's days of our lives.
They're actors.
These are teleprompters.
Yeah.
And they don't know any more than you about anything that matters as a general rule.
Every now and then you get, but like even like within agencies that are heavily like medical oriented, like the CDC, where you would expect them to have a lot of specialized knowledge, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do a good job.
But like they all say that much.
A My Lai a Month00:06:29
The New York Times comfortably lied about Iraq.
Yeah, it's not great.
So during the transition from the Johnson to Nixon administration, U.S. military command began to act under what General Creighton Abrams described as a total war mindset against the infrastructure of the Viet Cong insurgency.
This began with a six-month operation to clear the Mekong Delta, codenamed Operation Speedy Express.
This would prove to be the first major military operation that both Nixon and Kissinger oversaw, and it was a titanic bloodbath.
There is a good article on this operation in The Nation, and the title of the article is A My Lai a Month.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So it's bad.
Oh my God.
Now, the Mylai Massacre had occurred in 1968.
Before Nixon or Kissinger were in power, you know, that ain't on them.
And Seymour Hirsch didn't like break the story until 69, which is the year that they come to power.
And this slaughter of 500 civilians by U.S. troops was horrific enough.
But within a few months of taking power, Speedy Express had exceeded it many times.
Quote from the nation.
An inkling that something terrible had taken place in the Mekong Delta appeared in a most unlikely source, a formerly confidential September 1969 senior officer debriefing report by none other than the commander of the 9th Division, then Major General Julian Ewell, who came to be known inside the military as the Butcher of the Delta because of his single-minded fixation on body count.
In the reports, copies of which were sent to Westmoreland's office and to other high-ranking officials, Ewell candidly noted that while the 9th Division stressed the discriminate and selective use of firepower in some areas of the Delta, where this emphasis wasn't applied or wasn't feasible, the countryside looked like the Verdun battlefields, the site of a notoriously bloody World War I battle.
That December, a document produced by the National Liberation Front sharpened the picture.
It reported that between December 1st, 1968 and April 1st, 1969, primarily in the Delta provinces of Kianhoa and Dinh Tuong, the 9th Division launched an express raid and mopped up many areas, slaughtering 3,000 people, mostly old folks, women, and children, and destroying thousands of houses, hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards.
But like most NLF reports of civilian atrocities, this one was almost certainly dismissed as propaganda by U.S. officials.
A United Press International report that same month in which U.S. advisors charged the division with having driven up the body count by killing civilians with helicopter gunships and artillery was also largely ignored.
And it's because they're saying they're soldiers that they're shooting from a distance on helicopters.
Colin Powell justified it by saying, well, they're providing food for the enemy, so there's no difference.
Yeah.
By the time Speedy Express comes to an end, U.S. forces had killed more than 10,000 people.
The vast majority of these were claimed to have been insurgent fighters.
But extensive mop-up operations after the fact found less than 800 weapons on all these bodies.
Hey, they shared.
That is fucking crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, like, we can't even frame them competently.
No.
No.
And also, remember, you're taking guys that you drafted.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right.
You know, to do this.
Yeah.
I mean, like you said with your uncle, I mean, it is.
It's like the generational ripple through that and the lifetime, you know, what it does, it ruins.
I mean, yeah, just pretty.
Beyond who dies, who doesn't live again?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And what, yeah, what do people take back with them?
Now, it is fair and necessary to note that this began in the December before Nixon and Kissinger took office.
This is not entirely on them.
Some of the blame for this goes on the LBJ administration as well, obviously.
But it continued under them.
This paragraph, written by Christopher Hitchens, gives you some idea of the savagery of what occurred in the early days of the Nixon administration's control of the Vietnam War.
The people who still live in pacified Kian Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in early 1969.
Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way.
There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in 1970, one village elder told me.
The Americans destroyed every house with artillery, airstrikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters.
About 100 people were killed by bombing.
Others were wounded and others became refugees.
Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs, which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground.
So Nixon's plan at the beginning, you know, when his people had derailed the peace negotiations in 68, was that he would win election and then make peace with Vietnam, right?
Then he's going to do the thing that he promised to do.
But it swiftly became clear that peace was a messy prospect.
One of the things he's worried about is that like, well, if we withdraw from Vietnam, the Saigon government's probably going to fall, right?
Because we're just barely propping up this shitty dictatorship.
And it'll make me look weak, right?
And so I can't do it because it'll make me look weak.
Give me one beer and then I'll quit drinking.
Yeah.
And then I won't win re-election in 1972.
And that's unacceptable.
And that, I mean, obviously keeps going over and over.
You get into office and then you're like, well, what about re-election instead of going like the best direction for...
It is one of the few things I'll give Biden some credit for because he had the same calculus with Afghanistan.
A lot of criticisms to make about the pull-up from Afghanistan, but he did not make the same decision Nixon and Kissinger did.
He did fucking get out.
It would have been easy.
Yeah, so withdrawing from Vietnam, I mean, Saigon is going to fall.
The government's going to fall.
And that will be bad in the 72 elections.
And it might push Kissinger and Nixon out of power.
Neither of them can accept this.
And this description of a meeting from December 1970 by H.R. Haldeman shows Kissinger's role in pulling back from peace.
Kissinger came in and the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam and the president's big peace plan for the next year, with Kissinger later, which Kissinger later told me he does not favor.
He thinks that any pullout from next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the 72 elections.
He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of 72 so that if any bad results follow, they will be too late to affect the election.
Ah.
Yeah.
And it's, you know.
That's what our wars always are.
They're all about.
Yeah.
They're all about elections.
They fucking always are.
It's, you know.
Yeah.
This led to Republicans thinking that, you know, they had to get war back on track at some point.
Pullout Before Elections00:02:59
Yeah.
But it's always, it never works.
Like, it's, it's just such a crazy idea.
And you also, like, people are watching bodybuilds go home.
Like, no one's happy about anything that's going on.
No.
And it, um, this, they just kind of, I mean, that's part of why it keeps going is this kind of craven knowledge that like, well, the worst thing that could happen is we don't get re-elected.
Yeah.
At no point is he thinking about any of the human beings involved, even any of the American human beings involved.
It's just like, well, we can't be losing re-election, you know?
Imagine if Kissinger was damaged from his childhood how bad things would get.
It could be really bad.
It's like, you know, actually, when we talk about the story of like American presidents making craven political decisions, one of the reasons FDR did not approve more effort being taken to evacuate Jewish refugees from Germany is he did not want to be seen as pro-Jew.
Oh, jeez.
Because of the socialist policies and stuff that we're going through, he knew that that could hurt him.
There were a number of other reasons, but like, yeah, like they did not, that is, like, there is, there were things that were done that led to the U.S. government saving fewer Jewish people from the Holocaust that were done for craven political reasons by the FDR administration.
Let me hear this Kaiser pitch again.
It actually big hat.
I love the hat.
Biggest hat you've ever seen.
Very spikey.
Now, loves his mom's hands, but oh, God.
So the fun thing about this episode is that everything we're going to talk about in part three is even worse because in part three, we're going to talk about fucking Cambodia.
So you guys want to plug anything after my ears?
Three hours?
Yeah.
I'm going to be in a toilet trying to get clean after this.
