Henry Kissinger's legacy is dissected through his pragmatic yet ruthless "triangular diplomacy," which prioritized Cold War strategy over human rights, from normalizing U.S.-China relations via Pakistan's Yahya Khan despite the 1971 Bangladesh genocide to endorsing Chile's Pinochet coup and Indonesia's invasion of East Timor. The episode exposes his manipulation of intelligence through Team B, his controversial wiretapping of Nixon, and his post-government advocacy against sanctions on China following Tiananmen, ultimately illustrating how his centralization of executive power created geopolitical realities that shielded him from accountability while reshaping global conflict dynamics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:43
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Manchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
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.
Man.
Yeah.
Oh, how we all, this is behind the dollop.
Bastards.
Dollop the bastards.
This is those best, those dollop bastards.
Comparing Leaders to Hitler00:03:58
So, I don't know.
What do you guys think?
Out of all of the characters y'all have covered, who do you think Kissinger gets along with best?
Oh my God.
Better.
I mean, that's a tough one.
That judge in Texas with the bear.
I mean, the judgy text of the bear he definitely gets along with.
There's definitely guys like, you know, the guys who did the filibustering, Walker, and those guys who just love to just take over other countries.
Yeah.
Kill many people.
There's not, we've never experienced this level of casualty.
No.
Yeah, we haven't.
This is, I mean, you know, like there are evil.
It's, it's the spray of your evil that is so remarkable about this.
The ability to have your finger on this button with this level of darkness is, I don't know, it's a little, you know, I wouldn't say it's, you know, again, I mean, we've covered evil motherfuckers, but I don't think they've been able to scatter shot in the way that, you know, Kissinger's is a rare talent at a rare time on a rare team.
I would put Jan Peter Zun Cohen, who was the East, the Dutch colony guy, the East India Dutch colony guy.
He did a lot of fucking killing.
Yeah.
And he definitely had the same sort of attitude.
Very casual about killing people.
Yeah.
The killing because we're white Americans.
Yeah.
Or just white people just, you know, for land has been, it's a theme.
Andrew Jackson, I would put up there with Jackson.
He's at that level of like monstrous national leader who believes in a fucked up thing.
Like in terms of his death toll, Andrew Jackson and his and his white supremacy, Hitler and his Hitler stuff, you know, Mao and some of the weird things he believed about crop rotation or like whatnot.
He's at that level of like death toll, but he doesn't believe in anything.
Like he's not trying to do a thing.
He's not like, he's not like attempting someone.
He's not adoption of society.
There's nothing.
I guess that's the weirdest part of him because this sort of death count usually comes out of ideology.
Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to get at.
Yeah.
Imagine if his childhood affected him, what he would do.
Yeah, that might have an impact, right?
Imagine if that had actually impacted him in any way.
Yeah.
And it, yeah, that's the, that's the, it's so fucked up that like it's fucking crazy.
Again, we keep getting back to like Walter from the big Lebowski logic, but like at least those other war criminals had an ethos.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
You like Kissinger, baby.
You could negotiate or talk down or at least there would be like an angle.
At least like, oh, you are a you are a person, like not to morally compare him negatively to Hitler, because for the record, folks, Hitler's worse, you know, than basically, yeah.
But there's at least you can grasp onto a level of understanding with Hitler because it's like, well, I believe in things and I even believe in things that like I think it would be okay to like use violence in order to because of those things that I believe.
I think there are situations that justify violence and those are based on things that I believe about morality.
And Hitler had things that he believed about morality that he felt justified violence.
And so you can grapple at least with what must have been going on in the man's head when he did some of the terrible things he did.
I cannot get into the head of a man who is willing to do this to keep a gig.
Right.
Yeah.
It's for a gig.
Justifying Violence for Beliefs00:02:42
Yeah, it's for a gig that he didn't even need.
He didn't even need this job.
No, he's almost as bad as Dr. Phil.
Yeah.
I mean, yes, that's a little bit hyperbolic, Dave.
I don't think that's hyperbole.
Dr. Phillian levels of evil.
That's odd.
It's also just the dumb, the idea that 60 Minutes was like, take the keys, Hank.
Have the keys, Hank.
There you go.
Yeah.
You know, just the new normalization.
It's like.
Now, yeah.
When it comes to the folks who will defend Henry Kissinger or even call him a great statesman, and those folks do exist.
I have read some of their books.
When you get to those people, there are generally a couple of achievements that they will trumpet.
It's like, well, you have to give him, you know, these things, right?
Oh, God.
And they sound impressive on paper.
In 1973, he and North Vietnam's Lee Duc Tho won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in the negotiations that became the Paris Peace Accords, right?
Winning a Nobel Prize for stopping the Vietnam War, impressive sounding on paper if you don't think about the fact that he extended the Vietnam War.
Like I helped to, you know, was a part of that.
He did negotiate the first strategic arms limitation treaty and anti-ballistic missile treaty with the Soviet Union.
Those are good things.
Yeah, but he's the whole thing is he loves he.
It would be like nukes are great.
It's like congratulating Sully Sullenberger if he threw the geese into the if he had been breeding geese in that exact area.
And he'd been big geese and he was making bang noises to scare him into the plane when he landed on the Hudson.
Yeah, they're like, wow, what an amazing achievement.
Yeah.
And yeah, it's one of those things, like, yeah, he, he got part, and part of like the arms reductions that he secured with the Soviet Union are less impressive than they sound.
I was just talking in the last episode about that documentary, Command and Control.
And one of the points it makes is that like these Atlas II missiles, which nearly killed half of the people on the East Coast through radioactive fallout, were obsolete and not effective and recognized as not being useful.
But they were kept in the arsenal, not because we needed them, but because we were going to have a treaty with the Soviets soon and we wanted to have something we could give up that wouldn't actually cost us anything.
Oh my God.
Like that, like it's that kind of shit.
Like that's all of the fucking fucking got rid of spent fuel rods.
Basically, yeah, yeah, and he does this.
He helps negotiate reductions in nuclear arms after pushing the missile gap myth for the JFK administration, right?
He did help pass an international convention against biological weapons, which is cool if you don't think too much about the defoliance that he ordered spread out across Southeast Asia.
Jesus Christ.
Mao and the Chinese Civil War00:06:35
We need to stop people like Henry Kissinger.
We have to stop.
I must be stopped.
They must stop me.
It is the only way to appease me.
He had a role in the Helsinki Final Act, Article 10, which committed nations on both sides of the Cold War to, quote, respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief, for all without distinction to race.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
He's literally the guy who's in a room and he's like, we should kill everyone.
And then he walks out and comes back in another door and goes, killing is bad.
The killing must stop.
It's like when OJ was like, OJ was like, I'm going to find the real killer.
Yes.
Yes.
We got to find this guy.
He's still out there.
Henry Kissinger doesn't go to DC anymore because he might run into the man who ordered the carpet bombing of Lao.
That would be awkward.
We are all trying to find the guy who did this.
We're not going to live till we find out which son of a bitch is behind this.
Now, there is, however, one huge titanic achievement that even the most hardened critics have to give Kissinger.
He restored diplomatic relations between the United States and China.
Now, this is a huge deal, no matter how you slice it.
For a brief primer, China had them a big old civil war between the communists who won and the nationalists, who we backed, who were called like, you know, Democrats, Republicans, whatever, like called Democratic forces.
They had, you know, them a dictator, as it always is.
He was a dude named Chiang Kai-shek.
And yeah, Mao wins in 1949.
Chiang Kai-shek and his forces take all the gold they can carry and they flee to Taiwan.
And for the next 30 years, the United States refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Chinese state and deal with it directly.
In one of the most unhinged decisions in the history of U.S. foreign policy, decades of presidents pretend Taiwan is the real China.
Like Taiwan has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council that is China's seat.
But Taiwan is, you can look on a map.
Itty bitty.
It's a slow bitch.
It is somewhat smaller than actual China.
It's like what we're doing with Venezuela.
No, it's like, yeah, like that guy's the president.
No, right.
Yeah.
Klaido, yeah, right.
Yeah.
And it's one of those things, like, you don't have to be a fan of Mao to recognize this as stupid.
Like, Mao is in head of a government that is this basically a whole continent, and you're just pretending he's not.
And that's nuts.
The emperor has no land.
Yeah, it's craziness.
It's stupid.
Yeah.
And in fairness, again, because we're about to talk about like Kissinger had nothing to do with this, right?
Kissinger is not why we refuse to recognize the existence of the Chinese government.
This is a dumb thing that when he comes into power, he and Nixon are both very astutely recognized as a dumb thing, and they don't want this to continue.
And it is, it is hard to overstate how dangerous this state of affairs is.
For one reason, after Stalin dies in 1953, relations between the USSR and Mao's China steadily decline.
In 1964, the year China conducts their first successful nuclear tests, diplomatic relations break down between both communist nations.
So now you have three massive empires, all of whom are armed with nukes, none of whom are directly talking to each other.
This is a bad situation.
And Kissinger does recognize how dangerous the status quo is.
Now, in 1969, China and the Soviet Union have a series of border skirmishes.
Their soldiers are shooting at each other.
Moscow threatens to start dropping nukes.
And for a time, the Chinese government conducts its affairs from underground bunkers.
So, again, very reasonable that Nixon and Kissinger are like, well, we should probably have some way to fucking call these people on the goddamn phone, right?
Like, this seems bad.
Let's just get a phone.
Let's get a fucking phone.
You would think it would be that simple, Dave, but we're going to talk for about an hour and 10 minutes about how it's not.
So, by the time 1971 comes around, Nixon and Kissinger were also both looking for a major diplomatic coup that could distract from the fact that they hadn't quite managed to end that whole Vietnam War thing and had, in fact, made it all very much worse.
There's also some rational self-interest in here.
You know, whatever else you can say about them, I don't think either of these men want to die.
And they recognize, like, well, this could cause a nuclear war that ends all life on Earth, including us.
We should probably deal with this.
Yeah, they finally realize that life has purpose once it's there.
Yeah.
It's also one of those, this is getting a little off topic, but like people talk about, you will see, at least on the right, people say, well, you know, if the nationalists had won the Chinese Civil War, a lot less people would have died.
And it's like, well, the specific things Mao did that killed a lot of people wouldn't have been done.
But if Chiang Kai-shek is in charge of China, and like while China is communist, they almost get in a nuclear fight with the USSR.
Do you think right-wing Chiang Kai-shek-led China is less likely to have a nuclear fight with the Soviet Union?
What would the hard-nosed version be?
Yeah, what is it like if they're not on the same ideological side?
Yeah, people don't talk a lot about the fact that the USSR and Communist China nearly, nearly nuked each other just with the USSR.
And also, Mao killed landlords.
So are those people well, fair.
Yeah.
Some of them are landlords.
It's not the landlords we're complaining about.
It's the, you know, the people who didn't have grain.
But that's a story for a completely different set of days.
At this point in time, you've got two countries that should, three countries that should all be talking on the basis that they all individually have the ability to end all life on earth.
And they're not.
And Kissinger is like, you know what?
I can get in here.
I can make this work.
I can make this work.
And also, it'll help us win an election.
So it just so happens that 1971 is also a time in which China is willing to sit down with the United States.
Mao wants U.S. help negotiating with the Soviets, which is very strange.
And like the does not make a whole lot of, yeah.
I can't talk to these guys.
I can't talk to these guys.
You know, I need to talk to these guys.
Nixon.
You love communists.
Get in here.
You know, it's just the, you've got like the way the Cold War is portrayed from the thousand-yard view to people like watching the propaganda of whatever state.
And then you've got like Mao being like, hey, Nixon, I need your help to deal with these Soviets.
I need a rational partner.
And Nixon being like, you're drunk.
You know who's going to get me, cinch me Richard Milhouse Nixon, the election in 72.
Nixon and the Cold War View00:13:49
Mousy Dunk.
It's so crazy.
It is weird.
Politics in this state.
It's almost like there's only three people in the world.
Yes.
Yes.
So this is, you know, Nixon, yeah, Nixon's very much down to talk with China, but it is not that simple because since the diplomatic situation has been dumb for so very long, there aren't like U.S. diplomats in China that we can like send a message through, right?
Like you literally don't have those ties.
So the U.S. does have ways of communicating with the Chinese government.
They're through back channels, though, because you can't admit publicly that you're doing it because Taiwan is your ally and Taiwan doesn't want to acknowledge that the Chinese government is a legitimate government.
Very dumb.
One of the back channels is through the leader of communist Romania, Nikolai Cheachescu.
Oh, boy.
And the other Nikolai is not the bad guy of this story.
I mean, when Chechescu is your hero, things are not good.
Not your hero, but let's call him a benign force in this specific instance.
When he's your straight man.
Yeah.
The other is through the military dictator of Pakistan, General Adha Mohammad Yahya Khan.
Now, we should probably talk a little bit of history here.
In 1947, the British gave up ruling over the Indian subcontinent, finally.
As a rule, whenever colonial powers leave their former possessions, they attempted to set up states based on their pre-existing alliances and racial biases.
This is why we have, for example, the entire modern map of the Middle East.
In this case of the Indian subcontinent, what had once been a colony was split into India and Pakistan.
India is obviously Hindu majority and Pakistan is a Muslim majority nation.
Now, if you know your English colonialists, you know they're not very good at maps.
So the Brits divvying up the subcontinent decide that Pakistan should include two huge chunks of land separated by more than a thousand miles of India.
West Pakistan is the Pakistan we know and love today, right?
Classic Pakistan.
Right.
Like the, yeah.
East Pakistan is like the new coke of Pakistan, except for now it's Bangladesh, right?
But at the time, Bangladesh is each Pakistan.
And there's just like a whole fuckload of India in between the two, which is there's like a line that Pakistani people will say at the time that like East and West Pakistan are only united by religion, the English language, and Pakistan Airlines.
And by far, Pakistan Airlines is the strongest of the three.
Cool of England once again.
I mean, just a great plan, guys.
Yeah, really.
What do you say?
We put a blindfold on and then tried to pin the tail on this donkey.
And the fact that Indian partition that England partitions India at all is a humanitarian crisis on an incomprehensible scale.
As many as 2 million people died, often as the result of horrific racial or religious violence.
And Henry Kissinger's hearing that, like, hold on, I'm getting hard.
I can do better.
That's nothing, baby.
I can beat those rookie numbers.
Week.
Where do I send?
Congratulations, Cook.
10 to 20 million are displaced.
But even though East and West Pakistan are supposed to be united by faith, there's like massive ethnic divides, right?
Like they're not, the fact that they're all ostensibly Muslim does not mean anything because like they're completely different parts of the world with completely different chunks of history, right?
And at least America learns this lesson.
Yes, thankfully.
We get this right.
You know, by the time we get into Pakistan, we're done with the stupid stuff.
We're faking a vaccine drive in order to steal people's blood.
That's right.
The good guy, eh?
Yeah, the good guys are back.
I know how to fix this.
Yeah.
So, yeah, here's the Smithsonian magazine kind of laying out the relationship between East and West Pakistan by the time Kissinger and Nixon take office.
With most of the ruling elite having immigrated westward from India, West Pakistan was chosen as the nation's political center.
Between 1947 and 1970, East Pakistan had only 25% of the country's industrial investments and 30% of its imports, despite producing 59% of the country's exports.
West Pakistani elites saw their Eastern countrymen as culturally and ethnically inferior, and an attempt to make Urdu the national language, less than 10% of the population of East Pakistan had a working knowledge of Urdu, was seen as further proof that East Pakistan's interests would be ignored by the government.
Making matters worse, the powerful Bola cyclone hit East Bangladesh in November of 1970, killing 300,000 people.
Despite having more resources at their disposal, West Pakistan offered a sluggish response to the disaster.
As French journalist Paul Dreyfus said of the situation, over the years, West Pakistan behaved like a poorly raised, egotistical guest, devouring the best dishes and leaving nothing but scraps and leftovers for East Pakistan.
Well, that's not cool.
It's not great.
It's not great.
And Pakistan's military is what's in charge, right?
It's a military dictatorship.
They run everything, and they are hyper-focused on India, who is their primary geopolitical rival.
In 1965, Pakistan attempts to invade Kashmir, sparking a vicious conflict.
And I'm not giving you the whole detail of the conflict between India and Pakistan.
Please don't take this as me throwing all of the blame on one side or the other.
This is just like the Barrest Cliffs notes because we have a lot to cover in this episode.
And the U.S., it's worth noting, had been selling arms to both countries in 1960.
What?
Yeah, I know.
Very disappointing.
America?
Yeah.
Strange.
Come on.
Gosh, our history is so different.
LBJ's administration was forced by public outcry as a result of this to issue an arms embargo on both nations.
Pakistan saw the embargo as unfairly harming them.
And as a result, there was bad blood among the high command towards the Democratic Johnson administration.
By the time Kissinger and Nixon are in the White House, the president of Pakistan is, again, this guy Yahya Khan.
We'll just call him Yahya because it's fun to say.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very fun to say.
He took power in March of 1969 by forcing out another general and instituting martial law.
Kissinger once wrote of him: Yahya is tough, direct, and with a good sense of humor.
He talks in a very clipped way, is a splendid product of Sandhurst, and affects a sort of social naivete, but is probably much more complicated than this.
Now, Sandhurst is like the British Royal Military Academy.
It's like broadly speaking, British West Point.
Yahya affected an English air.
He carried like a swagger stick.
He dresses like he's a British officer.
He acts like he's a British officer, right?
He is also a raging alcoholic.
One Pakistani politician noted, he starts with cognac for breakfast and continues drinking throughout the day, night often finding him in a sodden state.
Nice.
So he's always like Brad Bray.
He's just a drunk dude who always carries a stick for hitting horses.
It's very hard.
I go to Conwhack.
I mean, Churchill drank a fuck ton, too, right?
Yeah, I mean, yes, absolutely.
There is just something about JSK was on meth for a decent chunk of his early presidency.
Oh, wow.
So great.
When we point out that a guy like Yahya is drunk, it is not to contrast him with Western leaders who are not going to be able to do that.
Yeah, why don't you just point out the one fucked up?
I think, what's his name?
The guy who came after Nixon, but not right after, Carter, probably pretty sober in the White House.
Yeah, but his brother was making Billy's like, I'll tell you what, I'll drink for Jim and no problem.
Oh, Billy.
Billy Carter should have been the president.
Then we would have gotten some shit done.
Honestly.
Wouldn't have been good.
I'm fine with that.
I'm fine with that different trajectory.
Let's see what bad could chaos.
Fuck it.
Fuck it.
Let's dance.
In 1970, Yahya decides to hold an election, which is meant to be more for show than anything else, right?
It's this thing you do because he's Pakistan is definitely India is a neutral country.
They're not on the side of the Soviet Union or the U.S. and the stupid Cold War thing.
They're very intelligently like, well, what does it benefit us to pick one side?
Like, fuck that stuff.
But they also, because India's got much more of a socialist, especially early on, is much more of a socialist government.
There's a lot of distrust from them in the United States.
And Pakistan really leans on that to be buddy-buddy with the United States more.
And one of the ways, as part of like his attempts to get closer and closer to the U.S., because he wants arms, like everybody who gets buddy-buddy with the U.S., Yahya decides to hold an election because we love seeing people have elections.
We don't really care how they go, but we like seeing them, you know?
Yeah, right.
It's sport.
It's sport.
Yeah.
So he's allowed, he has this election, and his plan is to like basically rig it so that, you know, it doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't take any power away from the military.
But Yahya's not good at anything.
This is an important thing to know.
He's really bad at everything he does.
Do you think that breakfast cognac had anything to do with this problem?
It might have been in the middle of the day.
Just a question.
So this election gets out of his hands immediately.
East Pakistan is much larger than West Pakistan.
And while West Pakistan's votes are split between parties, like there's a bunch of different conflicting political parties, nearly everyone in East Pakistan gets in line behind the same party, the Awami League.
Their big thing is they want autonomy from West Pakistan, you know, and they're very angry at like the fact that they're getting fucked over by the West.
So the West, which is doing the fucking over, has a bunch of minor shit they're quabbling over.
The East is just united behind let's stop getting fucked over.
And as a result, they get a shitload of people elected in this massive block.
And they come to, it's enough that they will completely dominate electoral, like the parliament of Pakistan because of like how well this election goes for them.
Yahya does not like this.
And rather than allowing the newly elected assembly to sit, he cancels their first meeting and declares martial law.
Nice.
Yeah.
Riots follow.
The leader of the Awami League, a guy named Sheikh Mujbur Rahman, I apologize for what is surely a mispronunciation, declared a civil disobedience movement.
It was into this volatile situation that Henry Kissinger stepped in the spring of 1971.
Oh, God.
Now, he and Nixon had pretty good relations with West Pakistan's government, which is at this point, you know, just Yahya.
They were loath to trust India since it was non-aligned.
Nixon also was very racist and hated the fact that India's democracy was popular among Americans, while the country maintained close ties with the USSR.
He once told Yahya, quote, there is a psychosis in this country about India.
Now, a big part of Nixon's hatred of India is that it's led by a woman, Indira Gandhi.
Oh, my God.
Oh, yeah.
We'll be talking more about that in a second.
Yahya, on the other hand, is one of the few people on planet Earth that Richard Nixon comes to consider as a friend.
One of Nixon's, one of Kissinger's.
They're both drunk assholes.
I don't remember the friendship, but God was an important of the two.
One of Kissinger's aides later said of the situation: they liked him.
He was a soldier.
He had style.
He was kind of a jaunty guy.
This aide, Hotchkinson, admits that Yaya was not very smart, but says that for Nixon and Kissinger, he was a man's man.
He wasn't some woman running a country.
Right.
It sounds like they're talking about.
This is how people talk about Yeltsin.
Yeah, right.
He's a man's man as he sees the Secret Service is tracking him down drunk in the middle of D.C.
Yeah.
That was Yeltsin, right?
Like a skeptic.
Yeah, well, Yeltsin, who like was passed out on the plane.
I forget he was supposed to meet.
And he was passed out on the plane, and they were like, Boris, Boris.
And he's like, go fuck you.
No notes, Boris.
None.
Look, if we had kept every world leader after that point to the standards of drunkenness that Yeltsin set, we wouldn't be having this war right now.
I'll tell you that much.
No.
We might have had other wars.
Well, Nixon would wake up in the middle of the night, too, and he'd be like, drop the nuke, you know, and they'd be like, buddy.
Like the next day, he'd be like, I don't remember what I said.
They're like, thank God.
Yeah, we need to institute a mandatory drink minimum for all elected leaders in this country.
Welcome George W. Bush.
Sobriety did not help.
If you can't force term limits, you can force liver cancer.
Yes.
Like we can brute force our way into getting him out of office after a year or two.
Hey, you know who else can force liver cancer?
Oh, well, we are sponsored by Stollich Naya Vodka, which is now illegal in several states for reasons.
It's difficult to explain.
About the remarkable.
It's like, it's just.
How are we so dumb?
How are we so dumb?
It's amazing that in this deeply ugly and complicated situation where large numbers of people are suffering, Americans recognize that the right thing to do is destroy bottles of vodka, not domestic of the countries involved in the conflict.
They're taking Finnish vodka and just throwing it into the streets.
That'll take you, Rudy.
Oh, great country.
Here's some other ads.
Oh, we're back.
Man.
Man.
That was a good time.
So, this is not a Nixon miniseries, but in order to talk about the friendship, the deep and abiding love that the two men had, there is an incredible paragraph from the book The Blood Telegram by Gary Bass that I'm going to read now.
Despite all his global FaceTime, Nixon was a solitary, awkward, reclusive man.
Kissinger, who could not bring himself to say that he was fond of the president, once famously asked, Can you imagine what this man would have been had somebody loved him?
Oh my God.
That's coming from Kissinger.
That's coming from Kissinger.
That's the saddest thing I can imagine.
Henry Kissinger being like, nobody really loves, if only someone had loved this man.
Kissinger's Lonely Presidency00:06:22
Whoever would have met anyone who had the blackened heart.
Can you imagine?
Nixon's only true friend was Bebe Rebozo, a Florida banker.
He said, It doesn't come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy.
Even H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, worried that the boss was too much in his own head and once tried to find the president a friend, tracking down an oil man whom Nixon had reportedly liked in his Los Angeles days and installing him in a bogus White House chair.
Okay, by the way, listen.
Listen, listen, listen.
The movie needs to be written.
It's like driving Miss Daisy, but with a body count.
Yeah, it's I love you.
Yeah, it's I love you, man with war crimes.
Yeah.
Okay, so I'm.
James Franco is someone in this movie.
So I'm going to work in the White House, but I can't act like I'm there to meet him, even though my whole thing is that's right.
So, yeah.
So, I'm just going to.
So, whether so I have to try to get in just with him, just drink with him and eat pineapple and whatever he wants to do, just do it.
He's going to want to, he's going to want to put weird things in pineapple.
He's going to get really drunk and cry on your shoulder.
He's going to bomb several Southeast Asian people.
What are you guys talking about?
Sorry, I'm going to depart.
Nothing, buddy.
Okay, who's this fella?
Oh, I like the look of your face.
Oh, come on.
My name is Bobby, and I uh sorry, my uh, my pineapple and uh, you're what I for lunch.
I have pineapple and cottage cheese every day, and it's it's uh, it just got out of my best meal is absolutely the best lunch.
Oh, you like that too?
That's all I eat.
Well, yeah, in between, in between just guzzling vodka, that's generally what I have.
Am I on candid camera or something?
Are you going around?
What are you talking about?
I mean, my heart is I feel them.
I need to lay down.
I'm sorry.
Oh, God.
You're great.
You're my favorite president, and I just want to thank you for killing so many people.
If you're H.R. Haldeman, right?
How do you recognize that you are trying to make play dates for a man bombing illegally multiple nations and not go democracy and all politics is a sham.
I must go down in flames to take everyone out around me because that is the only justice that can be achieved.
Is violently affected by the people.
Nixon belongs in the bubble that the good witch and the wizard of Oz lives in.
Yeah.
Like he's on that level of it's like at some point you have to wake up and be like, okay, look, these guys are bombing the shit out of countries, and my goal is to find the president a buddy.
Yeah, I have to get him a friend.
I'm looking, I'm trying to get him a friend.
He might do something crazy if he doesn't have it.
He might become unhinged.
We're a little worried.
Oh, God.
What a crazy.
I just, it's great.
It's just, it's just like you have a president who doesn't have a friend.
Like, that's what really president doesn't have a friend.
And that's a big part of why, when it comes to deciding who should be the U.S. intermediary to talk with Mao, Yahya wins out over Ceaușescu.
