CZM Rewind: Kissinger Parts 1-3

Henry Kissinger is dead! If you're wondering why people are so happy about this, listen to our six hour series on the life and crimes of one of the 20th century's greatest war criminals. (Ft. Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds from The Dollop)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
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 Bastard's
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

(00:27):
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 doll up 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

(00:49):
an album out that you can find. It's a hot
Head by Dave Anthony. You can go to Dave Anthony
dot bandcamp dot com. I probably don't need a spell
Dave Anthony for you, right 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 twenty

(01:09):
twenty four. They have too many links to promote as one.
But if you go to Gareth Reynolds dot com that's
g A R E T h R E y n
O l d s dot com you can find their
schedule for live shows. Gareth is wonderful. Check those out too, Anyway,
nothing else to say. Here are the episodes. Oh Sophie,

(01:36):
this plate of Behind the Bastards is so heavy as
we walk through this hallway. Oh my gosh, is that
David Anthony and Gareth Reynolds with a heavy plate of
the doll up? Oh no, oh no, I'm losing control.
Oh god, you guys are slipping too. How was that?

Speaker 3 (02:00):
I couldn't disagree more?

Speaker 4 (02:01):
That was the most organic, just real thing I think
I've ever heard that.

Speaker 3 (02:07):
It was, yeah, like, you're really the only thing I'm
noticing is you didn't have plates. So I'm wondering how.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
I was wondering as I started it, are they going
to join in? Or am I going to just have
to commit fully to this?

Speaker 4 (02:22):
And now that's something where if it's me, I just
let you go and then let.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
You have inside. I was a dog in a yard
that wanted to leave it. But I was like, I'll
get it. I'm not supposed to leave, so I was
I wanted to join that.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
Oh gosh, well this is this is just a wonderful time. Obviously.
Again you are Dave Anthony Gareth Reynolds, hosts of The
Doll Up, the podcast that invented being funny about history
on the Internet. Thank you so much for for sitting
down with us today.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Thank you.

Speaker 4 (02:54):
We've always for a long time, I've wanted to do
something with you so and we've talked about this, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:00):
We have.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
This has been like bouncing back and forth for a
while and it was just one of those things where
it's like, well, when we finally do our six part
series on Henry Kissinger, it's going to be the worst
thing we've ever had to do.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
They have a therapy session setup right afterwards.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
Dave married a therapist in preparation.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
That's good, really putting in the deep work to make this,
to make this series of success.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
So my working.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Title for this, which they probably won't let us use,
is Henry Kissinger comma a big sack of donkey balls before?

Speaker 3 (03:39):
Can we do that? So fun perfectly finds that what
are you talking about.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
What do you guys know, Like I kind of think
we maybe it's a good idea to start with, like
what's your your cliffs notes, we'll have We'll have you
do it, Dave, because because you're the one who reads
things normally Kissinger, Yeah, you know, a Kissinger.

Speaker 4 (04:00):
The thing that you know obviously stands out as Vietnam
and Camp and Camp Boda, and you know that's.

Speaker 5 (04:06):
Just reprehensible beyond all words.

Speaker 4 (04:08):
But he's really been a part of just so many
horrific foreign policy decisions and had his He's always getting
in there.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
He's always a part of the business. Really was.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
I don't know if he is now, but for a
long time he was always a guy who would come
in and go, why don't you do the worst thing?

Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (04:26):
And that's that's the thing that's that's interesting and even
a little bit difficult about talking about him because he's
not one of these guys. He's not like you can't
say with him like you can with an Asaddam husseaying
like oh, he ordered he started this war on this date,
you know, or he he ordered this man. I mean,
you can actually, but he's he's not like a he's

(04:47):
not on paper supposed to be a warlord or an
elected leader. The thing that he is good at doing
is getting the ability to do stuff that warlords and
dictators do by sitting in the back rooms with people
who are the ones who on paper hold the power
and convincing them to let him do stuff. And he's
the best at that there's ever been.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
We've had a couple figures on our podcast who I
would relate to like, and I would say, maybe Kissinger
is like the War Crimes Forrest Gump, where yeah, it's
like yes, kind of you're like, oh, yeah, he was there,
He's invented shit happens. I don't know, he invented that phrase.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
Yeah, that's that's incredibly that's that might. I mean, that's
honestly a better title than the one I came up.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
This is the favorite title.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
I mean, And obviously Forrest Gump is blameless and Kissinger
is not, but it does get it. The fact that
he's just like, he's just there. He's just in every
fucking photo of like guys doing a war crime like
it is baffling the number of things he's connected to.
I should probably just start stop selling it, but I
do kind of want to talk about the fact that
he is. He is this kind of back room figure

(05:56):
in a lot of the worst things that happened in
the twentieth century. Because we're gonna spend episode one. By
the time this episode's over, he's not, you know, in
the White House, He's not running shit. This is an
episode where we talk about like his early life and
his ideological roots, because that's that's what underpins all of
the things that he does. He's not a guy people

(06:18):
talk about like what Kissinger believes, and Kissinger himself has
written a bunch of books about what he believes. My opinion,
as an amateur guy studying this dude, is that I
don't think he believes things as much as he beliefs
and ideas are weapons that he uses in order to
get people to let him do horrible things. And he
is the master of using beliefs and moving between different

(06:40):
groups of people who on paper are ideologically opposed and
getting them all to agree with whatever bullshit he wants
to do, because he's really good at talking about ideas
like a fucking philosopher, Like that's his superpower.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
They might just have trouble understanding him. I know, I have.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Whatever what did we agree to Oh god, I was
going to ask Gareth before we get started. Here is
your German accent locked and loaded? Ah, I mean, listens
to the disgust of the German people.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
It is.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
That's fine, that's fine they I think we can all agree.
After the twentieth century, the Germans lost the right to
be angry when people.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
That's how It's like Texans. You know, everyone can do
a Texan. Yeah, that's how.

Speaker 5 (07:23):
I sure, I don't.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
Think I can.

Speaker 4 (07:25):
I can make any accent sound kind of English and
sort of Spanish.

Speaker 3 (07:30):
And you can't do English. It's really just sort of
this amazing ability to.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
See whenever I do a non American accent, it just
drifts Russian at some point, like one hundred percent of
the time.

Speaker 4 (07:42):
Yeah, oh my god, Well this is your time. Now
you can shine with what's going on.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
I know, I know, I'm ready to just yuck it
up over. Speaking of which, there's a number of roots
of what's happening between Ukraine and Russia right now that
you can type action. I mean that that's a little
bit less his his the area that he fucked around in,
But he did some fucking around there, Like one of
the things. We are spending six episodes talking about Henry

(08:08):
Kissinger and we're leaving some shit out.

Speaker 5 (08:10):
Wow, yeah, you have to. I mean, he's been around
so many years.

Speaker 4 (08:13):
I mean, just the fact that he was still powering
around Hillary Clinton in the election, and you're like.

Speaker 5 (08:17):
What is that guy doing there?

Speaker 3 (08:19):
Don't you know? He's bad and he's.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
The thing that is so interesting about Kissinger is that
he does have this equal He's equally good at talking
to like people who would call themselves liberals and progressives
as he is to like far right neo cons like
he's he's he's I mean, you could I think you
could say that. Part of what that reveals is that
the ruling class in this country are all in agreement

(08:41):
about things more often than they disagree about things. But
part of it is just that, like he is so charming.
We will be talking a bit about Kissinger as a
sex symbol, which is a thing that happens, and I
am so sorry that we have to discuss it.

Speaker 6 (08:54):
No.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
I was hoping he would say this because I've wanted
to fuck him for so long, Like that's one of
the main things he's hot.

Speaker 3 (09:01):
I call it henryone Fuckinger. I've always wanted. The kiss
is not enough kiss. That's just a taste of what
I'm after.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Oh boy, well, ab test the Forest, Gump and the
Fuckinger title. Yeah, we'll just see what plays best in Poughkeepsie.
So Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on May twenty seventh,
nineteen twenty three, in the city of Firth, Germany. The
Kissingers were a Jewish family, And so given that this

(09:30):
is Germany in the early twenties, you can tell we're
not off to a great start already, right, this is
this is not going to be a story that begins
in a particularly pleasant place. He was born in a
very chaotic world. The Great Year was like five years
past when he comes onto the planet. Everything is falling
apart in Germany and a lot of other places. The
year he's born, Primo di Rivera seized power as the

(09:50):
dictator of Spain. Mustafa Kamal took power. In Turkey, the
Bulgarian prime minister was assassinated in a coup. Like it
was a troubling time to be a baby. But Heinz's
mother and father had some reasons for optimism. While Firth
was not an attractive city, in fact, one contemporary described
it as stifling in its narrow, dreariness. Are ungardened city,
city of soot. You know, it's it's a city. It's city.

(10:15):
It's city. It's a working class factory town. But because
of that, and this is the period in which the
working class is a lot more left wing than you know,
folks tend to give it credit for being today. It's
a very it's like a haven for democrats, not like
our democrats, but people who support democracy as opposed to
want to go back to having a kaiser, you know,
so Firth is.

Speaker 5 (10:35):
I wouldn't want to go back to having a kaiser.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
He was so we're so good.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah, yeah, I want to have a king who gets
us into World War One and like whaps off about
his mom's hands.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
That sounds great again. Well, now that I know what
we're talking about, let's dance. I'm in I want a kaiser.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
So Firth is. In some ways, you could see it.
It's rep in Germany as being kind of like Portland today.
It's a very left wing town. It's seen as a
haven for socialists. But it's also kind of like Selma,
Alabama during the Civil rights era. Because Firth has a
very large Jewish population, and the period in like the
late eighteen hundreds is when a lot of there's essentially

(11:17):
apartheid against Jewish people in Germany for a long time.
So Firth is the city that has Germany's first Jewish lawyer,
and it has a bunch of their other first Jewish
you know, exes person who does this job because it's
this very progressive city with a very integrated Jewish community.
So it's this mix of the Nazis aren't going to
like this town, right, Yeah, Like Cortland.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Yeah, like Partland.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, it's got some similarities between a couple of things.
So Heinz's parents, Paula and Lewis, had grown up in
Imperial Germany, where Jews were restricted from holding certain jobs,
going to certain schools, living in certain homes, and this
had ended by the time the Kaiser had so Lewis Kissinger,
Henry's dad, kime of age in a period in which
a Jewish boy could actually build a professional life for

(11:59):
the first in mainstream German society. He was a member
of the first and almost the last generation that this
would be true of why what happens oh day, we
may need to do it a separate podcast seriesly.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
I never read any German history. Oh my god, it's
so exciting. So he starts work.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Lewis as a teacher in a secular private school when
he's eighteen, and he holds the job for fourteen years.
And he was a very patriotic person. He's also like,
he is an Orthodox Jew, so he's very religious, but
he considers himself a German first and foremost, and his
family is very patriotic. His brother fights in World War One,
so does his wife's dad. Two of his cousins die

(12:39):
fighting for the Kaiser, and when the war ends, German defeat.
You know, there's all these rumors spread throughout the far
right that the nation's been stabbed in the back by
an alliance of Jewish boogeyman Heinz or sorry, Lewis kind
of he sees this as happening, but he doesn't think
that it's ever going to like take hold. Henry would
later recall that his father would regularly say, we live

(13:00):
in an age of tolerance, So his dad is not right.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Yeah, I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (13:05):
Are you talking about America twenty two or are you
talking about Germany?

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, we are talking about this on the day that
Texas just announced a fun new law. Yeah, this is
this is like, you know, Henry's wrong about a lot
of stuff. His father is also wrong, but for a
much sadder resent.

Speaker 3 (13:22):
I guess there's a psychic gene in the family. I
see us being tolerant for generation. Germany will be a
watchword for tolerance. We will be a bastard for all types. Oh,
poor buddy. Yeah, so he's Uh.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
It's interesting because like the Zionist movement is rising in
this time, and Kissinger's family rejects this wholeheartedly because they're
so German right, like, they don't they don't want to
ever leave. So obviously the Nazi party rises consistently through
Henry's childhood. Firth was initially safe from this. Just a
few months after Hines is born. In September of twenty three,
the Nazis and other far right organizations hold a German

(14:03):
Day in Nuremberg. Several caravans of them passed through Firth,
sort of like Nazis do today in a lot of places.
And you know, they were looking for a fight when
they drove through. They went through first because it's the
town where you can get a fight, and they got one.
This is like right after Hintonary is born, a mob
of brown Shirts are assaulted by a hundred strong crowd screaming,
killed him and down with Hitler, which is prenny.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
Let's end the story there.

Speaker 5 (14:26):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
It's a great and it's the tale of Henry Kissinger,
a kid who was a baby when some dudes did
some rad stuff. So Firth was integrated enough that heines
initially attended a public school with Christian classmates, which was
not common for Jewish kids in this time. Yeah, he's
like going to school with other like kids who are

(14:49):
not Jewish. Eventually his dad puts him in his private school,
but that's also an integrated private school. So while his
education is secular, his family's very strict Orthodox and did
Hebrew school, which he hated. I found a quote from
another Jewish guy who grew up in Firth at the
same time that gives an idea as to why Henry
was not a big fan of his early religious education.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Religion was a study and not a pleasant one, a
lesson taught soullessly by a soulless old man. Even the
day I see his evil conceited old face in my dreams.
He thrashed formulas into us antiquated Hebrew prayers that we
translated mechanically without any actual knowledge of the language. What
he taught was paltry, dead, mummified, and that I think
is broadly in line with how Henry feels. Because he's

(15:32):
not well, doesn't grow up very religious. So Henry is
is a little kid, you know, he does a lot
of religion stuff, but as he grows older, he rejects
his father's passion for faith and his dad's interests in
classical music and theater. Instead, Henry Kissinger falls in love
with soccer. He is a huge soccer head.

Speaker 4 (15:50):
Oh yeah, happening.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
Firth has like a locally renowned team. They're one of
the best teams in jury many and so like their kids' teams,
which are feeders into this whatever team are very competitive too.
Henry starts playing in a youth league when he's six
years old, and he later recalled quote, I wasn't really
very good, though I took the game seriously.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
But now what about soccer? We should talk about that?

Speaker 6 (16:16):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Sorry.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
So his real prowess early on was in strategy, as
this quote from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, a book named Kissinger
like the guy makes clear. Though no great athlete, Heinz
Kissinger was already a shrewd tactician, devising for his team
a system that, as as it turns out, is the
way the Italians play soccer. The system was to drive
the other team nuts by not letting them score by

(16:39):
keeping so many people back as defenders. It's very hard
to score when ten players are lined up in front
of the goal. So immediately Henry Kissinger, as a kid,
is like, you know what will help us win and
also make this game no fun at all?

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah, we need to poison Henry, what are you talking about?
Firebombs the holmes. We know what to do. Keeper. I
know we are.