You can go to the dollar, go to dollopodcast.com for tour information.
My website, DerrenReynolds.com.
I'm on tour.
But not like tours of duty, just like stand-up and podcast tours with the aim of bringing joy to people.
I don't want to talk like that anymore, Dave.
Dave, shut your fucking mouth and you can just listen to the dog.
Last time I saw you do a set, you just fucking murdered the whole fucking shit.
Shut your fucking face.
Like not only did you kill that crowd, you left unexploded ordinance in the crowd.
They even tripped over late.
It should have been over 15 minutes earlier.
And like with Unexploded Ordnance and Lau, 40% of the people who loved your jokes after the set ended were children.
There'll be no more relating.
There'll be no more correlating.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's part two.
You got two more weeks of Henry Kissinger ahead of you folks.
Shut Your Fucking Mouth00:04:04
So strap in.
Gets a lot uglier.
But also, we'll be talking about his sex life.
So, you know, a lot uglier.
I was going to say something to look forward to, but like not really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Come back next week for more of the dick-sucking toilet, Henry Kissinger.
That's a pretty good title.
Sophie's not happy with it.
No, Sophie's not on board.
I don't love it, but you know.
All right.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come.
Look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, I don't.
How do I, Sophie?
How do I introduce part three of the Kissinger series?
You just might.
You just did it.
Gareth and Dave are right here.
They're waiting for something good.
And I just, I'm just, I'm fucking it up, Sophie.
I mean, yeah, but you did, you, you accidentally introduced the podcast, which is Behind the Bastards.
Operation Steel Tiger00:15:02
Behind the dollops, dollop the bastards.
Dollop the bastards.
Dollop the bastards.
It's a hybrid podcast.
And like all hybrids, it is incapable of procreating.
That's right.
But better at getting up steep mountain passes.
It's getting a little goatee now.
We can multiply by cell division, but not through sexual matters.
Yeah.
We've tried.
Yeah, we have.
We're in that process.
We tried.
So since we last recorded a podcast, war has broken out in Eastern Europe.
Oh, God, three days.
Well, we like ended it, and then it was like, oh, wow, it's happening.
And now it feels like it's been two months since then.
Had a brief conversation.
What do you think's going to happen?
And then immediately checked our phones to be like, oh, okay.
So there's shoveling all over the place.
Okay.
Oh, so, y'all, are we ready to learn about Henry Kissinger and a little country you might have heard of called Cambodia?
Oh, God.
And also a separate country you might have heard of called Laos.
And also Vietnam still.
So that energy.
I am.
Let's go.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
So on February 14th, Valentine's Day, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder.
This was a long-term campaign of aerial bombing against North Vietnam.
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.
It did not succeed as a spoiler.
None of this works.
Like, it's just amazing that you have all this firepower, you have all these planes.
And really, you're talking about destroying like railroads and shipping and like underground tunnels, too.
This is the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, is that what we're talking about?
The Ho Chi Minh Trail?
Okay.
And they were never going to do that.
No, 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.
You could talk about like what's happening right now in Ukraine, which has not succeeded in its strategic aims.
You could talk about a number of wars the U.S. has been involved in.
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.
Like military leaders always have this idea that we can just bomb our problems away and it just never really works.
Yeah, no, it doesn't.
You know what it does?
It terrifies the civilian population.
It sure does.
Yes.
It helps the Pentagon a lot, I think.
It does help the Pentagon.
It makes money for people.
So I guess to that extent, it succeeds in its goal.
And Operation Rolling Thunder did make some people a lot of money.
It continued for three straight years until November of 1968.
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.
For reference, the United States dropped half a million tons of bombs in the Pacific theater during all of World War II.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which we bombed the shit out of North Vietnam to no notable effect.
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.
The CIA says that 75% of all casualties were people involved in military operations.
U.S. government estimates, not by the CIA, however, estimate at least 30,000 civilian fatalities.
Other estimates place the civilian death toll much higher at close to 200,000 civilians.
Probably fair to say north of 100,000.
A lot, a lot of folks.
By the time Kissinger and Nixon took office, it was clear that Rolling Thunder had failed miserably.
This was due in part to the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
In 1959, this is before U.S. soldiers had officially entered the country.
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.
At the start, it led across just the demilitarized zone into Khe Son and South Vietnam.
Porters would carry boxes of ammunition and rifles on their body, which they would then hand to insurgents in the south.
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.
As the fighting escalated, the trail veered into Laos, where the government was engaged fighting its own insurgency and unable to stop the transit of weapons.
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.
Today, even Defense Department sources recognize it as one of the greatest logistical successes of 20th century warfare.
It works pretty good.
It's true.
It's amazing to think of the number of bombs you're talking about, and then they made a tunnel.
Yeah, not only did they make a tunnel.
They dug a hole.
Yeah.
Like a really good hole.
It's like El Chapo.
It's not just a tunnel.
It's in a jungle.
Like, we're talking about a very difficult sort of environment to make a tunnel.
It's not that like, it's incredible what they did.
Yeah.
So LBJ's administration sent planes into Lao to bomb the trail and to escort Laotian planes while they bombed the trail.
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.
Cambodia was bombed as well, but during LBJ's administration, Lao was considered a more important target.
They thought more stuff was getting into Vietnam through Lao.
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.
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.
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.
Right.
In the spring of 1969, after Kissinger and Nixon took office, they approved the expanded use of U.S. special forces in Laos, along with a campaign of sustained airstrikes.
This was called Operation Steel Tiger.
All of these are the stupidest names.
They're always so dumb.
Yeah, I mean, the marketing that we have gone for in this country for so long has been so absurd.
Steel Tiger.
Well, I mean, they're just taking YNT album names at this point.
Yeah.
If only they'd gone with like Prince Operation Purple Rain, but it's like the defoliant that gives everyone cancer.
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.
Henry was the chairman of something called the 40 Committee.
Hell.
Oh, sorry.
Yes.
This was a semi-secret body that had been set up to provide management and oversight to CIA covert operations.
The committee was made up of members of the National Security Council.
They concerned themselves regularly with the question of how to stop weapons from flowing into Vietnam.
By this point, trails ran through parts of Lao and Cambodia, but also from the Vietnam-Chinese border.
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.
Jesus Christ, out of its entire damn mind.
And to be fair, is nuts enough that even Kissinger is like, no, that's a little too far.
Let's sleep on this.
He also considered bombing the dikes that kept North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding all of its fields.
Both of these would have been war crimes on a Titanic scale.
Thankfully, Kissinger declined to do either in favor of a completely different set of war crimes.
So that's good.
That's nice.
Yeah.
Let's do a different thing.
He decides which war crimes to commit.
Like we decide, like jeans or sweatpants in the morning.
I mean, I think that would go really well with what we're doing now.
That'll really tie the whole thing together.
Yeah.
That's quite a life.
So immediately after taking office, Henry helps his new boss put together a menu of bombardment targets in Cambodia.
This is literally called Operation Menu.
No!
Yeah.
What?
Have you bombed on us before?
Try the specials.
We've got some great ideas on special.
That's what.
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.
Somebody will figure it out.
We'll do it in post.
Yeah, we'll figure it out.
Different parts of Operation Menu had code names.
Different targets had code names like breakfast, lunch, snacks.