Oh, my God.
Because Nixon likes Yaya.
You know, that's a big part of it.
Not the whole reason, but that's a big part of it.
Now, and again, let's just remind everybody: Tchesky was great, so I can't believe that.
Flawless man.
Also, by the way, great death.
If we are going to talk about that, pretty good punishing death.
A lot more.
I'll go so far as to say most of the people we name in these episodes could have handled a Ceaușescu.
Absolutely.
It wouldn't have been a bad way for him to go out.
Yeah.
So when it comes time to decide, yeah.
So anyway, they go with Yahya.
Now, by 1971, again, spring of 71 is when all of this political stuff with East Pakistan is coming to a head.
These protests are happening.
You know, things are on the brink there of kind of like a civil conflict.
Kissinger has been the center of U.S. policy for three years at this point, right?
U.S. foreign policy.
And folks in DC by 71 are amazed at the degree to which he has centralized power.
His junior Southeast Asia aide, Sam Hoskinson, recalled: the power was there.
He was gathering it up.
You felt like you were at the political center of the universe.
He and the president, that was where the decisions were made.
What a sounds like a democracy to me, baby.
And you know what?
Instead of getting away from that, let's just replicate it forever.
Yeah, let's just do versions of this forever, but with people who are, well, not, yeah, let's just do versions of this forever.
I'm not even going to try to quantify it.
Yeah.
At age 48, Kissinger was new enough to power that he was noted at the time as being extremely jealous of anyone who might be seen as a rival.
He focused obsessively on pleasing Nixon.
Henry himself had no particular biases against India or Indian politicians, at least not compared to Nixon.
But when he saw how racist his boss was, he knuckled down and found his inner bigot.
He was successful enough that Nixon said of him, Henry is my least pathological pro-India lover around here.
God, good work, Henry.
You did it, buddy.
You won.
You won the worst thing.
In late 1970, Kissinger and Yahya began to make plans for a brokered secret meeting between the United States and China.
As a thank you for his help, in October of 1970, Yahya got to visit the White House in person, where Nixon agreed to sell weapons to his country again.
Now, this is illegal because there's an arms embargo, which does not get lifted, but they decide we'll just do it.
It'll be a limited violation of the USB.
I believe that there was a loophole for BFFs.
Yeah, he got drunk with me.
I born in Kanyak.
Quote from the Blood Telegram.
Yahya got a reward for his efforts in late October 1970 when he met Nixon in the Oval Office at the White House.
In their last meeting before the crisis erupted, Nixon began to sell weapons to Yahya again, and what was officially billed as a one-time exception to the U.S. arms embargo imposed on both India and Pakistan in 1965.
It was the kind of exception that demolishes the rule.
That embargo had already been eroding under Johnson, but now Yahya secured a moderately big haul, a harbinger of much larger ones likely to come.
The promised weapons included six F-104 fighter planes, seven B-57 bombers, and 300 armored personnel carriers.
You want to guess what's going to be done with the weapons we send him?
The Lube of Diplomacy00:15:55
Nothing?
Yep, that's right.
I'm like, episode's done.
All right.
We all had fun.
In March of 1971, Mujibur, who is the, he's like the guy, the East Pakistani political leader, right, who runs this party that wins the elections.
He meets with Yahya in Dhaka, which is the capital of East Pakistan, in an attempt to reach an agreement over the elections Yahya had just decided to ignore.
At first, it was a very important thing.
It felt like an agreement was already reached electorally with the voters?
Yeah.
So at first, Yahya's like, hey, we settled things.
Great.
And then the very next day, he has Mujibur arrested and sends 60,000 soldiers into East Pakistan.
Now, actually, I say Sinzen.
These guys had been slowly infiltrating the country for weeks by air because you have to like fly them in, right?
They can't just like drive anywhere because there's India in between the two.
They embarked on an operation called Searchlight.
And I'm going to quote now from an article in the New Yorker.
Firing squads spread out across East Pakistan, sometimes assisted by local collaborators from Islamist groups that had been humiliated in the elections.
In the countryside, where the armed resistance was strongest, the Pakistani military burned and strafed villages, killing thousands and turning many more into refugees.
Hindus, who composed more than 10% of the population, were targeted.
Their un-Muslimness ascertained by a quick inspection underneath their clothing.
Tens of thousands of women were raped in a campaign of terror.
Bengalis also murdered and raped Urdu-speaking Muslims whom they suspected of being fifth columnists for West Pakistan.
Archer Blood, the U.S. Consul General in Dhaka, among others, reported the slaughter of professors and students at Dhaka University, an attempt to silence the intellectual class who had eloquently articulated Bengali grievances.
So, Archer Blood is interesting.
And the Blood Telegram really goes into detail about this guy.
One of the very few cases of a powerful State Department or of a State Department official with some power who's like a genuinely good person.
Blood works all over for the State Department's difficulty.
He does have the worst rights.
He sounds like he should be doing Kissing Blood.
Yeah.
Sounds like you should shoot fire arrows.
He has opportunities to be in what are considered more prestigious postings, including Greece, but he doesn't want to be in Greece because it's a CIA-backed dictatorship at this point.
And Bengal, you know, what becomes Bangladesh is like, he feels like I can do something there, right?
It's this place that has a lot of like legitimate problems, but also there's this like burgeoning democratic movement and people are like taking, and he's renowned in the area for like being incredibly social with Bengalis.
You know, like his kids make friends with local children who live around.
They invite them into their home and have slumber parties.
Like he's just like a nice person.
And you're not going to rise to, yeah, who wants that guy?
Blood sends a telegram to Nixon and Kissinger.
You know, Dave, when we tweeted about this, you asked, will there be blood?
And I said there was going to be a blood telegram.
This is what that is.
In the blood telegram, Archer Blood attacks the Nixon administration for their deafening silence towards the violence in Bangladesh and moral bankruptcy in the face of what he termed a genocide.
And this gets signed by every diplomatic official who's in Dhaka.
This enrages Nixon.
And Kissinger soothed his boss by saying, that consul in DACA doesn't have the strongest nerves.
Basically, like, oh, he's just getting scared by a little massacre of all of the students and professors at the university.
This guy, huh?
Don't worry, Dick.
I cannot believe his last name is Blood.
Let me rub your broken spine.
Really would work better for my last name, you know?
Why?
My last name is about kissing and he has blood.
He's the kissing guy.
He's kissing.
I'm bloody.
Kissinger added, and this is him now talking about what Yahya is doing in East Pakistan, quote, the use of power against seeming odds pays off.
He's very impressed by the fact that Yahya gains control of East Pakistan with just a few thousand soldiers, you know?
He's really impressed.
So there's a bunch of people get angry.
You know, one of the big people who's most vociferous in the U.S. government against what's happening in East Pakistan is Ted Kennedy.
He is like a really, like, like takes this on as like a banner crusade.
So, you know, once again, people get very angry at the administration for what's going on.
Nixon tells Kissinger, quote, the people who bitch about Vietnam bitch about it because we intervened in what they say is a civil war.
Now, some of the same bastards want us to intervene here, both civil wars.
He's being like, see how inconsistent they are?
Yeah.
You know, pick which pick, what do you want?
Henry.
Do you think selling arms to one side in a civil war might be intervening?
Is that is it possible?
They want to count.
We're not going to do that.
Oh, Yahya needs how many more missiles?
Oh, sure.
We'll give us some missiles.
Absolutely.
So Kissinger writes up a policy paper in which he urges the U.S. to, quote, make a serious effort to help Yahya end the war he'd started.
And again, this isn't even really a civil war.
East Pakistan isn't like mobilizing a vast army to fight for their independence.
They like voted, and then Yahya sent soldiers to kill them all.
Civil war.
It does.
There start to be guerrillas and the Indian government starts sending weapons into guerrilla fighters in East Pakistan.
But the massacres start first.
Well, and again, I mean, like, to what you're saying, he held an election.
I mean, this would be like if David Cameron just had tanks the day after Brexit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, God.
That's not a bad idea.
That's not a bad idea.
I would have, I mean, marginally better, I guess.
Britain somehow colonizes the EU.
Oh, my God.
Britain finally colonizes itself.
I say there.
You work for us.
Well, we already bloody work for you.
No, you don't.
Now you do.
No, we already did.
We're British.
You work for the British now.
Oh, yeah.
And because of their Sandhurst educations, Gareth, your same fake accent can work for Yahya.
Lovely.
Tis I. Yaya.
Come out.
So.
Cognac on the mine, I think.
Nixon responds to Kissinger's policy paper with a handwritten note that he adds to the paper saying, Don't squeeze Yah at this time.
Do you want to do that?
Which is good advice under normal circumstances in May in May.
India.
Pass this to Richard.
And this is, you know, India, there's a degree of legitimate concern among Indian people for like the humanitarian crisis.
There's also politically, there's tons of refugees, right?
And so there's also this very blunt political, like, well, we can't let this be happening because refugees are a political problem for us, right?
There's states, you know, nations don't make decisions ever because it's the right thing or the wrong thing to do.
But India is broadly speaking on the right side of this one.
I think that's fair to say.
So because they're watching what's happening, India starts massing troops on the border of East Pakistan in order to potentially intervene.
But they don't do anything yet.
Nixon tells Kissinger to cut off economic aid to India if they intervene in this genocide.
And Kissinger responds, quote, the last thing we can afford to do now is to have the Pakistani government overthrown, given the other things that we are doing.
This is a clear reference to their plans to meet with China, right?
These very directly saying the reason we can't let anything happen to Yahya's government, even though they're carrying out a genocide, is because we need him to get to China.
Now, Kissinger follows this up with a sop to Nixon's racism, calling Indians, quote, the most aggressive goddamn people around there.
Again, I mean, it's obviously like the projection is obviously insane.
Nixon responds by telling Kissinger that what India needs is a mass famine.
Kissinger does not.
Jesus Christ.
Kissinger does not disagree.
And he follows up by saying India has no right to invade another country, quote, no matter what Pakistan does in its territory.
I'm going to take a five.
You guys can keep going.
I'm going to take a five.
You guys keep going.
No, that's fine.
I'm going to go outside.
Real concerned about national sovereignty.
Can you imagine someone doing something like that?
Yeah.
We can discuss, given the history of the United States as a whole, who gets to fairly complain about violations of national sovereignty, but definitely not Henry Kissinger.
Yeah.
Certainly not this guy, right?
It's like the fucking dudes from the Bush administration yelling at like what Russia's doing in Ukraine.
Not just the Russian actions in Ukraine.
No, it is like, no, not you.
Not you.
There's a lot of people we don't want to hear from that.
You're absolutely not on the fucking list, Bill Crystal.
So Kissinger assures his boss, besides the killing has stopped.
So it's fine.
It had not as a head.
It had not.
It has not.
In April of 1970, Mon, which is, by the way, Archer Blood, the State Department official who does everything possible to get the U.S. to act, Kissinger and Nixon fire him.
Get him immediately out of the deck.
You got to get that guy out of there, right?
Yeah, this guy's out there.
My guy out of there.
He's terrible.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Yeah.
Now, in April of 1971, the same month as the Blood Telegram, Nixon receives his official invitation from the Chinese government.
And again, it's a secret invitation, right?
You know, everything's because they don't know that it's going to work.
You can't just have Nixon go to China first.
You have to send someone ahead of time to handle early negotiations along.
Like it's a whole process.
Yeah, it's a pre-China.
Yeah, it's a pre-China.
Yeah, you got to lube up your China before you get that dick.
Yeah, before you get that dick in there, actually.
That's right.
Nixon, gleeful, tells Kissinger to go.
Kissinger is the lube in this situation.
Tells Kissinger to go in secretly and handle these early negotiations.
He claims that this visit to China they're planning will be, quote, a great watershed in history, perhaps clearly the greatest since World War II.
And that's what Nixon says.
Kissinger, being a kiss ass, responds by saying, No, no, it'll be the greatest since the Civil War.
I mean, my God.
The idea that you're following that up with, no, no, better.
Better than World War II.
Yeah.
So July came, and Kissinger set off for Southeast Asia on what was billed as a diplomatic tour of the region, but obviously is in reality a secret diplomatic mission codenamed, oh boy, Operation Marco Polo.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
For fuck's sake.
I mean, at least just get a better marketing person.
It's like, Nixon, Nixon, listen to me.
Marco Polo.
Push out of water.
Marco.
So Nixon visits India and then he flies to West Pakistan.
And shortly after landing, he's a drinking.
He's drinking me and Yaya.
Wait, what?
Oh, my God.
Yeah, he fakes the stomach bug.
Oh, I thought he was a kid.
He pretended to get his stomach pumped.
No, no, no.
So he's like, you tell everybody I'm shitting.
Yeah, tell everyone I'm pooping myself.
Tell them I'm on the toilet shitting my brains out.
So he cancels, Kissinger cancels a couple of days of planned meetings.
And then while he's supposed to be sick, he boards in secret a special plane and flies from Islamabad to Beijing.
Okay.
Now, I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Daily Star, which was an Indian newspaper that summarizes what happens next.
During Kissinger's China visit, both sides discussed a variety of issues.
Kissinger found Zhao and Lai, who had studied in France and Germany from 1920 to 1923, to be a very articulate person who could converse even in German, Kissinger's mother tongue, with ease.
Both leaders agreed on recognizing communist China as the only China and allotting a permanent seat in the UN Security Council to Beijing instead of Taiwan.
The situation in the Indian subcontinent was discussed in detail, on which they had similar views, with both expressing their unwavering support to Pakistan.
Zhao briefed Kissinger about the Indo-Chinese border skirmishes and blamed India for provocations.
Both leaders had complete convergence of views on Yaya's stand on the Bangladesh issue.
Kissinger flew back to Paris and reached Washington on July 13th.
So, good.
I mean, again, like, yes, they should be talking.
Yes, this is fine.
Yes, if you're going to have a security council, Beijing should probably sit on it rather than fucking Taiwan.
Also, it's just a shame that it needs to come from mainly alcoholics.
Yeah.
Like that in order to make the right decisions, it needs to come on the back of genocides and blackouts.
Yeah.
And like, I feel like probably if the Nixon administration had just like announced publicly through like the global media, we were wrong, the United States, and our policy towards Taiwan, and we want to recognize China and establish relationships with them and put them on the U.S. If they just said that in like a news thing, probably China would have been like, oh, okay, this all could have happened.
But that also would have looked weak by the standards of like politics, right?
It would have looked like begging.
And so they're not going to do that.
They're going to do this instead because it looks like for the base who just wanted Vietnamese and Cambodian people to be fucking massacred so they'd feel better.
Like, yeah, it's the base we're talking about.
The base wanted blood and they fired him.
That's right.
So when he got back to DC and sat down with his boss, Kissinger excitedly relayed the story of the cloak and dagger exercise.
That's what he's very excited that he got to do with James Bond.
He tells Kissinger, or Kissinger tells Nixon, quote, Yahya hasn't had such fun since the last Hindu massacre.
Oh my fucking god!
What in the fuck?
You need to just like bring in another.
I mean, blood would have been a good person, but there just needs to be a regular person who's like, hey, I'm sorry, we can't talk like that.
You guys keep getting really comfy with this language.
It's really not okay.
Yeah, nobody says a goddamn, there has to be like some motherfucker cleaning up Nixon's like puke in the corner while there's a janitor who just like quietly shakes his head every time to camera.
Yeah, if they've got a gym in there.
Yeah, right.
So that the bartender, the knowing bartender.
Just imagine that coming out of your mouth.
Yeah, you can't, it's not a joke when you say that, while there's a genocide going on here.
It hasn't had that much fun since a genocide, so that says a lot about us.
It's just you celebrating a guy killing people.
You realize how cool you got to be to him?
Look, I don't have a friend, but if I did.
So on July 15th, 1971, Richard Nixon addressed the United States and told everyone that Henry Kissinger had just conducted a secret mission, which had concluded with an agreement for Nixon to travel to Beijing and negotiate.
By this point, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi civilians were dead, and more than a million had been made refugees.
India was edging closer and closer to war over the whole matter, and it was the considered opinion of the defense establishment that they would win fairly easily.
India had started arming Bengali guerrilla fighters at this point, and during one meeting on the matter, Nixon described Indians as, quote, a slippery, treacherous people who would like nothing better than to use this tragedy to destroy Pakistan.
Oh, so fucked.
I mean, you can't even talk about it.
I mean, it's like, you can't even say shit anymore.
Yeah, it's just, it's just insane nonsense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just so crazy how this, you know, this is imperialism, colonialist language.
It's just never faded.
No.
No.
There's just always guys in power.
They've been talking like this since the fucking 1500s.
It's never stopped.
Genocide in West Pakistan00:12:36
It's the, I mean, this guy's not, you couldn't really call him in power, but it's that fucking journalist for whoever talking about like Ukraine and like, this is the first war between civilized nations.
It's like, what the fuck, dude?
You know, it's quite different to see people who are white and European do it.
That feels quite different.
And the way he's carefully, that journalist you're talking about, the way he's carefully picking his language and he's like, you're like, wait, this is your thoughtful version?
Is that in his dream?
This is your delicate statement?
He cut the slurs out, you know?
Yeah, he was like, gotta be careful here.
I'm gonna say some dirty words.
Because Nixon, they absolutely say some slurs.
Yeah, oh, yeah.
So the outcry domestically and internationally reaches a fever pitch at this point, kind of late summer 1971.
And in August, the escalating crisis pushes India to sign a formal treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union.
Anti-communists, Nixon included, considered this a disaster and as good as an end to India's neutrality.
But condemning Yahya or stopping the sale of U.S. weapons to a country committing genocide was not considered an option.
Yahya had to be kept in power until the China trip was conclusively locked down.
Jesus Christ.
I'm going to quote again from the Blood Telegram.
A while after Kissinger returned from Beijing, he said, we cannot turn on Pakistan, and I think it would have disastrous consequences with China that after they gave us an airport, we massacre them.
In this case, for Kissinger, massacre meant putting pressure on a government, not the actual massacres.
I mean, they've done so many massacres that massacres aren't massacres anymore.
Yeah.
This is the only thing Henry Kissinger ever described as a massacre is people being mean to Nixon's drunk genocide.
Yeah, yeah.
Nixon, meanwhile, was committing a genocide.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
You know what?
Somebody make a Nixon-themed gin cocktail.
The genocide.
It should be red in color.
Pineapple.
Definitely.
Cherries.
A little bit of your own puke from the first tip.
So also in August, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar organized a benefit concert in New York, supporting relief efforts in Bangladesh.
Nixon brushed this off to Kissinger, saying, quote, Biafra stirred up a few Catholics, but you know, I think Biafra stirred people up more than Pakistan, because Pakistan, they're just a bunch of goddamn brown Muslims.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
Fucking Christ.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, we need to bomb the Beatles.
Yeah.
Recorded the Beatles.
We have to kill the Beatles.
The only one we could keep is Ringo.
He seems like we could maybe shift him.
Yeah.
We're back.
Again, I mean, it's like you would expect, and again, I mean, or at least in my head, at some point, you would expect someone to just be like, guys, what the fuck?
And at least, even if it didn't, even if it didn't really change anything, it would at least change the casual language and racism that is just kind of tossed around.
Or someone would be like, hey, you shouldn't be recording all this.
Yeah.
Oh, boy, you shouldn't be recording all this, Dick.
Hey, I'm going to hit this.
That's why we have all this to take.
I'm going to hit stop on this.
Yeah.
I'm going to stop this infiltrated the Nixon administration.
Yeah, Nixon did.
Nixon was like, I think we got a mole and it might be drunk me.
I think the blackout re-recording us.
We need to fight a war on Knight Nixon.
On October 25th, 1971, the People's Republic of China was admitted to the UN as a permanent member of the Security Council.
Again, their seat had been occupied for Taiwan by years.
Taiwan gets let out very unceremoniously.
China gets put in place.
The People's Republic of China's representative celebrates with a vocal attack on, quote, American imperialists and their running dogs.
But nobody took this seriously.
It was generally referred to as firing by empty cannons.
You know, you're China, you gotta get, you gotta, you gotta throw out your attack on the U.S.
But like, you know, everybody's getting along at this moment.
Right.
By November, again, when we just talked about the guy who built that giant mountain-sized cannon for Saddam, like not long after this, the CIA is like illegally helping that arms designer subvert international treaties to sell cannons to China because China's, you know, not on good terms with the USSR.
It's all just like brinksmanship political fuckeration.
That doesn't match up with some of the history in this country.
That's strange.
So, yeah, by November of 1971, more than 10 million people had been made refugees by the violence in Bangladesh.
Jeffrey Davis, a doctor who was brought into the country by the UN later to perform late-term abortions on rape victims.
Again, this is like, so part of what happens is the systemic mass rape by Pakistani soldiers, Bangladeshi women.
The UN brings a doctor in afterwards to like perform these abortions on these rape victims.
The estimate before this doctor comes in is that between 200 and 400,000 Bengali women had been raped.
And Jeffrey Davis says, oh, it's way more than that.
Oh, my God.
It's much more than that.
The CIA estimates 200,000 civilians are murdered in this period.
Given where the U.S. stands on this issue, you might not want to trust the CIA's numbers.
Now, the Soviet newspaper Pravda estimates some 3 million dead, which is also likely not entirely accurate, but is probably closer than the CIA's numbers.
Credible low estimates of the death toll are over half a million.
It is very likely that between one and two million Bengalis were murdered.
One and a half million is often what you will hear.
Probably pretty fair.
Although any kind of exact count is obviously impossible.
But this is a genocide on a Titanic scale, you know?
In December, West Pakistan declared war on India.
Remember, Yahya's not good at things.
So.
Again, breakfast cognac will do you some crazy shit.
So their man declares war.
Again, Yahya declares war.
That's right.
We're going to get you, you bloody fools.
You mess with the wrong Yahya.
Nixon and Kissinger blame this on Indira Gandhi.
Oh, but I'll clear it.
Is why you can't have a woman in India.
She's simply just asking to be attacked.
Nixon tells Henry that it makes your heart sick to see Pakistan be done so by the Indians.
And after we have warned him, the good guy.
After we've warned the bitch.
Oh, sorry, I cut you off.
Yeah.
And after we have warned the bitch.
I mean, again, it's like you're not in a tavern.
This is the fucking White House.
Should we put that in an official press statement?
Let's talk about it in the morning.
Oh, let's call her a whore then.
Let's just.
Yahya proved to be as bad at war as he was good at being friends with Dick Nixon.
The Indian military curb stomps Pakistan.
I cannot exaggerate the degree to which these guys get their asses handed to them.
Within a week, it is clear that not only is West Pakistan going to lose the war, but Pakistan might not survive as a country as a result of how badly they're being beaten.
Right.
Yahya is not good at anything.
I want to quote now from a write-up by an Indian veteran.
He's very good at drinking.
He's really pretty good at drinking.
What do you mean I started war with him yet?
That was days ago.
I said, I'm sorry.
I can do it.
Probably my worst knockout.
So I want to quote now from a write-up by an Indian veteran of the conflict for Indy TV, which is another Indian news periodical.
On December 8th, as Pakistani defenses in East Pakistan were falling before the onslaught of the joint command of the Indian Army and Bangladeshi Mukti Bahini, liberation warriors, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were busy plotting ways to change the tide of war or arrest it.
Henry Kissinger, in a meeting with Richard Nixon and Attorney General Newton Mitchell, now declassified, said he has got a message for you to you from the Shah of Iran, which says he can send ammunition to a beleaguered Pakistan.
He is doing it now.
What is going on?
I mean, honestly, who can help us here?
The Shah of Iran.
The level of war to stop war.
Yeah.
So.
Who's another piece of shit we can bring in on this?
The brilliant diplomat also revealed that Iran will send fighter planes to protect Jordan from Israel, while Jordan will send jets to Pakistan for the war effort against India.
Honestly, what is like an NFL trade works?
Yeah, how could you have thought this would work?
I mean, it's a drunk game of risk.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
He's just wasted playing risk.
The U.S. National Security Advisor also expressed fear that India would attack West Pakistan in a major way after winning the war in the East.
The Indian plan is now clear.
This is Kissinger.
They're going to move their forces from East Pakistan to the West.
They will then smash the Pakistan land forces and air forces, annex the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir, and then call it off, warned Henry Kissinger.
When this has happened, the centrifugal forces in West Pakistan would be liberated.
Baluchistan and the Northwest frontier will celebrate.
West Pakistan would become a sort of intricate Afghanistan.
So this is Afghanistan.
That's Henry's concern.
So he insists this is enough of a disaster that the U.S. has to send the 7th Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in order to scare India.
The 7th is headed by the USS Enterprise and is widely considered to be the most powerful naval force on earth.
This prompts the Russians to send a fleet in as well.
And the world gets to live through another period of are we going to have a nuclear war?
Jesus Christ.
Kissinger, because he's real good at calming people down, encourages China to intervene against India.
And in Nixon's words, quote, scare those goddamn Indians to death.
China's like, maybe we should go back to the Taiwan thing.
That actually seemed to be a little funny.
That seemed to be pretty good, actually.
That was working a little better, I think, for you guys.
Welcome aboard.
Now you're in hell.
In the end, Kissinger's plan failed.
India does not take his bait, and in late December, Pakistan surrenders to India, East Pakistan, because of its own independent nation, Bangladesh.
Yahya is forced out of office and placed under house arrest where he suffers a stroke.
So that's.
I'm a genius.
I've got an idea for a comeback, boys.
It's called the comeback cognac kid.
Oh, you mean I can't leave?
That'll be fine.
So Kissinger claims this whole state of affairs, how this all resolves, is a victory for the Nixon administration.
Of course.
Clearly, he announces this by saying, Congratulations, Mr. President.
You saved West Pakistan.
I did.
What time?
Was it last night?
You saved West Pakistan.
Amazing.
I mean, who's the hero?
I mean.
Two months ago.
Congratulations.
You did it.
Congratulations being said.
Amazing.
Now, two months after the end of the war, Nixon makes his big visit to China.
The media eats it up.
And suddenly Nixon's re-election campaign has something to hang their hats on beyond claims that peace in Vietnam is going to happen one of these days.
We'll get it right.
The detente with the Soviets is announced soon after, right?
They do like they're good things.
Obviously, it's good.
Like this happens.
Good things result from it.
During a conversation later that year, Kissinger tells his boss, no one has yet understood what we did in India-Pakistan and how we saved the China option, which we need for the bloody Russians.
Why should we give a damn about Bangladesh?
Well, there you go.
That says it all, right?
Yeah.
There it is.
Nobody's congratulating us on how good of a job we did.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in their opinion and their track record of foreign policy, it's all about egg breaking.