Speaker 5 (17:01):
Six, but we will park the bus. There will be
no joy in soccer.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
It remove the keeper's hands. He is.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
He is, as a six year old, doing the soccer
equivalent of carpet bombing. So he gets so into soccer
that he starts to neglect his studies and his father
actually bans him from playing for a while. The older
he gets, Henry has more and more conflicts with his dad,
a thing that no one else has ever experienced. And yeah,

(17:30):
he would regularly, after fighting with his father, bicycle over
to the home of a friend who later recalled he
liked being with us. It seems to me he had
a problem with his father, if I'm not mistaken, he
was afraid of him because he was a very pedantic man.
His father was always checking Hines's homework and kept a
close watch on him. Heines told me more than once
that he couldn't discuss anything with his father, especially not girls.

(17:51):
So his dad's not like hitting him or anything. He's
just like really really annoying to him and.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Just like a bit and just like pay attention to
your studies beyond anything else. Yeah, I think I like
this girl, Like, well, she doesn't. She's not going to
the same school the focus Henry Focus.

Speaker 4 (18:05):
Well yeah, and he's clearly a dick who's like, you know,
you can't be a professional soccer player at eight, you
have to go to school.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Like he's clearly an asshole.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, yeah, I mean he's definitely the villain of the story.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
So Henry is magnetic to women from a well girls
at this point from a very young age.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
What in the fuck is happening I know, it's really weird.
It's weird.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
And this is the quotes about you know, girls really
liking him at this age come from his father. But
like this also happens when he's in his forties and
the secretary of State. So I'm going to say his
father's probably telling the truth.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
I mean, at no point have I seen any version
of Henry Kissinger. We're like, man, I mean, it is
weird that got memory hold because there were there were
New York Times stories about how much women like Henry
Kissinger because he looks like a lump of clay you
could mold into anything potentially that would be looked good.

Speaker 6 (19:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, no, but.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
It's it's weird. I mean, yeah, he's the guy. Like, yeah,
we'll talk about some of the things he said about
sexuality later. I know you're all getting real excited for
that episode.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
At one point, one of his friends was actually ordered
not to hang out with him because he had quote
earned a reputation as a skirt chaser. And this is
like when he's nine. Wow, early little Henry cum Rocket Kissinger.

Speaker 7 (19:35):
The first time sex was nine, So you know, like
at this point he's rebelling against the family religion, he's
hanging out with girls, he's playing a hell of a
lot of soccer.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Which seems like a decent childhood. But obviously you know
the Nazis. So in the mid twenties, the German nation
goes on strike against some shit. France was doing Versailles stuff.
We don't need to get into it. Inflation goes crazy, right,
this is the wheel arrows full of cash time. This
hurts the Kissinger family badly because if you're like, if
you're a private laborer, if you're working for a private company,

(20:08):
you can generally like strike and organize to get your
salary adjusted to deal with inflation somewhat like, it's still bad,
but it's less bad. If you're a public servant, you
don't get shit. Your salary stays the same while inflation
jumps up. So this is really a disaster for the
Kissinger family, and of course economic trouble coincides with a
constant acceleration of far right violence. Later, as an adult,

(20:30):
Kissinger would note without emotion that he was somewhat regularly
chased through the streets and beaten up by Nazi thugs
as a child. Yeah, that's tough. No punch lines no,
no punchlines. But there is something weird about that because
he's talked about this a few times, but every time
he talks about this, it is so that he can
emphatically state that this part of his life had no

(20:52):
impact on him.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, if you're really weird, it's very strong literal impact
of fists had no impact upon him.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
In nineteen fifty eight, he declared, quote, my life in
Firth seems to have passed without leaving any deeper impressions.
You don't get to say that, by the way. Yeah,
I feel like you don't like. I feel like you don't.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
I feel like I said that to a shrink once
about my parents' divorce and then wept. Yeah. I didn't
do anything anything. I mean, what's this, what's his flood
coming out of it? And it's like Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
In nineteen seventy four, when discussing the times he was
beaten in the streets by Nazis, he insisted to a
reporter quote that part of my childhood was not a
key to anything. I was not consciously unhappy. I was
not acutely aware of what was going on for children.
These things are not that serious. It is fashionable now
to explain everything psychoanalytically. But let me tell you, the
political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life,

(21:43):
which is really interesting, right So I know.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Right, like I'm sure the reporters like, I'm ready to
ask follow ups whatever. He stops talking. Yeah, you're not
supposed to remember from before ten anyway. I mean, I wouldn't.

Speaker 5 (22:00):
That's how I can kill I went not at nine.
I don't feel anything.

Speaker 3 (22:05):
It is.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
It's like, you know, I got assaulted by a Nazi
when I was thirty three, and it left a mark here.

Speaker 4 (22:14):
But anytime it just growing up in that environment without
being assaulted is going to leave psychological damage.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
If your parents kick you completely safe from street violence,
it would it could not. Yeah, And it's like, Henry,
this is the only time I'm going to speak sympathetically
to you.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
But it's fine. If being beaten by Nazis as a
child left a mark on it's the only time you
want to Matt damon him what Robin Williams are Yeah,
like it's okay, man, Okay, it happened.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
It's interesting the way he the ways he explains why
this didn't leave any mark on him are very interesting,
and I want to quote from Henry Kissinger in two
thousand and four. Now, I experienced the impact of Nazism,
and it was very unpleasant, but it did not interfere
in my friendship with Jewish people of my age, so
that I did not find it traumatic. I have resisted
the psychiatric explanations which argue that I developed a passion

(23:05):
for order over justice and that I translated it into
profound interpretations of the international system. I wasn't concerned with
the international system. I was concerned with the standing of
the football team of the town in which I lived.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
Which you can't do both.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
You can't pay attention yeah, soccer, obviously, as no one thinks,
Henry that as an eight year old, you were like, well,
this is going to impact the way that I believe
state power should be used when I'm Secretary of State in.

Speaker 3 (23:29):
Several decades an advised addiction.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Just like if you have a car accident as a kid,
You're not thinking, well, this is going to make me
unable to let other people touch me when I'm thirty three.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Right, you know I'll hate freeway merging.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, Like obviously, man, and I don't know, like there's
a degree to which in terms of this is the
period in which you can be sympathetic to him. I
do think there's probably something to be said that if
you have this childhood, maybe you don't want to give
the Nazis anything, you know, even the car like this
left an impact on me, right, because like, fuck him,
I don't want to say that it had an influence

(24:04):
on me, which I get.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
No. Having grown up in a traumatic, you know, sort
of childhood, you can shut it down and tell yourself
that you're fine.

Speaker 5 (24:13):
Like you he The way he survived it.

Speaker 4 (24:16):
Was to to shut his emotions down a little bit
and tell himself that he was fine when it actually
is by far probably the most traumatic thing there, and
and created a fucking monster because he didn't get any
psychological help.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
I'm like, naturally, it is not nature versus nurture. I
would have killed just as many people, been a despicable
piece of shit either the way. I don't judge my mity.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
So as the twenties rolled to an end, the political
situation in the Weimar Republic gets correspondingly more dire. In
nineteen twenty five, during a Nazi rally in Firth, Hitler
himself had called it the citadel of the Jews. The
local response at that point in twenty five is overwhelmingly negative,
and in nineteen twenty seven only two hundred people in
Firth were members of the Nazi Party. Hitler visited the

(25:10):
city again in nineteen twenty eight, to little effect. The
party just got six point six percent of the vote
in local elections that year. But the Great Depression rescues
the end of the twenties rescues the Nazis flagging poll members.
As firsts economy collapses, people grow more willing to listen
to the fascists. In the nineteen thirty elections, Nazis surged
from two point six percent of the vote nationwide to

(25:30):
eighteen point three percent. In Firth, they won twenty three
point six percent of the vote, which is four times
better than they'd done two years earlier and very frightening
for a lot of relevant reasons to today. Yes, Yeah,
Nazi electoral successes continue to pace the next year, and
by nineteen thirty three, more than twenty two thousand Firthers
were Nazi voters. I want to quote from Niall Ferguson's

(25:53):
book again. On April ninth, nineteen thirty two, fifteen SA
men were set upon by Iron Front members as they
left the pro not Yellow Lion pub. Two months later,
Nazi supporter Fritz Reinngruber was beaten up for being a swastikist.
The same fate befell another Nazi caught selling the NSDAP
newspaper the volkas Schebeobacter. The police watched helplessly on the
evening of July thirtieth as a mob threw potatoes and

(26:15):
stones at a Nazi motorcade going from the Firth Airport
to the Nuremberg Stadium. The car carrying Hitler himself was
among the vehicles. But just a year after, Hitler's car
gets pelted. After the Nazis begin to consolidate power, when
Hitler's the chancellor, the mood is very different. On March third,
there's another torchlit parade by the Nazis through Firth, and
on the evening of March ninth a crowd of between

(26:36):
ten and twelve thousand people's gathers outside one of the
bars there to watch the raising of the red Nazi flag.
So you know it gets bad pretty fast.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Can I just flag the person who brought the potatoes
to the rock throwing event. Yeah, I feel like he
turned first. Yeah, how were doing rocks? Oh?

Speaker 2 (26:58):
I know that was a drag of rock? Those look
like potatoes. Now, lord, you know what I'm going to
say it right now. If that guy had brought rocks,
he might have killed Hitler. Could we kind have avoided.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
Right the guy? Yeah, for want of a rock? World
War two? Oh you guys, see my potato hit that car?
It really smushed it.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
I look, mas, I do left the idea that he
also boiled it before.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, yeah, well I don't want to look weird.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
So Lewis Kissinger lost his job teaching once the Nazis
came to power. Henry again, who'd never gotten along with
his dad, watches his father collapse into what biographer Thomas
Allen Schwartz describes as a quote state of immobility and
psychological depression. Lewis withdrew into his study. According to Henry's
brother Walter, while the world outside veered closer to nightmare.

(27:57):
In his book Henry Kissinger and American Power Schwartz, Kissinger
and his brothers saw the progressive segregation, isolation, and humiliation
the Jews of Firth experienced, even their attempt to watch
soccer games came with the risk of their being beaten
by young Nazi thugs. The world of Heinz's childhood rapidly collapsed,
and his parents and the older generation of Firth's Jews
could not protect their young from the hatred around them.

(28:19):
After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in nineteen thirty five,
Kissinger's mother began to look for a way to leave Germany.
A cousin in the United States was willing to provide
the financial support that would allow the Kissingers to immigrate.
In August and of nineteen thirty eight, after a last
visit with Paula's elderly parents in Ludershausen, where Heines saw
his father cry for the first time, the family headed
to New York. Only three months later, during Christalnacht, the

(28:41):
synagogue and Firth, like hundreds of others throughout Germany, burned
to the ground and a knight of orchestrated violence.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
Free so months, yeah, I mean that is crazy.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
When Henry Leive's Firth there are two thousand Jews in
the Jewish community at the end of World War Two,
there are forty Oh my god, yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
And three months is so? I mean that is barely meanly.
That's like they stay as late as they possibly care. Right, Yeah,
at least.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Thirteen members of Kissinger's family would perish in the Holocaust. Obviously,
it being what it is. I don't know that you
can it's not super easy to get exact numbers. But like,
his family is as devastated as you would expect of
a German Jewish family. And he does acknowledge for the
first time, he admits that like some part of this
had an influence on him. It was moving away from

(29:29):
Germany and like going across the world to the United States,
and he says, and this is I think him being
somewhat honest, that the deepest impact of all this was quote,
all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed,
and many of the people that once had that one
had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous
turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities. People will say, we'll

(29:51):
talk about this later. He's very much an order obsessed guy,
and like, okay, yeah, I get it, Like I get
where that came from, you know.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
I mean, that's very common for that happened in you know, Chile,
in other places where it all falls apart into authoritarianism.
There's a lot of people who are like, I just
want it to be the same.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, well, yeah, you hear that all the time here too.
I mean, not like that. Obviously, it's far it was
far more dire. But there are a lot of people
I know who keep saying that shit here, who keep
being like, I just wanted to go back to normal.
And you're just like, that ship is fucking sailed.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
That is not you know, yeah, it never does, it
never can, but we all do it. Like even the
kind of like obsession with nineties nostalgia is evidence of that,
and not because the nineties were like a perfect time,
but because like, yeah, you didn't. You weren't aware of
how fucked like like Henry, like your dad hadn't collapsed
into like an unable to handle him.

Speaker 3 (30:46):
You're just likes too aggressive and yeah, oh my god,
we don't have money.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah yeah, you went from oh my gosh, you know,
the OJ Simpson trial, what a mess too? Well, now
what plague has killed him?

Speaker 3 (31:00):
And people, oh my god, it's better give me that
time capsule.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
It's it's so funny that parallels because I'm i literally
am writing a dollar right now, and and the guy
turns into an authoritarian and his dad shut himself in
his house and isolated.

Speaker 3 (31:21):
It's it's so weird how these things.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
I mean, if you I mean, just to continue off
of that, Dave Hitler's dad dies when he's a little kid,
pledges the family finances and situation into insecurity and chaos. Yeah. Yeah,
it's when when something that seemed stable from your early
childhood collapses. Perhaps it has an.

Speaker 3 (31:41):
Influence, yes, by what Kissinger said, by what Kissinger said,
But you know what, Henry Kissinger loves the products and
services that support this podcast.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Look, Henry is one of the few VIPs on It's
Island where you can hunt children anytime he wants. He
gets a free three bedroom apartment on the child hunting Island. Sophie.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
That yeah, because for some fucking reason, he is still alive.

Speaker 4 (32:13):
Yes, well, let's be honest here. This is essentially as
eulogy because when we finish this podcast and it's published,
Kissingers should die.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
It's possible. I'm planning a dark occult ritual using my
own blood and a candle I bought in Mexico to deal,
Like I mean, I'm not gonna say I'm not doing it.

Speaker 5 (32:35):
Yeah, it's anyway.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
Here's here's some ads. Oh we're back. Have you guys
gone to the island where you can hunt little kids
for sport?

Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yes, it's amazing. It's also fresh. It's very the brisk,
expect to be that fresh. So good.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
So Kissinger today has i Kissinger today has idyllic recollections
of his early years in the United States. He often
talks about walking down the streets of his new neighborhoods,
seeing a group of boys walking towards him and crossing
the street because he's you know, he's afraid he's going
to get beat. Yeah, and then he would realize like, oh,

(33:24):
that doesn't happen here, which obviously it did.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
Those boys. Yeah, they're just wearing brown shirts because they
like brown.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Yeah, yes, Henry, this is a country where some people
who wear brown aren't Nazis. Some of them are, some
of them are, Henry.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Different did not mean easy. Though the Kissinger spent their
first years in a crowded Bronx apartment living with family.
Lewis got sick and even more depressed. Paula had to
take control of the family and handle shit. She became
a caterer and started a business that became the family's lifeline.
The neighborhood they lived in was dominated by Orthodox Jewish
families with a familiar background. A lot of them were
from other parts of Germany, and so the Kissingers benefited

(34:04):
from the help of several community organizations and getting back
on their feet. He benefits a lot from the fact that,
you know, there's not really a government support network, but
the other Jewish refugees who have come over from Europe
have built support networks to make it easier for new
folks coming. Henry's teen years were a mix of school
in synagogue. He failed his first driving test but excelled

(34:27):
at soccer, and he grew to admire many aspects of
his new home, including quote American technology, the American tempo
of work, and American freedom, which I might say is
in direct opposition to the American tempo of work.