Oh my gosh, what?
Why?
I mean, it is one thing to be like so sadistic, and it's just another thing to tie it into.
Do you want to try brunch?
Yeah.
Should we do it?
Yeah, we're going back to brunch finally under the watchful eye of the Nixon.
They'll never take this away from us.
It's nice that slaughter can be fun.
Like you can find fun.
Yeah, it's the same.
You should.
You got to love what you do, Dave.
Otherwise, it's just going to feel like work, you know?
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 effect of this act could tend to increase casualties.
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.
Like, heads up, so you know what you're doing.
This is what's going to happen.
Now, as they approached the question of bombing Cambodia, Kissinger and Nixon had a choice.
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.
Nixon had been elected with Kissinger's help in part due to the LBJ administration's failure to end the war.
He didn't want to go into 1972's re-election campaign, having to defend the fact that he expanded it.
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.
And I'm going to quote from Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Randon.
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.
Then he would bring them to Kissinger and Haig in the White House for approval.
Kissinger was very hands-on, revising some of Sitton's work.
I don't know what he was using as his reason for varying them, Sitton later recalled.
Strike here in this area, Kissinger would tell him, or strike there in that area.
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.
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.
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.
Then he would write up false post-strike paperwork indicating that the South Vietnam sortie was flown as planned.
It's so much work.
It reminds me of when I used to skip school, that like the lengths I would go to to get away with cutting class.
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.
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.
Yeah, they really are going through a lot of work to illegally bomb a neutral country.
To look like they're not bombing.
Yeah, to look like they're not.
It's gaslighting, you know?
That's what this is, Kissinger.
We're finally going to get him canceled.
This is going to be what that is.
Man, it would be, imagine uncancelable.
We're going to do to Kissinger what Hannibal Burris did to Cosby.
Oh, man.
Oh, come on.
Come on.
So, you know, obviously, this is very illegal.
There's a lot of, and there's a lot of parts of it that are illegal.
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?
Like, colonels don't get to that's not their like, you're not at that level, right?
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.
Sitton knew at the time that it was weird to cut his commanding officers out and report directly to Henry Kissinger.
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.
Yeah.
Where he's meeting with.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to a secret basement.
Yeah.
To talk about bombing.
Like, maybe, maybe this isn't how it's supposed to be done.
He'll seem like a democracy.
Yeah.
I feel like we shouldn't be doing things like this in a basement.
You come to secret democracy basement.
Yeah.
The people voted for this basement.
So I know as you.
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.
And in fact, all of Sitton's superiors knew what he was doing.
They just didn't want to be involved because, again, it was a crime.
So they're down with the cutout because they're just like, yeah, you do it.
I don't want my name on this show.
That's fucking crazy, but go with it for sure.
I love it.
Keep me out of the loop.
But I love it.
Yeah, they didn't know about the bombing of Cambodia the same way I have never known a pot dealer.
Right.
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.
And he would go, he did on a couple of occasions go to his superiors and was like, are you okay with this?
And his exact phrasing of what they responded was, just do just what you're doing.
When you get a call to go to the White House, go because you don't really have a choice, which is great.
Oh, my God.
It feels so good.
It's straight out of the show snowfall.
Secret War in Cambodia00:05:29
Like, it's just like this shit just happens all the time.
Yeah, this is what happened with Iran-Contra.
It was the same fucking shit.
Yeah.
It's all crimes.
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.
Like Kissinger is not even a year distant from being a fucking teacher.
And now he is orchestrating a secret war in Cambodia.
I mean, and like, I love the, I love the, the, 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 just taking the maps and going, no, I like this bomb here.
Like just totally random.
He doesn't have any fucking idea what he's doing.
He's just like, that hill looks like it should go away.
He has not even begun to micromanage this war crime day.
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.
Now, the president had shared this with close confidants prior to the 1968 election.
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.
We'll just slip the word to them that, for God's sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed about communists.
We can't restrain him when he's angry.
And he has his hand on the nuclear button.
And Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.
Which is like the idea of someone's like, so you want us to try to convey that you're crazy?
Okay, that seems, I think it's coming across, sir, honestly.
I think that's where he sort of thinking about it.
That's baked into this whole thing a little bit.
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.
You know, like North Vietnam, not a big country compared to, say, the French imperial forces or the United States.
He's not a kind of, you're not going to scare Ho Chi Minh, right?
He's not a guy who gets spooked.
No, it's over.
That's just absolutely not happening at this point.
Yeah.
Now, Kissinger either believed in his boss's plan or understood that he had to play along.
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.
Quote, toughness, after all, was a late motif that ran through much of his statecraft.
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.
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.
I mean, like, it's not even, I mean, it's not a double down.
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.
And the more you learn, the more you go, no, there's just, there's not.
They are just all like, it's like a bunch of junkies figuring out how to get more junk.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just like, it's just how do you get through the day?
It's not long-term anything.
Yep.
You know, there's a degree to which, and this is like one of the things that's most frustrating about this, 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.
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.
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.
Like, Chamberlain.
Nonsense escalation.
Chamberlain also is always in play there, too, because it's like everyone's like, oh, you don't want to be Chamberlain.
Yeah.
We're appeasing North Vietnam if we don't drop more bombs than were dropped in all of World War II on Cambodia.
Yeah, it's Cambodia.
It's this nonsense escalation of logic, of historical logic that's like...
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.
There actually are some quotes from Kissinger that aren't all that far off here.
We're back.
So the first bombing mission in this operation was launched on March 18th, 1969.
Kissinger was in conversation at the time when he was interrupted with a note telling him that the bombing run had been a success.
He smiled and then sent the information on to the president.
Nixon's chief of staff later recalled, Historic day.
Kissinger really excited.
He came in beaming with the report.
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.
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.
Nerd Redesigns Bombing Runs00:02:02
No fucking expertise in this area.
Absolutely none.
He's a fucking nerd who reads books.
Like, you don't know anything about what to bomb, Henry?
It's like me showing up at a hospital and being like, all right, give me the surgical schedule.
I need to start working these surgeries and getting them in order.
Like, it's fucking crazy.
It is.
I mean, there's a human impulse here.
We're seeing it in Ukraine where all these like random people are being like, here's how you disable a tank.
And it's like, you've never disabled a tank.
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Like, you're not going to, like, throwing paint on it isn't going to stop it.
You're going to get people killed if anyone's stupid enough to listen to you.
Shut up.
It's just like Kissinger is actually in a power to really do that.
And there's this, I don't know what it is.
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.
And there's, and there's, it doesn't sound like there's anybody who's going like, no, it doesn't make any sense.
Is this out of its mind?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's just like, it is.
It's just people being like, okay, sure.
Because there's a lot.
Obviously, the unrestricted drone warfare that escalated during the Obama administration and continued at an even higher pace under Trump is indefensible morally.
But also the way that it tended to work was like you would get, you know, these guys would, the administration, whichever one it was, would say, like, these are the things we are going to target with drones.
And then the military would bring them like, well, here are the different options for strikes that we have.
And they would like pick which one to do.
Kissinger is literally taking the maps from them, erasing their plans and like writing in his own, which is like a coach.
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.
That would make someone head the ball into the net.
It's it's I think, yeah.