Yeah.
You know, for whatever version of omelette they insist they're serving.
Yeah.
And it's like, yeah, man, I agree.
U.S., you know, Mao and fucking Kissinger or Mao and Nixon should have sat down and talked like all of these conversations should have been happening.
Detente with Russia good.
Feel like you didn't need to back a genocide to make that happen.
You know?
Like that wasn't a necessary ingredient.
It's easy to look back on a genocide and go, was this right or wrong?
But when you're in the middle of a genocide, you're like, this seems pretty okay.
I mean, I'm getting a which genocide are you on?
How else can I talk to people?
I'm having cognac with Yaya before flying to China.
And keep in mind, I'm good here.
Sycophants During a Genocide00:06:58
I'm pretty much blackout drunk for all this.
So they're pretty good for a guy who can't walk in a straight line.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's how Henry Kissinger made peace between the nuclear powers.
Jesus fucking Christ.
No asterisks on that one.
I mean, it is the most chaotic, insane fucking nonsense.
It's just crazy.
No, I really, it is on a level where, I mean, it's been hard to process the whole time, but now it's like it's normalized.
And you're seeing the version when they're sort of there, the training wheels have been taken off.
How much they are actually doing and getting away with in way, like, again, I mean, just to have an adult in the room.
But I mean, they fire, you fire the adult, obviously.
But it is on, it is, I mean, it just is absolutely fucking preposterous that this is not well known about, or even if it, even if it is well known, how the fuck Kissinger keeps showing up over and over again with all these people that people that people are sycophants for in our in our politics.
No, I can never, I can never get over the fact that Hillary Clinton was campaigning with him.
Yeah, and that people are like, oh, look who's back.
Shady.
One of the things that's so, this doesn't really like mark on like the moral list of things that he did wrong, but I just find it so shameful that like, again, you have all of these other people, like all of the folks we've talked about, like Yahya, like Nixon, who do horrible things, but are like also getting to like exercising power and like the big men and like, you know, the dudes that the, like, I don't know, they're not like sycophants,
whereas Henry is just sort of like sucking up to everyone around him in order to further war crimes, which again, it doesn't isn't, it doesn't rate disgusting on a moral level compared to everything else.
It just is like, that's the guy he is.
Yeah, he's just like a power guy.
He's just like, he is not, I mean, and also, and I don't mean to keep beating this drum, but they're drunk.
Yeah, well, I don't think Kissinger is, but Nixon for sure.
That's what I mean.
Yeah, and Yaya is, yeah.
Yaya is, and Nixon is, and Kissinger is not.
And he's still like, ah, that's a pretty good idea.
Yeah.
You know, it's me like, it would be like if you're around, like, like, you're in a car ride to Florida with three drunk guys and they're just like, hey, well, what did we drink last night?
And the one guy's like, I haven't drank, but let's go to Florida.
Yeah.
God, it's, man.
And the blatant racism as far as like who you're willing to sacrifice.
I mean, you know, as usual with this country, where yeah, you just, you really do not give a fuck.
They really just literally do not care about anybody who's not white.
They just don't fucking care.
Why would they?
I mean, if you're them, there's no referee in this game.
So foul as much as you want.
To fucking, to fucking, you know, grow up with the Nazis right there and watch the Holocaust and then be able to disappear.
His childhood, he didn't, was not affected by this childhood.
That's true.
Sorry.
No impact on it.
Going back to that, but again, we've sort of knocked that domino down.
That did not happen.
Like it never occurred.
It didn't happen.
Clearly.
You know, that's why, look, that's why he's fine with what's happening in Bangladesh.
He knows it's not going to affect those kids, the ones who survive.
Those who lived through history are doomed to repeat it.
Because it was fine.
Yeah, because it was going to be.
It was completely fine.
It was fine.
Why?
Because I said so.
Yeah.
Anyway.
I just typed in Kissinger's name in to Google and the first thing that comes up is you.
Pile of vomit.
Oh, God.
What did he say?
Fucking hell.
We don't need to say that.
To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end.
I don't even want to know.
Oh, that was 2014.
What the fuck?
Okay, okay.
Still nonsense.
Like, of course, yes, it would be great to start at the point where there's not a war, but that's not really helpful.
Thanks, Henry.
Yeah.
Yeah, thanks, buddy.
Yeah, okay, whatever.
He's on the same thing.
Yeah, he's doing kissing.
Like, it doesn't matter.
Like, obviously, when you say, like, there's point things like the fucking nuclear disarmament, where like you can find moments in history where he's right.
It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong about a specific issue because we see what he actually does, which is whatever it takes to keep himself close to power.
Like, he doesn't believe anything to the extent that he's ever right or a part of something good, like arms reductions.
It's because that's the thing that the people who he's sycophants to want to do.
And it doesn't matter that he supported the opposite thing for years, like because he doesn't care.
Yeah, because it's a parasite just looking for a hook.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
Like, I don't give him credit for anything.
Yeah.
Well, like, it's funny.
It's funny you say that because all these articles about what he said about Ukraine in 2014, so people are going back to like, he said, and you're like, yeah, no, that guy's a fucking war crime.
If only he'd thought to start at the end of the war.
If only we'd thought of that, Henry.
Great point, Henry.
Solid.
Thank you.
We're going to start a GoFundMe to get you bones.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
I hope if he doesn't die immediately, obviously him dying immediately is my primary hope.
But I hope if he doesn't die immediately, he lasts long enough to get sucked into one crypto scam.
You know?
Just one good cryptocurrency scam.
Can we get that at least?
I want him to start his own crypto called Hank Bank.
Hank of America.
I'm noble blockchain.
You can buy a piece of my skin.
Each NFT represents an individual time Richard Nixon vomited into my lap.
I've become an NFT.
Oh, God.
All right.
Well, guys, plug anything here.
I mean, again, it's getting harder.
All right.
We're the dollop, and you could go to dollopodcast.com for tour information.
We will be all over Australia and America this summer.
And then you can go to my website, which is GarethReynolds.com for stand-up dates domestically and in Australia.
And go to parasite.com, which is just pictures of Kissinger.
Yeah, yeah.
Go to his parasite.
Go to his parasite.
I have a novel.
Just Google AK Press After the Revolution.
It's for pre-order now.
You can still get it signed.
Every copy, I will spit on Henry Kissinger's grave once when he dies.
So you're going to need an IV.
It's getting woozy, everybody.
Hurry.
The Kissinger Parasite Novel00:02:06
Look, like all politicians, I won't entirely keep my promises.
Some of that spit's going to be piss.
You know?
Some of it's going to be piss.
Here we go.
Already breaking it.
Yep.
Thought I knew you.
Oh, God.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Music, Conversation, and Guests00:16:18
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Monument.
Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Dollop crossover special event, week three of our Henry Kissinger series, and the stress is getting to everyone.
David and Gareth fighting viciously.
I'm not, I mean, I've been quite calm.
I just, I just when I'm attacked, like Henry Kissinger, I am attempting to maintain a balance of power between you and the state of Deton.
You get it.
You have the answers.
Yes, yes.
Our podcasts are now bombing Cambodia.
Finally.
A show that I relate to.
Oh, boy.
Well, this is week three.
Can y'all believe we're already in the home stretch of this series?
Is it week three?
Yes.
Wow.
Episodes five.
I've been living together for three weeks.
I know.
Most podcasts don't make all of the guests live together.
How do they do it?
What do they do?
Yeah.
I think with like the internet.
I'm going to have to look that up in my dictionary.
Yeah.
So I've enjoyed our time here.
I've really, I don't, I don't want to leave.
So, I mean, but it's, I mean, I, you know, we should.
I got to go back as a family.
We could do another couple of episodes on Henry Kissinger, but, you know, just do one a year for the next like five years.
There we go.
We'll just do like a reunion show.
Yeah.
What's Henry Kissinger up to?
A revival.
Yeah.
There's probably more chapters coming.
Yeah.
Hopefully just dead soon.
Hopefully dead is what we'll be doing.
I don't think that ends it.
Somehow I feel like that's not going to be enough.
Yeah.
We'll be doing the episode about how Henry Kissinger brings the army of hell back through a portal to somehow fight on both sides of the Ukrainian war.
And the Army of Hell's been misled as to the rationale.
They're like, you said that there was going to be a lot more slavery here.
Go ahead, follow me.
Come with me.
I'll show you where they hide the WMDs.
Henry Kissinger.
I should have studied Kissinger's accent before this.
Totally, but you do have an ear for accents.
It's really dope.
This will be so iconic that it will retroactively become Henry Kissinger's accent.
Kind of like the Nazis are now British.
I do one, just one Kissinger accent.
I nail one thing.
Hello, Kafka!
That's the only way you know.
Perfect.
Wow.
It's like we're there.
It's like we're in the Oval Office.
I am excited for when, what's his name?
The guy who did Vice, that director.
What's his fucking name?
The Cheney movies.
Yes.
Adam McKay.
When Adam McKay does his Kissinger movie in 10 more years, he'll use that accent, David.
That'll be great.
Dave will be on set coaching Christian Bale.
You know, you're saying hello, and it's really more Like aloe vera.
So, here at Behind the Bastards, and at the dollop, which Behind the Bastards is the Kirkland brand version of, we like to ask questions that historians all too often try to ignore.
Namely, how did bad people in history fuck?
So, what's happening?
We're talking about how Kissinger boned.
Are you excited for this dick?
No, now I want to go.
Can I leave?
I think he wants to take care of himself, if you understand.
You know, it is important to both cover the historical crimes of a guy like Kissinger and to get some personal color.
And since we've spent four episodes talking about his beliefs and his acts and power, it's only fair that we now turn our fuckroscopes onto his sex life.
This episode's going to have base under it, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So, I think the best way for me to start this segment is by reading a quote from a September 15th, 1971 article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
As a warning, guys, there is a 30% chance this is going to give one of you a stroke.
Oh, no.
You mean, wait, you mean we're going to be stroking it or actual stroke?
That is impossible to say.
Okay.
Quote, Henry Kissinger, sex symbol of the Nixon administration, stars.
Stephen bite a stick.
Let me bite a stick.
I'm just going to bite a stick just to be safe.
I'm just going to get a branch in my mouth.
Steps out of his office onto a sun-drenched San Clemente terrace with a cup of black coffee and sits in a white deck chair with his legs crossed.
Oh, the man who has pressured Moscow, drafted state-of-the-world addresses, advised the president to enter Cambodia and paved the road to Red China, appears as something of an anachronism in his baggy midnight blue cotton trousers, black tie shoes, bright blue unfitted blazer, blue and white striped shirt and striped tie.
What?
You guys hold men so far?
I mean, what?
Fuck.
Embedded reporter LLB.
What?
Why?
I can't imagine combining the fashion sense with the war crime.
It's so good.
Because they acknowledge the war crimes and they're going to talk about any stress.
It's like Henry could be walking down a catwalk like you'll see Henry right now in a tight white pantsuit.
You can see it sucked to him.
Henry also known for ruining Cambodia and Vietnam.
Spin around.
Continue the quote.
Here comes mass murder sex machine.
Kissinger.
Oh, no, it's an open robe.
On the back wall, you can see some victims of the Agent Orange campaign in Northern Vietnam.
And Henry Sucker, you could notice the outline of his hog in those.
I don't know, fancy pants brands.
Otherwise, I would have finished that joke.
But I'm going to finish the quote now, because by God, there's more.
What are you trying to do?
Seduce me?
Henry will tease as he notices his visitor's hot pants.
You know I like these hot pants very much.
Then he'll light your cigarette, touching your hand as all continentals do, offer you a cup of coffee and discuss trivia as readily as he would a Sino-Soviet Entente.
The impeccably tidy image is perfect for dealing with Alexei Kuschin or Chowen or Zhao and Lai or lecturing at Harvard.
But one cannot help wonder if the movie stars mind that the ankle socks of Washington's greatest swinger are falling down or that his wiry chestnut hair, which flashes golden in the intense white sunlight, is too close-cropped to run their fingers through, or that at least 10 of his 178 pounds protrude over his thin black belt, somehow shortening his five feet nine inches.
But suddenly, an electric twinkle will flash through the intense blue of his eyes, and one catches an inkling of that movie star magnetism, that special quality which causes some people to call him Cuddly Kissinger.
No, how is that the craziest thing that's happened so far?
How is that?
How did that happen?
Oh man, this is worse than war crimes.
Yeah, this is a bottom below the bottom, folks.
Can we go back to just murdering hundreds of thousands of Cambodians?
How did that happen?
What in the fuck just went on?
Is this a guy or a lady writing this?
I think it's a lady.
I'm already certain it's a lady.
Yeah.
So she wants to fuck him.
She wants to, or the dude wants to fucking.
Well, who wouldn't?
He holds your hand when he lights your cigarette.
Why do we have to talk about Kissinger's chest hair?
Why?
Why?
Why indeed?
Why indeed, David?
Because can we napalm it?
This is what napalm's for, right?
Speaking of palm, a little palmade in that hair of Henry's.
This has convinced me there is a place for the B-52 bomber in his pants.
Boy, that's what Henry calls little Hank.
So fuck.
Bafflingly, almost impossibly, it is not hard to find articles written at this exact sexual tenor.
And unfortunately, I would love to tell you guys that I'm sure this was like a satire or a joke, but people were weirdly serious about this kind of shit.
In 1972, and there's no way you're ready for what comes after this part of the sentence.
What?
In 1972, the Playboy Club hosted a poll of the bunnies and asked them who was, quote, the man I would most likely do.
Why not go out on a date with?
Henry Kissinger was number one.
What in the fuck?
No, no.
No.
What a horrible indictment of.
This is the worst indictment of America that has ever been.
This is the most damning thing you can say about us.
It's right to the ground in the Playboy Mansion.
What?
How is that?
I can't.
It's like we're in the back to the future Biff timeline.
Well, hold on.
The man who massacres hundreds of thousands knows how to fuck.
That's just an old saying.
That is.
That is an old saying.
I want to fuck you like I fuck the people of Vietnam over.
So once the first few articles about Henry Kissinger's, you know, sex symbolitude dropped, you know, Kissinger himself started being questioned by reporters about the phenomenon.
His standard reply became one of his most famous quotes.
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
I mean, like, there are, there is, I mean, people are attracted to like psychos, too.
Like, Ted Bundy had like a fan club and like, you know, like, I mean, like, I've been compared to Jeffrey Dahmer a number of times, looks-wise, which has always been a pleasure.
And you're both very handsome young men.
And yes, thank you so much.
And both still in the primes of our youth.
Absolutely.
It's still, it's like, you feel like there is a separation with him and what it just seems very, like a very strange connection.
It's baffling.
Other than that, like, here's the sad thing.
We're going to get to this.
It's not just that he's powerful.
And the other thing about him that makes him women so attracted to him is like bleak in a surprising way.
But we'll get to that.
So famous women loved being spotted on Kissinger's arm.
One night he was sighted at the Traitor Vic's in the Los Angeles Hill flirting and holding hands with Jill St. John, who played the very first Bond girl.
What?
He dated the first James Bond girl.
Come on.
The Hag.
He needs to be in the Hague Yeah, and so does Jill St. John, to be honest.
Jill St. John fucked that little fucking murder troll.
That was so horrifying.
Who could have been in that part?
Who goes from Bond to murder Munchkin?
I mean, Bond is kind of a murder.
Yeah, but he's a good guy.
Come on, Rob.
Always a good guy.
So while they were out on this date, Jill St. John and Kissinger were spotted by Ann Miller.
Ann was a dancer, famous dancer at the time.
She approached Kissinger and, quote, in a friendly way, these are the words of biographer Walter Isaacson, criticized him for having fun in public while our boys in Vietnam are getting their heads shot off.
Kissinger responded dourly, Miss Miller, you don't know anything about me.
I was miserable in a marriage for most of my life.
I never had any fun.
Now is my chance to enjoy myself.
When this administration goes out, I'm going back to being a professor.
But while I'm in the position I'm in, I'm damn well going to make it count.
I mean, really avoiding the centralized station.
I mean, like, at no point does he acknowledge that that is an unfair thing he's doing.
He's just like, look, come on, even us psychopaths need to have some fun.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, I mean, it's nice to hear someone like approach him and say something like that, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And of course, she approached him for not doing right by our GIs and as opposed to not doing right by millions of Cambodian and Vietnamese and banks.
It's a morsel.
It's a morsel.
Yeah, civilians.
But yes, it is a morsel.
I did something similar to the lead singer of the counting crows.
I went up to him and said that his ban was bad and they drove me crazy.
Your ban's a war crime.
You know, Dave, you might have had more of an impact if you'd criticized him for playing his music while our boys in Vietnam are getting their heads shot off.
Oh, I'm not going to get sorry.
You would have had some trouble parsing that out.
Sir, are you okay?
Yes.
Yep.
I'm here playing your jam band while our boys in Vietnam are out there dying in the mud.
Face down in the muck.
How dare you?
I think you were the wrong person.
Get a counting crows.
I know what you did.
Something about a pocket lot.
That you are edging up on my favorite conspiracy theory, which is that the Tonkin Gulf incident was engineered by the Counting Crows in order to sell out several decades later.
We know it was.
Yeah, absolutely.
That seems proven at this point.
So biographer Walter Isaacson describes Kissinger as having, quote, the boyish glee of a senior on-prom night and the twinkle of a middle-aged rake.
He regularly had, quote, striking blonde women come with him into the White House on lunch dates so he could show them off to his colleagues, telling a co-worker on at least one occasion to eat your heart out.
He's very much like bragging to other dudes about the fact that being Henry Kissinger has turned him into a sex symbol.
He just had a gun and he was like, no, literally, eat your own heart.
So it was known that Kissinger's notorious temper could be somewhat offset by tossing young women in front of him.
When his staffers fucked up and had to give him bad news about a scheduling issue, they'd send the youngest female secretary they had to go and give him the news.
The White House press office used Diane Sawyer for this purpose.
Oh my God.
Eventually the two started dating.
Oh my God.
I mean, she should not be allowed to still be doing news.
I mean, I know, I know, right?
You need to have your news license revoked.
Do you think it just comes pure poison?
Oh, it's like sarin gas.
Yeah.
It's just like a gas slowly releases.
Yeah.
We could harness Henry Kissinger's cum to get Europe off of Russian crude.
They're going to drop the Kissinger goo on us.
Diane Sawyer later told New York Magazine, quote, the power of Henry working a room is still seismic.
All of a sudden, everybody wants to step up their game and say something he'll find interesting or funny.
And you know, I don't know how much of this is just like his narrative.
He's clearly a charismatic man, right?
He clearly has it feels like it's dinner for schmucks, and he's like the rube.
Kissinger's Charismatic Charm00:05:15
Like, it feels like it's not just doing everyone's just doing a bit.
Like, it's just like it's incongruent with the person that we I see and hear about that you're like, oh my god, if you can get in a room with Henry Kissinger, just get right next to you will not leave his side.
Yeah, obviously, he's sexy, obviously, he's sexy who wouldn't want to fuck Henry Kissinger who wouldn't want to.
Now, this is all profoundly upsetting, but it gets weaker.
So, if Walter Isaacson, who's who's probably Kissinger's best biographer, if Walter Isaacson is correct, the reason all these women liked hanging around Henry wasn't just that he was powerful.
And no, it was not that he had, you know, incredible dick game, which I'm sorry for saying that in the context of Henry Kissinger.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
We just lost.
I appreciate it.
We just plunged in the rankings.
I appreciate that.
That's a fireball offense.
Yeah.
I'm going to quote now from Kissinger, a biography by Walter Isaacson.
Kissinger's secret with women was not all that different from his one with men whom he wanted to charm.
He flattered them, he listened to them, he nodded a lot, and he made eye contact.
But unlike the way he was with most men, Kissinger was exceedingly patient with women who wanted to talk.
Very few men in the 1970s actually listened to women, according to Betty Lord.
Henry talked to you seriously and probed for what you knew or thought.
He was someone who could and would make a Jill St. John feel intelligent or a Shirley McLean feel politically savvy.
Next to Ingmar Bergman, he is the most interesting man I have ever met, said Liv Ullman.
He is surrounded by a fascinating aura, a strange field of light, and he catches you in some kind of invisible net.
Over long dinners at public places, he would listen with sympathy while women talked about themselves, their lives, their hopes, and even sometimes their slightly wacky new age philosophies.
He would call them on the telephone late at night and talk for an hour or more at a time.
He was a great friend, especially a telephone friend, always there when you needed him, said Jill St. John.
The dirty little secret about Kissinger's relationship with women was that there was no dirty little secret.
He liked to go out with them, but not home with them.
His fascination with affairs tended to be foreign rather than domestic.
Henry's idea of being romantic was to slow down his car when he dropped you off at a date, said Hauer.
He may have been, in fact, the most celibate lecture in Washington.
People say, yes, he doesn't do anything with these girls, his friend Peter Peterson once remarked.
Wait, what the fuck is happening?
So he's a little asexual.
I don't know if he definitely had sex.
He had relationships.
He had kids.
But I think the being seen with women, the being seen as a sex symbol wasn't, but I don't think he had a particularly high sex drive.
I don't think he's going out and like fucking his way through like famous people.
I think he likes being seen in public with beautiful women.
And I think beautiful women, number one, he's safe.
Like he's not going to pressure you for anything.
And number two, he'll actually listen to you.
Like he's accustomed.
It's an extremely low bar.
It's really bleak, right?
There is like something to that.
You know, it's like he's he's doing, yeah, I mean, I think that even now with guys, like when I'll hear like guys talking, like, yeah, it's like, just be respectful and it'll probably get you like, I mean, it at least makes you not an asshole.
I mean, he's, he's, he's, you know what it is.
I think the women in this situation are getting something out of it, right?
Being with Henry Kissinger gets you in the news.
It raises your profile.
He's extremely famous and powerful.
And you get taken maybe even more seriously, you know, as a woman who's a journalist, who wants to be seen as kind of intellectual.
Being around Henry Kissinger, he's a very serious public intellectual.
It's good for your career.
And also, he's just men in power were so much worse than they even are now that he was like the best dude in that world you could hang out with.
He's kind of like, it's almost like a Batman villain, again, in the sense that like he's got, he's this evil piece of shit, but yet he is also able to hold a conversation and not be a prick.
And you're like, wow, who could pull off such opposing forces?
Yeah.
He treats women like humans.
That's his magic.
Yeah, literally, that is his magic.
And yet he will look a woman in the eyes.
Yeah.
He is the only man.
Jill St. John feels smart.
The guy is a magician.
Yeah, he is the only, he is the only man in power in Washington, D.C. who will like sit down with a woman and listen to what she has to say.
And as a result, he is the primary sex symbol of 1970s squash and bars solo.
I mean, it's incredible.
It also, again, it comes down to what we've talked about before with him, which is media normalization and how it is just, once you kind of create that bubble, most people just acquiesce.
And then you're just like, you know, you kind of like Diane Sawyer is just like, oh yeah, well, he's people don't throw bricks at him when he's outside.
So he's okay.
Now, Isaacson gives an example of a typical relationship, Kissinger's friendship with Jan Golding, who's a New York socialite he dated from 70 to 71.
Diane Sawyer and Shared Secrets00:04:22
She was 22.
He's like 50.
And Kissinger had been given her name by Kissinger had been given her name by Kirk Douglas.
Jesus Christ.
Kirk Douglas is the fucking hookup in this case.
So Henry calls her one day without warning and asks if she wants to come out for dinner.
When she flew down to D.C. to meet him, she was met at the airport by one of Kissinger's military aides, who drove her to a fancy club where he was dining.
The two sat down to eat.
And midway through dinner, Henry got a phone call and stayed away for 40 minutes.
When he came back, he apologized and said that the Secretary of State had needed his advice.
But whenever he was present, he paid close attention to her and he asked her her opinion on issues of the day.
She found the overall experience heady.
The two dated for half a year without any romance ever developing.
Isaacson writes, quote, only once did they go back to his apartment.
And when they arrived, an aide was there fielding telephone calls.
By Golding's count, the phone rang 40 times.
You couldn't do anything romantic in that place, even if you were dying to, she recalled.
Who's dying?
Nobody's dying.
She wants to get fucked by the old weirdo.
Yeah, she's into it.
I must warn you, my cock is horned.
Yeah.
Yeah, she said, I just don't think Henry was interested in sex.
When it came time to perform, well, I just think he was too preoccupied for it.
He didn't have time for it.
Power for him may have been the aphrodisiac, but it was also the climax.
Oh my God, that's what he got.
I know.
That's a line right there.
That's what he was doing in the bathroom for 40 minutes.
Oh, Henry.
So on one occasion, Henry was more honest than usual with one of his female friends, Oriana Falacci, who's an Italian author and a former World War II partisan.
She's actually a pretty fascinating person.
He said, quote, when I speak to Lee Duc To, who is the Vietnamese negotiator for North Vietnam, I know what I have to do with Lee Duc To.
And when I'm with girls, I know what I must do with girls.
Besides, Lee Duc To doesn't at all agree to negotiate with me because I represent an example of moral rectitude.
This frivolous reputation, it's partially exaggerated, of course.
What counts is to what degree women are part of my life, a central preoccupation.
Well, they aren't that at all.
For me, women are only a diversion, a hobby.
Nobody spends too much time with his hobbies.
See, for a minute there, you're sort of thinking, okay, well, if he's getting something out of female accompaniment, then in a way that is, I mean, there's something kind of like, there is something kind of nice about the idea that a guy isn't just not like trying to fuck his way through, you know, beautiful women, like he's just enjoying the company of women.
But then the more you kind of peel back, the more it just does seem to be like he's just backwards.
He's a backwards person.
Every part of him has just been rearranged.
He's like a mannequin body of guts that fell down and was put back improperly.
Now, the surprise Kirk Douglas cameo there may queue in on the fact that Henry was also very popular with the celeb set.
During a party thrown for Gloria Steinem by the talk show host Barbara Hauer, Kissinger told those assembled, I am a secret swinger.
Now, yes.
Yeah, that's a thing he claimed.
I like any hole.
Maybe it's a joke.
Yeah, that means he's saying he likes to fuck, but all the evidence we have is that he doesn't like to fuck.
Yeah, again, I think that's him myth-making.
I think that's just saying that I like to go around and touch the genitals of fucking people.
Yeah, you go to a swingers party in D.C. and Henry's just there putting a finger on things.
Is it okay if I penetrate both of you with the pinky rings?
I get nothing out of this.
It's fine.
Don't worry, I'm comeless.