Speaker 3 (34:38):
But whatever.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Kissinger was frustrated to though by the casual approach to
life that he saw in his new peers. He thought
they were superficial. He wrote at the time that quote
no youth my age has any kind of spiritual problem
that he seriously concerns himself with which, well, yeah, okay, Henry,
all right, Hank fair I you come over from Nazi

(35:01):
Germany and you're like people here seem carefree and.

Speaker 8 (35:03):
Shallow and yeah, and your schooling was basically like some
old dude being like you did, right, you know, like
you're gonna be like geez, these guys are really not
focused on what matters.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:14):
Look, I don't want to I don't want to be
too critical, but New York used a little bit of Nazism,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
It's a little loose, good lord.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
So because of all of this, this is this is
why one of his biographers, Schwartz, describes young Henry as
socially inept. He's not not great at talking to it's
not great at dealing with his new peers. He did
start dating again, though, first a girl who was a
refugee from nearby Nuremberg, but most of his focus was
on schoolwork in soccer. Because you graduated George Washington High

(35:45):
School and started at the City College of New York.
He took classes at night so he could work during
the day at a brush cleaning factory. Some of his
cousins owned the.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
Brushes failth they boys keep going. It's the most amazing
like old timey job ever. I mean, it's basically like
all I can picture is just like the jobs are
either like pressing sheets or washing brushes. These brushes I'm
not going to clear themselves, gentlemen, how many times do
I have to tell you?

Speaker 4 (36:13):
Well?

Speaker 2 (36:13):
In the corollary is some mom being like, Billy, you
didn't take your sister's brushes to the cleaning shop. Now,
it's very funny. Everything old timey is funny. People are
going to think this in the future about I don't know,
having water. So at this point Himry's ambition in life

(36:37):
was to get quote a nice job, likely in accounting.
One biographer noted, quote nothing that happened to Kissinger during
those years encouraged him to read more widely. His historical
interests were as underdeveloped when he was twenty as when
he arrived in New York as a boy of fifteen,
which is the first normal thing about him that like, yeah, dude,
you know whatever, like he's a kid. Yeah, we're about

(36:58):
to get to the studio. Fifty four years. Yes, so
World War II happens, starts for the United States, at
least it started elsewhere a bit earlier, but for the US,
it's right, we'll do it when Henry is twenty one.
He did not initially feel called to volunteer for service,
but when he got his draft notice in nineteen forty three,

(37:19):
he complied and joined the roughly sixteen million Americans who
became soldiers during this period.

Speaker 3 (37:24):
And if it.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
Weren't for this, Henry Kissinger probably never would have been
a figure of historical importance. Again, he just kind of
wanted to be an accountant, but being drafted successfully disrupted
his plans for a quiet, boring life and thrust him
into the world that says it all. Yeah, it's not
maybe don't draft this guy.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
Right, yeah, don't right care right? I could be like
you don't. I did not actually see your venmo this year,
so the process.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah, there's a future where he just has really strong
opinions on W two's.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
Yeah exactly ten ninety nine. But I feel like it
was actually more like W four mm.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, or he does like a Bernie madeoff thing. But
either way, it's a much better future than the one
we got. I will take the madoff ending for him
for sure.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
Yeah. Fine, So we have.

Speaker 2 (38:16):
Letters that Henry sent to his brother Walter during training.
He purported to like the quote middle Americans he met there,
but warned his sibling, don't become too friendly with the
scum you invariably meet there.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Hell, hell he did.

Speaker 5 (38:31):
He did pick up all something from the Nazis.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
He's a little bit right.

Speaker 9 (38:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
He also he also advised against having sex with the
quote filthy syphilis infected camp followers, which is too specific
to have been random. I think the Kissinger had a
bad experience with the camp follow.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Like everyone that's camp has syphilis.

Speaker 5 (38:57):
Every girl I fucked had syphilis.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
I thought one girl one of them has it. Yeah,
that's what the notation zero of the syphilis epidemic. Surrounded
by counselors.

Speaker 2 (39:14):
So the Army administered a series of tests, which Kissinger
excelled at, and he earned entrance into a special training
program that sent particularly bright soldiers to college. He received
his American citizenship in nineteen forty three while he was
at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. The program lasted just six months,
and Henry finished twelve engineering classes. During his off hours,

(39:35):
he would hitch hike home and see his girlfriend. He
was a brilliant student, recognized by his roommates as the
quote brainiest of a very intelligent class. One classmate recalled
he didn't read books. He ate them with his eyes,
his fingers, and with his squirming in the chair or bed,
and with his mumbling criticism.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
He was more as salt if I've been other than
he sounds like a book. This is really a weird
way to describe it. Dude. It's kind of what but
the way he looks now is like he eats books.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Yeah, kind of had like a visual like oh reaction
to that, to that line, like, oh, cringe.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
I now kind of want the story of that classmate, Like, yeah,
caused you to describe a dude reading books that way?

Speaker 3 (40:21):
Well, in my college, I hate analogies. I just would
just just devour them. I need them like a synonym.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
You know, His professors would use Henry to explain complicated
concepts to the other soldiers, and for a brief period
of time, he had status and respect, which he'd begun
to crave as a young man. His time in this
program was cut short because you know, d day we
decide America is like we're going to do us a
normandy landing, and the army is like, well, we probably

(40:50):
don't need smart people for that, so let's police kids
out of the class and show how to get shot
by you guys.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
We actually want to talk to you over here about
something totally different. Guy. No, no, not you, not you, Chad,
you stay right there, Jed, talk about these other guys.
Thank you, good luck.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
So Henry and his classmates get sent back to basic training,
where the drill sergeants, according to Henry took glee and
tormenting the college kids, which I don't know, probably true,
while he was preparing to go overseas. And this is
what my grandpa was doing in World War Two. And
I hope he bullied Henry Kissinger. I hope my grandpa

(41:25):
got a chance to give Henry Kissinger some shit fingers.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
He did, right, he did, but he did absolutely so
while he was preparing to go overseas.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
His biographer Schwartz writes, even in the misery of Camp Claiborne, however,
Kissinger stood out, selected by his commanders to provide soldiers
with a weekly briefing on war news. Although he did
the job well, Kissinger was more impressed with another older
German refugee in an American uniform Fritz Kramer, who came
to Camp Claiborne in May nineteen forty four to speak
about the meaning of war. After Kramer's impassion talk, kiss

(42:00):
wrote him a note, Dear Private Kramer, I heard like
sorry basically yeah, yeah, he literally like it's like I
liked what you had to say.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
Can I help you? Like, that's literally what the note is. Scared.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Yeah. Kramer responded almost immediately to the simple fan letter,
returning a few days later to seek Kissinger out for
conversation in dinner, insistingly speak in German, not English. The
Lutheran Kramer later said that he was taken with this
quote little Jewish refugee he had met, who he believed
as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything. Wow,

(42:35):
that's an interesting way to describe him.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
It sounds like, yeah, and this guy Kramer is Kramer
is a Prussian, which I don't know the degree to
which that that means anything to a lot of people,
the Prussians.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
So there was most of the resistance to the Nazis
was from the left. Once the Nazis got into power,
the resistance to the Nazis that meant anything was Prussian
not because they were good dudes, but because they were
way too conservative for Hitler. They were like, well, we
want to fight on takeover all of Europe, but like
with a kaiser who has royal blood, not this like
gross little corporal and stuff. And it's complicated because like

(43:11):
a lot of those Prussians got murdered by the Nazis,
And as a general rule, your sympathy is with the
people who get murdered by the Nazis, but it's also like, yeah,
you got murdered by the Rai Nazis for the wrong reasons.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Right right, yeah right. They were like we have one
small note, but everything else is working great for it.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
They were the guys who were like Hitler's bad because
he's not going to win the war against Russia, right wow, okay, yeah.
So this guy, Fritz Kramer would be, in Henry's words quote,
the greatest single influence on my formative years, since Fritz
was a Prussian conservative. So for an idea of how
fucking German Fritz Kramer is, he wears a monocle to

(43:48):
make his wow I work harder to make his weak
eye wow, Like, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Oh I'm the craziest asshole ever.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
Wow, And you know, Fritz hated the Nazis, which good good.
He also hated the Communists, which you have to think
there is some some some suss stuff there. Yeah, you know,
Communists in a mixed bag like everybody. But I don't
think he's very nuanced about it. Schwartz also credits Fritz
with expressing quote a respect for international law and emphasis

(44:24):
on the moral basis of civilization. And what Fritz Kramer
means by the moral basis of civilization is not the
same as what.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
I think maybe you or I might need. Yeah, okay,
now that Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
I think the most important influence Kramer had was he's
Kramer is very conservative, and he Henry is kind of
a natural conservative. And Kramer really reinforces this feeling in Henry,
which is expressed by a growing sort of revulsion in
Kissinger towards any ideas outside of the political median right,
which you get why he has a tendency towards this.

(44:57):
If your life, if your childhood is this like battle
of ex streams in your hometown, I get why you
would kind of veer towards the middle. And this guy
Kramer really turns that up to eleven in him. One
write up in The New Yorker notes quote he warn't
Kissinger not to emulate cleverling intellectuals and their bloodless cost
benefit analyzes. Believing Kissinger to be musically attuned to history,

(45:18):
he told him, only if you do not calculate, will
you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the
little people.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Oh so that's bad. So that's gonna go really bad.
I mean you really are like, I mean, this is
his Morpheus. We're just starting to be like, Okay, this
is And by the way, have you thought about maybe
just losing the glasses and just going with the Wand
that is so much like punish your weak eye. You
much punished a week, even when it comes to your eyes. Yeah, yeah,

(45:45):
he is.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
He has found a kid who like has a problematic
history of starting fires and is now teaching him how
to build a fertilizer boss. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Yeah, he's a bad influence. Yeah, and it matches us
so so but have you ever seen a zippo?

Speaker 4 (45:58):
Yeah? Great.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
So Kissinger finishes training and is deployed with the eighty
fourth entrant for Infantry Division as it moves towards Nazi Europe.
His division sees a decent amount of combat.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
He does not.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
He's a back ranker. He handles administrative and management tasks,
and he finds the power and authority he gets through
his time in the service intoxicating. Though he never again
he doesn't fight directly, he does earn a bronze star
for a valor because he helps catch and take out
a Gestapo sleeper cell, primarily due to the fact that like,
he's just you know, a very observant dude. In nineteen

(46:32):
forty five, he participates in the liberation of a concentration camp.
Alam ahl em, I'm not one hundred percent sean how
to pronounce it. One prisoner at the camp remembered him
as the young American who announced you are free. For Kissinger,
the overwhelming memory of this experience with seeing inmates he
described as being barely recognizable as humans and feeling the

(46:53):
instinct to feed them before learning that some were so
starved that solid food would kill them shortly thereafter. Yeah,
I mean, one thing you gotta say, he does not like,
he's not a sheltered upbringing, and you, I.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
Mean, like you would be like, oh, maybe that could
be the influence that made him be like oh, you
know you can. There's good you can provide, like provide
the people who are tortured and starved.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Some you know.

Speaker 4 (47:17):
Yeah, you could take away from this like, my god,
war is evil and we should do everything we can.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
Yeah, right, as opposed to yeah maybe, well, let's see
how it plays out, Dave.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Maybe this is the sixth part behind the Bastards episode
about a cool dude who does nice things. I just
brought you guys here to talk about a chill guy.
So shortly after liberating this concentration camp, Kissinger writes an
essay on his experience where he asks quote who was
lucky the man who draws circles in the sand and

(47:51):
mumbles I am free? Or the bones that are interred
in the hillside. He concludes from the experience that this
is humanity in the twentieth century. So, I mean an
understandably bleak take from liberating a concentration cam. Yeah that's fair.
You know, what is a bad time to move to

(48:12):
an ad plug.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
I didn't think you're gonna be brave enough to do this,
but fair enough?

Speaker 6 (48:21):
Boy?

Speaker 5 (48:22):
Wow, yeah, you know what makes me hungry.

Speaker 3 (48:28):
Probably shouldn't go too far down that road. Let the
ads do the talk. Let the ads do the talking.

Speaker 5 (48:35):
The ads are going to come and win the same
way the Soviet Union did.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
Wave after wave of men into Nazi trenches. Anyway, I
think we lost it. We had it for a minute,
and there I took it too far, you know, I
took it there.

Speaker 3 (48:54):
Here we go.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Oh we're back. So when the war ends, World War two,
you know that is uh. Sergeant Henry Kissinger finds himself
as quote the absolute ruler of a small village named Binsheim.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
He enjoys this experience. He really starts to like having power.
One thing that we're.

Speaker 4 (49:19):
Getting here is that he adores having power over people.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Yeah, he really likes it.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
In his letters, he celebrates repeatedly to his family that
he has quote absolute authority to arrest people.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
And it's this is this is problematic because of what
he does later.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
I will say, if you are a Jewish kid who
has to flee Germany and then you come back and
get made like the military head of a town that's
full of former Nazis, I get reveling in it a
little bit.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (49:52):
Well for me, I'm having beheading tuesdays, if that's me.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah. So again, he's not because of what he does later.
This is unsettling, but like it's understandable in the moment. Yeah,
he appropriates a luxury home and a fancy car, both
of which had to have belonged to some Nazi, which
is like, it's what you do, right.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
He gets a butler.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
He brags back to his family that he's a Nazi butler,
a fucking Nazi butler.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
For not giving me butter. Yeah, that is that is obvious. Now.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
That said, he's also, to his credit, really aware of
not wanting the Germans in town to identify this guy
who is absolute ruler as being Jewish. I think because
he doesn't want it to make things up problems for
people whose Jewish people who stay behind in Germany. He
makes other soldiers refer to him as mister Henry rather
than by his last name. He's conscious he doesn't want

(50:48):
them to think quote that the Jews were coming back
to take revenge. And he had a reputation in general
as being more objective as a as a ruler in
this kind of period than most Jewish veterans in similar positions.
In general, Henry counciled accommodation in rapprochma with one exception Communists.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
The civil of course, fucking like understandable beer, Yeah yeah,
the Nazis butmi yeah yeah, And that's literally what happens.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
So the Cold War, you know, early stages in nineteen
forty six, but already in that period, Kissinger advocates strict
surveillance of German civilians for left wing sympathies.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
And yeah, that's Nazis just doing like did Yeah, the
left is due, the left is due. He doesn't want them.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
He also wants to ban Communists from teaching at the
local schools, which.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
Again is what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (51:50):
He went straight Nazi all of a sudden. Yeah, he's
he's definite. Well let's say fascists. Let's let's say fascists. Okay, yeah,
fascist now, yeah, he does a bit.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
He does a bit.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
He starts dating a gentile German girl during this period,
because again he's not very religious. His letters home to
his parents though, because they don't like this at all.
They're they're like, you're losing your your faith, and Henry
gets very combative with them. He sees them as irrational, writing, quote,
to me, there is not only right or wrong, but
many shades in between. The Real tragedies in life are
not choices between right and wrong, real difficulties, bare difficulties

(52:26):
of the soul, provoking agonies which you and your world
of black and white can't begin to comprehend.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
How's the dog? How's the dog? Love you, mom? Love
you mom? Alsopuffs good.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Is his.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
And his parents. His parents have their reaction real died
where they're like, hey, how are you? Hey? It seems
like the war may have effect on you.