I'm just upset because I bought 40 gallons of paint.
Signing Off on Crimes00:12:09
Because you were going to try to knock out a couple of tanks.
Now the whole fucking thing is shot.
Yeah.
There are some things paint is good at when it comes to conflict.
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.
That was nice.
That was good.
Wow.
Look, that's not to say that amateurs never have good ideas.
They were not amateurs at that point, though.
Those kids had been fighting those proud boys for a minute.
So Kissinger's extraordinary degree of control over the situation was possible because he had literally reformed the entire national security apparatus around himself.
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.
And he could do this as long as he kept Nixon happy.
Under Kissinger, the National Security Council, which he headed, became the center of U.S. foreign policy.
A massive bureaucracy fed piles of information, embassy cables, cables, intelligence reports, et cetera, straight to Henry Kissinger.
He decided.
Again, Henry is where all of the information from this vast apparatus that the U.S. has to gather information, right?
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.
And he was a teacher.
And he was a president.
A year before.
He was a guy whose primary claim to fame before this was, we need more nukes.
We don't have enough fucking nukes.
And also, we should use them whenever.
I was just watching.
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.
A guy accidentally dropped a bolt and it ignited part of a nuclear missile and it nearly killed everyone on the Eastern seaboard.
Yeah, it was a big kerfuffle.
Nazis, guys, there's a screw fell in the thing.
That's nuts about it.
But one of the things that pointed out, I think we have, Sophie can Google this for me.
I think we have about 6,000 nuclear weapons right now, which is way too many.
But as a result...
We have, yeah, we have the Soviet Union.
Russia has around 6,000.
We have around 4,800, I think.
4,800.
So that's too much.
Both countries have too many nukes.
I think we can all say that's fair.
It's a lot.
I'm not sad enough on that.
As a result, in part of Kissinger's, we have a missile gap and we need to build more.
By this point in the mid-60s, there are 32,000 nuclear weapons in the United States.
That's even an aside because it's like a Kardashian with shoes.
Well, I feel my thing has always been every person who owns property should be allowed to have a nuke.
Your own nuke.
Look, I think we can all agree.
You know what?
You know what there wouldn't be if everyone had a nuke, Dave?
No knock raids by the cops.
That's true.
If you're not going to have any of that shit, they ain't going to be busting down doors.
Yeah.
No, come on in, guys.
It's fine.
Doors open, asshole.
Real different situation, R.E. the cops, if everybody's got a nuke.
Other problems, though.
There would be some other problems.
I don't see any problems.
So anyway, Kissinger is the Kissinger has effectively turned himself into the eyes and ears of the United States military apparatus.
He decides what the system is.
You can argue he's one of the two or three most powerful people who's ever lived at this point.
An argument could be made.
So Marvin and Bernard Kolb, who were both diplomats at this point, describe what Henry builds here as Henry's wonderful machine.
Quote, since Kissinger.
Mr. Magorium's nuclear temporary.
Since Kissinger controlled the system, he controlled the decision-making process.
Everyone reports to Kissinger, and only Kissinger reports to the president.
This setup allowed Henry to micromanage bombing campaigns, order covert arms deals, and engage in secret diplomacy at will.
He was not merely executing the president's orders.
He himself was free to make national policy as long as Nixon was happy with him.
From Kissinger's shadow, quote, Kissinger, according to Marvin and Bernard Kulb, 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.
Rogers at State was opposed to the idea of escalating the war into Cambodia.
Laird at the Pentagon was for it, but thought it needed to be done aboveboard, legally and publicly, through the normal chain of command.
This gave Kissinger an opening, letting him stake out a na-plus-ultra position.
He wanted to bomb.
He wanted to bomb in a way that inflicted the most pain.
And he wanted to bomb in absolute secrecy, completely off the books.
Fuck you.
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?
Has to be considered one of Henry Kissinger's crimes because it is his job to personally sign off on all of them.
And he is not just a rubber stamper.
He is actively pushing for things.
So we are going into very specific detail about one specific crime.
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.
So again, we're going to have to leave out a lot.
It doesn't even sound like it's, I mean, it's like ego-based.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
But I mean, I just don't think most people would be capable of this, but it is.
It's just like, it's not really from anything other than he is just feels great being at the helm of this.
And it's an extremely powerful position.
It's such a bad idea.
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.
Right.
Right.
They would be like, look, I need help.
I mean, we're doing what we came to do.
Like, a reasonable warlord would be like delegated.
Level-headed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
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.
Now, sometimes it was a little bit less specific in this.
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.
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.
The bombings Kissinger directed were carried out by B-52 bombers.
These are massive planes.
These are like the size of the big international commercial aircraft, roughly, right?
These are not like fighter jets and stuff.
These fly too high to be seen from the ground, and they are incapable of meaningful discrimination between civilian and military targets.
This is not an era in which there's much at all in the way of precision-guided bombing.
And with a B-52, you cannot even attempt precision.
You are dropping explosives blindly from like a mile up.
I want to quote now from a write-up by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan for Yale.
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.
In many cases, Cambodian villages were hit with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours.
The result was near total destruction.
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.
It's like a sturgeon with eggs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is completely indiscriminate.
Yeah.
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.
It's just like, it's also not, it doesn't work.
Except, I mean, one Cambodian survivor of a U.S. bombing described it this way.
Three F-111s bombed right center of my village, killing 11 of my family members.
My father was wounded but survived.
At that time, there was not a single soldier in the village or in the area around the village.
27 other villages were also killed.
They had to run into a ditch to hide, and then two bombs fell right into it.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah.
You cannot exaggerate the extent to which this is indiscriminate.
Yeah, it's just total madness on top of madness.
I mean, there's no people are rightly furious about like bombing in Ukrainian cities right now.
What the United States is doing in Cambodia is eliminating grid squares on a map of all life.
Right.
Yeah.
Which is a country that has nothing to fucking do.
Yeah, some dudes are walking through it, you know?
Like, it's cop logic where 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, like, it's that kind of shit.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the ostensible purpose of all this carnage was to put an end to North Vietnam's ability to wage war.
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.
Right after the bombing of Cambodia began, Nixon sent Kissinger to talk with the Soviet ambassador, a fellow named Dubrinyan.
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.
I mean, the honest, like, you'd think you'd at least lie about it.
No, no.
Just the, oh, my God.
Look, murdering democide is one thing, Gareth.
But dishonesty, France.
It's just, it's disgusting.
That's, I feel like a parent.
Look.
The Soviet ambassador is someone Kissinger drinks with, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
You got to lie to him.
I mean, I just, I would love to see a version where he just keep up an appearance.
Look, you can't, we just, Nixon hates losing.
That's what this is about.
We can't take the people.
Yeah.
It's.
So between March of 1969 and May of 1970, more than 3,630 raids were flown across the Cambodian border.
Each was approved personally by Henry Kissinger.
The New York Times broke this story to the American public for the first time in May of 1969.
So that's pretty good, right?
Like the New York Times actually is pretty shocking on this and reveals what has happened.
This prompts protests and international outcry.
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.
And then it's like, oh, and they also were the first people to reveal this horrific crime against humanity.
There are these bright spots where you're like, oh, you fuckers.
It's like a broken clock, though.