So Kissinger missed the announcement that he'd been nominated for Secretary of State because he was on a date with Norwegian Oscar nominee Liv Ullman.
He took Candace Bergen out on a date when she was a young star.
She later said that he gave her, quote, the sense of shared secrets, probably the same set he gave every anti-war actress.
Like he would act like, oh, I'm really against the war.
I'm inside the administration, like trying to get us out of these things.
You know, it's just like, yeah, he doesn't, he's, yeah, he's a psycho.
Psycho.
I don't know what else to say about it.
It's just, I mean, he's completely, everything we've heard is completely contrary to him.
Wiretapping the President00:15:39
He's the fucking devil.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just psychotic.
But also, you have to credit, like, I don't think Candace Bergen is lying.
I can imagine how you're not privy at that point in time to any of what we have, right?
To any of this information we have about how much he was planning this, about what a two-faced liar he was.
So maybe you believe, yeah, this man is so intelligent and is so like emotionally competent.
I can't imagine him being the architect of these war crimes.
He must be just, it's such a titanic system of evil and he's fighting alone to bring it down.
And like, it must be why Hillary Clinton still hangs around him.
He's like, look, I had nothing to do with any of that, Haylor.
Don't worry, we'll talk about that, Gareth.
Okay, let's go.
Oh, great.
Oh, God.
So I'm going to quote next from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger.
Quote, for the press, the story was irresistible.
The dowdy Harvard professor reborn in Hollywood as Kerry Grant with a German accent.
When Marlon Brando pulled out of the New York premiere of The Godfather, its executive producer, Robert Evans, unhesitatingly called Kissinger, and Kissinger obligingly flew up despite blizzard conditions and a schedule the next day that began with an early morning meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the mining of Haiphong Harbor and ended with a secret flight to Moscow.
A reporter asked, Dr. Kissinger, why are you here tonight at the Godfather premiere?
Kissinger responded, I was forced by who?
By Bobby, Bobby Evans.
Did he make you an offer you couldn't refuse?
Yes.
As they fought their way through the throng, Evans had Kissinger on one arm and Allie McGraw on the other.
What in the fuck is that?
I know, right?
Would you have called that when we started this shit?
Kissinger, you've lulled us into this being okay.
Because at the beginning, absolutely not.
But now, I mean, imagine, honestly, like a war criminal on a red carpet going like, look, I didn't want to.
Obviously, I want to stay in South Vietnam, but Bobby Cold.
You're my Bobby.
Oh, man.
It's incredible.
You know who else attended the premiere of The Godfather with producer Robert Evans and Ally McGraw?
I can't wait to hear.
The sponsors of this show.
All deeply tied in.
Well, of course they are, right?
Like, they're the kind of people who get invited to hunt children on private island reserve off the coast of Indonesia, you know?
I've heard it's an archipelago.
I refuse to believe that Hollywood producer Robert Evans did not hunt children for sport at least once.
There's just no way.
Those glasses were just scopes.
He laughed like a man who has hunted the most dangerous game.
Anyway, here's ads.
We're back.
Now, in our Cambodia episode, I mentioned, and by the way, we're done with the sex stuff.
You made it through.
Wow.
I ripped my sweatpants.
My sweatpants have ripped.
God.
Please get back to the killer.
Well, don't worry.
In our Cambodia episode, I mentioned that the illegal bombing of Cambodia was leaked to the New York Times.
And this was a big story, and it prompted Nixon to suspect that Kissinger's liberal staffers had been the ones who had done the leaking.
And so after this gets leaked, Kissinger and Nixon work together to orchestrate a wiretapping program.
While Kissinger initially ran the whole program, he was actually in charge for only like a day.
Nixon decided pretty quickly that he didn't trust Kissinger after all, namely because Herbert Hoover expected that Kissinger was the one leaking things.
And this is because Kissinger absolutely was leaking things.
Now, he was not leaking the bombing of Cambodia, right?
But Kissinger had his favorite journalists that he'd leak things to.
Some of them were guys he wanted to write a book about him, you know, and so he wanted them to give him positive coverage.
Some of them were like leaks in order to hurt other people in the administration because there's just constant, it's Nixon's.
We're not getting into this enough, but Nixon's administration is just like an endless series of power struggles.
Everyone is fucking over everybody else, right?
Like that's the Nixon administration.
Right.
That's incredible.
Yeah, it's really quite, quite a tale.
So yeah, Kissinger's absolutely leaking some stuff.
And that's it.
Nixon is pretty aware of who Kissinger is leaking things to.
And as Walter Isaacson writes, the real reason why he pulled Henry from overseeing the program was that the two were having one of their periodic feuds.
Nixon actually made the call to pull Kissinger from the wiretapping program right before he flew to Camp David and like stopped returning Kissinger's phone calls for a week.
It's this thing they it was like it's like fucking 19 year olds fighting.
It's very they literally had just little tiffs and they said little tiffs.
You know they got to send him to voicemail.
Put him to voicemail.
There's so much petty bullshit between Kissinger and Nixon.
And they're very much like if you've ever been in a codependent relationship, Kissinger and Nixon will seem extremely familiar because they'll like be fighting over some stupid bullshit and then things will get bad and they'll like come together and be like all collapsing at the same time as they're propping each other up.
It's very funny.
I mean millions die, but I'm sorry that I said that to you earlier.
Well, I've been waiting for your apology.
I can't stay mad at you.
Who else will I bomb Cambodia with?
Look, we have too many people to kill to stay mad at each other for this long.
Get over here, you piece of shit.
Despite Nixon periodically being angry with him, throughout the duration of the wiretapping program, Henry Kissinger retained the ability to pretty much wiretap American citizens at command.
He would submit names to the FBI, who would start a wiretap on that person.
When the secret wiretapping program was leaked in 1973 and it blew up into a big congressional inquiry, Nixon took the blame, defending Kissinger by saying it was his responsibility not to control the program, but solely to furnish information to the FBI.
So, what they claimed is like Kissinger wasn't ordering wiretaps.
He was giving the FBI information on people we thought were suspicious, and they would decide to wiretap.
And it's a coincidence that all he would do was hand them a name and they would immediately start the wiretap.
Right.
It's like he would give the garment to the bloodhound, but he was a person.
But he's not hunting the child looking for him on GoFree.
So it's also, though, like, this might be the moment that proves Dick Nixon was actually a better person than Henry Kissinger.
Oh, my God.
Because he did, like, kind of take a hit for his team.
Not that he wasn't responsible for the wiretapping, but he surely was too.
In the land of no respect, a man with one ounce has on all.
It was like a tiny, tiny dollop, if you will, of honor from Henry Kissinger.
Yeah.
And we just never see that or from Nixon.
And we just never see that from Kissinger.
It's kind of like saying that a cheese grater is better to fuck than the blade of a jigsaw, but you know, it's something.
Boy, that went that got really.
Well, no, now that I think about it, I mean, if someone laid it on the table, right?
Yeah.
Well, let's hand me that cheese drainer.
Let's grate this cheese.
What do we say, gentlemen?
I'm going to drop Trout.
Let's get graded.
So here's how the secret wiretapping program worked: Kissinger and another Nixon dude, I think it was Haldeman, would submit names to the FBI, which the FBI viewed as requests, right?
The transcripts of that person's conversations then would all be sent to Kissinger's desk.
So he got direct transcripts of every wiretap personally, and he would decide what to bring to Nixon.
He wasn't the only guy.
Because again, Nixon had multiple people kind of competing through this program, right?
Right.
He's like the head writer.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So James Adams, head of the FBI's intelligence division, later told a biography that he did not think there was, quote, more or less wiretapping under Nixon than under previous presidents.
What made things unusual then was that the wiretaps Nixon and Kissinger ordered were on NSC staff, individuals that were part of the White House family, in Isaacson's words, right?
Quote, in other words, previous wiretaps had mainly been on suspected spies, potentially subversive union leaders and the like.
A regular program of wiretapping one's own aides was, according to Thomas Smith, another top FBI official, unprecedented.
Oh my God.
It's amazing.
Like, that's what's amazing, right?
It's like, well, no, it's not unusual to ask for this many wiretaps.
It's just normally on people that you're worried about attacking the country, not people who you've hired.
The FBI is like, you know, we're okay with spying on dissidents, but they made us spy on their friends and we feel gross about this.
But you see, Henry Kissinger's wiretapping Nixon.
Yeah, he's getting very caddy.
Kissinger's just asked for a wiretap on himself.
I want to see what I'm up to.
I don't trust myself.
You were joking, but you have accurately predicted where the story goes.
No!
What the fuck?
What?
What?
This is such a weird chapter of American politics.
Trust me as far as I control myself.
Oh, my God.
I am such a fucking asshole.
Look at what I was saying.
Oh, my God.
So these wiretaps were all considered legal at the time.
Although the Supreme Court did later determine that they were illegal, it was kind of like one of these at the time they were legal.
And because of how gross they were, the Supreme Court was like, you know what?
No.
And thankfully, the U.S. never, never wiretapped people again.
That's the end of it.
That's the end of it.
Famously.
That's why Edward Snowden is famous for his reveal that no one was ever wiretapped again.
That's why we don't know who Edward Snowden is.
Yes.
Famous private citizen living in Ohio, Edward Snowden.
Pull the name out of the air.
Random guy.
So a tremendous amount has been written on the subject of the wiretapping in the Nixon administration.
I'm not going to go too into detail on it because, as sleazy as it is, wiretapping your friends doesn't quite measure up to war crimes.
Like it's gross, but it's also not that gross in context.
Super weird.
Yeah, it's just like weird.
It's a weird thing about them.
There is something I should read here that reveals something meaningful about Henry's character.
William Sapphire was a New York Times op-ed columnist and a Nixon speech and a Nixon speechwriter.
He later said that Kissinger was, quote, capable of getting a special thrill out of working most closely with those he spied on the most.
So like Sapphire's attitude is like he was doing this mainly because he thought it was like kind of hot to be wiretapping a guy that he organized orgasms.
Yeah.
Finally.
It's the power thing.
It's the power thing.
Yeah.
He knows he's he loves that he's like fucking over someone he's just hanging out with and talking to and they don't know.
He's like sliver.
It's like, yeah, he gets like this crazy thrill out of it.
Yeah.
He knows secrets about them.
Like, oh, God, it's so fucking weird.
Going to wiretap that.
So he gets like, yeah, that quote from Kissinger, Power is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac.
It's usually translated to him being like, that's why women are so into me, right?
Because power turns people on.
But I think it literally means that he kind of gets off on exercising power, right?
Like 100%.
That's his thing.
Oh, my God.
I can even fuck my friends over.
It is also worth noting that Henry wiretapped himself.
Once he took office, he had a secret.
I was kidding.
I know.
I know, but it happened.
Once he took office, he had a secretary listen in on all of his calls and take memo notes on his conversations.
He also had a series of what are called dead key extensions added to phones.
These are keys that were secretly added to phones in his office so that his secretaries and aides could like press them to listen in on calls without other people knowing and take notes on the calls.
When Nixon would call Kissinger drunk, slurring his words, Kissinger would like to wave all of his people.
He'd be like, get in here, get in here, get in here.
Like pick up the phone, pick up the phone.
It's like a goosebuster.
We got one.
And then he would make faces making fun of the president while his notes, his like aides listened in.
Okay.
I mean, just actually, that's the coolest thing about take a step back and realize that Henry Kissinger is making fun of the wiretap he's called on himself while he's talking to the president who's blackout drunk.
It's something else.
While a war is happening.
Not to minimize how fucked up, you know, the current administration to the previous administration was, but by God, America still has not reached the Nixon peak of craziness.
He's gotten it in like pieces.
They've never had like the full team together again.
Yeah, you can't.
It's really hard to compete with Dick Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
And I mean, I'm talking about ahead of his time.
Oh, my God.
His stuff age is great.
Oh, man.
So Kissinger also used the transcripts he made to attack his coworkers and reinforce his loyalty to the president.
When his colleagues said something to him that he knew Nixon would hate, or when someone made a comment agreeing with Kissinger on an issue, he would pass those notes from his secret conversations on to the president.
So he'd hand the president like a transcript of a call he'd had with like a thing underlined that made Kissinger look good.
Oh my God.
From Kissinger, a biography.
William Sapphire, who dubbed the transcripts the Dead Key Scrolls, said he once saw Kissinger altering one to shore up a point he wanted to make to the president.
He had been chewing out a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor for writing a story that was unfavorable to Nixon.
In doing so, he also tossed in occasional complaints about the perfidy of Secretary Rogers.
Since he was planning to send the transcript to the president, Sapphire said, he had taken a draft and edited it, adding to the fierce loyalty of his own remarks.
So he would like mark it up to make him like be more of a kiss ass to kick to Nixon.
I mean, fucking incredible.
Nixon's also like hammered.
It's like, how hard do you have to work to like convince this guy?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, hand him a Mai Tai.
Like it's easy.
There you go.
This is from Trader Vicks.
Like, you're my best friend.
I love you, Henry.
I've never had a closer friend than you, Hank.
Look at how much of your bitch I am.
The existence of these transcripts was revealed by the Washington Post in 1971, but Kissinger insisted they were just for the president's files.
In reality, he used them as notes to write his two books that he published after leaving power.
But he was canny enough to know they had damning information.
So when he considered quitting the Nixon administration in 1973, he had them all shipped to a bomb shelter at Nelson Rockefeller's house.
I mean, listen to what you just said.
I know what you just said.
Every third sentence you have to write about these guys.
He's like magnet fridge poetry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He illegally hid government files in Nelson Rockefeller's private bomb shelter.
It's just like, it feels like.
Rockefeller, may I use your bomb shelter for storage?
I need to put my biography notes there.
Of course.
Of course, Henry.
That's you know what I always say.
My bomb shelter's yours.
These are what?
Short stories, right?
Yes.
Sure, yeah.
Whatever you need to tell yourself.
I need them safe in case there's a nuclear war.
So obviously, this is very illegal.
Woodward on Off-the-Record Talks00:14:50
And when Kissinger decided not to quit the administration, he had a military liaison send a plane to pick them up from Rockefeller's house.
And then he hid them in a bomb shelter under the White House.
Oh, after he left the fuck.
There's no rules for these people.
They're fucking notes.
They don't need to survive the fucking nuclear holocaust.
How great, though, if a bomb is incoming towards the White House and they all go there and it's just stacked with Kissinger papers.
Yeah.
This guy was a real piece of shit.
This is awkward.
I think we're all going to perish.
Yeah, he's just sitting in the corner.
I don't think you should read those.
So after he left office, Kissinger donated the papers to the Library of Congress under the restriction that they would not be made available until he had been dead for five years.
Well, he's been dead for five years.
We should be able to read them now.
Who makes that deal?
It's not a great thing.
The Library of Congress.
Jesus Christ.
By the way, most people do like the after I die.
He wants the five-year buffer, which sounds a little unique.
He wants time for people to get things out of the country.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to make sure I'm pure bone.
Yeah.
So Kissinger was also convinced that Nixon's chief of staff, Haldeman, had Nixon wiretapped and Nixon, sorry, Kissinger was also convinced that Nixon's chief of staff, Haldeman, and Nixon had wiretapped him, which they absolutely had.
So Kissinger was kind of tapping himself.
But Nixon had also wiretapped Kissinger.
And when he passed Haldeman in the hall, Kissinger would say, quote, what do your taps tell you about me today?
It's almost, remember that?
What was it?
I don't remember what I was on where Lily Tomlin was the one ringy-dingy operator who keeps plugging in all it's almost like that with wiretaps where you're just like every wire is getting plugged and crossed.
Nixon's wiretapping Kissinger, who's wiretapping himself, who's wiretapping Nixon, who's also wiretapping Haldeman, who's wiretapping Kissinger, who's also wiretapping Nixon.
And that's why we know so much about not just like the crimes they committed, but like what they were saying in the meetings while they committed the crimes.
Yeah.
Because unbeknownst to Kissinger and to everyone else, Nixon was also wiretapping himself.
Like he recorded every conversation that he had in the Oval Office in secret.
That to me is like one of the most, I mean, it's why we know so much because if you are able to like, if Trump or I mean, if any of them, I mean, if you had the Bush tapes, like they would be fucking incredible.
But it's also that Nixon recorded himself and then was like, okay, take them.
And everyone's like, the fuck, are you drunk?
And he's like, I am actually.
I am extremely, I am so drunk, my Secretary of Defense has a contingency plan in case I try to nuke everyone.
She's never been that drunk.
No one has.
So this was a secret until the Watergate scandal was revealed at the end of 1972.
Kissinger was warned about this, that like the Watergate story was about to break two months ahead of time.
And he was horrified by the implications, namely by the fact, by the things we've already gone over at length, that he had, like, he was on tape in these records, agreeing and encouraging with Nixon's bigotry and his copious racial slurs.
So like Kissinger is not involved in Watergate.
So he's like, I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried that everyone's going to know that I was like egging Nixon's bigotry on in order to kiss his ass.
Yeah.
Amazing for him to be horrified.
Like of all the things he's done, like for this to be like, it's always like the weirdest thing, but it's like for this to for him to be like, this could really damage my credibility.
It's like a mass board of me.
When he was asked about this later, about like encouraging Nixon's bigotry, Kissinger explained that the things he'd said to Nixon were based on quote, the needs of the moment rather than to, quote, stand the test of deferred scrutiny, which was a nice way of saying I'm only racist around racists.
In one of the most impressive feats of mental gymnastics in political history, Kissinger actually argued that his egging Nixon on was meant to protect the American people.
Quote, he was so much in need of succor, so totally alone.
Our national security depended so much on his functioning.
It's called yes and, okay.
He was Chicago school.
It's called the Improv Olympic palm.
I mean, again, to be able to get away with that argument, it just should not be loud.
Now, speaking of Nixon's functioning, it's probably time to talk a little more about Watergate.
As previously covered, in 1971, Nixon and his team, including Kissinger, hired a goon squad of ex-FBI and CIA agents called the Plumbers and asked them to investigate the leak of the Pentagon papers.
These guys broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg.
That's the guy who leaked the Pentagon papers.
He was a Department of Defense employee.
They break into the office of his psychiatrist to try and steal records to smear him.
In 1972, one of the plumbers, G. Gordon Liddy, was transferred to the committee to re-elect the president.
The acronym of this organization was literally creep because satire has never happened even once.
Like, it's impossible.
Nope.
It's over.
It's over.
Liddy's team executed a wide-ranging plan to illegally spy on the Democratic Party, which ended with them breaking into DNC headquarters in the Watergate building in D.C. and bugging the phones of staffers.
They got arrested almost immediately.
Like that night, they get busted, right?
That's like when this all starts.
And so that's what, like, the fact that this, like, the Watergate scandal and public knowledge starts is like these guys getting arrested doing a break and Keys a crime reporter named Bob Woodward in on the case.
He was not a political journalist.
Was like a crime beat DC reporter, but he hears about this break-in and he's like, something's fucking going on here.
And he winds up making, you know, contacts with a guy who we later, eventually, like decades later, learned was the associate director of the FBI.
That's deep throat, you know, famously.
This guy gives him information.
And the Washington Post under Woodward and Bernstein, right?
He has a partner in it too.
Like they're both doing very good journalism here.
They start dropping articles at the tail end of 1972.
And a trial over the break-in starts in 1973, January, right after Nixon wins re-election.
While Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, were running down leads, they got in touch with another FBI guy and asked him, hey, who kept authorizing all of these wiretaps?
That FBI guy said, well, Henry Kissinger.
In a lot of cases, it's Kissinger.
He's like our main guy calling us.
So Woodward calls Henry Kissinger, who plays dumb at first and then tries to blame Haldeman for the wiretapping.
Woodward asked, okay, well, is it possible you were the one doing wiretapping, Henry?
And Kissinger says, I don't believe it was true.
Woodward asks, what?
Yeah.
That's such a weasel answer.
He's four years old.
Woodward asks, is that a denial?
And Kissinger responds, I frankly don't remember.
I mean, it's kind of like, it is kind of like nice to see the genesis because the I don't remember thing is just utilized so much now.
Yeah.
It's like one of the first, like where you're just like, I think if I just say I forgot, I can get away with this shit.
Yeah, you can imagine a young Bill Clinton reading this news story and saying, I'm not sure why, but I think I'm going to take notes on this.
I remember ejaculating, but I don't remember how that came to be.
It's also, it shows you like how insulated they were in their psychotic little dome that once they actually take their tactics out in the real world, people are like, yeah, that's like crime and we have you.
They're like, oh, shit.
Fuck.
What's it?
Fuck!
The president's drunk.
So Kissinger admitted after that line of questioning that he might have given the FBI the names of some people who had access to leaked documents.
And quote, it's quite possible they construed this as an authorization.
So once he makes this admission to Woodward, Henry starts to get looser.
And he talks about how he figured he probably should take responsibility for the wiretapping.
And then he realized almost immediately, like, oh, shit, I fucked up.
And he asks Bob Woodward, you aren't quoting me, right?
Like, he's like, this isn't on the record, is it?
So Woodward works too, right?
You put it on the record and then you're like, that's off record, right?
Woodward says, of course, this is on the record.
Like, what the fuck?
Like, I never said this was off the record.
What's wrong with you?
Kissinger insisted, well, I was only speaking on background.
Quote, I've tried to be honest and now you're going to penalize me.
In five years in Washington, I've never been trapped into talking like this.
If a journalist calls you and asks you questions as the Secretary of State.
You're calling us BFF, right?
Yeah, you just wanted to chat, right?
I was just going to chew the fat for a while, I thought.
How are you?
What crimes have you committed, Bob?
Yeah.
It's fascinating.
It's so dumb.
It's so dumb.
And it shows what fucking tame little pricks the entirety of the White House press corps were, right?
Because Kissinger thought he could get away with this.
And he finally encountered like an actual journalist for the once.
And just like 30 seconds with Woodward and he's blown wide open.
And he just cannot handle it.
Yeah, he's just pissing his pants, crying.
You know what it is?
If you've seen those videos of like those fucking those Tai Chi champions who are like in those videos fighting their students where they're just like flipping everyone around the room, throwing them.
And then like they fight an actual MMA fighter who just like takes them down in 13 seconds?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like how Seagal fights where they all say Putin's judo.
Yeah.
It is.
This is the moment for Kissinger.
That's like when Stephen Seagal got choked out by Gene LaBelle and shedd his pants.
All right.
All right.
Okay.
I'm the star.
Come on.
I don't think this could happen.
Come on, no.
We play fake.
Next from Kissinger a biography, quote, Woodward wondered what kind of treatment Kissinger was accustomed to getting from the press.
He consulted Murray Martyr, the kindly soft-edged diplomatic reporter who covered Kissinger for the post.
Well, Martyr admitted, Henry was regularly allowed to put statements on background after he had made them.
I mean, it really, it does.
And what's so frustrating is that it's like, you know, they've all kind of learned from the mistakes of this time in ways where it is, it's kind of the same shit.
I mean, everything is kind of a fluff piece.
You're allowed to be in the White House press corps if you ask softball questions.
You know, like this, this was like a major fuck up.
And they all were like, well, the lesson we've learned here is don't let good reporters around you.
Yeah, don't let journalists exist.
It's one of those.
God, there's so much going on here.
It really is.
This is like, we are peaking.
There are ways in which like there are times when journalism does work that way, right?
When I am like sitting down and talking to like a fucking dissident or a protester, someone who like might be targeted by the state or by, you know, fucking fascists or whatever and murdered.
And they like say something and then later are like, oh, you know, can I take that off the record?
I'm worried that's going to like reveal me.
Yeah, of course.
Like I'm not going to like.
Yeah, you could get killed.
But like, it doesn't, it should never work that way for cabinet level fucking government officials.
Right.
They don't, they can't, if you agree ahead of time to make something off the record, yeah, that that happens.
That's like a thing that occurs, although I think that's problematic too.
But like, they don't get to just take something off the record retroactively.
That's not how it works.
Yeah.
And I mean, they just, all they care about is access.
So they don't care about the actual story.
They just want to talk to him again.
Yeah, they want to keep getting access.
It is.
It's like it needs to be a group of people need to say that this is all fucked, but instead they're like, oh, what a great cocktail party.
And Woodward, to his credit, there's critiques to make about Woodward later in his career, but to his credit, Woodward was like, I don't give a shit about access.
I'm trying to take down a president.
Like, I could give a fuck this off here, you know?
Like.
So Nixon eventually took the fall, as we've covered, but the issue was brought up again in 1973 when Kissinger went through his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of State.
We don't need to cover the politicking he did to secure that job, but I should note all the fallout over wiretapping and the disaster in Cambodia didn't do shit to reduce Henry's popularity at home.
In 1972, he had ranked fourth on the list of most admired Americans.
In 1973, he was number one, largely because Harry Truman had died.
Which is also pretty bleak.
What the fuck?
Yeah, baby.
We are.
I mean, and that's when you're like, we deserve it.
I mean, if you are that incapable of deciphering reality from fiction, to some extent, you want to be taken advantage of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're the rube who opens the door to the vacuum cleaner salesman.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
Yeah.
Pour some dirt on my floor.
I want to see how this thing sucks.
You mean my social security number?
Of course.
Okay.
And you promise I get $500,000 in the mail.
Okay.
So one congressman proposed a constitutional amendment to allow foreign-born citizens to run for president because of like how much he liked fucking Kissinger.
I don't like Henry.
Henry received a figure at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London, which quickly became the star attraction.
Miss Universe pageant contestants voted him, quote, the greatest person in the world today.
Is it possible that we just put a heart in the Madame Toussaux figure and melted it, and that's what's walking around now?
Yeah, that's we just left it in the sun for a week.
Like you bring up the media, like, this is just so like, they just normalize monsters.
They act like monsters are great people.
Yeah.
And people don't actually hear the fucking heinous shit that they're doing.
No.
And they just hear he's a smart guy, but it's because that's what matters.
He can like quote smart dead people that they you haven't read, but you know they're smart because their name sounds vaguely familiar.
And so you're like, well, this guy's read all these smart dudes.
He must be a good guy because smart people don't do bad things.
Well, and smart people don't like go out with reporters.
And, you know, it would just be like, look at Frankenstein at the Playboy Mansion.
Gosh, he's got those bolts on his neck and the girls love to twirl him.
Smart People Don't Do Bad Things00:03:32
So it is perhaps not surprising, even though the Watergate scandal had built to a fever pitch by 73, that Henry Kissinger was a shoe-in to be appointed as Secretary of State.
On the day of his first congressional confirmation hearings, someone in the press asked, Do you prefer to be called Mr. Secretary or Dr. Secretary?