Speaker 5 (52:57):
I've said this ever since you met the mono, but
you're really intense.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yeah, maybe maybe all of the things you've seen have
had an impact on you. And herey response to this
by getting enraged and saying, not everybody came out of
this war as a psycho neeurotic.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
Oh, that shows them. That'll teach them that that's exact.
That's fine, that's fine, that's exactly right. That's the right
reaction of a non psycho neurotic.

Speaker 5 (53:21):
When you're when you're screaming, I'm not a psycho neurotic.

Speaker 3 (53:24):
In letters, you're a psycho neurotic. I got from Garland Camp.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
If all they're saying is like, hey, Henry, do you
think maybe seeing a concentration camp has left some mental
scars that you need to like heal from.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
Hey, maybe I should drive that to the toilet. Okay,
all right, buddy, all right, path We're just we're just
writing letters here, buddy. We're just writing some letters. That's
all we're doing. It's one of those things.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
This is a period of time obviously, like every like
one of the things that causes what happens later in
American history is that sixteen million Americans go to war
and a bunch of them get traumatized, and they come
back to a world where like their dad would always like,
if you talk about your feelings, I'm going to hit you.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
Hearry's family doesn't seem to be like that. His parents
are like, hey, do you want to talk about your feelings?
And he's like, I'm not crazy.

Speaker 4 (54:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Obviously, obviously, the fact that this is a time in
which like men don't fucking do therapy does have an
impact on it. But I think his family's probably more
understanding than well.

Speaker 3 (54:23):
He also has no I mean even now, he has
no acknowledgment of like his trauma. So yeah, even in
the actual moment, I mean, you're probably even more defensive.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
You know.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
In nineteen forty seven, Kissinger finally decides to leave Germany
for the second time. On Fritz Kramer's advice. He applies.
He applies late to Harvard, and he was accepted, winning
one of the two national scholarships the school gave New
Yorkers each year.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
Wow, now, chop trap house did a tournament of evil
people from Harvard.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
It's a and a Kissinger one. So yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
Oh bo, the IVY League no good at producing bad people.
Maybe we should look into that one. So one of
his classmates recalls, and he obviously he does. Like it's
Henry Kissinger. He's very good at school. One of his
classmates recalls that he quote worked harder and studied more
than anybody else on campus.

Speaker 3 (55:18):
He school. He at school.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
He couldn't stop him from shoving pencils.

Speaker 3 (55:23):
In his mouth the campus like Godzilla would have. He
nearly died.

Speaker 2 (55:27):
He almost died from lead. His studies so absorbed him
that he ignored the people around him. He made quote
no lasting friendships with other students. He seemed scarcely aware
of the extraordinary range of people gathered around him. So
Kissinger's ideology evolved along the lines Kramer had started him
off on. He agreed with Girtha I believe, as the

(55:48):
name of the German philosopher that if he quote had
to choose between justice and disorder on the one hand,
an injustice in order on the other, I would always
choose the latter.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
So, well, there we go.

Speaker 3 (55:58):
He's made his choice very telling, Like we know, we know,
we get up. Yeah, it's just nice to know where
like around the time, Like, okay, so he was pretty defined. Okay,
So Henry, you know some other people who thought that
order was more important than justice. Yeah, they had an
impact on your child. Yeah yeah, no shit, yeah, but yeah,

(56:21):
it's just such a too.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
It's a strange thing that it's so conscious, like he yeah,
he's so completely aware of it.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, Like he's like a psychopath. He might be.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
I mean, I think if you're I try to do
too much like the psychoanalyzing people. But like fucking maybe.

Speaker 4 (56:38):
Right, Well, psychopaths are very good at the stuff you
talked about winning people over in the room, you know, ladies, man,
Like there is a they learn how to be a
human and then they sort of and.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
A lot of you got syphlicid camp and a lot
of them simplicit camp like Henry Kissingerry Well, Sophie.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Can we let's green light some Henry kiss some t
shirts that are just Henry Kissinger with his face riding
off from syphilis. People are gonna want to wear them.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
He's making the kissy lips and his lips are falling
off like a Kissinger. Let me French Kissinger you.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
So he meets his second mentor at Harvard. Henry Kissinger
has a lot of mentors, and this is maybe a
lesson to never mentor anybody. You never know they might
become Henry Kissinger. Yeah, don't teach people things. Sabotage them
at every step. Right next time you drive past a kindergarten,
throw him a textbook that's all lies, you know, Just

(57:42):
slow him down. So his second mentor is this guy,
William yandell Elliott. And Elliott has is a professor at Harvard.
He's also like very politically connected. He had advised several
US presidents on international matters. And Kissinger was drawn to
this guy because not only is he a respected educator,
but he's really well connected to people with power. And

(58:05):
Elliott one of the things that like, he is famous
for being a big advocate of is is what's called
real politique as embodied by you know, and particularly the
guys that Kissinger grows up admiring, and that Elliott, you know,
helps teach him to admire. I'm in like Klauswitz and Bismarck,
these these these guys who are like Bismarck is the
dude who makes Germany right, we have it, We get

(58:28):
a Germany because Bismarck orchestrates, over a period of like
I think it's decades, gradually he welds all these different
German principalities and kingships together and then helps to orchestrate
this war, which out of which emerges Germany. Like that's
the kind of dude that Auto von Bismarck is, and
he is kind of the master of the kind of
politics that Kissinger comes to respect. And he Kissinger calls

(58:51):
Klauswitz and Bismarck philosophers of history. That's how he sees
this guy, these guys which is not really what I
would call out of on Mark, Like he's very good
at what he does, obviously, but not I wouldn't call
him a philosopher. I want to quote now from the
book Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandon. From these thinkers, Kissinger
cobbled together his own view of how history operated. It

(59:14):
was not a story of liberal progress or of class consciousness,
or of cycles of history, or of cycles of birth, maturity,
and decline. Rather, it was a series of meaningless incidents
fleetingly given shape by the application of human will. As
a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history
for analogies to gild their triumphs. Well the vanquished sought

(59:34):
out historical causes of their misfortune. So, yeah, yeah, you
know stuff, it's it's maybe not yeah, yeah, you can
think about that however you want. So a lot of
folks who analyze the the Kissinger in this period seize

(59:57):
on one sentence in Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, and his thesis
is titled The Meaning of History that they can kind
of explains a lot of what comes to be going down.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
What an old paper it is, right, I mean, honestly,
he's not a dude who makes like little leaps, right, Yeah,
why do we love this is the line.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
The realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except
by an inward experience, which is you know, read it again,
the realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except
by an inward experience.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
Wow, and this is this is a.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Like a heavily influenced by French existentialism. His thesis cites
Jean Paul Sart a lot, and both Start and Kissinger
think that morality is not an inward thing. It's determined
by actions, which is not an unreasonable thing to believe,
right that, like what matters is what you do. You know,
there's that line from the Bible. You're not damned by
what goes into your head, but like what you know
comes out right, Like, that's not an unreasonable thing to believe.

(01:00:59):
Start he believes that like action creates the possibility of intellect,
individual and collective responsibility. Right, that morality is determined by action,
but that our actions create this possibility of like individual
and collective moral responsibility for things. Kissinger does not come
to that conclusion. Kissinger believes that morality is determined by action,

(01:01:20):
but he also thinks that, like you, moral indeterminacy is
a condition of human freedom.

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
It's this idea that you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
Can't be bound by morality and be free. If you
want to freely act, you have to be able to
act above morality, right, Look.

Speaker 4 (01:01:35):
That's yeah, so that's that's just giving yourself an excuse
to do heinous acts.

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
I mean, a lot of his intellectual development is him,
and I'll you know, also a lot of this is
obviously all of this. One of the things that you
have to account for is all of this analysis of
like his development intellectually comes after he does all the
horrible things like so sure right from him and from
like the people who are sources who are saying this
is what he was, like is a kid. There is
that degree of biasing, right, like that this is after

(01:02:04):
he is the person that he is, Because if he
had gone on to like just be a professor, nobody
would have given a shit about what Henry.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Kiss the accountant said that. I'd be like, yeah, look,
just you what do I owe?

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Yeah? Yeah, tell me what the irs gets? Man, don't
I don't need another lecture on this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Yeah. And Kissinger's the fact that he becomes so kind of.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Moral relativism is the word of use. I don't even
know if that's right, but like this idea that like
freedom and morality are kind of like inherently opposed. This
upsets a lot of people around him, including people who
are like his big supporters, including that professor Elliott guy
at his retirement party, Henry Kissinger. Elliott's retirement party, Henry
Kissinger and a number of students gather to like bid

(01:02:44):
him farewell, and journalist David Helberstam wrote that Elliott had
positive things to say about almost all of his students
who had gathered there, but when he reached Kissinger, he
said this, Henry, He began, You're brilliant, but you're arrogant.
In fact, you're the most arrogant man I've ever met.
Kissinger became ashen faced. Mark my words. Elliott continued, your

(01:03:05):
arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
Oh oh, that is amazing so many levels, like at
your retirement party to be like hey and you listen,
ship bag, chill out, and then for that also to
be totally incorrect, Like you know, I saw this like
clip of some some guy in like Atlantic City talking
to Trump when Trump is going like, well, what is

(01:03:28):
what makes a native American? And the guy just goes, sir,
I'm glad You're never gonna get into any real power.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
And you're like, oh, dude, oh dude, well, and one
of the things like this, the Professor Elliott is like
one of the guys who helps get him his first
big gigs and shit, like he's a major bass and
I think this is kind of him belatedly being.

Speaker 10 (01:03:48):
Like, well no ooops boosy, poopsy, poopsy, poopsie.

Speaker 3 (01:03:52):
I'm gonna go patronize a Cambodian restaurant just to make
myself feel of the more. Yeah right, real well, when
he went like, dude, just give me the tip slip.
Don't I know the food, Just give me a tip slip.
I owe you guys. I'm not going to tell you why.
Here you go, don't worry about it. Take my take everything.
Here's my pin hanged. I gotta go. Do you know
if there's a Bangladeshi restaurant nearby? I'm actually heading a

(01:04:15):
lot of spots tonight in not eating. I'll be honest.
I'm going to a lot of places. No no, not German, No,
not German, no, no, not German. You know what, They're
actually fine? I don't think I Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:04:28):
So his thesis him, well, that that thing that that
he says to Kissinger, it it should be what happens.

Speaker 4 (01:04:36):
But our society rewards psychopaths above anybody else, and.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
To be most societies.

Speaker 4 (01:04:44):
Yeah, so what the things should be is the opposite.
What he's talking about is a just world, which.

Speaker 3 (01:04:50):
Isn't what this is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
And it's it's one of those things. This is something
like that. Get kind of more into anthropological thinking. But like,
one of the reasons people will say, like why we
have psychopaths is that if you're in a band of
seventy people who are like hunter gatherers, starving through the winter,
it's helpful to have a guy like Henry Kissinger. You
can say, like, well, these six people are too old

(01:05:13):
and sick, and we have to let them die otherwise
we'll all starve. Right, that's a situation which it's good
to have a psychopath because you need someone who just
doesn't give a shit about certain things. When you have
a society of billions that's global, it becomes a problem
because that kind of thinking is not so useful and
tends to just get millions and millions of people killed.
It's not great anyway. Henry's thesis is published in nineteen

(01:05:38):
fifty at roughly the same time Harry Truman decides to
send troops to Korea and to aid French forces in Vietnam.
Professor Elliott told Kissinger that the Korean War was an
example of the East quote testing the civilization of the West. Yeah,
people doing their own thing in their own country is
a test to us, like the Koreans in the Vietnamese

(01:06:00):
having completely their own shit going on as a test
of us in the United States.

Speaker 3 (01:06:05):
How dare you?

Speaker 2 (01:06:07):
You know, ho Chi men not wanting to be ruled
over by the French is really a test of American power.
It's very sting, I mean, and obviously they see that,
like the Soviet Union's ormonstrating all this, and the Soviet
Union is involved too.

Speaker 3 (01:06:18):
But like they're looking at us in the eyes. They've
got their own shit going on. Dude, they are on
the same level. How dare they do this?

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
So, as the US increased its commitments to a growing
series of wars in Southeast Asia, Kissingery got more dedicated
to the work of a guy named Oswald Spangler. Spangler's
book The Declient of the West is not something I
am well equipped to describe or explain in detail, but
Greg Grandon is, so I'm going to quote from him again.
Spangler waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality.

(01:06:52):
He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience
that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct,
in creativity rain we have, Spengler thought, hardly, yet an
inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and
experiences is only disguise, only image and expression. To get
behind image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests,

(01:07:13):
and grasp what Spinler called destiny, one needed not information
but intuition, not facts but hunches, not reason but a
soul sense, a world feeling. Often enough, a statesman does
not follow, does not know what he is doing, Spengler wrote,
But that does not prevent him from following with confidence.
Just the one path that leads to success.

Speaker 3 (01:07:33):
Oh my god, and that is George W. Bush crawl
out of a pile of goon now I means for
our freedom.

Speaker 2 (01:07:42):
George Bush like pops out of Henry's Kissinger's back, is Apollo's.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Rumsfeld bush like thing like way now where they are
there in the east west north and.

Speaker 2 (01:07:59):
Kissinger finds this logic intoxicating, But he did disagree with
Spingler about Spengler's primary contention, which is that civilizational decay
was inevitable. Spengler argued that civilizations had spring, summers, autumns,
and winters, right, that they proceed through kind of like
inevitable stages, and there's not really any way to stop
this procession, right, which is I think a pretty reasonable

(01:08:19):
like yeah, and civilization is going to have like a
life cycle, right, that's a thing like historically you can
argue pretty well, Kissinger doesn't believe.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
This everything dies. Yeah, well that's actually.