It's, you know, every now and then.
It's like a broken clock, but when it's right, it's about like the massacre of civilians on an industrial scale.
But also when it's wrong, it's about the massacre of civilians on an industrial scale.
Mixed bag So there's immediately protest and international outcry armed students seize a building at Cornell University, which is very based.
Revealing Horrific Crimes00:11:19
Students at Kissinger's own Harvard engage in a two-week strike.
Ever PR savvy, Kissinger agreed to meet with student protesters in order to prop up his image among liberals.
He told them, if you come back in a year and things haven't changed, we won't have a morally defensible position.
So like, hey, you know, I know it's all fucked up.
I've got to fix this whole messed up.
It's been going on for years.
You know, I'm working on it.
If you come back in the world, I find out who's behind this, I will figure it out.
I figure out how to do it.
Once I find out who's the problem, there's a cug in here.
Give me one year to kill all the babies.
And it also shows how fucking crazy you are.
Like, if you're doing this, you know, you'd be like, look, hide me.
I do not want to talk to the fact that he's like, I'll meet with them.
It's like you can make it work.
Yeah.
Give me a tournament.
I'll just tell him what's up.
Like, look, we got to kill, we got to kill people for like a year.
Let's see how it goes.
Give me a year.
I'm going to bomb the shit out of just villages and shit and kill a bunch of babies and ladies.
You have no idea how to do this.
It's just nice.
It's a year.
Nice to be back at Harvard.
Look at the campus.
You guys changed a couple of things, huh?
You guys are just like, you guys are like, oh, I heard something bad.
We're just getting started.
By the way, give me a year is an amazing thing to say when this, it's on this.
Look, this is happening in the year.
We'll revisit.
It's like, yeah.
No, not a year.
You don't get to revisit this.
You know what?
Revisit.
We should revisit where we are in the story after this break.
Yeah.
Let's revisit the sponsors of this show.
You know who else?
You know who else needs a year to keep killing?
Yeah.
Look, if has not stopped the carpet bombing of Cambodia in a year, then you can cancel your subscription.
By the way, talking, that's menus.
Those are menu options.
Yeah, it's very much like a White House visit with a hell of a what do you want to make, a quesadilla or do you want to do this chickpea salad?
What do you want to do?
There's options.
You want to do a flatbread margarita style?
Oh, we're back.
So there's congressional inquiries about the illegal carpet bombing.
On what grounds?
What are they after?
What?
They smell some smoke?
I should also note seizing Cornell offices with arms, dope.
Actually, sitting down with Henry Kissinger to let him talk about how things aren't really that bad.
Not dope.
Maybe throw a stapler at his face, you know, something.
Try to hit him.
You fucking hit him really hard.
Try to hit him, you know?
At least give him a shoe, you know.
You've got options.
Somebody from a fucking baseball team at Harvard had to have been able to hit him with a fastball.
There are people that, if you're around, you should, Cheney, Bush, you get around certain people.
You get close to him.
You should fucking hit them.
Hit them.
Look, Dick Cheney is basically like a charging phone.
Just unplug him at this point and see what happens.
Just whatever his little plug is, just be like, turn on a microwave next time.
Just have a microwave and an extension cord and put it on popcorn and throw it in his lap.
Yeah, but look, we all know, everybody here knows that eventually Cheney and Kissinger shed their human skins and become one ball of energy.
I think Kissinger currently is shedding his human skin.
If you've seen him lately, it looks like he's halfway through the fingers crossed.
Yeah.
But the two of them merge and then wings pop.
Oh, yeah, I get it.
So they kind of become like a cerebus or something like that.
Yeah, then they're one.
It's like.
Come on, Henry.
Let's get out of here.
Finally, they got true form.
Then they locate and nuke microbiological life on Europa.
We are coming to the bottom.
This is a war crime no one has done yet.
Oh, I love that thing.
Vincent is coming.
So there's congressional inquiries.
Kissinger gets brought before the Senate where he assures everyone that Cambodian territories bombed by the U.S. were all, quote, unpopulated.
He knew this was a lie at the time.
We know from briefing documents Kissinger received that he was warned in detail about such things.
The breakfast bombing target, he was told, was inhabited by 1,640 civilians.
Dessert had 350.
Nixon initially.
It's just like ice cream.
Yeah.
You wouldn't get angry at me for bombing a Baskin Robbins, would you?
There are no people there.
Senator who hates cake.
It's called the magic shell.
So Nixon eventually initially blamed Kissinger for the leaks that had revealed the story of the bombing of Cambodia to the New York Times.
And this is because Kissinger brings in a lot of liberals.
A lot of Kissinger's staff are not Republicans.
They're not right-wing guys.
They're like Northeastern liberals.
Yes, because he's charming.
They are not.
But Nixon is like, it must have been one of these East Coast liberals you brought in that leaked at the Times.
Oh, right.
So he thinks it's an extension of Kissinger, not Kissinger himself.
No, no, no.
He doesn't think Kissinger.
That would be.
Someone's really up to something.
Somebody's fucking around.
Somebody's a big asshole of you.
I won't tell you who, though.
But this is like bringing Woody Allen in.
He's funny.
He's good.
This is some good context on how comprehensively shitty a person Kissinger is, how incapable of real loyalty he is.
Thomas Schwartz writes that in order to preserve his own position, Kissinger had to throw large numbers of his team members under the bus.
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.
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.
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.
It's a meteoric raw.
It's like American idol-level sudden impact as far as, I mean, as you pointed to, he wasn't like this crazy.
I mean, he was crazy, but now it's like he's just, it's on Reuts.
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.
Yeah.
It's pretty cool.
And just like he's not capable of even like treating his very loyal friends well.
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.
So let's return to Cambodia.
It is worth noting that Operation Minyu achieved nothing.
It was useless in a military sense.
The enemy command and control facilities they were ostensibly trying to destroy were never taken out.
And it was useless from a negotiating standpoint because North Vietnam did not bulge.
Budge.
Bulge.
In May of 1970.
They bulge, baby.
They fucking bulge.
In May of 1970, Nixon decided to escalate again by ordering a ground invasion of Cambodia.
He announced this with a typically unhinged speech.
And again, this is public because at this point, you know, the New York Times has revealed things.
We live in an age of anarchy.
We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the past 500 years.
It's happening.
It's because kids are like protesting and colleges.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, he framed it as a test of the nation's, quote, will and character.
Oh, seriously.
He's right.
When one of his staff members, Balkan Kissinger's staff members, balked at plans to illegally invade Cambodia with ground troops, Henry told him, Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern establishment.
This staff member, William Watts, tried to physically attack Henry Kissinger, who hid behind his desk.
It's just like, if he was only able to just kill him, imagine the ripple.
If only there'd been a sharper letter opener on the desk.
He could have just penned and put it like a pen through his neck.
Yeah.
It's very funny that Kissinger did at some point have to hide behind a desk to stop his own staff from assaulting him.
So strong, bombing everywhere, and then he's hiding under his desk.
All right, the relax.
So this staff member, Watts resigns right after this.
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.
And so Lake resigns too.
Yeah.
Bold words from hiding behind a desk.
Yeah, big tough guy.
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.
Nine more were wounded.