He replied, I do not stand on protocol.
If you just call me Excellency, it will be okay.
Oh, excuse me.
Jesus pardon.
And again, as a journalist, the proper response to that is to throw your handheld reporter at his face.
Like try to take a chair to his nose like they did to Geraldo.
Yeah, right, yeah.
And break his face.
Oh, I'm not hung up on titles.
You can just bow and call me on Majesty.
So Kissinger was extremely nervous going into the confirmation hearings because, again, Nixon is being torn apart for Watergate right now.
And he was expecting that he'd be interrogated about all the shady wiretapping he'd done.
But as it turned out, all he had to do was lie and say he'd never recommended wiretapping.
Everyone decided that was fine.
And he was confirmed as Secretary of State, 78 votes to 77.
Jesus fucking crazy.
And here's the thing: even among the people who voted against him, there was not always strong antipathy.
George McGovern voted against confirming him, but he called Kissinger afterwards to privately endorse him.
To be like, hey, publicly, I got to pretend I don't like you, but like, cool, right, bro?
And don't worry, someday I'll be the president.
And I got my eye on you, Henry.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, that might have happened.
Yeah, probably.
So when he was sworn in on September 21st, 1973, a family friend presented Kissinger with a copy of the Old Testament that had been published in Firth in 1801 for him to be sworn in on.
Kissinger decided instead to use Nixon's copy of the King James Bible.
They just opened it.
It's a bottle of bourbon.
Oh, sorry.
It's just a bottle of bourbon.
Let's poop, see.
Let's use that other one.
Let's use that first one.
So, alas for Dick Nixon, 74 was an even worse year for him than 73 had been.
In July of that year, three Southern Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee announced that they were voting to impeach him.
On August 5th, a transcript of taped conversations between him and Haldeman was released, which proved his involvement in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in and proved he'd lied under oath.
This was the nail in the coffin.
On August 7th, Barry Goldwater told Nixon he would not survive an impeachment vote.
Nixon had already made the decision to leave.
He met with Jerry Ford, his vice president, and told him that he was about to be president.
He urged Ford to keep Kissinger on as his Secretary of State.
Then Nixon made his big announcement to the American people.
Next, from history.com.
After the speech, Kissinger accompanied Nixon to his living quarters one last time.
History is going to record that you were a great president, Kissinger assured Nixon.
Henry, the president said, that will depend on who writes the history.
Can you imagine a wasted Nixon showing Gerald Ford around like, fellow, this is the vodka?
Put that in your weedies in the morning.
This is pineapple.
You should eat this with cottage cheese every day.
Now, here's a Dick Nixon secret: if you pour a little Diet Coke in the bourbon, they can't tell you're getting drunk at nine in the morning.
And when you're confused, just nod.
And when you're throwing up in the toilet, say something disagreed with you, and it's diarrhea.
The secret service agents have to let you puke down their sleeves.
History Depends on Who Writes It00:04:42
That's what I've been doing.
This is the vodka room, and this is the vodka room, and this is the vodka room.
This drawer here is for letters and things like stamps like that.
And this is the drawer you can puke in, but just bend over and pretend you're looking for something.
I'm going to be honest.
I've been shitting in the fireplace a lot.
It's hard to find the bathroom when you're turned in the oval.
Look, look, if you're worried, just lift this cushion up.
This chair is actually a toilet with wheels.
Sits behind the desk.
Try to think what else.
These are laws.
You can wipe your ass with them.
By the way, this is all being recorded.
Everything is.
Wait, this chest here is actually a tape recorder.
Kissinger's sorrow over his boss stepping down was sopped somewhat by the fact that right around the same time, he'd succeeded in overthrowing an actual democratically elected leader, Dr. Salvador Allende.
Now, fuck, this makes me mad.
Yeah.
We have, we're not going to talk about this in a lot of detail because we have gone into detail on the coup against Allende in both our episodes on the Dulles Brothers and on the School of the Americas.
It's just like not, this is the thing to like cut out of our Kissinger story because we've covered it a lot before.
But I will give an overview of Kissinger's involvement.
For the listeners who maybe aren't familiar, Robert.
Yeah, so I know we are all on the same page, but you're Gareth or whatever.
Salvador Allende was a socialist-y dude who was elected in 1970.
Like all kinds of socialists the U.S. overthrows.
He was not nearly as radical as they pretended he was, but he was like solidly left-wing.
The U.S. backed a military coup that overthrew him in 1973.
Allende committed suicide and was replaced by General Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people over the next 17 years.
So I'm going to be brief here, and I'm going to read a summary of Kissinger's role in that kerfuffle from the Transnational Institute.
Less than a week after Nixon received the disappointing news about the presidential vote, he decided to annul the Chilean vote.
A quote widely attributed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained Nixon's morality.
I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.
The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
I mean, like, you are, you need to be like so far gone to be comfortable speaking in that way.
Yeah.
Yeah, you, you, that's ghoulishly evil.
I mean, it's just like you could come up with a version of that that would also probably sound effective, but to basically be like, look, the people have fucked up voting.
They've, they've wrongly voted.
Oopsie poopsy.
Let's we'll do it for them.
We'll figure it out.
I mean, we'll take care of this.
Again, United States policy pretty much, you know, all the time in perpetuity.
Yeah, and it's, it's, it's good.
Yeah.
And after the bloody coup that that Kissinger and Nixon endorsed, uh, Kissinger pushed to recognize Pinochet's coup government and offered economic aid.
Uh, he pressured international lending organizations to lend money to the new Chilean government.
Yeah, he sucks.
This is a bad thing that he did.
Um, you can hear a lot more about it.
Honestly, Kissinger was involved, but like the Dolus Brothers were a much bigger part of this specific thing.
So check that out in our Dolus Brothers episode.
All this with Raquel Welch on his arm.
Jill St. John, I love the way you actually, the woman he does marry, Nancy McGinnis, who is also a fairly prominent person, is a huge fan of the overthrowing of the Chilean government.
Henry, his wife is like more hardcore right-wing than he is.
Come to bed.
Tell me about how you ignored the will of the Chilean voters, Henry.
Oh, yeah.
So I don't know much about the working relationship Henry had with Jerry Ford.
Honestly, like they didn't spend a lot of time together.
We're not going to delve super deep into it.
There were like too much to talk about still.
There is one thing I want to note about his relationship with Nixon.
Like for the first several years that he's working with Nixon, he's desperate to go to Camp David.
Anytime the president invites him, he's excited to go.
But then when the Watergate thing is going on and Nixon feels isolated and alone, Kissinger spends like the whole Watergate hearing time jetting around the Middle East and stuff doing diplomacy.
And Nixon begs him like, do you want to come hang out at Camp David with me?
And Henry's like, oh, buddy, I'd love to, but you know, sounds so good.
I just got so much worms.
I'm swamped over here with stuff, you know?
It's like such a worm.
U.S. Fuckery in Indonesia00:12:30
Gosh.
It's amazing that there's a moment at this where you're like, oh man, Dick, he did you dirty.
That's not a friend to him.
A little bit of sympathy for Nixon.
Do you want to come to summer Camp David with me?
I can't.
I could really use a friend.
I broke my arm.
I can't get any merit badges or anything this summer, my mom said.
Oh, man, it's amazing.
So, yeah, there's so much to talk about.
I will tell you, I will note that one of the first things that Henry did as Secretary of State for President Ford was to deliberately enable another genocide, which put him just one genocide away from earning a free coffee at the Pentagon Starbucks.
Oh, my gosh.
So he's close.
He's close.
He's close.
We're going to talk about that.
But you know what we got to talk about right now?
Products and services that support this podcast.
Finally.
Hey, including Starbucks.
Commit five genocides and Starbucks will fund a sixth if it reduces the price of coffee beans.
Make sure it's a Venti.
Oh, we're back.
So in 1969, the U.S. conspired with the Indonesian dictator Suharto to encourage the illegal annexation of West Papua Act of Free Choice.
This was a shameless propaganda exercise, which allowed the United States to pretend democracy.
Rah-rah-rah, you get the idea.
Behind-the-scenes support by the U.S. at the UN allowed Suharto to solidify his control on West Papua.
This led to four decades of genocidal policies, which have killed huge numbers of the Papuan population.
Six years later, Suharto had another fun idea.
East Timor was nearby, and near the end of a 27-year-long process of being decolonized by Portugal.
Having just been ruled pretty brutally in the name of capital, you won't be surprised to hear that the East Timorese people were somewhat sympathetic towards socialism.
The leftist Friedland Freit Fretilan Fretilin party began to gain ground as freedom grew near.
In 1975, it had a brief civil war with the much smaller right-wing pro-Indonesian party.
This freaked out Portugal, who pulled their last people out of the country during the fighting.
Seeing the territory abandoned, General Suharto felt he had an opportunity.
He and others in the Indonesian military began to complain to the Americans that East Timor might be used as a base for dastardly communists to inspire secessionist movements in Indonesia.
Over in East Timor seems like it's going to be really bad.
Oh, we got to kill them.
We gotta get rid of them.
I don't like the sound of this.
Over in East Timor, Freitlin, the Socialist D Party, recognized the fact that they were in danger.
They had their oh, we're in danger moment, and they declared their independence on November 28th, 1975, so they could ask for help from the United Nations.
Everyone ignored them.
Japan, a major investor in Indonesia, twiddled her thumbs.
Australia looked away.
This left the United States as the only power that could potentially stop Indonesia from invading Timor.
Do we do it?
What?
Yeah, we did it.
Everything's good now.
They're doing great.
They're flying cars.
How many times do we have to be the heroes?
Another job well done for the United States.
On December 6th, 1975, on the eve of the planned invasion, Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger flew to Jakarta to meet with Suharto.
The very next day, Indonesian land, air, and naval forces invaded.
The timing is predominant enough that people have debated ever since whether or not Kissinger and Ford gave Suharto the green light here too.
From a write-up in the nation, Kissinger, who does not find room to mention East Timor, even in the index of his three-volume memoir, has more than once stated that the invasion came to him as a surprise and that he barely knew of the existence of the Timorese question.
He was obviously lying, but the breathtaking extent of his mendacity has only just become fully apparent with the declassification of a secret State Department telegram.
The document, which has been made public by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, contains a verbatim record of the conversation among Suharto, Ford, and Kissinger.
We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action, Suharto opened bluntly.
We will understand and will not press you on the issue, Ford responded.
We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.
Kissinger was even more emphatic, but had an awareness of the possible spin problems back home.
It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly, he instructed the despot.
We would be able to influence the reaction if whatever happens happens after we return.
If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the president returns home.
Micromanaging things for Suharto, he added, The president will be back on Monday at 2 p.m. Jakarta time.
We understand your problem and the need to move quickly, but I am only saying it would be better if it were done after we returned.
Worst case scenario, I'll just say I never said this and nobody will ever have a transcript if you said anything.
I mean, to be scheduling it like a golf day.
Can you crack down on the independence and freedom of these people and engage in a genocidal war like once we're back?
Just there's a lot going on.
345 or like 4 on Monday would be great.
Tuesday, people wait would be unbelievable.
Tuesday would really like that's a lot of time.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I thought it was a workout.
That's right.
Yeah.
There's a lot of U.S. fuckery in fucking Indonesia.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to hear this, gentlemen.
Enough of that talk, please.
The greatest country on earth.
You do have that giant Indonesia in the United States shaking hands over a burning East Timor tattoo over your heart.
Well, I would hate for that.
That's speculation.
And please cut that out.
Sophie, can we make a note that that should not be included in the episode?
Seems a little incriminating.
So, Suharto's troops, when they invaded East Timor, which they did, were equipped with the finest U.S.-made weaponry.
Under the Foreign Assistance Act, such materiel could only be provided to nations who would use it exclusively for self-defense.
When this was brought up to Suharto, or when this was brought up to Kissinger, and he was asked whether or not selling arms to Suharto had violated the act, Kissinger responded, it depends on how we construe it, whether it is in self-defense or it is a foreign operation.
Back in D.C. on December 18th, in a meeting whose minutes are now declassified, Kissinger admitted that he knew that he and the United States were violating the statute from the nation.
An even more sinister note was struck later in the conversation when Kissinger asked Suharto if he expected a long guerrilla war.
The dictator replied that there will probably be a small guerrilla war while making no promise about its duration.
Bear in mind that Kissinger has already urged speech and dispatch, urged speed and dispatch upon Suharto.
Adam Malik, Indonesia's prime minister at the time, later conceded in public that between 50,000 and 80,000 Timorese civilians were killed in the first 18 months of the occupation.
These civilians were killed with American weapons, which Kissinger contrived to supply over congressional protests, and their murders were covered up by American diplomacy.
So, I mean, we did it again.
We did it again, guys.
It really is like, it's like a serial killer who just gets very comfortable with killing, gets kind of cocky about it, starts leaving clues, but in this case, there's no cops chasing anyone.
There's nobody who's really trying to solve the case.
It's like if the Unobomber left his name on every package.
Yeah.
And then Brittany was like, this is okay.
A return address.
Yeah.
Ted Kaczynski, Shaq 9.
Roughly 300,000 East Timorese civilians, roughly half the population, were forced out of their homes and into camps during the fighting.
By 1980, the death toll was at least 100,000 and possibly as high as 230,000.
Thomas Meany, writing in The New Yorker, has tried to make sense of this all.
Kissinger's sign-off on the Indonesian President Suharto's genocidal campaign in East Timor was meant to signal that America would unquestioningly reward those who had decimated communists within their reach.
In retrospect, the notion that everything America did would be duly registered and responded to by its opponents and friends seems like an expression of geopolitical narcissism.
At the time, the 33-year-old senator Joe Biden accused Kissinger at a Senate hearing of trying to promulgate a global Monroe doctrine.
Kissinger is that guy where repeatedly terrible people will be like, Well, you're in the right here, but only because you're talking about Henry Kissinger.
Yeah, right.
I mean, yeah, he's like, Yeah, it's like in the next episode, we're going to have a moment where the CIA is a voice of reason to give you an idea of where Nets go.
And how many people have to be the voice of reason?
I mean, it just is like he's like cocky.
I mean, it's just no shit's given at this point to have no, I mean, it's not like he's had a soul throughout all of this, but you would think that once you have a soul for such a long period of time, you would start to notice the absence of a soul and at least start to act like you had a soul.
Well, good news, Gareth.
Nothing like that ever happens.
Oh, fucking great.
Yeah, we're going to have fun in episode six.
But, you know, now it's time to just chill out, you know, have a drink, just a nice sip of the blood of, I don't know, East Timorese dissonants, and go watch the Theranos documentary to see Henry Kissinger get cooked by a fucking gripper.
I mean, yeah, you need only like, I forget who said it, but that's true.
That's our hero.
She's our hero.
This psycho who was like, hey, yeah, you can give, we can do this with your blood at Walgreens because she got Henry Kissinger involved.
And I mean, just he's, he's not, it's not like he's not a genius.
There's just not a lot of genius it takes to just be awful and indiscriminate.
Yeah, he's just like the best weapon networker of all time.
Yeah.
And here's the thing.
Episode six, we're going to talk about his political downfall because he does get his comeuppance, but it's from people who suck maybe even worse, at least as bad as he does.
And so there's no satisfaction in it.
Like, of course.
And he's also, it's also like a- It's like if Hitler had gotten assassinated by Hitler II, who had then like expanded the.
And it's also by people who are like, they're there because of him.
Like they like he had to walk so they could run.
Yes, exactly.
Yes, there's someone needs to paint a picture of like Henry Kissinger kind of on the bow of the Titanic holding up Dick Cheney with his arms spread wide.
Oh, that feels nice.
That feels real nice, Henry.
You also love your form.
Let me paint you.
Kissinger walked so that Donald Rumpsfeld could stagger.
Yes.
But that's going to be part six.
Wow.
Until then, Dave.
What?
Gareth.
You got any pluggables to plug?
I want to drink like Nixon.
We again.
Look at what capitalism gets us.
Yeah, we will be invading the shores of Australia searching for their WMDs, which we believe are north, south, east, and west.
You can go to dolloppodcast.com, and I'll be also doing stand-up when we're there.
And you can go to GarethReynolds.com for those stand-up dates.
And we're also touring America this summer.
Sorry, we're touring the best country on earth this summer.
And you can go to dollopodcast.com for all that information.
Now, I should note here, y'all, that you guys have an ongoing, an ongoing argument over whether or not Gare is an appropriate nickname for you, Gareth.
And I felt like maybe we could bring in a negotiator to help us deal with this question.
So I'd like to introduce to the call, Dr. Henry Kissinger.
Oh, my God.
I'm sorry I said all those horrible things.
Gary's a fan then.
I think Gary works great.
You look like a Gary a little bit.
He's got his nice shorts on.
He's got those nut huggers.
You can see the outline.
You can see the whole breadbasket.
Looks like a baby bird in the nest now, but it becomes a python when war starts.
They should call me Dick, shouldn't they, Dick Nixon?
Ego Modem Meets Kissinger00:02:52
Once the bombs hit the soil, I'll rip these babies.
I really hope people stopped listening.
I so desperately.
I stopped listening and I'm talking.
All right, everybody.
All right.
We'll see you on Thursday.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.
Really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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 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.
Handling Sadat and Assad00:16:23
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.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So this is episode six.
You know, we're, what, eight hours into talking about Mr. Kissinger?
Yeah, we've got a lot of people.
I'd love to meet me from eight hours ago, man, buddy.
It's like when Bill and Ted meet each other halfway through and they don't know the journey they're about to go upon.
Yeah.
Buddy, backle up.
So the things, the thing that Kissinger gets the most credit for that we haven't mentioned, we've talked about a bunch of the things that he gets credit for, is bringing peace to the Middle East.
He does get credit for being that guy.
Obviously, he did not do that, but he did play a significant role in stopping what had been a decades-long cycle of wars between Israel and the Arab nations around it.
Now, to call that bringing peace would be ignoring a tremendous amount of ongoing violence against the Palestinian people, but Kissinger did help ensure, like, you know, there were all these different, like, everyone would invade, yada, yada, yada.
There'd be a bunch of fighting.
That doesn't really happen anymore.
And Kissinger is part of why that doesn't happen anymore.
The gist of it is that on October 6th, 1973, on Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated assault on Israel that for a time threatened the state's very existence.
Kissinger had not spent much of his time working on Mideast-related stuff up to this point.
This was partly because Nixon thought having a Jewish man negotiate with Arab countries would be a bad idea.
It was also because Kissinger was kind of buried in Vietnam stuff, right?
But by October of 73, negotiations with Hanoi had been concluded.
U.S. forces had stepped back from an active role, and Kissinger had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize with his Vietnamese counterpart, Lee Duc To.
What?
Yes, absolutely.
Now, I can't, there's no counter-argument.
Absolutely.
No, he nailed it.
What?
I mean, Nobel Peace Prize really doesn't.
I mean, they must hit sometimes.
I'm just familiar with a lot of the no's, though.
It seems mostly to be misses in my experience.
When he got that, that's called the no.
Yeah.
Nobel Peace Prize.
And you know who felt that way, Gareth?
Lee Duc To, who was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Kissinger.
I don't want mine.
I don't want mine.
Yeah.
He literally was like, no, I'm not going to take it.
The war isn't over yet.
Like, all he's done, all we've done is negotiate the U.S. no longer murdering people on the scale they had been.
And he's in charge of it.
Yeah.
And specifically, he was angry because right before the armistice was signed, in order to try and force Hanoi to agree on some points, Kissinger orchestrated a massive nighttime bombing campaign on Christmas of Hanoi.
They didn't bomb on Christmas Day, just the day before and a bunch of the days after, but it gets called the Christmas bombing.
We're worried we'll hit Santa.
I don't want that jolly blood on my hands.
So.
Lee Docto is like, I don't, I'm not going to take an award for peace with this guy.
Fuck him.
So Kissinger accepted it alone.
Oh, my God.
He's such a cool dude.
He's such a cool dude.
Wow.
More credit for me.
I can't believe I'm the only one who got it this year.
I must be really good at this stuff.
So, yeah, he's like the Conway Kanye of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Sorry, you did great, but Kissinger had the best war of all time, of all time.
It would have been really funny if Henry Kissinger had like shoved Taylor Swift off stage.
You had a great war.
You did great at peace, but come on.
We're talking about the goat here, baby.
So by October of 73, Kissinger is free and clear and ready to get it on in the Middle East.
And this actually went better than you might think.
Weirdly enough, Henry Kissinger was probably one of the fairest negotiators the United States ever sent into that conflict.
In fact, he was more or less in constant tension with Israel because he would do stuff like try to halt arms shipments there.
Like during the Yom Kippur War, right?
Israel's on a back foot.
They're in real danger of being overrun.
They want U.S. weapons and like U.S. arms and a bunch more F-4 Phantom planes.
And Nixon agrees to give them to him, but Kissinger's like, we're not giving them anything until they can arrange for commercial flights to ship the weapons to them because I don't want, I'm trying to negotiate with Syria and Egypt.
And if they see U.S. military aircraft landing in Jerusalem to give the Israelis weapons, that's going to fuck up my negotiations.
So like he's actually really unpopular with a lot of folks in Israel because he does stuff like this.
And in fact, Kissinger's, and obviously, like every U.S. negotiator in this conflict, Kissinger is more on Israel's side than anyone.
But it's probably fair to say he's less on Israel's side than any other negotiator we ever put in there, which is like weird.
This is fascinating.
It sounds like he's the most progressive because, I mean, like, obviously we could give a fuck.
He's not a Zionist, for one thing.
He doesn't have like, there's not a, you know, he's Jewish, but he's not really that like there.
There is some amount of like, as a Holocaust survivor, he believes strongly that, like, you know, Israel needs to exist.
So he does have that going for him.
Again, he eventually agrees to ship them weapons on U.S. planes after it becomes enough of an issue.
But he like the fact that there's like any of that at all is weird.
Yeah.
He probably had like a little Nixon on his shoulder who was like, I know you're just going to be a Jew about this.
And he was like, no, I will not care.
Not Devil Nixon.
It's weird how plugged in you are to how Nixon reacts to everything.
Exactly what he was the spirit president.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
So Kissinger's best relationship in the Middle East wound up being with Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt.
The two like were legitimately good buddies.
They would kiss each other on the cheek.
Like they liked each other.
I thought they found the one.
Meanwhile, Kissinger and Gold of Mair, which was the leader of Israel, had a really contentious relationship.
At the end of the day, Kissinger, again, would always side with Israel on existential issues, but he wound up giving them a lot more shit than you might expect.
Now, the fact that the U.S. eventually sends in arms turns the war around for Israel, which allows their forces to deal decisive blows to Egyptian and Syrian militaries.
But once Israel was out of kind of the period of most risk for them as a state, Kissinger starts to push back on them even harder.
He's particularly enraged at the fact that they kept attacking while he was trying to negotiate a ceasefire.
And again, his main concern here, this is not because he just like wants to stop the bloodletting.
It's really important to him to negotiate a peace and it be seen as Henry Kissinger brought peace to the Middle East.
So he's pissed that they're fucking over his negotiations.
And he cares more about his reputation than he does about Israeli military success.
They're forgetting about the people of Kissinger.
Yes, exactly.
The real chosen people.
So when Israeli forces surround the Egyptian Third Army and encircle it, violating a ceasefire, Kissinger is livid.
And he's particularly angry.
We're not getting as much into this aspect of his beliefs, but his whole thing in this period, the reason he organized, like as we talk about in our China episode, and this like three-way diplomacy thing that he deals with with China and the Soviet Union, he wants what's called a balance of power.
That's his whole thing.
He's a big cold warrior, obviously.
He overthrows a lot of communist governments, but he's not one of these people who thinks we can eliminate communism.
Instead, he really wants this balance of power.
And he wants a balance of power in the Middle East between Israel and her neighbors, too.
And he's livid about, in part, that they violated the ceasefire, but he's also worried that like, well, if the Israelis wipe out the Egyptian Third Army, that's going to mean Egypt is humiliated.
And if they're humiliated, Sadat can't actually make peace and there's going to be another war.
And I want to try and stop the next war.
But he's effing so hard right now.
Yeah, we're so good friends.
But he is like broadly on the right side of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Over the course of several chaotic days, he makes numerous trips between each of the belligerent nations in this war, negotiating with their heads of state.
And one of his primary tactics is to mock whoever he'd just been talking to when he's in front of the next person.
So like, yeah, how did he miss that guy?
NMC.
Yeah.
So when he's dealing with Hafez Assad or Anwar Sadat, this means talking shit about the Israelis and often Jewish people in general to get on their good side.
So when Israel violates that ceasefire, he is heard to complain at a meeting, quote, if it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic.
Oh my God.
Wow.
On another occasion, he says, quote, and I need to remind you, this is a Holocaust survivor saying this.
Any people who have been persecuted for 2,000 years must be doing something wrong.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
He fucking said that.
Wow.
Holy shit, man.
We are just such fucking assholes.
Gosh, I'm on fire.
I'm just ripping right now.
This is some good.
Someone write this down.
No, don't worry.
I'm wiretapping myself.
He kills at the clubs in Damascus.
Oh, my gosh.
And yet, he is actually really popular with a, not all, because there are other, we have quotes from other, like, people who are, like, particularly other Egyptian military leaders under Sadat who are like, well, Sadat's fallen for it.
He's obviously just saying whatever he thinks will make us like him.
Like, he doesn't, clearly, he can't believe this shit.
He's just trying to, like, there are people who see through it, but he's able to trick the folks who matter, which in this case are Sadat and Hafez.
Right.
So all that aside, this period is, again, broadly speaking, the one where Kissinger does the most actual good.
But it's worth noting that even when he's on the right side of things, I think negotiating an end to a war is generally the right thing to do when there's a war.
But even when he's on the right side of things, his ego plays a massive and often toxic role in how everything shakes out.
See, while all this is going on, Nixon is barreling towards impeachment.
And a big part of why he's constantly over there, like while all of the big milestones in the Watergate case hit, like when Nixon is like ordering the cover-up and shit and doing the things that will get him impeached, Kissinger's always away.
Like he's like very studiously, as soon as the story breaks, like, I need to be overseas as much as fucking possible.
So is it possible he's competently trying to negotiate Middle East peace because he's trying to save his own ass and doesn't want to be?
Yeah, that is literally what's going on.
Because he's not a dumb man.
He sees that Nixon is fucked.
So he's, he's like, well, I can't just be doing nothing.
Yeah.
Why don't I actually try to make this work?
I guess I'm in a lot of trouble domestically.
Yeah, I mean, that's it.