Speaker 2 (01:08:31):
Not with.

Speaker 3 (01:08:34):
Of course, the man who is like living way beyond
his shelf life is like told you so, doesn't die.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
So here's grand and again talking about Kissinger. How Kissinger
grapples with this aspect of Spangler having lost a sense
of purpose. Civilizations lurch outward defined, meaning they get caught
up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to
doom by history's cosmic beat, power for power's sake, blood
for blood. Imperialism is the inevitable product of this final stage,
Kissinger wrote, summing up the decline of the West's argument

(01:09:04):
an outward thrust to hide the inner void. Kissinger accepted
Spengler's critique of past civilizations, but rejected his determinism. Decay
was not inevitable, Spengler, Kissinger said, merely described a fact
of decline, and not its necessity. There is a margin,
he would write in his memoirs, between necessity and accident,
in which the statesman, by perseverance and intuition, must choose

(01:09:27):
and thereby shape the destiny of his people. So Spingler's like, yeah,
it seems like when civilizations lose their purpose and start
to age, they lurch out what engage in wars of
imperial conquest and a search for meaning, and that leads
to disaster, which destroys them. And Kissinger's like, but what
if you did the War's right?

Speaker 3 (01:09:42):
Yeah, but you were well what if I was involved
in everyone? What if I was like Mickey in the
corner of Rockie.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
Yeah, it's it isn't amazing, like this guy being like,
here is what happens to empires every single time there's
an empire. This is a thing you can go through
history and see constantly occurs through thousands of years.

Speaker 3 (01:10:02):
And Kisser's just like, no, I can do it, right,
But to be like, no, you're pretty you're pretty close.
You're pretty close. Bah I saw.

Speaker 4 (01:10:11):
I'm just thinking kill more like I heard what you
said ups and downs, but I think you wipe everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:10:17):
Out, you know, if you try to get blood.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
It is the same logic I have seen. Every time
I've seen more than one person get stuck in the mud,
it's always either one person gets stuck in the mud
or fifty two. Because one person gets stuck in the
mud and the other forty nine go well, I saw
it happened to that guy. But I think I can
figure it out. I can get around.

Speaker 6 (01:10:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:10:35):
Yeah, yeah. It's almost like when you enter Congress. I've
got a plan. I've got a plan. Oh I get money. Oh,
never mind, I don't have a plan.

Speaker 4 (01:10:45):
Plan.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
Yeah, well, I have a plan, but it's a different one,
and you are not going to like it a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:10:49):
More about a pool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:10:55):
In nineteen fifty one, Henry got a gig working as
a consultant with the Army on psychological war fair while
he finished his graduate studies. Kissinger's doctoral thesis on the
Congress of Vienna did not seem overly relevant to politics,
but its first sentence had discussed nuclear weapons and proposed
to readers that the efforts of British and Australia, and
that the efforts the British and Austrians made to contain

(01:11:16):
Napoleon might be useful in handling the Soviet Union. I
might argue, did Napoleon have a way to end all
life on Earth if things went badly with Containa? Was
that a factor in Napoleon.

Speaker 3 (01:11:30):
A sword?

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
Kissinger believes he sees that containment is a failure, which
it is because people do not like being colonies, and
if the opposition to being a colony is communism, they'll
be like, well, let's try communism. Being a colony seems
to suck. So Kissinger sees that containment is a failure.
But he also believes believes not that like, well, why

(01:11:52):
don't we just like let people do things and like
just take care of our own shit. He's like, no,
because containment's a failure, war with.

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
The Soviet Union is inevitable.

Speaker 2 (01:12:01):
Now, in Kissinger's view, this has nothing to do with
the actions of the United States, but as instead quote,
because of the existence of the United States as a
symbol of capitalist democracy. It is literally the early extent
of like, well, they hate us for our freedom, right right, yeah, right, yeah,
Like that's that's that's where he's starting down. Obviously a
lot of people are saying shit like this, right, this

(01:12:22):
is not a Kissinger invention. You know, you've got the
John Birch Society all sorts of shits. Yeah, on this period,
I don't want to give him too much credit there.
It's clear by this point that Henry was going to
get into politics, although law enforcement was a possibility too,
because when heked on, he gets he starts being a
professor at Harvard right like after he graduates and stuff.
He starts like helping out his stuff and teaching some classes.

(01:12:42):
And at one point the school hosts an international seminar,
and when he hears that like a bunch of foreign
academics are coming to Harvard, he calls the FBI and
volunteers to spy on people for as.

Speaker 3 (01:12:56):
I mean, honestly, it is so amazing with his background
to be like to have that attitude. It just is,
it really is. It's hard. It's hard to get there.
You got to give him credit. The man covers some ground.
The man is a Batman villain, Yeah, he really is.

Speaker 2 (01:13:14):
So Yeah, his love of politics and his first attempt
to build influence at Harvard Is by starting a journal
named Confluence. Now, this is ostensibly a journal that exists
to create what he calls an international forum for discussion. Right,
I just want to get good people talking from all
around the world, you know, let the ideas fly. It's
like got Ted talk kind of pitch. Sure, but he's
really vague about He doesn't really seem to care about

(01:13:35):
what particular discussions he encourages, and his critics would later
claim that this journal was quote a fake, primarily an
enterprise designed to make Kissinger known to powerful people. Right, Yeah,
like he's just giving letting powerful people write articles because
then he gets them in and he gets their their
phone number. Right, it's they're mainly working. Yeah, he's not working.

(01:13:56):
Confluence leads to Henry's first mention in the pages of
the New York Time Times, and despite what his critics claim,
which is probably broadly accurate, the journal did also publish
some really significant figures, including Reinhold Neighbor and Hannah Rint.
But while he claimed commitment to free discourse, Kissinger had
a real tendency to publish right wing shitheads, including Enoch Powell,

(01:14:16):
a conservative British politician famous for comparing immigration to quote
rivers of blood.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):
Well, that's fair. I mean I've always agreed with that.
I mean, that is just sovers. I love a blood river. Oh,
the laziest of rivers. Mm yeah, because you float real good.
Oh yeah, yeah, it's molasses.

Speaker 4 (01:14:37):
That's freedom you can if you can say immigrants are
like a river of blood, that's the freedom he's talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:14:44):
That's the freedom.

Speaker 2 (01:14:45):
You want to know what other kind of freedoms he's interested.
I'm going to quote from Nil Ferguson from the book
Kissinger here an article by Ernst von Sullomon, a right
wing German writer who had been convicted for his role
the assassination of Walter Rathanow, a German foreign minister in
the Weimar Republic. The article provoked an angry letter from

(01:15:07):
Shepherd Stone of the Ford Foundation, who had provided money
for both the International Seminar and the journal. So, first note,
he publishes a guy who's basically pretty close to a Nazi,
a far right German terrorist in the in the Weimar years,
and it's so upsetting that a representative of the Ford
Foundation complaints.

Speaker 3 (01:15:26):
I mean, if you can upset the you're crossing that line.

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
If the Ford Foundation is like your connection to a
Nazi worries met.

Speaker 3 (01:15:35):
Hey you have, and that's coming from us who I'm
really who we are, like tuper find of that look.

Speaker 2 (01:15:41):
I have the protocols of the Elders of Zion tattooed
on my chest. But Ford Foundation employees, I'm gonna.

Speaker 3 (01:15:48):
Throw a flag on the play. I'm still a flag
in the play. And are Carr's coming out the Ford
Ta yeah, oh man so quote.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
Stone was appalled that Kissinger would publish an article by
a criminal and a Nazi sympathizer like Solomon. Kissinger told
Stone he disliked Solomon and opposed what he stood for,
considering him a damned soul driven by the furies. Demonstrating
a remarkable self confidence for a graduate student, Kissinger defended
himself for publishing the article. I may air occasionally on
the side of two great tolerance, partly because I believe

(01:16:23):
our readers sufficiently mature to make their own judgments. Kissinger
argued that what Solomon represented was a symptom of certain
tendencies of our age, but that by appearing in a
liberal journal like Confluence, Solomon was the one who was compromised.
Kissinger was not simply defending free speech. He had solicited
the article from Solomon, telling the German about quote, having
long admired your writing. See, hom I could not share

(01:16:45):
your point of view. What so it gets better and
more relevant to today because when there's an outcry against this,
Kissinger writes a letter to his friend Kramer and says,
I have now joined you as the cardinal villain in
liberal demail analogy.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
Oh my god, this is he's just doing it. Now,
he's just doing it. Now, he's got the monicle that too.

Speaker 5 (01:17:08):
It's like you're Glenn Greenwald talked to Joe Rogan.

Speaker 3 (01:17:11):
Yes, It's like, what the how?

Speaker 2 (01:17:13):
How is this still happening? How are you the pioneer
of this? Henry Kissinger? How are you the pioneer of this?

Speaker 3 (01:17:20):
Oh? That's his explanation if you're if you're me just
listening to like, uh okay, okay, I'm not sure what
he's saying, but all right, okay, So we got to
hear from this nazi who shot a dude? You okay
because you all right? Well, is it'll anger the lips
as light as you said. It's cool.

Speaker 5 (01:17:42):
And next next month we have ed Gean is doing
a little.

Speaker 3 (01:17:45):
Number, and Deane's gonna walk us through lamp workings.

Speaker 2 (01:17:51):
So and then we're having the Zodiac Killer on to
teach us about proper parking technique.

Speaker 3 (01:17:58):
Uh huh pentagram. He'd actually be pretty good at that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:06):
So, once he had finished his dissertation and graduated, Henry
found himself in need of like a steady He's doing
like it wasn't a professor at that point, but he
was like doing like graduate students, you know, helping to
teach whatever. I didn't do a college so, but you
know how grad students teach shit and stuff. But he
wants like a full on gig. He's trying to get
an actual full time job as an assistant professor, but

(01:18:27):
he's not able to because most people don't like Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 3 (01:18:30):
I wonder any reason why a lot of people at
Harvard not a huge fan loving the Nazi publishing June. Yeah,
they are. They consider him slightly problematic.

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
Drifts for a bit, he's unable to find work, you know,
and he's still he's still doing some stuff at Harvard,
but he's like not He's kind of a drift in
his career until in nineteen fifty four he runs into
a friend Arthur Slushinger, Junior at Harvard slashing our head
a letter in his possession from a former Secretary of
the Air Force defending Eisenhower. The Eisenhower administration standard of

(01:19:07):
threatening massive retaliation for the to the Soviets. Now, the
gist of this idea that the Eisenhower administration really kicked
off was that if we promise the Soviets that if
there's ever a confrontation, we will immediately like send out
a world in inhale of nukes, right, then those lines
won't get crossed, Right, we won't have any kind of
fight at all. If like that, if everyone knows those
are the stakes, then nothing will happen. Right, That's the idea.

(01:19:30):
Kissinger disagrees with this take, right, which is reasonable to
disagree with. Right, there's a lot of problems with the
we will in the world if there's any kind of issue.

Speaker 3 (01:19:38):
To take, he's gonna make it worse. He's gonna make
it worse.

Speaker 2 (01:19:44):
He shared us that that's exactly what he does, Gareth,
because because Kissingers, we'll talk about what he does in
a bit. But he writes a letter kind of writing
out some critiques to this, and he has his friend
Nelson Rockefeller send it to Eisenhower. He's friends with Nelson Rockefeller,
but su everyone is in this period. When the President

(01:20:05):
rejects Kissinger's analysis, at the advice of John Foster Dullis,
Rockefeller resigns and he resigns from his job with the administration,
which like temporarily closes a door to Henry. But the
letter that Kissinger had received was well enough, like popular
enough among other thinkers in Washington that it earns him
a job offer heading a study group at the Council
on Foreign Relations studying nuclear weapons and foreign policy. But

(01:20:29):
of course, Henry's problem with massive retaliation wasn't that using
nuclear weapons was unconscionable. It was that the world ending
nature of the threats the Eisenhower administration was making meant
they would never knew anybody. And Kissinger thought this was
a terrible idea. So he thought that nuclear weapons should
be used tactically to secure battlefield victories against the communists.

Speaker 3 (01:20:49):
What's happening? He thinks?

Speaker 5 (01:20:53):
He thinks it's bad to have nukes and not use them.

Speaker 3 (01:20:55):
He's yeah, that's his answer, that's his angle. What in
the fuck?

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
Yeah, it's wild that in this argument between if there's
a fight, will kill everybody? Or what if we just
try using nukes a little bit the kill everybody. Guys
have the more reasonable take.

Speaker 3 (01:21:13):
I mean, really, you're close, you're close together.

Speaker 5 (01:21:17):
Yeah, we can get off a couple of much faster.

Speaker 2 (01:21:20):
It's it's incredible. And also but like again, this is
this he's the people he's arguing with is the Eisenhower administration.
Nelson Rockefeller is not a right winger who's like, this
guy's got some shit going on. You know, we should
listen to him, and like, he's a lot of people
who are not like, you know, hard right dudes are like, yeah,

(01:21:40):
maybe it makes sense we got to be using these
like tactical nuclear we consider the possibility. You know, he
makes a good point. He uses smart words and about
nuking folks words. So that is part one of our
epic series Henry Kissinger Jesus Christ, dude, maybe become an accountant?

Speaker 6 (01:22:00):
What a guy.

Speaker 2 (01:22:01):
In part two we'll talk about how he gets into power.
So that's going to be a.

Speaker 3 (01:22:04):
Hoot for everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:22:06):
But I feel like before we do that, you guys,
do you guys like do you like them, like like
like a giant influential popular podcast that maybe this, this
podcast is heavily influenced by.

Speaker 3 (01:22:18):
Is that something you guys do are you talking about Rogan?

Speaker 2 (01:22:20):
Yes, yes, you are both Joe Rogan, right, yeah, the
doll Yes, the dollar it is your podcast, we believe,
yes that that was your six part series, The Dollups.

Speaker 3 (01:22:35):
Why we need the nuke PI Go for it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:40):
Check out The doll Up.

Speaker 3 (01:22:41):
If you have not already. Just a fucking, very very
funny podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
You guys want to plug anything else before we roll
out into part two?

Speaker 3 (01:22:49):
I mean my ears a couple of times during this,
but yeah, well you can dot com. We're on tour
all over the place and domestically soon. That will be
very exciting. I am excited for tour touring to exist
again in our lives. Yeah, fingers crossed until part two.

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
Go home and read some Oswald Spangler and then disagree
with it in a way that makes you much much worse.

Speaker 3 (01:23:19):
Yep, yes, put the monica on the bad eye.

Speaker 2 (01:23:22):
Yeah all right, Oh, welcome back to what is either
Behind the doll Up or Dollup the Bastards, a podcast that,
no matter what name we choose for it is about
tickling absolutely.