Two weeks later, at Jackson State, police shot into a crowd of black students protesting the war.
Two were killed and 12 wounded.
The invasion prompted some of the first consequences and only consequences Kissinger ever faced.
Stern rebukes from fancy academics he respected.
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.
One of the men, Thomas Schelling, opened by saying that he supposed he should explain who they were.
Kissinger responded with confusion that, I know who you are.
You're all good friends from Harvard.
Next, from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, 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.
We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisors.
Each of them then proceeded to berate him, taking five minutes apiece.
Now, he's on his desk at this point.
This scene from Rudy when they all hand in their uniform to get ready to play.
It's like that.
And this is where he's like Rudy.
If you have, oh, God, what's his fucking name?
I'm spacing.
The West Wing motherfucker.
Oh, Aaron Sorkin.
Aaron Sorkin.
If Aaron Sorkin is writing, motherfucker.
That is the best description of him.
If Aaron Sorkin is writing this, this is like the heroic moment where the conscience of the American ruling class comes in is like, this is not right, Henry.
And really, that's bullshit.
That's not what's happening.
And Ferguson goes on to note that these guys were kind of full of shit.
They are all Washington insiders.
They have advised.
Schelling advised LBJ to massively escalate violence throughout the war in Vietnam.
Ferguson continues, and this is his explanation of what they were really doing.
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.
When Neustadt told The Crimson, I think it's safe to say we're afraid, he did not specify of what.
Others were more candid.
Khmer Rouge Blame Deaths00:11:30
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.
So it's amazing.
For fuck's sake.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, this happens on the dollop a lot where I'm like, all right, we got a hero.
And then immediately I'm like, more villains.
God damn it.
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.
Yeah, and wouldn't, I mean, this would kind of be the last time that that even happens, really, right?
That like the people in that level of power do feel any sort of like threat from the regular folk.
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.
Emotion.
Yeah, good, like seriously, good work.
But of course, you know, that doesn't stop anything, obviously.
No, he's got, yeah, he's got many desks.
Yeah.
So Cambodia falls into chaos as a result of the sad, as most places would when bombed on this level, right?
Hard to maintain a state with this level of things exploding.
It is unclear precisely how many people die in Operation Menu, the subsequent invasion of Cambodia, and the bombing campaigns that followed.
The low estimate is 50,000.
The high estimates are 150 to 200,000.
30 to 50,000 Lotions die in the bombing campaign, which makes the sparsely populated nation the most densely bombed place on earth.
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.
40% of the victims are children.
One aid worker said of the situation: There are parts of Lao where there is literally no free space.
There are no areas that have not been bombed.
And when you are in the villages now, you still see the evidence of that.
You see the bomb craters.
You still see an unbelievable amount of metal and wreckage and unexploded ordnance just lying around in villages.
And it's still injuring and killing people today.
What a legacy.
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.
Yes, and nobody's in disagreement about that.
And we have enough bombs in this country to make gardening a lot more dangerous.
Family is dangerous.
Yeah.
That is my 20.
If there's not a one in three chance digging up a potato loses you a goddamn arm, you're not really a gardener.
Power the tomatoes.
Ken's dead.
Ken died.
If any of this concerned Nixon and Kissinger, we have no evidence of it.
We know that in 1972, Nixon asked, how many did we kill in Lao?
And the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, responded with a guess, maybe 10,000?
15?
Kissinger agreed.
In the lotion thing, we killed about 10.
15.
This is how they talk about.
It's the showcase showdown.
Three to five 9-11s worth of people.
I mean, it's the way you talk about it.
Did you get like one bag of grapes or two?
Yeah, I had two bags of grapes.
What's the cover fee to get into that, to get into that concert?
Oh, it's like 10 or 15 bucks, you know?
Yeah.
They're just complete and total fucking psychopaths.
And they're off by a half at least, you know.
It's hard to get accurate, you know, death tolls here.
And the bombs were not the only thing left behind by the campaign that Kissinger orchestrated.
Greg Randon writes: Defoliation chemicals did their work.
Just over a two-week period, April 18th to May 2nd, 1969, U.S. dropped Agent Orange caused significant damage.
Andrew Wellesdang, 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.
The rubber plantations totaled approximately one-third of Cambodia's total and represented a loss of 12% of the country's export earnings.
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 request that would have revealed U.S. cross-border activity.
Every effort, Kissinger wrote, should be made to avoid the necessity for a special budgetary request to provide funds to pay this claim.
Oh my God.
Look, we're going to need the money.
You're going to get the money.
This is going to take a while.
I just need to get it.
It's like a tax thing.
Yeah, I need to move some stuff around.
But you're going to get it.
It's fine.
Let's just keep it on the deal.
Yeah.
It's the Secret Service wasn't calling Trump Agent Orange, by the way.
If that wasn't his code name, that's a disappointment.
That is, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be disappointed in the Secret Service, but that is one of them.
That's my number one.
So the loss of life and economic damage caused Cambodia to spiral into chaos, or at least it was a factor.
Other stuff's going on.
We have a couple episodes about King Notodom Sahanuk, who was a real piece of shit and the king of Cambodia in this period.
A lot's happening.
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.
You guys are looking to change things up here.
We've got a plan.
We got an idea.
Doesn't matter what happens.
Someone bomb you?
Well, why don't we provide some help?
Yeah, exactly.
And the coup, you know, overthrows the king, who then starts backing the Khmer Rouge, who then wins.
They're great.
Yeah, they're counter-revolution against the right-wing coup.
And this leads to the establishment of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government.
Yay!
Once the Rouge took over in 1975, Nixon had left office.
Kissinger, though, was still in power.
In November of 1975, he told Thailand's foreign minister, you should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them.
They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way.
We are prepared to improve relations with them.
I mean, we get it.
Kissinger.
I mean, they're my people.
We're murdering.
I get it.
Murderous thugs.
I'm all about murderous thugs.
I think we could find common ground.
This man wants to kill a million people.
I think that is a cute start.
I got adorable.
In 1988, when questioned on this, Kissinger explained that, quote, the Thai and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina.
We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate.
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.
Of course, the United States attempted at least to provide direct military aid to the Khmer Rouge in order to help them oppose Vietnam.
And there's a lot of debate and uncertainty.
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.
But it is fair to say that Kissinger and Nixon's actions were crucial in creating the circumstances that brought Pol Pot to power.
And once he was in charge and massacring people, they tacitly supported his government because they thought it would stymie the Vietnamese.
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.
It's so incredible how their ideology of just communism bad.
They're like, well, communism will kill a bunch of people.
And they're just fucking everything they can to save those people.
Well, and it's also like they don't even really believe communism because the Khmer Rouge are communist as hell and they're fine with working with them because Vietnam is the ones who beat them and so they're angry at Vietnam.
And it's like, and Vietnam fights Cambodia.
Like, it's not, there's no, these people don't believe in anything.
Yeah.
There's not good lessons to take from this, but no, it's really.
Someone should have stabbed Henry Kissinger.
That's for sure.
Oh, just if that guy stabbed him.
Yeah, there's so many people we should have stabbed.
I mean, there's so many, but Kissinger's way up there.
And in this story, right?
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 way to which he's central to a lot of the worst actions in these wars.
Well, and 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.