Like, he wants to, because part of it is he doesn't want to be near Nixon because Nixon's toxic.
And part of it is like, well, if the last thing everyone remembers about Henry while Nixon is going down is that he ended war in the Middle East, I'm going to keep being Secretary of State.
You know, there's a friend of mine who had this theory when he was like, he said when he, or it might even be a bit, I don't remember, but like when he's in like a rideshare, he won't talk.
And then the last two minutes, he'll just take great interest.
So he leaves on a real high note.
And so it's like, he's kind of like distant and not really doing much.
And then the last two minutes will be like, oh, that sounds great.
Well, good luck with your family.
And then, so that's kind of like he's just trying to leave.
Like, yeah, leave on a high note.
So the last thing he's going to try to do is actually decent after a bunch of bullshit.
Yeah.
When I, when I enter a party, I set off an IED at the start of it.
So everyone's really like shaken up.
But then at the end, I hand out a six pack of beer.
And right?
That means everybody's like, that was the guy who dropped the IED.
Oh, come on.
He's the six-pack guy, in my opinion.
That's who that guy is.
That is how Henry Kissinger handles everything.
So, yeah, now, again, but here's the thing.
The fact that, like, this is all existential for Henry, right?
Ending the war between Israel and her neighbors is like he knows he has to do this or he's not going to keep his gig.
So not only is he trying to negotiate peace, but he can't let anyone else play a role in bringing peace to the Middle East, right?
Because this is how this is his job interview.
And you know how Henry Kissinger treats jobs.
You've seen what he'll do for a job interview, right?
He won't do to get a job.
Yeah, I'd like to see that list.
So this becomes a problem when, while this is all going on, this Egyptian and Israeli general, you've got this massive encircled Egyptian army.
The Egyptian general in charge of that and the Israeli general meet each other in the field between their armies and like sit down and start negotiating a ceasefire and figuring out how to poll.
Like they start talking like people.
It's one of these weird moments in military history where these guys are like, I think we can work something out.
Like we don't need to be doing this anymore.
You guys be quiet.
Shut the eyes.
Shoot the bit.
Kill them quick.
So Henry is enraged when he hears this happening.
And he starts again.
All these people who like in any other situation, neither like an Israeli general or an Egyptian general in the 1970s, not guys you would expect to be the voices of reason, but because Kissinger's in the story.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
So he starts maneuvering to make these guys shut the fuck up.
He sends a letter to the Israeli ambassador asking, what is Yariv?
Yarav's the Israeli general selling here.
Tell him to stop.
Suppose Yariv comes out a great hero on disengagement.
What do you discuss on December 18th, which is the next round of negotiations?
Oh my God.
He's such.
Yeah, I mean, it's just what a heinous asshole.
I mean, I feel like he could still tilt the credit towards him, but he's like, I want my fingerprints solely on this.
I don't want to get too into what might have happened because I'm not an expert on either Egyptian or Israeli military history.
But you have to think maybe it would have been good if like an Israeli general and an Egyptian general had brought peace to the conflict.
And maybe that had been part of the military legacy in the area.
Might have been nice.
I don't know.
You realize we're staring down the barrel of a tragedy right now.
I might not be recognized as the one who did this.
So, Kissinger, a biography, continues the story.
Quote: At Kissinger's behest, both Sadat and Mair reigned in their generals at the Kilometer 101 talks.
That's like where this army is encircled.
The Israeli ambassador, although a Kissinger partisan, felt that it was largely a matter of ego.
Kissinger's view was that if any concessions were to be made, they should be made by him, Denitz recalled.
He was very upset when he found out that things were actually being settled by the generals at Kilometer 101.
We had to make them stop.
Ego was a weakness of his, but it was also the source of his greatness, which I might quibble with.
Ego was a weakness, is understating.
Yes.
I would like to call it an airstrike.
Can we kill both generals?
And if we're going to need to find new generals, these guys are getting along way too well, and I didn't, I wasn't there.
Listen, Dick, I know the Watergate stuff has you, but can we invade both countries?
For sure.
Will you come play, Kaya?
Come play, Kayp.
So, to his sort of credit, though, the peace that Henry helped negotiate to end the Yom Kippur War would prove to be durable, and it set up diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel for the next time.
Détente and Angola's Reality00:16:24
There's this very powerful moment when, like, Gold of Myir, because, like, Sadat still can't talk directly to Israel.
There's a whole like diplomatic thing going on, right?
But he tells Kissinger to tell her, like, I'm taking off my military uniform and I'm never going to wear it again.
Basically, like, things do, like, this is a really like good move in a lot of ways.
Obviously, that you could say this also like paves the way for nobody ever coming to help the Palestinians again, which is worth noting, but it does bring an end to this series of like constant wars.
Um, so yeah, what an amazing risk to take, though, to be like, you guys stop, we'll do my version.
We're gonna do it my way.
Yeah, the Frank Sinatra of Middle East peace negotiations.
That is kind of the reputation he gets because obviously this plays incredibly well for Americans.
And so, Nick or Kissinger is seen as still this like massive hero, even while this is a big part of why he's so popular, even as the rest of the Ed Men goes down in flames.
Now, this inaugurates a period of what comes to be known as shuttle diplomacy.
That's a term you'll hear associated with Kissinger all the time.
And it's him flying all these different countries in the Middle East and in Africa, him flying from like capital to capital for weeks on end doing these negotiations where he's always the man in the center of things.
Um, Henry actually kind of grew addicted to throwing himself in the middle of international crises and flying nonstop between capitals to do these negotiations.
It was this and the popularity he earned from being seen as a peacemaker that guaranteed him to keep his job in Ford's cabinet.
One of the few upsides to Kissinger's career prior to the 70s is that he hadn't really fucked with Africa to any appreciable degree.
Now, this is not because Henry Kissinger would have an issue with fucking with Africa, but it is because the U.S., like, we didn't have a huge footprint in the continent until the 60s.
You know, it's just swamped right now.
There's so much going on.
So many countries to ruin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is like him learning Spanish.
He just never found the time.
Yeah, look, I took it.
Maybe when I'm a little older and I get the chance, I can ruin Africa, but my God.
So, yeah, the U.S. footprint in Africa started up when the CIA, in like the early 60s, I think, when the CIA murdered or allowed other people to murder, it's a little unclear.
Patrice Lumumba, the left-wing democratically elected leader of the Congo.
The U.S. backed a right-wing general.
Well, even calling him like right and left are less useful terms in this, but we back a general called Joseph Mobutu, who proceeded to spend the next couple decades robbing the country blind.
It seems like a pattern.
Yeah, it happened.
It's weird that it keeps happening all the time.
While there was other U.S. fuckery in Africa throughout the 60s and early 70s, it stayed at a fairly low ebb until April of 1975 when Saigon fell to North Vietnam, now known as just Vietnam.
1975 was known by some in the media as the year of intelligence, not because any particularly good decisions were being made, but because Congress was investigating the presidency over Watergate, and there was this big flood of public questions about clandestine foreign actions carried out under the ages of Cold War politics.
A lot of the stuff we were talking about in episodes like two, three, and four had started to leak by this point.
And so people are like, there's this big national discussion about like, well, what the, what, should we be doing all the, should we have like a CIA?
Like, should we maybe.
And there are like the CIA gets like, there's a reforming of the CIA that occurs in this world.
And it helps the degree to which it mattered.
And it helped.
Yeah.
It may have made them less good at doing the bad things that they did, but not for lack of trust.
Hard to imagine.
It's the reform in the CIA is the difference between overthrowing Salvador Allende and those like U.S. guys pissing themselves in Venezuela after getting like arrested by fishermen.
Wow.
For Henry Kissinger, though, the year of intelligence was a year where he spent trying to reorient the United States towards a new anti-communist conflict.
His target this time was the nation of Angola.
Now, Angola is a mid-sized African nation located on the southwest coast of the continent, directly under the Congo and directly above Namibia.
It's close enough to South Africa to get fucked with, but not so close that they can just send troops right over the border, you know, which is a better place to be than directly bordering South Africa in this period.
In 1961, the people there decided to have themselves a good old-fashioned war of independence, which lasted 13 years, killed tens of thousands of people, and only ended when a coup overthrew the dictator of Portugal.
Now, this coup was, by the way, very weird.
Most sources will describe it as a left-wing coup against the dictator.
The reality is a lot more muddled.
The guy who winds up in charge of Portugal on paper is a monocle-wearing general who's like, I love him already.
Yeah, I mean, I'm in.
And he's not really leftist, but the powers behind him are some very left-wing army officers.
They form a new democratic government, which includes several elected communist leaders.
So Portugal has like elected communist deputies now.
Henry Kissinger flips the fuck out at this.
He is certain the country will fall to Soviet influence.
Interestingly, like this détente he's worked out with the Soviets, a big part of it is this idea that like, well, the Soviets have their sphere of influence in the East, and we have like the West has its sphere of influence in Western Europe.
And the Soviets kind of hold to that here because they don't get involved in Portugal.
They don't like try to make push things further in their direction.
Henry is like convinced they're going to and is absolutely wrong.
He got paranoia from Nixon.
He was like, Yeah.
Yeah.
Portugal eventually elects other people.
Like again, the government stays fairly left-wing by his standards, but like it does not, as you might notice, it does not join the Iron Curtain, you know?
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Kissinger is just like, we have some quotes from him.
He's absolutely certain that they're about to go full Stalinist.
Because again, he's wrong about most things, actually.
He does not have a good understanding of what's going to happen anywhere.
No, it's just almost at this point he's hung around so long that you're kind of just like, I guess he must know.
I mean, he want a Nobel Peace Pride.
Like you're like, he must know something.
I think it's worth looking at what happens, like Henry's expectations for what's going to happen in Portugal versus what happens.
And then think back to Chile, where like Henry's like, oh, Allunde is going to lead to, they're going to go full communist and it's going to be, you know, no, maybe if Allende had stayed in power, there just wouldn't have been a dictator and things would have been fine and they would have had a lot less problems than they.
Let's see the communist version.
How many people die in the communist version?
Yeah.
Probably less.
The puppets that we put in power are not like these amazing like peacekeepers.
It's just like we're like the Midas of genocides.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So the biggest international result of the coup is that the new Portuguese government had no stomach for colonies, right?
They negotiate a treaty with the three largest militant groups in Angola in 75.
These were the FNLA, the MPLA, and UNITA.
The non-acronym names of all these groups are in French.
I'm not even going to try this.
Dave, Dave, you can do it.
Dave has a lot of people.
Absolutely not.
What you need to know is that the MPLA were Marxists, right?
Kind of Marxists.
They were formed, at least the organization had been formed by members of Angola's intelligentsia who were Marxist and Marxism had like a big influence on the MPLA.
Unfortunately, like, yeah, meanwhile, like kind of, so that's one faction.
The FNLA and UNIDA are generally described as being right-wing groups, but this is one of those things where like grafting Western political terms onto the civil war in Angola does not work great.
All of these groups, even the ostensibly Marxist MPLA, are very tribal in origin.
And by that, I mean like they are based on specific tribal grievances and tribal like arguments that are going on in the region, as opposed to like being clearly like, well, we're pro-communist or we're anti-communist.
Like that's really less of what's going on.
We're getting shirts made.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For an example of how useless a strict ideological it lens is here, UNIDA was initially very left-wing in its messaging, attacking the United States as quote, the notorious agents of imperialism.
UNIDA's fighters were literally trained by North Korean soldiers.
But by the end of the civil war in Angola, they had been receiving arms from the Reagan administration for years, brokered via their paid representative, Paul Manafort.
Oh my God.
What the hell?
That's the kind of war this is where like UNIDA starts off being like, we're going to end American imperialism.
And by the end, they're like, Paul Manafort, get us weapons.
If you're good at our party, get next to this Manafort character.
He has a good time.
Yeah, just like to show you how weird this is, technically in the Angolan Civil War, Paul Manafort and North Korea are on the same side.
I feel like Paul Manafort's 250 years old.
Yeah.
I mean, and by the end, it is fair to say that by the end of the civil war, UNIDA's leader, Jonas Savimbi, is calling himself an anti-communist.
That's his messaging.
But he's less about anti-communism.
Then again, there's specific local grievances he has with the MPLA.
And that's more why they're fighting than that he believes strongly in anti-communism.
He just knows that's how you get weapons.
Right, okay.
Right.
He's just speaking the language, right?
Yeah.
And when North Korea is training his guys, he's not into Juche.
He's like, he wants the dudes to train his guys.
Yeah, right.
Now, the FNLA is led by a guy named, and that's the other usually called a right-wing faction, is led by a guy named Holden Roberto, who used to work with Savimbi before Savimbi formed UNITA.
I know this is a very complicated conflict.
I'm sorry.
They're generally described as like right-wing, and they did receive aid from the CIA.
So that would like, okay, yeah, definitely right-wing getting aid from the CIA.
They also got military aid from China, Romania, India, Algeria, Zaire, the AFL-CIO, and the Ford Foundation, or at least aid of some sort.
So again, like the sides here are just fucking baffling.
They're like the tender swindler.
They're just working every side.
Yeah, China, the CIA, and the AFL-CIO shaking hands over backing the FNLA.
It's like Big Brother.
Wait, you guys here too?
I didn't ever hear this.
Well, the Ford Foundation.
Well, well, well.
The MPLA, which these again are the kind of Marxist guys.
And if you're of the three factions, they are the ones who most do believe in like a political thing that we would recognize in terms of like left-right sides.
They are partly armed by the Soviet Union, which should not be surprising, but most of their military aid comes from Cuba.
And we're not really going to get into it, but it's worth noting how substantial Cuban aid is to the MPLA.
Cuba starts sending soldiers to Angola in November of 75, and by 1988, they had more than 55,000 soldiers in the country.
Wow.
And like, that's a trek.
I don't know if you guys know this, but Cuba and the west coast of Africa, not super close.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a bit of a jaunt.
Yeah.
And that's also a long involvement.
You know, they're in there more than a decade.
There's a lot of commitment here.
So as is generally the case.
It's actually Cuba now, to be fair.
As is generally the case, all of the communists were not in agreement about Angola.
The People's Republic of China did not particularly care about a left-wing struggle in Angola.
They wanted to keep Soviet power at bay on a continent where they were starting to do some business themselves.
So China and the U.S. worked together to support the FNLA and UNITA.
This is exactly the sort of thing Kissinger had been going for when he pushed to connect the U.S. diplomatically to China.
I want to quote now from a write-up by Maria Gouda of Wilford Laurier University.
Quote: This was part of Kissinger's grand strategy of triangular diplomacy.
Triangular diplomacy was essentially the U.S. exploiting the relationship between communist China and the Soviet Union to create a three-way detente between the countries, with the U.S. at the helm.
Kissinger was not pushing for covert operations through the CIA in order to elevate American standing in China because Nixon and Kissinger were orchestrating something larger.
This was to use China as a counterweight against the Soviets.
Kissinger's emphasis on triangular diplomacy caused him to view regional conflict in terms of involvement on the Chinese and the Soviets, not in terms of a local struggle.
So he very much sees this as a battleground between different ideologies.
But anyone who knows anything about the Angola Civil War knows that, like, no, that's not really what's going on.
Like, everyone is like, everyone is in here.
And it is certainly not like about what kind of political shit individual parties believe.
Yeah, the side, you can't graph these easily onto like a Western axis.
But as Isaacson writes, Angola became, quote, a vivid example of Kissinger's tendency to see complex local struggles in an East-West context.
In all respect to Kissinger, wrote Jonathan Quitney in his study of the Angolan War.
One really has to question the sanity of someone who looks at an ancient tribal dispute over control of distant coffee fields and sees it as a Soviet threat to the security of the United States.
I mean, what a guy.
Yeah.
It's like, I mean, it's also, I mean, it's, it's so, again, I mean, the ego on this fucking dude to be able to just go into things, massive conflicts, have no clue, and make it that binary and think that he's doing anything.
I mean, he's just so emboldened.
Yeah, he's emboldened.
And he just like, he's so arrogant that he's like, well, would you guys do me a favor?
Could some of you wear red shirts and some of you wear blue?
So we could kind of just go.
Let's do shirt skins, huh?
Yeah, I don't need to like, I, Henry Kissinger, don't need to like understand the actual dimensions of why these sides are fighting.
Yeah.
I can just assume that it graphs onto every other conflict I've ever cared about.
Knowledge is weakness.
Yeah.
And this is like, he's not the only American to be arrogant in this specific way about a conflict in Africa.
He's the last.
He's the last one.
He would be the last.
Thank God.
Since then.
So CIA funding for UNITA and the FNLA was initially quite low, but Kissinger pushed for an escalation.
And soon the agency had poured $22 million in covert support for both of these groups.
Kissinger felt they were thinking small, though.
He believed that after suffering a public defeat in Vietnam, U.S. foreign policy needed a comeback.
And Angola was...
Yeah, baby.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What a better place than Angola.
Everybody cares.
Everyone's plugged in.
You're going to love my new stuff.
The problem with Vietnam is that it was too distant from American concerns.
Angola.
That's it.
That's the problem.
Now, he, yeah, so he believes that like Angola is going to be our fucking comeback tour.
It's the equivalent of, I don't know, one of the times Elton John did a farewell tour.
I guess something like that.
He's on his knife.
Yeah.
There's a lot of similarities between Henry Kissinger and Elton John's musical career.
Yeah.
Bombing at the Jets.
Yeah, actually, Tiny Dancer, that song is about Henry Kissinger.
He is the Tiny Dancer.
He is a little guy.
So, yeah, Kissinger wants to prove that the United States is still a global power.
And he also wants to prove that Henry Kissinger is still a Secretary of State with some teeth.
He's just ceded a bunch to the fucking in these negotiations with Vietnam.
We need to bring peace of mind to Henry Kissinger.
Yeah.
He is like, everyone is going to see Vietnam as an L for me.
So I need a win, baby.
So, yeah, you could kind of see his attitude in Angola as like the powerful sociopath version of buying a sports car to impress like 20-year-olds.
Like when you're, you know, an old man.
Yeah, right.
He's in his midlife war crisis.
Vietnam as a Personal Loss00:14:36
And the people around Kissinger are a lot less bullish about escalating involvement in Angola.
And in fact, this includes like the fucking CIA.
But they had really big shoes to fill, to be fair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're just like, we don't want any part of this right now.
Wow, you guys are really negative.
You guys, it's Angola.
It's Angola.
It's a win.
Gotta be a fucking hole in one, baby.
In June of 75, Kissinger holds a meeting with President Ford, the Defense Secretary, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the head of the CIA.
They discuss the invasion of Angola, and while most of that meeting is still classified, we know Kissinger urged what he called a diplomatic offensive.
Quote, if we appealed to the Soviets to not be active, it will be a sign of weakness.
He played on stereotypes of Africa as mysterious and wild, claiming it is an area where no one can be sure of its judgments.
Next, Gouda writes, quote, revealing his talent for manipulation, Kissinger used daunting and dramatic language to illustrate the situation in Angola as he saw it.
By giving the impression that there was no way to tell how the Angolan civil war would play out, Kissinger pushed forward the idea that the U.S. had better get involved in Angola through tangible or covert means before it was too late.
The U.S., through the CIA, needed to support the FNLA and UNITA to prevent the dominance of the Soviet-backed MPLA.
This view wholly disregards the idea that the Angolan Civil War was indeed that, a civil war.
Kissinger was positioning Angola in a wider East versus West context.
Oh my goodness, you got Biggie, you got Tupac.
I mean, only the United States can want to be in, like, only the United States can be sold on getting involved in a conflict, or he's like, we have no clue what's going on, so we got to get our hats.
We're going to really throw our dicks in this one.
Come on, guys.
Let's get moving.
It could be crazy.
This is one where, like, the U.S. actually doesn't really want to get involved.
Like, this Kissinger is the one pulling everyone else in here.
He's a marketing wizard.
Yeah.
And based on his urgings, the CIA comes up with a plan called IA Feature.
It was a covert paramilitary operation in which U.S. military advisors and special forces would be sent to Angola in a manner basically identical to how U.S. involvement in Vietnam started.
Kissinger's literally like, let's do that again, baby.
Let's see.
It goes pretty good when we do it.
This is how I get to bomb Namibia.
That's on my vision board.
He has dreams of flattening the Congo.
Oh, I woke up.
I thought that I had done it.
Now, despite the fact that the CIA did come up with this plan at his behest, there's intense resistance within the agency, a lot of whom think Kissinger has lost his fucking mind.
And thus, CIA Director William Colby joins our pantheon of bad guys who seem reasonable because Henry Kissinger is involved.
Right.
Kobe is like pretty rattled by how Vietnam ended, and also by the fact that there's all these congressional inquiries into like the CIA doing a bunch of other terrible shit, right?
They're actively being investigated right now.
So this isn't Kolby being a good guy.
This is Kobe being like, oh, I don't want to drive when I've got, you know, shit in the car, basically, right?
Like, I'm holding right now.
You know what?
Honestly, any other time, I'm just fucking Angola like crazy.
Like, I'm just fucking going nuts, but it's just not the right time.
We got to right now.
Yeah.
He's the guy who's like, he's like, Kissinger's like on a casino floor and he's been cheating and like the security's gathered and they're whispering and pointing at him.
He notices and he's still playing.
He keeps going.
He's going to let it ride on black one more time.
How many times do I have to say hit me?
So the 40 committee, which again, Kissinger heads, approves IA feature.
But William Colby is like, okay, but I'm going to insist we actually go to Congress to have the funds appropriated for the conquered options.
Oh, that branch?
Those guys?
What?
Are they still here?
Oh, my God.
They're old-fashioned, Colby.
So while Kissinger argues for his covert operators, South Africa sends troops in to support the FNLA and UNITA, who had, again, originally been trained by North Korea.
So there's FNLA troops who receive training from both South Africa and North Korea.
This is just a very weird war.
So China has the reaction we're all having and is like, you know what?
This is too messy for me.
I don't even need this right now.
Like, I got other shit going on.
And they kind of bounce from the situation.
Okay.
The Soviets and the Cubans, though, extend more aid to the MPLA, who win the war handily and install themselves in the capital, Luanda, by the end of 1975.
So a few weeks after this, the CIA holds an interagency working group meeting with Kissinger to discuss how to ask Congress to send in U.S. advisors.
And like at this point, the war is lost.
And Kissinger's like, no, we got to get some guys in there.
Come on, guys.
No one else wants this, right?
Everyone else is like, this seems like way more of a hassle than that.
He's going up to the party at like 2:45 a.m.
Come on, let's keep going.
Let's do shots.
What do you mean, the kegstab?
Yeah, the CIA is already puking from how much they've had to drink in Vietnam and Chile and shit.
Kissinger tequilas.
Come on, I brought absinthe.
Let's go.
Boomers.
So Kissinger, or so, yeah, they have this meeting.
And like, so Kissinger has a meeting with one of this, like a guy with a bunch of people, and then like they hold a separate meeting afterwards with the CIA about what Kissinger had said.
So like the side meeting's on Kissinger now.
Yeah.
So basically they present Kissinger with a report on like what would have to be done to send U.S. advisors into Angola.
And Kissinger reads the report and rather than giving a yes or a no, he grunts and walks out of his office.
So after this, all of these CIA guys have to sit down and decide like what does Henry Kissinger grunting mean?
We've both been a bit of a surprise.
This guy is really good at deciphering what Henry grunts mean.
Well, gentlemen, it was a pretty long grunt, which is never good.
It's a sigh grunt, which for Henry means he's a little agitated.
I'm going to quote writing about this meeting, Kissinger a Biography by Walter Isaacson.
Everyone found this rather disconcerting, especially since Kissinger was heading off for Beijing.
Well, someone asked, was it a positive grunt or a negative grunt?
Mokahi paused.
It was just a grunt, he explained.
Like, oomph.
I mean, it didn't go up or down.
Stockwell, the agent in charge, marveled as a group of somber officials supervising the nation's only extant war sat around a table trying to decipher a Kissinger grunt.
Mokahi provided his imitation of the grunt once again, emphasizing its flatness.
Someone else at the other end of the table tried it.
There were a few experiments contrasting positive grunts with the voice rising, then a negative one with the voice falling.
Different people attempted it.
Well, asked the CIA officer who was chairing the meeting.
Do we proceed with the advisors?
Mulcahy scowled and puffed on his pipe.
We'd better not, he finally said, trying to decipher his boss's mind.
Kissinger just decided not to send Americans into the Sinai.
There were a lot of nods.
The request for advisors was shelved.
It was an amazing way to run a war, Mokahi said years later as he recalled the incident.
Oh, yeah.
By the way, this is, they accidentally wrote a home improvement script at the end of this.
This is actually where the pilot to that show came from.
Jim the Tool Man Taylor.
It was like, no, no, it's like, yeah.
Okay, I like that.
That sounds a little more positive.
Yeah.
It's just like, what a moment for the United States.
All these fucking spooks with blood on their hands being like, well, was it like, or like, you know?
I mean, because you do, at least at some point in your existence, for the most part, you do believe that when someone is saying the central intelligence agency, that it is really like working on intelligence and is intelligent and is a body that is actually, you know, processing information that potentially you don't have access to.
And instead, they're just sitting around a fucking table going like, do the grunt again, Jim.
Yeah.
Do the grunt again.
It reveals.
And this is, I think, where a lot of folks on the left kind of mix up, viewing the CIA as like hyper-competent.
And it's where a lot of people everywhere fuck up viewing Kissinger as hyper-competent.
Like, no, they have a lot of power and they use it badly.
But like at the end of the day, Kissinger doesn't have the balls to like say yes or no on something.
And so he grunts.
And then all of these fucking, again, bloody-handed monsters spend an entire meeting like repeating the grunt and trying to figure out if it means yes or no.
And there's no, like, it's so unchecked.
I mean, like, you, there, and it's, it still is that.
But it's just, there's nobody there to be like, hey, this is fucking nuts.
Yeah.
Instead, they're like, do the grunt again.
Try the grunt again.
Yes or no?
Dan have the best grunt.
Dan, do it again because I want to play it slow for everyone.
That's a maybe to me, bro.
Well, I think it sounds ambivalent.
Having known Henry for a little while, he's pissed.
So the CIA's request for another $28 million in funding and the discussion of sending in advisors was again leaked to Seymour Hirsch.
Congress cut off all aid.
Obviously, he puts out an article about it.
Congress cuts off aid to Angola as a result of this.
Kissinger does not get his way, but the CIA money he'd already funneled into UNITA helped the group stay alive.
The Angolan Civil War did not officially end until 2002.
Although, again, this is one of those things, this is a really nasty civil war.