Speaker 3 (01:23:42):
This finally, is that's how you make us feel at home?
Thank you.

Speaker 5 (01:23:46):
Do you think anyone has ever tickled Kissinger?

Speaker 2 (01:23:49):
I can't imagine. I cannot picture it in my head.

Speaker 3 (01:23:52):
This is the way he would laugh. Stop it, I'm
going to work with my pants.

Speaker 2 (01:24:06):
I just try to imagine him whispering into the ears
of a sexual partner something.

Speaker 3 (01:24:14):
I'm about I'm going to know. It'd be more like
I'm going to end this corpse. Only one of us
makes it out a lie. I actually did.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
While we were taking a break in between episodes, I
had a moment where I actually did for the first
time in my life, I felt a profound sense of
solidarity with Henry Kissinger. My cat is named Saddam Hussein,
and as I was feeding him during the break, I realized,
like Kissinger did at one point, he's gotten much bigger.
Saddam has gotten much larger than I ever thought he would.

(01:24:54):
You know this is I did not anticipate this. Yeah,
well that's because you there's a lot to love what
you just said. Kissinger wouldn't make the same mistake. Oh
so yes, let's uh, let's uh, let's get get right

(01:25:14):
back down. What is for Kissinger memory Lane and is
what for everyone else is Nightmare Avenue, because this is
the story about why Vietnam lasted an extra half decade.
Good time, We're gonna have a fun one here. So
one of the mini downsides of an intellectual upbringing like
the one Henry Kissinger experienced is that he spent a

(01:25:36):
lot of time surrounded by people you might call political technologists. Now,
this is a term I first heard in Ukraine from
civilians describing Paul Manifort. That's what they called them. Political Yeah, yeah,
these like hired guns who come in and help anybody
who just happens to like have government money, like do

(01:25:56):
literally anything. Right. There're guys like his mentor, professor Elliott
and like Harvard economists Thomas Schnelling, who advised powerful elected leaders,
and like they all of the way in which they
think about the mechanisms of government are very mathematic and inhuman.

Speaker 3 (01:26:11):
Right, those are the.

Speaker 2 (01:26:14):
People that Kissinger patterns him self off of. Now, Schnelling,
who are Shelling? Who is just Thomas Shelling, who's a
Harvard economists we just introduced was one of Kissinger's other mentors,
and Shelling at the same time as he's he's working
at Harvard and mentoring Kissinger is advising the Eisenhower administration
on moral calculus in the early stages of the Cold War.

Speaker 3 (01:26:34):
Shelling argues, calculus, moral calculus? Have you never have you
never talked about that with anybody? Is he not a
common condres now? No? Sorry? No, I mean I was
terrible at calculus. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
Well you can't be moral and no calculus, which is
why you know, like polepot, I'm going to eventually set
all of my listeners after people who know math.

Speaker 3 (01:26:59):
That's that's the gold Bobby right there. How did we
get We're not sure, sir, No idea, No possible to say,
no way, incalculable. People keep trying to tell us, and
we just kill them. Adam to the pile. Someone had
two numbers, but we were unable to We can't negotiate it. Yeah,
so uh.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
Shelling is advising the Eisenhewer administration on moral calculus in
the Cold War, and Shelling's argument is that whether you
were quote deterring the Russians or your own children, the
proper tactic was to figure out the right ratio of
threat to incentive. So already Shelling might be the quickest
I've ever described a person and had it be clear like, well,

(01:27:41):
that's a bastard.

Speaker 3 (01:27:42):
That's not okay obviously.

Speaker 5 (01:27:45):
So since I have no human feelings, I have to
figure out this. And children and murderers are the same.

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):
Yeah, children in the Soviet government only understand one thing, threats.

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):
Can I have more ice cream?

Speaker 9 (01:27:58):
Dad?

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):
Put your hand in the drawer and find out. Now,
there you go.

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
I'm gonna tell you something, Jimmy. You go for that
ice cream. I have a loaded thirty eight on the table.
Now one of the chambers is empty, Jimmy, So if
you give that ice cream, maybe the hammer goes Stepp.

Speaker 3 (01:28:15):
I just want to go to bed. I don't like dessert.
There you go, money, Honey. You just feel like moral
calculus is not the way to go with the ice cream.
Maybe maybe you could just say no if you don't
want him to have dessert. Any dad could say no,
I'm learning.

Speaker 1 (01:28:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:33):
So, while Henry was teaching at Harvard, and this is
before he gets we ended the last episode him getting
that gig with the Council on Foreign Relations learning about
nuclear policy. In the period before that, when like Shelling
is his mentor, Henry learns a lot from him and
he walks away from their relationship with the belief that
quote bargaining power comes from the capacity to hurt, to
cause quote sheer pain and damage.

Speaker 3 (01:28:54):
She means, fucking Christ, you're just kind of waiting for
this person to step into the vacuum essentially, right, like
you're waiting for someone to be like, you know, there's
actually a bottom that's under the bottom.

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
Yeah, oh oh my lord, it's like this shit, like
if that were true. We're all watching this situation unfold
between Russia and Ukraine where you've got like a lot
of people with the ability to hurt, a lot of
people on both sides.

Speaker 3 (01:29:16):
And you know what, it doesn't seem like negotiations are
going great. Yeah, not really. Maybe that's not a good
basis to proceed from anything with. Yeah, I mean, I
just I can't believe that.

Speaker 5 (01:29:30):
It's it's the craziest fucking idea.

Speaker 11 (01:29:33):
It's not.

Speaker 3 (01:29:34):
It's not.

Speaker 5 (01:29:34):
It's not negotiating.

Speaker 4 (01:29:36):
Yeah, you go into negotiations, you're like, I'm probably not
gonna get what I want.

Speaker 3 (01:29:40):
We're gonna try and get the best we can.

Speaker 5 (01:29:41):
And he's just like, how much can I fucking hurt you?

Speaker 2 (01:29:44):
And usually you give me if you spend enough time
like I do around like gun culture. People on the
right in particular, there's these folks who like usually have
never done anything like in the military themselves, but they
read a bunch of like books by Navy seals and shit,
and they'll say shit like you should have a plan
to kill everyone in every room you walk into, and
like their frame is that, like the world's dangerous, you
gotta be ready. And I think any reasonable person is like, well,

(01:30:07):
you are someone who should not have a gun.

Speaker 3 (01:30:08):
Yes, you should not have a gun. You are out
of your entire damn mind.

Speaker 5 (01:30:14):
Like this is a guy who should never be negotiating.

Speaker 2 (01:30:17):
Yeah, absolutely not ready to kill someone. Is like, you
know what, don't go into rooms. That's just going to
be your thing. You don't stay anywhere, stay in your house.

Speaker 3 (01:30:26):
You go to one room. Yeah no, I could.

Speaker 5 (01:30:28):
I could tell your throat.

Speaker 4 (01:30:30):
I could come reach across the table, tell your throat
out and stab you in the eyes with ice picks.

Speaker 5 (01:30:35):
So I'm just we're just talking about what.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
He just wants ice cream, Dan, He just asked you
for an ice cream, Dan.

Speaker 2 (01:30:44):
So Henry gets his gig at the at the CFR,
and so he's the thing he's producing for the Council
on Foreign Relations for his buddy the Rockefeller It's supposed
to be like a report on how the US is
like should use nuclear weapons different ways in which like
they could approach it right. And while he's writing this report,
because it's with this thing takes a very very long
process getting this out, he also starts working privately on

(01:31:07):
a book of his own titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
And this book is a version of the stuff he
wants to write. And this thing he's like fighting to
get out with the cspods. Yeah kind of, but also
it's actually very smart what he does. Well, it'll take
us a second to get there. So this book that
Kissinger writes, that's his own project, criticizes US threats of
full scale nuclear attack and response to Soviet aggression. Nil

(01:31:30):
Ferguson sums it up in this way quote with his
skill for simplifying and expressing complex ideas, Kissinger put the
issue starkly. The dilemma of the nuclear period can therefore
be defined as follows. The enormity of modern weapons makes
the thought of war repugnant, but the refusal to run
any risks would amount to giving Soviet rulers a blank check.
Kissinger's conclusions were not original. The study group at the

(01:31:52):
Council was almost unanimous in its desire to find some
alternative to Eisenhower's stated policy, and many defense intellectuals, most
notably Ard Brodie and Basil little Heart, had also written
on the subject of limited nuclear war. Kissinger's book demonstrated
his talent as a creative synthesizer of their ideas, drawing
out the implications of their work in arguing that for
America's Cold War diplomacy to have any real substance, the

(01:32:15):
US had to accept the possibility of the limited use
of nuclear weapons. That Kissinger's own solution of limited nuclear
war was also highly problematic, was less important to many
contemporary observers than that it broke free from the straight
jacket of the Eisenhower administration's policy.

Speaker 4 (01:32:29):
So, but where does he describe like where you would
use it is like a tactical battlefield book.

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
Is it's like to win battlefield victories? To like in Vietnam,
he will briefly flirt, well, not even all that briefly,
but he will consider using nuclear weapons to cut off
train access between Vietnam and China, which.

Speaker 3 (01:32:50):
Isn't sane, Like as as a layman, you can cut
off trains in another way, presumably, right. I mean I've
seen the General with buster keat and you could throw
some logs on it.

Speaker 5 (01:33:03):
There there are these other things called bombs, just bombs.

Speaker 3 (01:33:09):
Kissinger. Yeah, so it really, I mean it is kind
of just itchy trigger finger, and it is like, if
you live in the realm of this sort of dark thinking,
how are you not going to start, you know, thinking
of ways that are just even more vicious brutal.

Speaker 4 (01:33:25):
He's basically saying they need to think we're a chained
mad dog, and if we you let the dog off
the leash once and he attacks the postman and then
and then everyone's going to fucking.

Speaker 3 (01:33:36):
Know then you don't get the mail anymore. Yeah, then
you start seeing your mail. We've bombed Japan already, like
everyard gets it already, mind of course, Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:33:47):
Yeah, it's not like it's this theoretical weapon that's never
been used and.

Speaker 3 (01:33:51):
It worked pretty well as far as making people be like,
god damn, they are out of their minds. Yeah, look crazy,
oh shit.

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):
But it's all Also there's a there's a factor here
a part of me wonders if he even really believed
about this or cared about whether or not nukes should
be used tactically, and if it was more a matter
of this is a big debate of the day, and
if I publicly take the most contrarian thing intellectuals who
don't really care about what works, but who care about

(01:34:20):
who's thinking creatively, Like right, Like that's the thing. He's like, Well,
it's not about whether or not his plan would work.
It's about we're getting out of this straight jacket Eisenhower's
put us in. And it's like, no, that's not all
that matters.

Speaker 4 (01:34:30):
Finally, Yeah, you know, it's really funny, Well just ironic
about this is the funny fun it. Places like the
Heritage Foundation for years have been have been saying that
Prutin would use tactical battlefield nukes, and that's why he's unhinged.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
That's one of the reasons. Yeah, it's I would say,
anyone who would do that is crazy. Yeah, imagine keep
him on as an advisor.

Speaker 2 (01:35:01):
Yeah, yeah, that's my feeling on nuke's. Don't shoot them
at people ever?

Speaker 4 (01:35:09):
Yeah, yeah, its bad.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
Maybe an Independence Day kind of situation. I'll be honest,
when I watch Independence Day, I think, yeah, I might
shoot some news. I might at that point try a
nuker too. Yeah, but you have Randy Quaid I do.
I do hang out with him a lot. That's my
main plan. If things go wrong, Randy get on the plane.
He lives in my basement.

Speaker 3 (01:35:34):
That actually tracks from the Instagram videos I've been seeing.

Speaker 2 (01:35:40):
So Kissinger's book was published in nineteen fifty seven, and
it almost immediately sold seventeen thousand copies, which is a
lot for a wonky book on nuclear warfare. It is
on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks.

Speaker 3 (01:35:53):
Wow, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:35:55):
Yeah it's not great.

Speaker 3 (01:35:57):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
He's timing is perfect. He puts this book out right
as the Soviets make two big advances in Hungary, there's
like a revolution that they kind of crush, and then
in the Suez, where like that brings the British and
the French are like fucking around in the Suez Canal
and the Soviets are like stop or we'll do something bad,
and NATO like backs the fuck off. Right, So the
Soviets have like two big kind of foreign policy wins

(01:36:20):
in this period and Americans can't look at this as like, well,
you know, maybe the fucking NATO shouldn't have been fucking
around the Suez, and yeah, that shit in Hungry is
fucked up, but like maybe we can't do anything about it.
They're like, we should listen to the guy who says,
what if we nuked them, you.

Speaker 3 (01:36:34):
Know, don't run.

Speaker 2 (01:36:35):
Yeah, that's that's where people go, right, They don't. They
they're Americans. They don't take the rational route.

Speaker 3 (01:36:42):
Now, No, they hate us part nuclear freedom.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
Yeah, they listened to the crisiest person in the room
about this. Right, there's a lot of things that you
can say about both what happened in Hungary and the
Suez crisis that are not why don't we use nukes
more often?

Speaker 3 (01:36:56):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (01:36:56):
By God, kissing your noses, audience, you know, Kisody writes
this book, and The New York Times in their review
of it. Right, For the first time since President Eisenhower
took office, officials at the highest government levels are displaying
interest in the theory of the little or limited war.
The theory of massive retaliation is re examined. I love
that those are that those go together, those are the options.

Speaker 3 (01:37:20):
Yeah, and then it's like the little war is the
nuclear war, Like it's the baby war for us.

Speaker 4 (01:37:26):
Yeah yeah, hand me out, hear me out, baby nukes,
little tiny nukes.

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
Well yeah, it's like if someone's like, look, we got
to decide if one of which of these is going
to be legal Sarah nerve gas bombs for civilians or
or chlorine gas bombs for civilians. One type of poison
gas bomb has to be legal, like we all we
have to have access. Everyone has to be able to
have one kind of poison gas Two is crazy taste.

Speaker 3 (01:37:50):
Great?

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
What if nobody has those? Oh god, that's not you know,
that's not where things go here. So President Eisenhower is
given a summary of Kissinger's book. You know, he's a president.
They don't they don't read books. Yeah, it's gets Yeah,
he gets a cliff notes and he recommends it to
his Secretary of State John Foster Doulas we have talked
about quite a.

Speaker 3 (01:38:12):
Lot on God, it was just yeah, I mean, who, like,
if he's the rational mind.

Speaker 6 (01:38:18):
If Dulas is being like this, dude seems a little
out of his mind, big problem, that's yeah, that's not
great because John Foster Dulas fucking lunatic.

Speaker 2 (01:38:28):
Yeah yeah, So the vice president at this point is
a little dude you might have heard of called Richard
Millhouse Nixon. He gets photographed with a coffee copy of
Henry Kissinger's book, which is not great. I mean, it's
actually great, foreshadow, it's just not writing a screenplay.