And that just that the avenue that we are down now is just, I mean, it's unconscionable.
There's so much.
We also, besides just the straight bombings, we destabilize areas.
We change the trajectory.
Look, Putin is our fucking doing.
Yeah.
We fucking took out the government.
Yeltsin, all that shit, that was a fucking alarm.
I'm not going to let you sit here and talk shit on Yeltsin.
He was very in control of what he was doing.
He definitely knew what was happening.
It wasn't like having a bottle of Smirnoff in charge.
Nothing that happens.
Everything we get involved with turns into a fuck pie.
I mean, it's just, we just create chaos.
Yeah.
We're murder Midas.
It's this, it's this thing where we're talking about like how insane it is that Kissinger is micromanaging these bombings, which is not to say that like the military men who were doing it before were particularly better.
And this is the problem that like we're going to have, you know, with Ukraine and whatnot, too.
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.
And like if you actually look at their resumes, it is not a wide-ranging history of successes, you know?
And it is the same thing with Russia.
You could look at like Russian intervention in a bunch of places.
It's a nightmare.
The kind of people who are in a position to make calls when the conflicts get to this level are always ghouls.
And they're always bad at anything but causing devastation.
And that's why all of this keeps happening.
Because none of these people are any good at it.
And no one gets punished.
And nobody ever gets punished.
It keeps rising up.
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?
Who goes away?
Whoever goes away.
Favoriting his tweets.
I imagine.
I know somebody who lost their job at a grocery store because they got arrested protesting for like protesting against police violence.
Oh my god.
Meanwhile, Bill Crystal's like a guest on media shows.
Bill, what do you think?
Wow, I mean, yeah, it's frustrating.
Every now and then, far too seldom, you get a story like that billionaire Russian arms dealer whose yacht got partially sunk.
But there's like three of those stories for every thousand Kissingers.
Yeah.
And they don't ever mean anything because that guy can afford to fix his fucking yacht.
No, it's like when they were egging Bezos' boat when he was getting that bridge torn down.
Yeah.
You're like, I mean, it's like he's going to have someone hose it down.
Nixon Losing It00:08:26
He's fine.
Everybody, look, yachts burn.
We know this.
We've done it.
They burn.
That's the thing.
Yachts burn and so do Bill Crystals.
Bill's crystal.
So I think it's like an eternal.
No, yeah.
Actually, when you burn him, he just turns into a few crystals.
So Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger's Shadow, sees the bombing campaign in Cambodia and Lao as the terminal phase in what he calls the crackup of America's domestic consensus, which had begun under Johnson.
Kissinger considered conditions in the country at the time of Kent's state to be, quote, near civil war conditions.
The paranoia Nixon had felt led him to push for illegal expansions of domestic surveillance, which eventually led to his ouster from office.
The Senate investigation into the Watergate scandal concluded: Kent State marked a turning point for Nixon, the beginning of his downhill slide towards Watergate.
Nixon grew increasingly unhinged, which is a story for another time.
Hey, Nixon's starting to lose it, gang.
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.
Right.
Like than you have ever been.
I don't care how drunk you've gotten.
You have never gotten Nixon in the White House hammered.
So with Kissinger's help, Nixon cooks up a plan to pursue an arms control treaty in order to discredit his political rivals.
Kissinger agreed that attacking the left was the right way to distract from the disaster they'd created in Southeast Asia.
He told his boss, We've got to break the back of this generation of Democratic leaders.
Nixon responded in agreement: We've got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.
Good news on that one, buddy.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, you know what?
A rare swish.
And he's drunk and he's right.
That is a hole in one for you, my friend.
No notes.
So prescient.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Re-election in 1972 was always going to be dicey for Nixon and Kissinger.
Nixon's plan was the infamous Southern strategy, cultivating racial resentment in order to turn whites into a reliable Republican voting bloc.
There's a lot to be said about this.
Obviously, we were just kind of breezing past it.
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.
Grandin described the continued bombing as, quote, blood tribute paid to the growing power of the American right.
And as, yeah, just, and 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.
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.
But unmasking, you know, yeah, or change, yeah, whatever it is.
I mean, you know, like we all know that war helps poll numbers.
So well, some of them do.
Yeah, right.
But I mean, in the short term, it seems like it's a short, there's a short-term gain to be made.
Certainly, if you're on the right, for sure.
Yeah.
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.
He was just like willing to do these horrible things.
But like, no, they know it's not winning the war.
This is for votes.
Yeah.
And Kissinger.
So, I mean, you're basically just saying it is just a white supremacist thing.
They're killing people of color to make whites in the South happy.
Yeah.
That's all we're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
White supremacist, the country.
But that doesn't fit on a lawn placard.
Yeah.
Get one of those like in this in this house, we believe in the Nixon administration.
We believe in covering up the right war crimes.
We're doubling down on racism in order to.
And so it's worth noting, too.
Kissinger isn't just micromanaging the actual racist bombing campaign that they're doing to get votes.
He is also the front man Nixon sends out to talk to right-wing leaders to try and like pump them up about this.
Nixon sent him to talk to Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California.
Kissinger sat down on Nixon's behalf with Billy Graham, with William F. Buckley, with Bob fucking names.
Oh my God.
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.
We achieved what we were after.
Well, I tell you, I really can't wait to go out there and rally those troops, Sir Hank.
Having just been doing some research, he is friends with Frank Sinatra.
Frankly, call him on the phone.
Yeah, that sounds right.
That fucking sounds right.
Can I get a nuclear weapon?
Is that possible?
Frank Sinatra with a nuke.
That's, yeah, there's no people left if that had happened.
I put some agent on Dean Martin's drink and he didn't notice, baby.
Kissinger spent a particularly long time bragging to Ronald Reagan about the administration's achievements.
Quote, we wouldn't have had Cambodia.
We wouldn't have had Lau, and we wouldn't have had an $80 billion defense budget, you know, without Nixon getting elected.
He also told Reagan, we wouldn't have had Amchitka.
Now, Amchitka is an island off the coast of Alaska.
In the early 1970s, the White House wanted to nuke it for a lot of complicated reasons.
This is one thing I'm actually waiting for on.
Not other islands, but specifically Amchitka.
We're like, Amchitka.
So the White House wants to nuke this island off the coast of Alaska.
And a lot of environmentalists and indigenous people are just folks whose brains aren't.
Why do they hate freedom?
They hate freedom.
Here's Greg Grandon again.
The test had no military or scientific benefit, but was seen as something of a ritual by the right.
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.
Then, when public opposition to the detonation began to grow, Nixon had a chance to show conservatives that he would stand up to liberals.
He let it be known that were the Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the test, he would go forward anyway.
The court didn't block the test, but Haldeman told Kissinger to play it for politics anyway.
Tell Reagan we're taking an unmitigated heat in order to keep that thing going.
We need all the support of the right.
Later, after the test was conducted, Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater and mocked the fears of environmentalists.
The seals are still swimming, the president said.
I'm damn proud of you, Goldwater told him.
I need to get a bucket to Barfin.
When people think like, oh, we've become dumb recently, we've always been so fucking stupid.
It cannot be emphasized enough.
We're just really dumb.
I honestly, I definitely thought that we've...
I mean, it is a shocking level of dumb.