It lasts a ridiculous amount of time.
Kissinger gets a lot of the blame, but we should also note that Paul Manafort is much more on this.
Like, he is the guy.
Manafort's the guy who brings Savimbi to DC and gets Reagan to send a fuckload of weapons over to like really escalate things.
Thank God for Reagan.
Yeah.
Thank God for Reagan.
But it is amazing that this fucking goes on until 2002.
Crazy.
Yeah.
What a legacy.
What a legacy.
So I have teased y'all that Kissinger has a Rhodesia connection.
And yet again, the funniest thing about this is that it's one of the least fucked up things he's ever involved in.
But the story is kind of funny, so I'm going to tell it anyway.
So in Rhodesia, you've got this country where about 8% of the population at the height of like white population in Rhodesia.
About 8% of them are white, but they hold effectively 100% of the political power.
This obviously is not something a lot of the black people living there like.
Sure.
For reasons I don't think I need to explain.
So some of them decide to fight back, and there's a number of rebel groups, and soon an ugly insurgent war between the Rhodesian government, which, by the way, is an international pariah, right?
They're like actually not supposed to exist basically.
So no one can legally sell them arms.
So everything has to get like smuggled through South Africa.
And the Soldier of Fortune magazine winds up sending a bunch of fighters over.
William F. Buckley Jr. or William F. Buckley raises money for them.
Yada, yada, yada.
Very nasty war.
We've talked about it in other episodes.
The GoFundMe war.
Yeah, it is a GoFundMe war.
So by the time Kissinger is in office, the white minority government of Rhodesia has spent years locked into the losing side of a grinding insurgent campaign.
The international community widely condemns Rhodesia as an apartheid state, and there's a bunch of arms embargoes.
And in fact, pretty much everyone hates Rhodesia except for South Africa and the U.S. right wing, who see the Rhodis as anti-communist crusaders.
Sure.
Kissinger was locked into an awkward position here.
He wanted to negotiate an end to the fighting and an end to the white supremacist government of Rhodesia, but he also doesn't want to piss off his right-wing base too much.
You know, this is like a really messy situation for Henry.
Yeah, of course.
So policy towards Rhodesia in the Nixon years.
There's a plan Nixon approved through South Africa in 1969 that is like U.S. policy in Rhodesia for nearly a decade.
And it is literally called, I am sorry for saying this, but Nixon calls U.S. plans, like the U.S. stance towards Rhodesia, quote, the tar baby option.
Oh, my God.
Oh, God.
She gets later.
Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Oh, my God.
At least there's no stream of white supremacy through American.
This was the one time.
It's like, I can't believe the guy fucking recorded himself for this is not just recorded himself.
This isn't just like Nixon saying a slur in a conversation with his buds.
No, it's not.
This is official U.S. government policy.
We write this out places.
Someone wrote it to Adam.
He's like, okay, I'll hand it in if you're sure, Mr. President.
Well, it seems pretty good to me.
And this is not just towards Rhodesia.
This is towards all of South Africa too, these white minority governments in Africa.
And the premise is that, quote, the whites are here to stay, and the only way that constructive change can come is through them.
So It's so and it really hasn't changed that much.
We just have fancier titles.
Yeah, we don't put the slurs right in the title of it.
Yeah, no, we don't record the president and we don't put the slurs in the title.
So the policy is sold to American liberals and moderates by basically saying the only way to liberate black Africans is to improve their economic outcomes through trade.
And that means dealing with the white governments, right?
Because we're just really bleak.
We've just changed it to tech.
We've just changed it to tech, essentially.
Yeah.
We would maintain, the document declared, public opposition to racial repression, but relax political isolation and economic restrictions on the white states.
I mean, it's fucking crazy.
Like, you know, the problem here is that people don't like the 8% white people that run the entire fucking place.
It's one of those, we continue and will always have debates over like sanctions and like when they're good and bad ideas.
But the argument here is that like we can't sanction South Africa and Rhodesia because it'll hurt black people.
And the degree to which that's a lie is that like, well, you're saying we have to start selling them fucking weapons so that they can oppress black people in order to improve economic outcomes for black people.
And perhaps that's fucking insane.
Rhodesia and Strategic Fuel00:08:15
Yeah.
It's a little more nuanced than that, by not by a lot.
Not much.
Not much.
Yeah.
To his credit, when Nixon is out and Ford is in, Kissinger kills the racial slur option.
And he authorized a new plan, one that is a lot better and that is actually focused on spirited opposition to white minority rule in Rhodesia.
Kissinger gives a big speech in Lusaka that immediately enrages the right wing of the Republican Party.
Basically, he's like, our plan, like under Ford, we want to bring an end to the government in Rhodesia.
Like this government cannot be allowed to do that.
The right wing is like unbelievable.
Yes, Ronald Reagan.
They're over 7% of the populace.
You can't disenfranchise 7% of Rhodesia.
Have you seen the color of their goddamn skin?
That is essentially what Ronald Reagan says.
He denounces Kissinger's plan as undercutting the possibility of a, quote, just and orderly settlement and argues that it will provoke a massacre of white people.
Boy, I mean, you want to have a head-popping moment.
Try to find a good guy in a Reagan-Kissinger debate.
It is.
It is an amazing fight.
It's just like...
Well, I hate everyone involved in this.
We should pay more attention to the white people.
I think we need to be careful.
I feel like you're both conning me into something.
I feel like you guys are good cop, bad copping, and you're working for the same outcome.
Look, Henry, I'm not 100% sure why I think you're wrong in this, but you must be.
The other guy's got to be wrong too, though.
So I don't really know what to do here.
Don't trust Reagan and hate him.
But Kissinger, you're the worst person on the planet.
So I am what I'd call a bit of a pickle.
This is a doozy of an issue.
I'm going to need to go in the other room and do some grunting.
Yeah.
So he, yeah.
What's happening here is that Kissinger is trying to wrench U.S. government policy in Africa away from supporting explicitly racist regimes in Africa.
And Reagan.
Because he's like trying to like, he's trying to get into a country club or something.
There's got to be some angle of.
I mean, obviously, it's the same reason he does anything, right?
He wants to be seen as being the guy who negotiates into these big issues.
And he's trying to, I think he recognizes by this point that like, well, Republicans aren't going to stay in power forever, but I, Henry Kissinger, want to have a shot at being in power still.
And maybe if I get rid of this bad government in Rhodesia, people will be like, Henry Kay, let's give him a gig, you know?
Right.
He accidentally stumbles into the proper outcome because personally he wants to end it.
And so he sees the way to end it is actually the way that's good.
We're lining up Henry's personal interests with a prudent solution.
And that eclipse is very rare.
Yeah, he's like a guy who stops a home invader from murdering a family, but it's later found out that it's because he was hitting on a 15-year-old girl, like he was trying to flirt with their daughter and stuff.
It's like that sort of situation where it's like, well, good, I guess.
Like he stops a robbery because he was peeping through a window that he fell through.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It is hard to find the moral lesson to take out of this.
So, yeah.
Obviously, the Reagan right loses their minds over what Kissinger is doing here.
Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speaker, writes in a column, quote, it is too early to determine if Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's safari through black Africa did greater damage to U.S. policy interests or to President Ford's hopes in the remaining primaries.
I mean, again, I like, it needs to stop where like this, this never-ending, what does it do to your re-election chances shit?
It's like we are so conditioned to that being how we operate and do everything, as opposed to actually just trying to do the thing that does long-term good.
But why would you do the thing that does long-term good?
Yeah, you're right.
You're right.
I mean, it's true, but it's like, I don't know.
It's just, it's a foregone conclusion now that everything is viewed through the prism of what does it do to the poll numbers.
Can I just say take off your masks?
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
So Kissinger did not achieve a tremendous amount in Rhodesia while he was Secretary of State.
He got Ian Smith, who's the leader of Rhodesia, to agree to a two-year turnover from minority rule to an actual democracy.
But the way he did this was by assuring Smith that black moderates had agreed that during the turnover, whites would remain in control of the military and police.
This was a lie.
The black people in Rhodesia, like the black moderates in Rhodesia, had never agreed to this.
He's just lying to Smith to get him to agree to this.
Awesome.
It also feels like anytime there's like a two-year deal that you're like, that's just your way of letting it sort of settle so that you can keep it.
Pushing you the fuckery.
Exactly.
Yeah.
The story of the negotiations is classic, Kissinger.
He's telling everyone what they want to hear and then kind of weaseling his way into getting people to sign things that make him look good.
This write-up from the New York Times sums it up well.
Mr. Smith has said he agrees to the five-point plan he made in public because he had received assurances from Mr. Kissinger that the black leaders had accepted the whole package, including Mr. Smith's edition on the white ministers.
In his view, either the blacks have reneged or Mr. Kissinger misled him.
The blacks, such as President Julius Noure of Tanzania, insist that they did not give their approval to the details of the five-point plan, only to the general thrust of majority rule in two years, leaving it to Britain to work out details later with black and white Rhodesians.
They say they would have rejected the proposal for white ministers.
Mr. Kissinger and his aides have been evasive.
On October 24th, Mr. Kissinger said on television that, I think everybody is telling the truth.
Wow.
What an incredible guy.
Wow.
That is the best.
That is the best bullshit statement I have ever fucking heard.
It's out of standing.
I believe I'm not sure.
Everyone's lying.
It's awesome.
I think everyone is.
Who is the bad guy in Rhodesia?
Nobody.
Nobody.
I think everybody.
Everyone's really cool.
Why do you need a bad guy?
In the end, the talks collapsed.
The war continued on for two more years until the Rhodesian strategic fuel reserve was blown up by insurgents and the government was forced to the table.
Kissinger and his supporters would later claim that the eventual peace was negotiated on the terms laid out during Kissinger's negotiations.
That's kind of questionable.
It is fair to say that by coming in very strongly, and he was very unequivocal about condemning the government of Rhodesia, by doing this as the Secretary of State, Kissinger caused a shift that led to a significant increase in trust of the U.S. by black African nations.
No wonder Reagan was pissed off.
Yeah, obviously.
It's one of his better moves from an ethical standpoint, but it's an ego move still, right?
Everything is an ego move.
And obviously, it's a sign of how much more fucked up things become that doing this broadly good thing causes the beginning of the end of his career in politics.
Of course.
You can't help the black people.
That's it.
You're done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's it for you, Kissy.
But to be fair, it worked for me.
That's why I did it.
We know, Henry, but we know, buddy.
But you know what won't fail to bring peace to Rhodesia?
What's that?
The sponsors of this podcast who orchestrated the destruction of the Rhodesian Strategic Fuel Reserve.
That is, we are sponsored entirely by the Rhodesian rebel forces.
Here's an ad.
The Fate of the Kurds00:15:41
Ah, we're back.
Good stuff.
Yeah.
So, yeah, on the whole, Kissinger's last year or so as Secretary of State involved his least number of war crimes per month, which might point to personal growth, but probably points to the fact that he and Nixon had just exhausted the U.S. government's ability to do shady shit.
We needed a breather, right?
We had to take a breather.
It took us a few years to get geared up for Reagan, you know?
He's like, he's been...
Go ahead, Dave.
We've just killed so many.
There's like no.
Like, where do we dig up?
We dig them up and kill them again.
Like, it's hard.
We're out of ammunition.
He's like, he's no longer a starting QB.
He's being traded.
He's riding the pine.
Yeah, he's got like, yeah, he got a wrist injury.
Yeah, he's on IR for the year.
Yeah.
So the last one of his escapades we're going to cover then is Kissinger's relationship with the Kurds.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, baby.
Jesus.
Oh, fucking Christ.
The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group on earth without a nation of their own.
They make up large chunks of southern Turkey, southern Iran, northern Iraq, and northeast Syria.
Now, if you look at this kind of broad Kurdistan region on a map, you'll notice a couple things.
For one, it's all landlocked, which means if you were, and there was a lot of talk when like colonial powers left, started to leave the Middle East after World War II that like should and promises were in fact made to the Kurds.
One of the issues that comes up is that it's going to cause like severe economic difficulties because they would be landlocked.
You'll also note that their territories all tend to exist in chunks of states that have wound up fighting each other repeatedly over the last half century or so, right?
Turkey and Syria, Iran.
Exactly.
And the Kurds were used on purpose by basically everyone as buffer zones and proxy fighters in these conflicts.
Now, starting in the Nixon administration, the Shah of Iran had a problem.
He was engaged in an escalating conflict with a new sexy young dude on the block, Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Can I just say right away, I like both these guys?
They seem like they're both going to go good places.
So the Shah decides.
He wants to arm, he wants the U.S. to arm Kurdish fighters in order to give Saddam some trouble and ease up pressure.
The ostensible leader of the Kurdish people struggle in Iraq at this time is a guy named Mustafa Barzani.
Now, Mustafa had been leading his people in battle against the Iraqi state prior to Saddam taking power for like a decade at this point, and he had repeatedly begged the United States for aid.
The U.S. traditionally did not like Barzani because he had spent a decade exiled in the Soviet Union and had some socialist-e-tendencies.
But the Israelis and the Shah had experienced great luck in using the Kurds to keep Saddam, who'd taken power pretty recently, off of their back.
Kurdish rebels tied up 80% of the Iraqi military during the 1967 war against Israel and are probably a big part of the reason why Iraq did not join in that war.
In April of 1972, Saddam signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union.
This finally tipped things for the nation.
The treaty of friendship is just a great term.
I mean, it is a nice term.
Response!
Yeah, it's like, oh, I broke my BFF when I was seven in a treehouse.
Yeah.
Can you sign my bro contract?
Yeah.
It comes with AK-47.
We are signing the BFF treaty.
So this finally tips things for the Nixon administration, and Kissinger gives the go-ahead for CIA Director Richard Helms to express American sympathy with the Kurds and declare our, quote, readiness to consider their requests for assistance.
Next, from a write-up in foreign policy.
In early 1974, Saddam violated the terms of the March Accord and unilaterally imposed a watered-down version of autonomy for the Kurds.
Barzani responded by traveling to Iran, where he met with the Shah and the CIA's station chief to request U.S. backing for a plan to set up an Arab-Kurdish government that would claim to be the sole legitimate government of Iraq.
As Kissinger wrote in his 1999 memoir, Years of Renewal, Barzani's request triggered a flood of communications among U.S. officials focused on two questions: whether the United States would support a unilateral declaration of autonomy and what level of support the United States was willing to give the Kurds.
The CIA in particular warned against increasing U.S. assistance.
But Kissinger was dismissive of CIA Director William Colby's caution, writing, quote, Kolby's resistance was as unrealistic as Barzani's enthusiasm.
Nixon ultimately decided to increase U.S. assistance to the Kurds, including the provision of 900,000 pounds of Soviet-made weapons that the CIA had stockpiled and a $1 million lump sum of refugee assistance.
In April of 1974, Kissinger said, Can I. Why the Soviet weapons?
Is that to confuse things?
You don't want people seeing them with U.S. weapons.
That's going to make it seem like we're involved, Aiden.
What an amazing move.
I mean, it's dope.
I stole a car to commit a murder.
So, in April of 1974, Kissinger sent Nixon's orders to the U.S. Ambassador in Tehran.
This cable was important because it laid out a succinct proclamation of U.S. interests vis-a-vis the Kurds.
The objectives, he wrote, were to A, give the Kurds capacity to maintain a reasonable base for negotiating recognition of rights by Baghdad government, B, to keep present Iraqi government tied down, but C, not to divide Iraq permanently because an independent Kurdish area would not be economically viable.
And U.S. and Iran have no interest in closing the door on good relations with Iraq under moderate leadership.
Yeah, but there are.
I mean, I'm not crazy, but there are landlocked countries that are economically viable.
And Kurdistan has a huge amount of oil.
Yeah.
It's such a crazy thing that they're saying.
Like, it's just, it's fucking insane.
What they are doing, and what Kissinger is establishing in writing here, is U.S. policy towards Kurdish people for more than half a century.
And the idea comes down to: we will provide them with aid and weapons when they fight our enemies, but only to such an extent that they achieve minor tactical successes, never enough to allow them permanent autonomy, because that's going to upset the balance of power, right?
Right.
This has been ever since this is what we do with the Kurds, right?
And Kissinger is the guy who lays it out first.
Now, Mustafa Barzani made the terrible mistake of believing that the U.S. actually supported his people's independence.
For three years, the Kurds battled Saddam, sustaining thousands of casualties.
But then in 1975, the Shah and Saddam made peace, and the Shah asked the CIA to cut off all aid to the Kurds as part of a deal with Iraq.
The weapons Kurdish fighters had relied upon suddenly dried up.
Barzani's fighters were massacred.
Thousands fled to Iran, but were turned away by the Shah.
Desperate, Mustafa cabled Kissinger, whom he had gratefully sent three rugs and a golden pearl necklace as wedding gifts just months earlier.
Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.
Kissinger never replied.
Later that year, the House Intelligence Committee asked him to justify this betrayal.
He responded, covert actions should not be confused with missionary work.
Oh my God.
What's like, you don't understand that sometimes I'm also just doing missionary stuff.
Yeah.
The key is that I don't give a shit.
As he stands naked on his rug with just his pearl necklace on.
Speaking of missionary.
So in the 1976 presidential elections, Ronald Reagan attempted to primary Gerald Ford from the right.
The Reagan campaign targeted Kissinger heavily, not for his numerous war crimes, but because of the fact that he had made a detente with the Soviet Union, right?
That's why they're angry.
It's amazing to be like, you know what?
The right's actually got a point.
He committed war crimes in Vietnam.
I mean, you're talking about a guy who's killed millions of innocent people.
No, that's actually not.
That's sad.
We're actually fine with all that.
The peace stuff we're pissed at.
They're a little angry.
Some of this peace stuff he's been locking in.
They are specifically livid that part of the detente means Kissinger was like, we're not going to fuck with Soviet spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.
And Reagan and his colleagues are like, well, this means they're just giving up Eastern Europe to communism.
Of course.
Always communism.
Exactly.
Always.
Fascists hate communists.
I mean, God.
And Kissinger's political instincts and charm were sufficient to fend off an attempt because there's within the Ford administration, there is an attempt to get Ford to promise to fire him in a second term, largely because they think it'll help him win the primary against Reagan.
And Nixon beats everyone here.
He manages to get Ford to be like, no, I would never fire Henry Kissinger.
Nixon.
No, no, no, not Nixon.
Kissinger succeeds in doing that with Ford.
Okay, so I thought I was like, if you're listening to Nixon at this point, there's a lot of Nixon in here, you know?
You mix it up sometimes.
He's just in a cupboard in the White House still.
Gerald, get me some gin.
Also, keep Hank around.
So the fact that Henry wins the fight within the Ford administration means that he becomes like a major marketing term for the Reagan campaign, right?
Like they do not stop.
In fact, they instituted a plank in the Republican Party that year that's basically the anti-Kissinger plank that says like, you will never accept that like communist states should exist anywhere.
Essentially, that's kind of what they do.
Okay.
That's just stabbing him in the heart.
Yeah, it is.
It's amazing.
And it's a mark of like how much he fucked things up that you can't even feel good about his downfall because he's replaced by people who just suck even more.
Yes.
So Ronnie felt the spheres of influence that Kissinger had established with the Soviet Union were, yeah, giving up the Eastern bloc to communism.
He also attacked Kissinger for negotiating with Panama's new government because Henry was willing to give the Panama Canal back to the Panamanian people.
They have no right to the Panama Canal.
Oh, my God.
Why would they?
And Reagan wrote that thing, but they were so fucking mad.
No, they have no claim to that canal.
Yeah, Reagan said in a speech, we built it, we paid for it, and we're going to keep it.
Refer to our two-parter on the U.S. in Panama for more on that one.
So Reagan's primary attempt failed, but by struggling against the rising far right, Kissinger had hammered the final nail into his political career's coffin.
In the Ford administration's last days, a dark alliance materialized, and smelling blood in the water, they acted to cut Kissinger off from any future career in Republican politics.
The three main members of this alliance were Paul Wolfowitz from the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Russell.
Oh, baby!
Yeah!
It's like there's four Kissingers.
It's like killing Satan, and then three winged demons fly out of him.
Yeah.
It's so funny.
It is so funny.
Fine, some good fun.
And in fact, so Kissinger has Kissinger, like Rumsfeld he sees as almost like a protege.
Like he and Rumsfeld are very close.
And when Rumsfeld turns against him, Kissinger describes him as, quote, the rottenest person I've known in government.
Henry, from you, utterly meaningless.
Honestly.
Like absolutely meaningless from you.
I mean, you're not allowed to.
Yeah.
It's so funny.
It's so funny.
So it's not funny for all the people who are going to die, but it's kind of, it's funny in like an existential sense.
Like if you're an alien looking at all this like a TV show, it's pretty funny.
Yeah, you'd be like, well, why don't they get a good guy?
You're like, well, it's really hard to explain, but they just don't.
If you can't laugh at all the people dying, are you an American?
Yeah, no.
The answer is no.
By the way, the first time that Nixon heard that Kissinger was working with a guy named Rumsfeld, he was like, well, pour him in a glass for me.
Get some ice on it.
Talk fucking elections.
Put some cellar in it.
So Rumsfeld and Cheney worked within the White House.
Oh, my my God.
Oh my God, I can't believe I got to hear their names.
I know.
I know, baby.
I know.
While Wolfowitz is part of the CIA's Team B.
Now, Team B is an intelligence review board set up by Gerald Ford as a SOP to the far right.
The Reagan conservatives, who he's, again, trying to win over and get behind him so he can win the election against Carter.
The Reagan conservatives were certain the agency had been, the CIA, I mean, had been under-reporting Soviet military power because the Soviet military in like the early chunk of the Ford administration is like, they're actually not doing great.
Like they're like, we really don't need to keep buying a shitload of weapons.
Like they're not, they're not, they don't have the kind of military assets that we've been saying for years.
And they now are getting a shady CIA inside of the shady CIA.
Yes.
This is like this, it's like a Russian nesting doll of the CIA inside the CIA that's even worse than the other CIA.
So the Reagan conservatives were certain that the CIA had been underreporting Soviet military power.
And Team B like was basically Ford gave them Team B so that they could get new appraisals that showed that the Soviet Union was actually increasing their military assets.
So basically what we like what like, I mean, essentially like what would eventually happen with Iraq where you're like, look, I'm not liking the non-distilled information.
Give me a bunch of bullshit.
That's exactly what's happening.
And one of the things that's fascinating here is that, in essence, this is a return of missile gap logic, right?
Which Kissinger helped get off the ground.
But now, because he supports this détente policy, and that's like his big claim to like fame within, you know, his career that he reached a dent with the Soviet Union, he's on the opposite side of like a missile gap bullshit myth, right?
Oh, man.
This is not my leopard's hand.
Leopards ate my face.
They never thought it could happen to me.
Yeah.
And then they came for the Kissingers, and there was no Kissingers left to speak for me.
It's the same thing as like Dick Cheney speaking out against the Trump administration and watching his daughter get slandered and stuff.
And it's what it's going to be in 20 years when, you know, Trump is welcomed at a president's funeral and we're going, you know, Trump really wasn't that bad.
I like the way he said we shouldn't nuke everyone on earth, as opposed to the next guy who nuked everyone on earth.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, Jill Biden handed him a piece of peppermint candy.
He's not that bad.
So former CIA analyst Melvin Goodwin later said of Team B, quote, they wanted to toughen up the agency's estimates.
Cheney wanted to drive the CIA so far to the right that it would never say no to the generals.
Not how estimates work in this is the estimate, like their estimates.
Pause this and listen to our episodes on the Dulles Brothers and then realize that Cheney's like, I want them further right than that.
That's not nearly right-wing enough.
That is the craziest fucking thing I've ever heard yet.
Bugfuck.
Like someone in a gangbang being like, I want more orifices.
Not enough holes here.
I can't stick my dick at enough stuff.
So in December of 1976, as the Ford administration prepared to hand over power to Jimmy Carter, the CIA finished and released a 55-page report.
Middleman for World Destruction00:14:42
Greg Grandin describes this as, quote, the rights answer to the Pentagon Papers, a nearly perfect negation of the document Daniel Ellsberg had leaked three years earlier.
The scholars and policymakers who composed the Pentagon Papers represented the kind of men Kissinger disdained.
Experts enthralled to facts.
In contrast, the members of Team B were admitted ideologues.
Its members, as J. Peters Skoblick notes, saw the Soviet threat not as an empirical problem, but as a matter of faith.
Oh, what kind?
I mean, you just, it's a church.
It's a war church.
It's also what's happening here because they are against Kissinger.
But as Grandin notes, they're using the kind of logic he used, right?
Yes.
He's not.
They're with him on all of the murder, crazy American shit, but they're like, he's just not racist.
I mean, they're basically like, we got to get rid of Kissinger so we can worship his tactics properly.
That's exactly what's going on here.
And in Kissinger's Shadow, Grandin continues, quote: Previewing what would become known as Dick Cheney's 1% doctrine, Team B interpreted threats with the smallest possible probability of occurring as likely to occur.
Absence of proof of Russian superiority was taken as proof of superiority.
Team B's failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was evidence that there could well be one.
No doubt, somebody would fucking know.
Yeah, which makes sense.
Of course.
I mean, it would be there is no evidence that I have e-got it and won an Emmy and an Oscar and a Grammy.
So that's pretty solid evidence that I in fact have them.
Yeah, you just have all of them.
Yeah, absolutely.
So in December of 1977, the New York Times published a front-page story on the intelligence findings of Team B, which provided legitimacy to the bogus SMI and ensured the next decade of defense spending was geared towards stopping a rising Soviet titan that did not exist.
Oh my God.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Thanks, New York Times.
Nailed it on that one.
Star Wars on top of that, which is Star Wars proceeds directly from creation.
Yeah.
And it proceeds directly, like Team B is laying the groundwork for Star Wars, right?
So while Team B's tactics ran directly counter to Kissinger's current positions, they rested directly on what Grandin calls his philosophy of history.
Henry had been an advocate on the value of intuition in assessing threats and guiding responses.
Historian Anna Hessen Kahn writes that they used Kissinger's own philosophy to, quote, belittle, besmirch, and tarnish Henry Kissinger.
Had to be a tough spot for Kissinger where he was like, it's a shame that I've been vilified, but goddamn do I love the way they did it.
So me.
So me.
Everything we, everything, that's, that's why when people, you know, you look at the current situation in Russia and everyone's like, we got to get rid of him.
And I'm always like, just, but just remember, whenever the U.S. gets what it wants, it's always worse.
Yeah, every time.
That it can be worse.
Like, he can be gone.