Speaker 3 (01:38:44):
This is great.

Speaker 11 (01:38:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:38:46):
Really, this is like season one of the Nixon Show.
And you just like see him with Kissinger's book, right right, yeah,
yeah right, good television, you know. So the book is
successful enough that it provokes Rockefeller, who gotten in the
job at the CFR, to rush out the report that
Nixon had been or that Kissinger had been making. And yes,

(01:39:07):
christ yeah, the report from the CFR concludes, the willingness
to engage in nuclear war when necessary is part of
the price of our freedom.

Speaker 3 (01:39:15):
Wow, I mean the price of our freedom is pretty good.
Damn price he isn't it? Is it combinsive?

Speaker 2 (01:39:23):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:39:24):
Man?

Speaker 4 (01:39:25):
How can we How can we live if we're not dead?

Speaker 3 (01:39:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:39:28):
How can we live without nuclear fallout?

Speaker 3 (01:39:30):
It's it's and it's amazing that it like it all
like I if it was part of his plan or not.
Like you said, the timing is just pretty remarkable to
release this book and then it actually shifts the way
that they view this to me, Yeah, you know, it's
actually he's got a really good point in his best
selling book about how nukes are cool, how nukes are sweet.
You know I am.

Speaker 2 (01:39:50):
I am excited for Ben Shapiro's book on the same
subject to lead to the annihilation of the whole life.

Speaker 3 (01:39:56):
Yeah wait, I'm gonna live underground. So that's a good
idea to you.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
So this report is a weird like weirdly popular like again,
this is a report from the Center or from the CFR,
from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is like not
you don't expect that to go viral?

Speaker 3 (01:40:15):
Right, you know you read this pamphlet. Have you read
this study by the CFR.

Speaker 5 (01:40:24):
I mean, you can never let you down when you're like, oh,
that won't happen, that won't happen, that won't.

Speaker 3 (01:40:29):
Go Yeah right it does. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):
So Rockefeller actually goes on the Today Show to talk
about this report the CFR.

Speaker 3 (01:40:37):
Wither, I know, it's amazing Macaroni castrole.

Speaker 2 (01:40:41):
So next, so he gives people of the Today Show
an address where they can write for a copy of
this report. No, they get forty five thousand requests the
first day and.

Speaker 3 (01:40:56):
The next Hell's post office is over.

Speaker 11 (01:41:00):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):
Yeah, the media US media called this report quote the
answer to Sputnik, which is like, hey, the Russian sent
sent an unarmed ball into space to further exploration. We
should this book about how everyone should be nuking everyone.
It's the answer to that.

Speaker 3 (01:41:17):
We're thinking that this report on nuclear weapons will actually
show the Russians that to not go to space. Yeah,
that's space. If you get rid of Russias, I can't
go to space. Do you understand.

Speaker 2 (01:41:27):
Yeah, And it is it's worth noting because I think,
like in our popular history, the answer to Sputnik is
the Apollo missions and its frame beauty, which you know
did eventually happen. But no, the first answer to Sputnik
was a report about how we should be nuking each
other more often.

Speaker 4 (01:41:41):
Yeah, I get they put a ball in the orbit,
so we should we should blow up SAT.

Speaker 2 (01:41:47):
We should be ready to drop thirteen nuclear warheads on
Berlin at a second's notice.

Speaker 3 (01:41:51):
That's what I showed them.

Speaker 2 (01:41:55):
So this makes Henry Kissinger famous. He is all over
the place.

Speaker 3 (01:42:00):
This is his This is how we become famous.

Speaker 4 (01:42:03):
Want some guy, some guys watch the today show when
he buys the books, so we can tell everybody at the.

Speaker 5 (01:42:08):
Elks Club that we need to use nukes.

Speaker 3 (01:42:11):
Someone's happening. Give this accountant a soccer ball. Some people
get famous because their dad is one of oj Simpson's lawyers.

Speaker 2 (01:42:19):
Some people get famous because they write a book about
how nuclear warfare.

Speaker 3 (01:42:23):
It is not that bad. Uh huh, you know, it's
just in fame. It's a crapshoot. Absolutely fuck.

Speaker 4 (01:42:30):
I mean, imagine being an anti nuke person at this point,
you're just like, wait, what is going on?

Speaker 3 (01:42:36):
Have you read the report? It's so good. We're gonna
show them if what they should not be going to space.

Speaker 2 (01:42:42):
Yeah, next time they put a satellite up, we're gonna
kill everyone in Paraguay.

Speaker 3 (01:42:46):
What we need to do is a radiated country.

Speaker 2 (01:42:50):
So on July fourteenth, nineteen fifty eight, Mike Wallace gives
Henry Kissinger his first big break into the public sphere.

Speaker 3 (01:42:57):
So many what happened? It really is, it really is
just fucking disgusting because I go through this all the
time on our show, where I'm like, it is the
same shit. But again, it's just media using its plats
irresponsibly to normalize things. That are fucking batship.

Speaker 4 (01:43:17):
Yeah, it's great, Like sixty minutes having a fucking whole
segment on the havana fucking.

Speaker 3 (01:43:23):
Sound it's come on, Dave, you know that's real. I
suffered from that for two years, those crickets. Oh man.

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
I will say, like, the stupidest joke that I laugh
at every time is, yeah, I got havana syndrome. Having
another beer never doesn't get a chuckle out of me.

Speaker 5 (01:43:45):
But we've done.

Speaker 4 (01:43:46):
We've had sixty minutes. Come on, sixty minutes. Did the
uh the uh satanic scare shit? Well, yeah, they were
big lots dandles, like they just run with ideas that
are crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:43:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:43:58):
There, I mean because for people who are at the
level Mike Wallace is, the definition of journalist is not
afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. It's be a
giant shithead. Yeah right, be a huge shihead.

Speaker 3 (01:44:13):
Man. Oh man.

Speaker 2 (01:44:15):
So Mike Wallace introduces Henry Kissinger, the guy whose one
achievement is a book about how nukes are cool. By
saying this, in the field of foreign policy and military affairs,
doctor Kissinger, you're acknowledged to be one of the most
penetrating minds in the country.

Speaker 3 (01:44:29):
Oh, he's penetrating.

Speaker 2 (01:44:30):
He is penetrating like an Atlas missile penetrates the cloud
cover above a city full of women and children.

Speaker 3 (01:44:37):
Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:44:39):
Now, during the interview, Kissinger expressed that quote a capitalist society,
or what is more interesting to me, a free society,
is a more revolutionary phenomenon than nineteenth century socialism. I
think we should go on the spiritual offensive.

Speaker 3 (01:44:53):
Yeah, the spiritual with a nuclear extension with Lukes. Yes,
so he's connecting, he's connecting. You know, the two options
nineteenth century socialist capitalism or the current day capitalism and nukes.
Those are the options. Yeah. And Mike Wallace just empty

(01:45:14):
headedly sits there and goes like, I really love your property.

Speaker 2 (01:45:17):
Yeah, just smiles in behind his eyes as a dial tone.

Speaker 3 (01:45:24):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:45:25):
So this earns him finally the job at Harvard that
he'd coveted.

Speaker 3 (01:45:29):
This is why they give him. Shut, shut the fuck up.
It was ever simple. I can't I.

Speaker 4 (01:45:38):
Cannot get over how fucking evil Harvard is. It's so good,
it is monstrous from it's the best. It is a
horrific some of us with their asshole.

Speaker 2 (01:45:56):
Anti Harvard action. So he gets his Harvard job, and
he keeps writing. In nineteen sixty one, taking a heart.

Speaker 3 (01:46:05):
What's he doing at Harvard?

Speaker 2 (01:46:06):
He's like teaching some shit, you know, Kissinger stuff type classes. Yeah,
talking about Spangler a lot.

Speaker 6 (01:46:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:46:13):
Nukes are awesome too, Nukes are awesome. Freedom is requires
an absence of morality, teaching kids good stuff, you know,
teaching kids good things. So in nineteen sixty one he
publishes a book titled The Necessity of Choice, which is
his manifesto on how the United States should approach foreign
policy in the nineteen sixties. It is not an optimistic

(01:46:34):
piece of writing. Quote, the United States cannot afford another
decline like the one which has characterized the past decade
and a half fifteen years of more of a deterioration
of our position in the world such as we've experienced
since World War Two, would find us reduced to fortress
America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.
Our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.

Speaker 5 (01:46:53):
What in the fuck is he talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:46:55):
Well, America influence. No, this is like the high of
American power. Obviously, yeah to anyone who's not, but Kissinger
is he knows this is bullshit. He is part of
a group of people who are pushing Have you guys
heard the term missile gap?

Speaker 9 (01:47:09):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:47:09):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:47:10):
In the the early stages of the Kennedy administration, there
is suddenly this huge and this is both like in
conversations that people are having in DC and in like
the media. There's this constant talk of a missile gap,
this idea that these Soviets have outpaced us in missile
development and in the number of missiles they have, and
there's talking about like there's bomber gaps, there's tank gaps,
there's talk about like these gaps between this idea that

(01:47:31):
is totally bullshit. Like not that the Soviets have not
made a lot of weapons, so he makes plenty of weapons,
but the United there is no point in the Cold
War in which the United States is like out fucking
gunned to any degree that like has it could be
anyone reasonable could call like a missile gap.

Speaker 3 (01:47:48):
It just does not happen. It feels like we're still
responding to that today to be like, do do first
by a log shot?

Speaker 2 (01:47:54):
Yeah, and yeah, it's it's it's this, it's it's this,
it's not I would say on him, but it's very
reasonable because the argument comes primarily out of the Defense
Department and the growing defense industry, who it's great for
them if everyone thinks there's a missile.

Speaker 3 (01:48:08):
Gap, like of course, yeah, you got to build a
lot more weapons. We'll sell them to you. I thought
it was the place you could get Khaki's on your rockets.
But you have a missile gap.

Speaker 2 (01:48:18):
Thank you, Thank you, a welcome.

Speaker 3 (01:48:19):
We'll be right back. Question. I'm sorry, you know what, Yes,
actually this is time for an ad break.

Speaker 2 (01:48:26):
So you know, if you're looking for a way to
dress up your RNI and X knife missile before firing
it into some guy's car, check out the missile gap.

Speaker 3 (01:48:41):
We are back.

Speaker 2 (01:48:42):
So it's bullshit, the idea of the missile gap. And
Kissinger is smart enough to know this, but he is
one of the major proponents. He's not one of the
there's other guys who are more influential pushing it, like
actually within the halls of power, right, because he's not
super within the halls of power yet, but he is.
He's all over TV and shit, like he's guy that
you call now, Like once you get in the rolodex

(01:49:03):
of media people, you stay there, you.

Speaker 4 (01:49:04):
Know, he's the nuke guy you want to he's the
other guy, a positive nuke guy. There's people that you
gonna get the negative nuke guy in.

Speaker 2 (01:49:10):
The positive nuke guy, and he's the guy who says
we don't have enough. You know, the thing, we've ever
not had enough of nuclear weapons. He is a big
part of why we have so many fucking nukes and
why the Russians have so many fucking nukes because once
the US, like, once you start this, like we have
to build a lot more nukes, They're gonna build even
more nukes, and like then you're gonna get to build
any more nukes because you can say they built so
many more nukes, we don't have enough nukes now, and

(01:49:32):
then you wind up put like twelve thousand of them
in the world.

Speaker 3 (01:49:35):
I have a name for that, I can. I've come
over right now. Nuclear arms race. That's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:49:40):
That's that's a neat one. We should finally a term
for it.

Speaker 3 (01:49:44):
We should nuke him. I mean that would just be
like the one thing I would one made it, just
nuke him one if the dam Crockett handheld missile watcher
sweating every wee could do.

Speaker 4 (01:49:56):
What about just a little a little tiny nuke that
we shoot into him explodes, But it's just a little guy, Kissinger.

Speaker 2 (01:50:04):
Yeah, you're nuclear weapon.

Speaker 3 (01:50:07):
Yeah, but he would just ingest it and go I
am no, I'm bigger and more upset it is.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
It is amazing to think about how seriously this guy
gets treated by everyone immediately, and how much influence he's
allowed to have on an incredibly dangerous thing. And this
is the same guy who got tricked by Farranos, the
same nude he gets winked by the fake blood lady
in the turtleneck. It's really amazing. Yeah, it's so funny.

(01:50:38):
It's so funny. So uh, Kissinger is is not Again,
he doesn't come up with the idea of the missile gap,
but he's like a very influential voice in pushing this idea. Right,
he's a he's a part of this. So he doesn't
get there if we could out honestly do a whole
episode on like why there's so many fucking nukes that
this would be a part of. But he is, he's

(01:50:59):
a factor in this massive arms build up, and he
also starts, uh, but but he's also like he's he's
just doing this for careerism. Reasons because it like gets
him in good with people who are in power. And
part of how you know that is that Kennedy not
a guy I'll give a lot of credit to. But
one of the things Kennedy says is that, like limited
nuclear war is insane. Like fuck you, Henry Kissinger. He

(01:51:22):
doesn't say that, but he it. It gets made clear
the connections that Kissinger has in the in the Kennedy
administration make it clear that like JFK does not buy
your attitudes on limited nuclear war.

Speaker 3 (01:51:33):
And so he.

Speaker 2 (01:51:34):
Stops talking about that. He wants to become part He
doesn't believe in shit, but he wants to be in
the JFK administration, Right, so he stops pushing this thing
that makes him famous and saying other shit because he'll
get it'll get him closer to power. And that's all
Henry Kissinger really cares about.

Speaker 5 (01:51:49):
Yeah, so I wonder if, like the Today Show is
calling up.

Speaker 4 (01:51:51):
And he's like, you know, I'm not really doing nukes anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:51:54):
No, he comes on.

Speaker 2 (01:51:55):
Yeah, the quote I'm gonna quote actually from Nia Ferguson
here he explains like what he starts doing on the
Today Show. Yeah, Kissinger now advocated a conventional arms build up,
since the dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is
more familiar and therefore easier to maintain. He continued to
insist that the United States developed smaller nuclear weapons, but
he moved his own position to where he thought Kennedy's was.

(01:52:17):
In effect, the necessity of choice was something of a
job application, and Kissinger hoped Kennedy would make an offer. So, like, again,
so it doesn't really, I mean, it's it's just Marjorie
Taylor Green.

Speaker 3 (01:52:29):
I mean it is the same shit essentially, And it's like,
you know, the sensationalism that gets you the headlines and
then once you're fail, it's any it's really any form
of our pop culture entertainment. Now, just get your name
in the fucking headlines and then define who you are
and then you can like figure out what you actually
think and actually believe or how you're going to ride

(01:52:50):
that to power. Yeah, just make a bang. It's the
it is it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:54):
It is like the political equivalent of a comedian like
saying a racial slur and then listening to the audience
to determine whether or not they're joking.