It's the fact that it's just this dumb.
Yeah.
It's just been going on.
It's a Fulkin Island because he wanted a fireworks show.
Yeah, because he wanted fireworks.
And it's just so they could tell Reagan.
It's like his gender reveal fucking party.
Right, right.
Jesus Christ.
It is worth noting for the sake of talking about how dumb we still are today.
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.
I'm sure these Cambodian civilians we've talked about appreciate it.
Well, that's the one where you need to, once you have 10,000 bombs, you're an expert.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
If you drop 10,000 bombs, you're an expert.
That's an expert at bombing.
Yeah, that's exactly.
So in order to be able to do it right, you have to do it wrong, Frank.
Log those bombs.
You got to log the bombs.
That's exactly right, Gareth.
Expert at Bombing Wrong00:10:07
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.
Nixon's chief of staff later recalled, We knew Henry as the hawk of hawks in the Oval Office, but in the evenings, a magical transformation took place.
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.
They just couldn't believe that the intellectual, smiling, humorous Henry Vick was a hawk like that bastard, Nixon.
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.
Like, well, and I mean, that'll happen.
Yeah, no, they'll figure it.
One of them will figure it out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It'll get cracked.
And you know, you got to dial the racism down a little and you got to dial the polite up and then kind of equalize them.
And then you can get the right access to the right people in media.
Yeah.
You know.
I mean, we already saw that.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, John Bolton was basically just there to write a book.
Yeah, everyone was.
The whole administration was.
Yeah.
They're like fucking Navy SEALs with the books.
Yeah.
So Kissinger's reputation was as a brilliant computer-brained policy wonk, but his success came from his charm.
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.
He had a regular series of lunches with Arthur Schleshinger, a liberal historian, whom he made sure to confidentially inform, quote, I have been thinking a lot about resignation after the invasion of Cambodia.
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.
Kissinger would warn his liberal friends that if he resigned, Spiro Agnew would run foreign policy.
He was basically threatening, if I'm not here, the far right's going to be totally in power in foreign policy.
I'm the only one keeping things from going crazy.
It's like sessions with Trump.
I mean, there are multiple people like that, but the amount of times that people will be like, oh, McMasters, you know, these are the good guys inside of the, you know, Bob hates this too as he's drawing on a map where to annihilate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it works.
It always works.
And it works.
And it works over and over and over again.
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.
As a rule.
Every now and then you get an exception.
But as a rule.
No, it's like when Chomsky points out to that reporter that why he's sitting in that seat.
Yeah.
You get the odd people who are willing to report on the Pentagon papers or whatever.
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.
It didn't do anything.
Doesn't matter.
It doesn't stop anything.
And the reason why people do it less and less is because you're attacked.
So, I mean, it works.
The public attacks discredit you, and then you are what you are.
You no longer get access to that information.
Yeah, it's great.
So a good example of how Kissinger used his charm is a speech he gave at MIT in January of 1971.
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.
Vietnamization is like the process of the U.S. getting out and South Vietnam taking over, right?
That's the big buzzword Nixon and Kissinger are using.
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.
Wait, wait, what is it?
What does that mean exactly?
He wouldn't get out unless unless Nixon was setting up gas chambers.
I mean, what the fuck?
The dude who said like his childhood to an audience.
His childhood didn't affect him in any way.
Yeah.
Outrageous.
And it's confidence.
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?
I guess not.
But at the moment, this doesn't really occur to him.
And at the moment, he writes, quote, he had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one of us.
And right, I'll blame the journalists.
Like, I'm not going to blame a student for falling for Henry because, like, he's essentially still a child.
And Henry Kissinger is the most powerful man in the world.
Of course, he's good at talking circles around these fucking kids.
The week after that speech, Kissinger and Nixon sent ground troops into Lao after another massive round of aerial bombardment.
This involved 17,000 South Vietnamese troops supported by U.S. air power.
It was a catastrophe.
8,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed or wounded.
The United States lost 215 men.
Nixon considered it a victory because it played well with conservatives.
When the media...
And he's drunk.
And he's drunk.
Yeah, he is.
And he is.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
That's not too bad, bro.
He just pounded back an entire bottle of vodka before saying that.
When the media savaged Lao 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.
Both Kissinger and Nixon saw Lao as a win because it benefited their domestic chances of re-election.
As Nixon told his right-hand man, the main thing, Henry, on Lao, I don't care what happens there.
It's a win, see?
Oh, a win C. He's a little gangster.
That's right, Henry.
It's a win, see?
It's incredible.
Dirty coppers.
Oh, and as the re-election campaign turned forward, Kissinger was about to help his boss engineer another win.
And this one, boy howdy, you think we've seen a body count so far?
Oh, my God.
What the fuck?
They're still mourning that island off of Alaska.
Now they're in sweeps.
Yeah, yeah, now they're hitting sweeps.
And if you think hundreds of thousands of Cambodian dead plus eighting and the deaths of another million or so was bad, it was.
It's really bad.
It's a historic crime.
But also, Henry Kissinger's just getting started.
So, you guys want to plug anything?
My ears.
Just death.
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.
And so that was his daily drunk lunch.
And then there's the one night where he's starting to feel the heat.
Well, maybe I don't know if you'll get into that.
Well, he basically goes out hammered with his valet and he goes and talks to some of the people protesting him.
And like one of the, he wakes one of these guys up and he's like, you really think I'm a bad guy?
And the guy's just like, the fuck is going on right now?
Nixon?
Drunk Dixon out, cow cruising.
Yeah, well, we'll, um, we, as, you know, look, it sounds like the world loves America after hearing some of this stuff.
So, we will be going to Australia on a tour.
Um, you can go to dollopodcast.com for those tour dates.
We'll be touring America, and um, even if we do badly, we won't bomb as hard as Kissinger and Nixon.
Yeah, I mean, it would be hard to.
It would be pretty tough to bomb on that level.
I don't, I honestly, we still have a lot of bombs.
I don't know if we have enough bombs to bomb that hard anymore.
I don't think so.
I honestly think we could pull our pants down and fight with our penises, and still people would be like, that's not a that's I've seen, I've heard of worse bombings.
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.
Uh, it's just Jesus Christ.
Yeah, he cannot process it.
And I'm an air as well.
I'm on the road to go to GarethReynolds.com for tour dates.
Yeah.
But feels, feels wrong to do that.
It's a hard promotion.
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.
And one day it will come for Henry Kissinger, and he will be frightened and alone and left with nothing to do.
I feel like he bombed the Reaper.
I mean, he like he is the level of melting.
I mean, he is.
I hope he dies.
I hope he just, I hope he shits himself and then slowly dies over eight hours.
Well, yes.
It needs to be like that.
He needs to be, it needs to be a letting.
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.
That's that's the kind of death.
That's warped.
And not just Kissinger.
There's like 30 people we've named in this story who deserve that kind of death.
There's a lot of folks.
I mean, Walpot died old and relatively, you know, unpunished, you know?
They all, most of them do.
Shitting in Own Guts00:02:25
Not all of them.
That would be great to hear a judge sentence Kissinger to that.
Like, it would sentence you to shitting in your own guts for about a week after a bomb disembowels you.
That's the right punishment for this kind of stuff.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
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