He's a fucking monster, but don't be surprised.
What comes after is really fucking bad.
And the idea of not questioning shit.
Like, we are the country who cried war.
At some point, you have to be like, look, sorry, everybody.
You're really going to need to step up with a lot of evidence because you constantly just fucking invention.
I mean, if you have, if you are forming organizations inside of bullshit organizations meant to bring like that if there's no submarines, it means there are submarines.
I mean, it's just kind of like, and the fact that it's still effective, it's constantly effective.
It's never, it's never stopped.
This is just a continuation.
And it's even like this is a domestic version of what happens everywhere else.
We just create more and more worse things.
Yeah.
Internally, externally, it's what we do.
Don't worry.
We'll make it worse.
Yeah.
That is the promise that the United States makes itself in the world.
Don't worry.
Don't worry.
We can fuck this up more.
Lifeguard has weights to throw on you.
Yeah.
I mean, we fucking created Putin if you go back and look at it.
Like we were behind all that shit.
Yeah, it's us looking at the bombing of Kiev and going, you know what will fix this if Bangladesh doesn't get COVID-19.
Yes, that's right.
Which at some point is going to be what like we will at some point solve something just totally on accident.
Yeah.
So when he left office in 1977, Henry Kissinger would never return to direct political power.
He desperately wants to.
He really wanted to.
Since then, he has always wanted to.
Yeah, that's nice.
Now I understand 2016.
Yeah, he really wanted it to happen, but he never quite made it, pulled it off.
He eventually started a consulting firm, which he would rapidly grow into an $8 to $10 million a year business for himself.
Christ.
He makes a ton of money doing this shit.
Of course he goes into consulting.
Oh, absolutely.
A consultant's job is to get the worst advice.
Yeah, and to make people feel good, and he's great at that.
I'm a shit oracle.
Walter Isaacson, author of the biography Kissinger, claims that Henry was actually much more ethical in this period of his life than most former government officials who start consulting businesses.
He waited an unusually long time to start his business.
He avoided for years directly connecting his clients to people he'd worked with in the State Department.
Like a low bar.
It may be accurate that he is more ethical in his conduct here than most people.
But again, that's a low-ass bar.
Yeah.
Most of his business, the business he does in this period can be boiled down to like he's helping oil and gas and other extractive industries.
Oh, so he's like doing nice philanthropical stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he's just destroying the world.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
He's a middleman for the people destroying the world.
Let's be clear about it.
You know, he's making connections between people who are linked to the world.
And to be fair, he's pining to be in charge of it again.
He is.
Probably his most morally questionable moment in like, I guess, a conventional sense is that, So, like, right after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, he shows up on Peter Jennings' show to argue that, like, whatever went on, the U.S. should not impose any economic consequences on China.
And this is, again, not due to a principled stand against sanctions.
It's because Kissinger was working on a massive business deal that involved the Chinese government and several large corporations.
And here's the thing: he's working as a journalist at that point.
Oh, my God.
He is a regular columnist for the LA Times and the Washington Post.
And he advocates in both magazines not putting any kind of economic, like doing any economic harm to China over this, which is like an ethical issue as a journalist because, again, he does not disclose that he has any of these business relationships.
And it causes a minor uproar.
And it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, that's unethical behavior, but also in Kissinger terms, like not even on the fucking radar.
Right?
To most people, this is an abhorrent act.
But congratulations on turning over a new leaf, Henry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow, Henry, you've really improved.
You really are less shit.
You waited until after the thing to do something bad.
Yeah.
So in his post-power years, he became even more of an international celebrity.
He's actually surprised when he starts doing this job.
He's racking up huge amounts of money as like a public speaker.
And he and his like accountant expect the value of him as a speaker.
Like, well, it's obviously it's going to decline over time.
People will learn that you're horrible.
It just gets bigger.
He just becomes more and more valuable as a public speaker.
Now, for some insight into his life in what we might call retirement, I found a New York magazine article from 2006.
Quote: He bonds with Oprah Winfrey over their shared love of dogs.
She recommended an artist to paint a portrait of Kissinger's lab and with Alex Rodriguez over their shared love of the Yankees.
He and A-Rod had lunch at the Four Seasons last year.
He and his wife of 32 years, Nancy McGinnis, spend every Christmas with close friends Oscar and Annette De La Renta in the Dominican Republic.
Asked about the nature of that friendship, given the unlikely connection between a former statesman and a fashion mogul, Kissinger says they are dear friends of mine.
They have no utility.
I'm going to try to kill them.
Yeah.
I will kill them.
Some plans to kill them soon.
Can we just finally agree that Oprah Winfrey is a fucking monster?
Yeah.
I mean, right?
Oprah buddies with Henry K. Winfrey.
Yes.
I mean, Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, like, she creates.
I'm not going to stick around Freddy Dr. Oz Talk, but the other ones you got me on.
Don't forget, don't forget John of God.
Yeah, right under your Sue Harto tattoo, Gareth, Dr. Oz high-fiving Henry Kissinger.
Now, to be honest, this is before he got his show, so I liked him early.
This was just like aspirational, you know?
Yeah, I didn't know.
He's a great pal.
So Kissinger became a New York socialite and was reputed to enjoy the city's social scene because, quote, Manhattan's social life is more generous than Washington's political life.
He should not be allowed to pick where he wants to go out.
I mean, he should have to get food raised to his cell in a bucket.
It's the same thing as that with the cook.
Was it David Cook, the one that just died?
But it was the same thing.
Everyone just accepted him in those fucking circles.
And it's like, no, he's a fucking monster.
And then Charles Coke is the one who's like, you know, was like on a rehabilitation tour for like six months.
Yeah.
And, you know, major news outlets are reporting.
Like, look, he recognizes they fucked up a little.
It's like he feels bad.
He feels bad.
I don't give a fuck.
Yeah.
Degenitalize him.
So Kissinger was regularly, and I think probably still is, regularly seen on the arm of Barbara Walters, who calls him a loyal friend.
And in fact, she was hanging out with Henry and his wife one night at a dinner party when Kissinger endured one of his few public shamings.
It came courtesy as the real, the only real hero of these episodes, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who sees Kissinger at a restaurant and is fucking enraged and screams out, how does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?
Yes!
Peter Jennings, baby!
And of course, Peter Jennings is gone.
So no luck.
He died.
Yeah.
Kissinger probably like invaded his lungs.
Yeah.
That should happen every restaurant.
And to all these fucking people.
Yeah.
Jennings is basically the only person at Kissinger's social level who calls him out.
And imagine, and I mean, he is a nightly news anchor on a major network.
Imagine if you had that sort of vitriol pointed at some of these people that we have in present day who are, again, not only allowed to walk around, but are still in spheres of power.
But Dick, like we were saying about Dick Cheney, like, you know, George W. Bush should not, he should not be in public.
He should not be releasing thoughts on Russian invasion.
No, he certainly shouldn't be fucking paying.
Yeah, he shouldn't be.
He shouldn't be getting mints.
He shouldn't have fingers.
No.
His daughter should not be on the fucking Today show.
Like, I don't know.
I like strawberry in my margarita.
So I want to continue the story because we're not done with the story of Peter Jennings like calling Kissinger out at a restaurant.
And to finish that tale, I'm going to quote from the New York magazine again.
The subject of Kissinger's past sins was very much in the air at the time.
Judges in both France and Spain were seeking Kissinger for questioning as the long, simmering debate over his connection to Chilean general Augusto Pinochet's brutal killing of dissidents in the 70s returned with a vengeance, not least in Christopher Hitchens' right-ringing indictment, the trial of Henry Kissinger.
These developments clearly rattled Kissinger, who had preemptively written a lengthy article for foreign affairs, decrying the dangerous legal precedent of using universal jurisdiction to try state actors for past action.
The same precedent under which German courts hoped to try Donald Rumsfeld.
The question and the question by Peter Jennings, how does it feel to be a war criminal, stunned the dinner guests, who included Time Inc. editor Henry Grunwald, who also died last year.
Yeah.
And former ABC chairman Thomas Murphy.
Grunwald told Jennings the comment was unsuitable.
Yeah.
That's really an unsuitable thing to say.
It wasn't as unsuitable as fucking bombing Cambodia.
Like, Jesus fucking Christ.
This is the thing.
Manners.
They care about manners.
They don't care about all the fucking bodies.
And to his credit, when like Grunwald is like, Peter, that's really unsuitable.
Peter's like, I don't give a shit.
He's a fucking war criminal.
He doesn't say that exactly, Peter, but he says the emotional equivalent of that.
It's such a bummer.
Barbara Walters later said of the moment, I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment.
Let's talk about him.
Reacted very strongly and hurt.
Kissinger said nothing.
Man, it really is like, you know, you see this a lot when like protesters will go into events and they will, you know, they'll have a message, they'll have signs, they'll have something orchestrated set up.
And not only will the politician and the people on the politician's dais sort of be like, okay, okay.
But the people at the event will be the ones who are like, you know, I like a congressional hearing.
This isn't the time or place.
This isn't the time.
It's like, there's no time or fucking place.
Where's the fucking time or place?
What do you fucking expect?
It's all we have at this point is that's the only thing you can really do is try to make them hate living in the world they're ruining.
Yeah.
It is a fucking mark of how fucked up any kind of accountability to the political classes in our society that the most consequence Henry Kissinger ever faces is Peter Jennings yelling at him once at dinner.
A man who's been dead for 20 years, 15 years.
I mean, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was out to dinner and some people yelled at her, I mean, you saw both sides condemning it.
Some fucking dudes yell at fucking Tucker Carlson from his lawn and he gets called terrorists.
There are Republicans and Democrats who always condemn that sort of stuff.
And it's not because people believe in public decorum.
It's because they don't want it to show up on their fucking doorsteps.
Right, right.
They don't want that shit to come back on them.
And I'm sure if someone's going to point out Peter Jennings did something fucked up, he must have.
Realists Blind to Facts00:10:17
He was in media for him.
He did 9-11.
Oh, right.
He did 9-11.
That was Peter Jennings.
He threw those planes right into those towers.
I'd forgotten about that, Gary.
That's how he died.
That's how he died.
But at fucking least, he was there and didn't mince words, just like, you're a war criminal.
Not like, how does it feel to be here where American boys are dying?
But like, no, no, you did war crimes, Henry Kissinger.
Fuck you.
Someone has to say it.
In his many decades worth of declining years, Henry has focused his remaining powers in an attempt to secure his legacy.
In 2003, he opened up his White House archives to a British historian named Niall Ferguson, whose book, also just titled Kissinger, I've cited a few times in these episodes.
Ferguson claimed his biography would, quote, provide a warts and all look at the man, but quotes he made about the relationship put the light of that.
And this is Ferguson writing about how jazzed he is to be hanging out with Henry.
I'm in Henry Kissinger's swimming pool talking about his meetings with Mao Zung thinking, I must be dreaming.
Shit in that pool.
I know.
Fucking hell, Niall.
Everyone.
Now, obviously, I have quoted from this biography because of the details, the information Kissinger provides about his early life.
It is not without value.
It's probably the most detailed look at his childhood we have.
It also only goes up to 1968, which neatly avoids the most controversial moments of Kissinger's life, right?
I mean, that's not great.
Even when journalists.
And now we end the story.
Yeah.
That was the end of Henry Kissinger.
Blah, blah, blah.
Even when journalists and historians that Henry hasn't authorized specifically interview him, they are likely to find themselves enraptured or at least tripped up by his clever wordplay.
Bob Woodward, who first interviewed Kissinger in 74, wrote, he wants to control not just what he says, but people's perceptions of what he says.
And it's kind of like one long book review where he is arguing with the reviewer of his book or his life or his policy.
Seymour Hirsch was more blunt in 1983 when he wrote, he lies like most people breathe.
Wow.
Now, the most comprehensive biography of Henry Kissinger.
And the one I would, if you were looking, if you're looking for just a book on Kissinger's influence in the U.S. and how toxic it was, I recommend Kissinger's Shadow by Grandin.
If you want an actual biography of Kissinger's whole life and time and power, I recommend Walter Isaacson's 1992 book, Kissinger.
I actually think Isaacson is too fair to Henry Kissinger.
But even so, even though he clearly does not wholly condemn the man, I find the book utterly damning, right?
Like the book condemns him, even if Isaacson doesn't condition.
He's saying to fully condemn such a piece of shit.
It's just impossible not to if you're accurate.
And I think Isaacson is pretty accurate.
If you lay out the facts, that's it.
Yeah.
Now, the best thing I can say about Isaacson's book, Kissinger, is that Henry Kissinger himself complained endlessly about it.
He whined to Isaacson's boss, Henry Grunwald, who defended Isaacson and said he felt the book was balanced and down the middle.
Kissinger responded, What right does that young man have to be balanced and down the middle about me?
Wow.
Wow.
It just shows you.
I mean, like, he should never be in the position where he should be pointing out that other people are crazy.
No, no.
Like, you don't get to say that, Henry.
Yeah.
No.
As New York Magazine notes, Kissinger denies that exchange ever happened.
Oh, I believe Henry.
I mean, the guy doesn't lie.
He seems like an honest man.
Yeah.
I bet Nixon still had him wiretapped.
And here's a quote from that article that's very funny.
I've never read the Isaacson book, he says, then quickly clarifies.
I've read a few parts of the Isaacson book, which I didn't like.
But I understand that there are many parts of the book that are very positive.
I missed those, he says with a sly smile.
That is so, that is so trumpy.
I know.
It really is, right?
I didn't read it.
I read parts one through five to 110.
Isaacson says Kissinger wrote him a series of letters contesting numerous passages.
My view, and this is Isaacson, my view is that if Kissinger reread his own memoirs, he would be outraged that they did not treat him favorably enough.
Kissinger.
Who wrote this?
You did.
Oh, no.
Oh, fuck.
That son of a bitch.
I'm going to get me.
Kissinger claims to be unconcerned about his place in history.
I cannot affect my legacy, he says.
And what does he think his legacy is?
I have no view, he says.
I can't control it by what I say.
I tell him I don't believe him.
You're not in your 80s yet, he replies.
Now, a lot has been made about Kissinger's purported role in the invasion of Iraq.
He did apparently urge Bush and Cheney to go through with it.
I think crediting him specifically with having an impact on that is not realistic because this is Bush and Cheney.
By the time they talked to Kissinger about this, they had made up their fucking money.
You know, it's probably push them into invading Iraq.
It's like similar when like the Queens of the Stone Age have Dave Grohl on drums.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
He's a player for sure, but he's not writing all the songs.
I mean, Josh's got this.
Kissinger's definitely the Dave Grohl of the Bush administration.
Yeah, right.
Great drum.
And I think that rather than actually being a meaningful role in arranging consent for the invasion of Iraq, I think Kissinger was doing here what he always did.
He was sucking up to powerful people by telling them what they wanted to hear.
And the best example of this comes from 2008, when during a presidential debate, both John McCain and Barack Obama cited Kissinger as supporting their positions towards Iran.
Both men held opposite views of what the U.S. should do in regards to that country.
And I don't think either of them is lying.
I think they're both, because I think Kissinger just would be like, yeah, of course, that's the right call.
Absolutely.
What would the start date be just so I can put it in my calendar?
Good call, guys.
That's great.
You're both right.
We should invade them and leave them alone.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
As a young law student at Yale, Hillary Clinton had taken part in outraged protests against Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia.
As Secretary of State, she praised the astute observations he shared with her and wrote in a review of one of his books, Kissinger is a friend.
And again, the astute observations are Kissinger saying whatever she wanted to do was the right thing to do, right?
Like that's that's what that's why these people like like him and think he's astute.
He's not, I think he does today get kind of like looked at as this secret power pulling the strings.
I think instead he's just like the ultimate kiss ass.
He's just like, oh, you're in power now.
Yeah, whatever you want to do is the good thing to do.
Absolutely.
Right.
You know?
Yeah, 100%.
I would tell people, like, if you're, if you're young and you don't understand what it means to see Hillary Clinton standing there with Kissinger, it's no different than in 10 years if all of a sudden your Democrat candidate is standing next to Cheney.
You're like, what the fuck is going on?
And I guarantee you that lost her.
A bunch of people didn't vote for her because they saw her standing next to Kissinger.
Yeah.
I guarantee you.
I guarantee.
And yeah, I think, though, when you're trying to talk about like his actual influence and like the fucked up things that have been happening in the last couple of decades, it's less in whatever advice he was giving politician ARB, and it's more in the way he shaped the way the U.S. government functions in terms of foreign policy.
He centralized power and set the precedent of allowing the executive branch to execute military actions without consent of anyone outside the White House.
And obviously, there were like things that were done to restrict the power of the executive branch from doing that.
But then those things were all undone after the, like, right?
Like, it's this, it's this kind of tug of war thing.
Um, but Kissinger, even though he did not set obviously the policy after 9-11 that expanded the executive government's ability to do military shit abroad, he did set the precedent of like how you would actually centralize power in that way within the executive.
And he made up, he set a lot of ideological and philosophical trends that are still shaping the way the U.S. government functions in regards to foreign policy today.
Sure.
And if you're looking for perhaps the most direct and succinct explanation for how Kissinger influenced the world of modern American politics, you can find it in this quote.
He himself wrote in 1963, there are two kinds of realists, those who manipulate facts and those who create them.
The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.
Wow.
Wow.
What a fucking wow.
To not be able to define realists in your two-to-new definite, your two-tiered definition of realism is absolutely delusional.
Yeah.
For neither of your definitions of realists to involve people who care about material reality.
I heard you say in the first one, I was like, oh, and a second one's going to be realists.
It's like, no, Neither one is realists.
Nope.
So that's Henry Kissinger.
It's so unbelievable.
And to what you like, you know, he really, his legacy, like you're sort of saying, is not just directly connected to the things he's connected to.
Because there was no prosecution for what Nixon did.
No.
And there's no prosecution for what Reagan did.
And there's no prosecution.
Because we never prosecute and we never actually hold any of these people accountable.
You know, you do see the seeds of that flourish now.
Like you can invade.
I mean, we're at the point where most people don't even know we've invaded countries we've invaded.
Like, at least with Vietnam, people had access to seeing it and being disgusted by it.
And then under Bush, it was like, well, we're not going to show the coffins returning.
And you see, I mean, it's not just Republicans.
You see it under Democratic presidents too.
It just is kind of more egregious at times under Republican presidents.
But, you know, it's, it's every president gets more powerful, does more.
And it does kind of boil down to they're going to be evil.
Vilifying People Under Republicans00:04:48
Journalists and media need to recognize what their fucking jobs are.
If you're in some of these jobs, like it's, it should not be a popularity contest for access only.
There should be, you should be beholden to doing good and making these people held accountable because it's so relevant in what you're talking about with Kissinger that they just let the access to him because he became a popular figure completely blind them as to what was actually going on.
Well, it's actually worse than not punishing them.
Remember when Obama was elected, everyone was like, these guys have to be tried for war crimes.
And he said, we got to move on.
And, you know, we're talking about torture and war crimes and everything else.
But it went further than that because they gave Bush like the Medal of Freedom.
I mean, there's a picture of fucking Biden hanging on his chest.
And they also, they also honored this guy named Henry Kissinger.
The administration honored him.
So it's beyond not doing anything.
Yeah.
Well, it's not even just, it's not even just him.
I mean, it's just, it's systemic.
It's just.
Yeah.
And you know what?
If you are, if you are one of these people, if you are a fucking anchor at CNN, like if you're Jim Acosta, think of how fucking popular you would be if you did just start using your access to just be like Peter Jennings.
Like be like Peter Jennings here.
We are craving this fucking figure.
But they would be immediately fired.
I mean, but they would be, but you would also, I mean, having even a moment of that would carry your career.
Like if we had that Peter Jennings shit now, it would go so viral and people would talk about that person endlessly that, I mean, it's like, it's like when, you know,
when billionaires started competing over being philanthropists, you know, you, at some point, you're so far in the other direction that you're not that far off from just doing the thing that you're supposed to do is going to be such a radical move.
It's this, it's very frustrating.
Like right now, you have all of these big media figures like moving their shows to Ukraine to be able to film Schelling in the distance.
Obviously, to be a journalist covering combat up close, covering war crimes up close requires a lot of physical courage.
There's like Sky News reporters who got fucking shot and shit.
The Daily Beast reporters got fucking shot.
But like being like Lester Holt, like having your show filmed with like Shelling in the distance, they have massive security teams.
They have massive resources invested in making sure they are in as little danger as they can possibly be.
And more than anything, they are out there and doing it for the fucking clout because that is easy to like pills.
Like, I'm brave.
What's actually brave is Peter Jennings yelling at Henry Kissinger at a fucking dinner party full of powerful people and making sure that for just a second, he has a moment of accountability.
And if one of them was willing to do fucking that to any of these ghouls, I would have a lot more respect than I would of them filming Schelling and Kiev from a mile and a half away.
Yeah, look, there was Wolf Blitzer who during the first Gulf War put on a helmet and was in Saudi Arabia where missiles were flying and saying how in danger he was.
At the same time, there were journalists, American journalists, in the fucking Baghdad hotel being shot at and rocketed by American troops.
And those guys didn't work anymore.
And Wolf Blitzer got his own TV show on CNN.
Or Brian Williams when he talked when he was like the way that he embellished his story about like getting off of a helicopter and taking RPG fire.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
We could use another Jennings or two, at least in this regard.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's hard because it's like, what would you, I mean, what would like, you're like, we want like a, we want a politician for the people.
And it's like, I like, that's like, that's what you wish for.
But you're like, the step first is to just have these people vilified for the things they should be vilified for.
Yeah.
It would be nice if there was a journalist.
That's the end of the story.
Well, honestly, like this was, I mean, just fucking incredible and just such a ridiculous.
He's a pretty bad one, right?
I don't think there's a worse American.
No Journalist to Stop Him00:05:49
I don't think he is the worst.
I know that there was talk of like in other countries of like trying him outside of, you know, not having him there.
Yeah.
But can he travel anywhere he wants or is he restricted?
He can't.
I'm not aware of.
I mean, there may be like one place that he also now, like, he's become like this watery figure.
So he's kind of like the T-1000, where if you just get close to him, he turns into silver goo and just can go through a drain or something.
Yeah.
You can't put a handcuff around a pile of watery goo.
I mean, he is a big part.
Like, he argues vociferously for why, like, Rumpsfeld shouldn't be able to be charged.
And I think Germany, it is, and he's doing it like selfishly.
I guess then shockingly.
Then it would put Kissinger in danger, right?
Like, he's not doing it out of loyalty to Rummy, who he probably hates at this point.
Although I don't know that Kissinger can take things personally, actually.
So maybe, I don't know.
He's like the Bill Walsh coaching tree of war criminals.
Yeah.
I don't know what that means.
Well, Bill Walsh, like, coached the 49ers and invented the West Coast offense.
And you just see the ripple effect through the NFL for generations and decades.
Yeah, it changed football.
It just changed everything.
And it's like, that's what he did.
He just was the guy who's like, you know, I came up with a new offense.
And it's like, everyone's just reading off of that playbook and tweaking it.
Yeah.
That's the guy used to.
Sports reference, Robert.
That's why I robbed football is when the title of this episode of that guy Gareth said of football and the politics.
I liked the two yes that preceded your, I don't know who that guy is.
No, I have no idea.
Yeah.
Hey, who is that?
Yeah.
It's like in basketball when Phil Jackson made the triangle offense.
That's somebody.
Yeah, triangle diplomacy.
It's like the triangle thing.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert's like, all right, I'll write a triangle.
And offense is the opposite of defense, right?
Yes.
That's what everyone says.
That's what everyone says.
In my opinion, it definitely is.
The team with the most points wins.
Well, for sure.
That's going to be critical.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, when the overtime gets a first down, that's really causing a problem.
Finish it.
You've nailed it already.
You stabbed it.
Absolutely.
Three-pointer.
Absolutely.
That's right.
A three-point touchdown for Robert.
Let's go, Globetrotters.
Well, honestly, thank you for allowing us to enter your dojo and mess around for a little while.
I don't know if thank you is the right to me read 31,000 words about Henry Kissinger.
Because we talked about it and I was like, I can't do it because it's not one episode.
It's so many episodes.
Yeah.
This is like the minimum I think you can responsibly cover Henry Kissinger.
Like we could have done another couple episodes.
Hey, hey, let's do it.
You know what?
Gareth, yes.
Let's just riff a couple.
Yeah.
We'll get a couple of photos of him hanging out with Jill St. John, joke about his hog.
Yeah.
Let's take it on the road.
We can get another 40 minutes of content out of that.
Honestly, we could just keep redoing parts of this on the road for a year and a half.
The dollop and behind the bastards present three guys going through shots of Henry Kissinger at fancy parties and talking about the shape of his dick under his pants.
Honestly.
Honestly.
This should work.
Looks like he was having a chub day today.
What do you think, Dave?
Well, tell you what.
The walnuts on the table aren't the only one I'm focused on.
Look at those tennis shorts.
This is how we make our millions.
Well, genuinely, thank you.
I am generally super scared.
Having watched how Colin Powell was treated when he died, be scared about people are going to react to Kissinger's death.
You're going to watch liberals be like, he was fucking awesome.
And you're just like, everything about him was bad.
Yeah.
W. It'll be fun.
Any pluggables at the end here?
Sure.
Yeah.
Listen.
Absolutely.
Well, first of all, we've got the Kissinger.
We should do Kissinger live and we should use the Kiss font.
And we should also wear like the Kiss makeup and we should just do Kissinger.
Yeah.
We will be in Australia and America, the best country on earth.
We'll be in Australia in the middle of April to May.
You can go to dolloppodcast.com for all that information.
We're all over the place.
And then I am doing stand-up in Australia and also over the summer.
So you can go to GarethReynolds.com for all that information.
And you can follow us on social medias with our I'm at Reynolds Gareth.
Dave's at Dave underscore Anthony on Instagram.
I'm at Reynolds Gareth on Twitter.
Dave's at DaveAnthony on Twitter.
And all right.
Thank you for having us again.
Motherfucker.
Sophie and Robert.
Yeah.
Everyone, go pray for Henry Kissinger's painful demise.
Yeah, let's all hope that Tim Cat Tim Allen takes him out somehow.
He smuggles Coke into a party Kissinger's at and it just blows out the old man's art.
Or he just starts doing war improvement with Kissinger as his character.
Amazing.
Yeah, Kissinger would be the, you know, the owl.
He's the owl.
Right, right, right.
No, you got to bomb Cambodia, Tim.
All right.
There's a good, that's another thing.
Pray for Kissinger's Demise00:02:06
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