Speaker 3 (01:53:02):
Like that's what he's doing. He's it's yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean show up to a club, take your dick out,
and then right your hour. Yeah, it's called it's uh
luisyk backwards. It's the it's the Casey. I'm not going
to figure out what.

Speaker 9 (01:53:18):
The back.

Speaker 2 (01:53:20):
Casey Casey Sewell yeh. So this he does not get
exactly what he wants, but he gets part of what
he wants. His buddy, uh Notlson Rockefeller is able to
give him a part time consulting gig for the National
Security Advisor. So it's not but it's not everything he wants,
but he is now he's he has like he you know,

(01:53:41):
like you start your way in and it's unless you
really fuck up. And by fuck up, I mean don't
get a lot of people killed. You'll just get closer
and closer to power because that's how our system works.
So you know, Kissinger is is obviously very conservative. Rockefeller
is not. Again, he's part of the Kennedy administration. This
is what I don't understand.

Speaker 3 (01:54:02):
Yeah, well, I we'll talk.

Speaker 2 (01:54:03):
We're actually we're going to talk a shitload about that
over the next couple of episodes, because this is like
a consistent weird thing about him. But like One of
the things Kissinger does is he oils Rockefeller with effusive
claims that Kennedy's inaugural speech, which Rockefeller had helped with,
was so good he quote might become a registered Democrat, Right,
that's the kind of shit. He says that, like, I'm

(01:54:23):
almost a Democrat now because how good JFK.

Speaker 3 (01:54:25):
Speech was so good.

Speaker 2 (01:54:28):
He doesn't believe in ship like I can't overemphasize that
other than that, Henry Kissinger should be very close to power.
He believes strongly in that, and he believes in that
as much as anyone's ever believed in the Bible.

Speaker 6 (01:54:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:54:43):
He does not believe in ideas.

Speaker 3 (01:54:45):
Birthday to the President. I saw what Maryland did and
testament sometimes the president.

Speaker 2 (01:55:02):
Would you like to see where they call me Kissinger? Oh,
I'm standing over this event and look at what they're
doing to my book. See that's the fan art. I
would have him kiss just like trying to fuck JFK
with every bit of charm in his German body.

Speaker 3 (01:55:18):
Oh dude, nobody told me Subway go over vent Look
at this, You're going to see everything goes nuke.

Speaker 2 (01:55:30):
So JFK is eventually assassinated by Bernard Montgomery s and
LBJ takes over. Oh yeah, I mean history is a
read this banquet. I've got a pamphlet for you myself.

Speaker 3 (01:55:43):
That's my length.

Speaker 2 (01:55:46):
So LBJ is the president now and and LBJ is
like between LGMJK. It's like a decade you know that
the Democrats are in power, and LBJ is very good
at exercising power. Right, And he's also super into Henry Kissinger.
He's not against Henry Kissinger either, but Henry kind of

(01:56:06):
is kept in this weird like he's on the margins
of power during this period of time, right finally, which
is yeah, well not really because while he's there's no breath,
there's there's no breath, there's good to hear. While he's
kind of on the not you know, on the margins,
he's able to build connections with as many Republican lawmakers

(01:56:29):
and their aids as he does with Democrats, right, Like
that's what he's doing while he's doing these like part
time gigs with the NSC and stuff, is he's he's
making friends with everybody he can. There is nobody.

Speaker 5 (01:56:40):
He's just networker, like he is just a supreme networker.

Speaker 3 (01:56:44):
Yeah, right, there is so.

Speaker 2 (01:56:45):
Much when I was a kid in speech and debate,
one of the other kids in the debate team with
me was obsessed with Kissinger, like read his books and stuff,
thought held and this was this thing that I heard
too from like family members and stuff that like, well
he was you know, he wasn't always right, but it
was he was doing the hardest job anyone's ever had,
and he was just this really genius man and you
can't really argue with him if you read about what
he was saying, and it's like, no, he.

Speaker 3 (01:57:06):
Didn't believe in shit he was.

Speaker 2 (01:57:08):
He was a genius at making people like him, and
that allowed him to horrible things. Yeah, which I guess,
like anyone who's really dangerous in politics is that's as
a version of that guy, right, Like yeah, like that's
that's all of them. But he's he's an interesting kind

(01:57:28):
of that guy and as a result, probably the most
toxic kind of that guy we've ever had in the
United States. Wow, which is saying something really bad, but yeah, so, yeah,
he makes all these connections, he cultivates them, and he
keeps his name in the news. Right, That's a big

(01:57:49):
part of why he's able to do what he is.
Later he keeps going on TV, keeps being on the radio,
He keeps being quoted and like cited and interviewed by
journalists for articles. Henry makes it known that, like, if
you're a journalist, I'm easy to reach you. Always give
you a quote. You can always reach Henry Kissinger for
like a line or two on this thing, you know,
which is very smart of him. It's very dumb and

(01:58:10):
shameful and uh uh horrible for the journalists.

Speaker 3 (01:58:14):
Yeah him, but like, yeah, God that they've learned. God,
that doesn't happen anymore now.

Speaker 2 (01:58:20):
I turned to the New York Times story published today
that described Nazis assaulting a book club as men with
a swastika flag. Someone pointed out, well, the article calls
them Nazis. It's just all of the social media they
described them that way. And I was like, oh, I
can't explain to you why I feel worse about that,

(01:58:41):
but I do.

Speaker 3 (01:58:42):
Yeah, it was not just that. It was not just
the dumb error. It was calculus. Yeah, yeah, moral calculus.

Speaker 2 (01:58:48):
It's yeah, moral calculus, right, good, good ship. So the
professor cultivates connections, Yeah, he gets good. He also he
goes to Vietnam at one point and he makes connections
with a bunch of people in Vietnam who were able
to to not just the South but the North Vietnamese government.
Like that's the thing he consciously does is like I
want to be able to like be able to take
the temperature of like guys, which is not like I
would say, actually, like the most reasonable thing he does.

(01:59:10):
If you think you're going to be in power, Like, yeah,
it's good you you probably want to be able to
talk to those guys. Even though we're fighting with him.
That's not an unreasonable thing. He will use it badly, Right,
Who's he's doing that on the part of just himself? Yeah,
what well he is working, he has a gig with
the guy he's like an advisor to the National Security Council,
and he's a known academic. You know, he's probably being like,
you know, I'm an academic. I'm trying to understand the

(01:59:31):
dimensions of this and like I want to talk to everybody.
I'm a very fair minded man. I don't let ideology
get in the way. YadA YadA, YadA. Like one of
the things about Henry Kissinger too, like he's as good
he can he's he's fucking his buddies with Mao. Like,
he's great at talking with people who are communists and stuff.
As long as you like Henry Kissinger and what he's selling,
he'll sell it to anybody.

Speaker 3 (01:59:52):
Yeah, it's so crazy. It's wild that like he might
he must have eyes that just start spinning in h
Like you just have to get close to notice that
he's got hypnotic eyes. You're like, oh, he isn't so
bad now that I'm taking him.

Speaker 2 (02:00:08):
You know, let's think about Vietnam for a second. Right,
if you're going to war in Vietnam, Gareth, Right, if
you decide how to go, Gareth Reynolds, I'm going to
go to war in Vietnam. How long do you think
it would take you to realize that was a bad idea?

Speaker 3 (02:00:20):
It would be I mean, I Gareth Reynolds, it would
be instantaneous, very quickly, very quickly. I mean it's David. Yeah,
can I okay?

Speaker 4 (02:00:29):
Can I just can I ask a question?

Speaker 3 (02:00:30):
Which side am I fighting on? The not Vietnamese site? Okay?
Then really quick? Yeah, really quick. I feel like you could.
I feel like you could. You could take Vietnam, David,
Dave going to see it the night they're not going
to see it coming. I would certainly be the guy
who they'd be like, we broke him. We broke him
before we even shouted at him. I'm sorry. I didn't
mean to show up with pants that were already pissed in.

Speaker 2 (02:00:52):
I know.

Speaker 4 (02:00:52):
I know one thing about me, and that's that if
things got really, really chaotic and bad, that I I
kind of thrive in that environment.

Speaker 3 (02:00:59):
Yeah, you'd be like, Dave, we don't have time to
eat their brains. He'd be like, shut up, I'm figuring
out what they know. It's like Doctor Manhattan ending the
Vietnam War.

Speaker 2 (02:01:13):
Both sides surrendered to Dave in the mid sixties, which
is fairly early on considering how late the Vietnam War goes.
It is clear to people, especially a lot of people
protesting in the United States, they're like, oh shit, this
ain't going.

Speaker 3 (02:01:25):
Great, right, Like, it's not hard for people.

Speaker 2 (02:01:29):
There are people who buy into the US propaganda, but
like people who are actually privy to information on the
war are aware that it is not going well. Kissinger
still decides we should escalate things. And I'm going to
quote again from Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Brandon. Upon returning
from his first visit to South Vietnam, and late nineteen
sixty five, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to build
public support for ongoing intervention. In early December, he joined

(02:01:51):
one hundred and eighty nine other scholars from Harvard, Yale,
and fifteen other New England universities in an open letter
expressing confidence that Johnson's policies would help quote people South
Vietnam determine their own destiny. Vietcom victory will spell disasters,
said the letter. Then later that month, he led a
Harvard team against a group of Oxford opponents of the war,

(02:02:11):
and a debate held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally
in the United States on CBS. Kissinger passionately defended the
bombing of northern Vietnam, insisting that it was not a
violation of international law. He invoked the analogy of World
War Two, saying Washington's actions in Indo China were as
righteous and justified as they were in Nazi Germany. Bob Schroum,
who went on to become a Democratic political consultant, was

(02:02:32):
on Kissinger's team and says that when he today watches
a recording of the of the debate, he is quote
amazed by two things. How young we look, even Kissinger,
and how wrong we were. So first off, I bought Kissinger,
you don't feel bad enough. I don't know how bad
you feel about this.

Speaker 3 (02:02:47):
It's not enough. Your first reaction be like, god, we
were kids, were young, we were young.

Speaker 2 (02:02:56):
There's like some Vietnam these dude next to him thinking
about like bomb's race down on the jungle and.

Speaker 3 (02:03:03):
Cross feedback. We had Kissinger, Oh my god, it's joelous.
Heck yeah, he's only got one jowl at that time.
That's before he got the eight Our hair looked so stupid?
Am I right?

Speaker 4 (02:03:13):
Am I?

Speaker 6 (02:03:13):
Right?

Speaker 3 (02:03:14):
Where did your legs go? By the way, before Henry
Kissinger looked like weird science.

Speaker 2 (02:03:21):
After things go wrong, it's amazing, like and it's it's
there's a lot in that paragraph both like of course,
when the debate starts to build, like should we escalate
this nightmarish war? The first thing, one of the first
things that happens is that a bunch of fucking New
England universities decided to have a debate about it. Right, yeah, right,

(02:03:43):
that's the right, Like, let's let everyone here, let's have
the best arguments of both.

Speaker 3 (02:03:47):
Sides about whether or not behinds.

Speaker 2 (02:03:50):
Yeah, like, first off, fuck everyone involved in this, even
the people arguing against the wall a little bit like
just don't do that's the premist.

Speaker 3 (02:03:58):
Yeah, the premiss it's bad.

Speaker 2 (02:04:00):
Yeah. Less so certainly, I don't know, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:04:05):
Maybe like it made sense, there's a virgins debating which
position is the best to fucking why is this instead
of the debate like hey, why are we there? Like
really why? Sorry, that's we're not we're not debating that,
we're not asking that. It's not the debate, and it is.

Speaker 2 (02:04:27):
Again, it's like and you can see just about how
comprehensively wrong these people are that like number one, this
idea that this will help the people of South Vietnam
determine their own destiny, which is, the South Vietnamese government
was a dictatorship the entire time the war was going on.
It's not any more democratic in any meaningful sense than
than the Northern Vietnam. And also like a Vietcong victory
will spell disasters, Like there's plenty of things to criticize

(02:04:50):
the Vietnamese government for, but like broadly on an international level,
it's fine. The country seems seems to be doing all right,
like better than a lot of places. It's fine. Yeah,
did pretty good job at COVID, like you know it did.
It didn't seem like a disaster. Maybe if we hadn't
killed five million people, things would be even better. It

(02:05:11):
seems like it couldn't hurt.

Speaker 3 (02:05:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:05:15):
Yeah, Again, they're wrong about everything. Like Kissinger in this period,
everything that he said, like that'sz he has, this reputation
is such an intellectual titan, and he's like so constantly
fucking wrong.

Speaker 3 (02:05:27):
But he didn't bring up there's always like yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:05:30):
It's the same as today, all of these people that
are constantly fucking wrong. Just yeah, keep on getting positions
of power and being media and they're always fucking wrong.

Speaker 2 (02:05:39):
And there's this shit like people will will bring up
like whoa, but there's this nuclear arms treaty he helped make,
and there's this like peace deal he negotiated in the
Middle East and like all of these things like yeah,
but that was like two percent of the shit that
he did, and it was largely because other people that
he wanted to stay in good with were pushing for
that kind of shit too, like Henry Kissinger. Whenever he
has expressed an idea that is his legitimate idea is

(02:06:03):
like really really disastrously wrong. Yeah, amazing, Yeah, fuck it,
nobody cares, Yeah, nobody cares. He's gotta get to invest
in Therano still as opposed to being the one victory,
the one victory we want to that's why we should
pardon her. Yeah, yeah, look, you stole a lot of money,

(02:06:23):
but you made Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 3 (02:06:25):
We're gonna release you to come up with another scheme
to take more money from this bag of ship. You
don't get to.

Speaker 2 (02:06:32):
Make a company anymore, but we're gonna have cameras fall.
Think of you, Frank Show. Have you seen punked?

Speaker 3 (02:06:39):
You can't. It's just every week for a Kissinger.

Speaker 2 (02:06:44):
You're gonna put on mustaches and like fake wigs, and
you're just gonna try.

Speaker 3 (02:06:48):
To find telling me this is a way for me
to get a longer spine. I mean, popcorn has zero calories.
I'm here.

Speaker 4 (02:06:58):
But you know it's about that story. Is that she's
a younger female kissinger. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. She's
like blood kissing. Everyone was super into her, and she
was just saying whatever people wanted to hear, and like.

Speaker 2 (02:07:12):
Yeah, right, it's amazing because there's there's the good grifters
and the evil ones. We just finished our four parterre
on the Tzar and talked about the fact that, like
before Respute and there was another spiritualist grifter who pretended
to talk to like ghosts and stuff named Philippe, who
like got a bunch of money for them, tricked the
Tsarina into thinking she was pregnant, and then bounced with
a bunch of their money. And the last thing he

(02:07:33):
did before he left was like, I'm gonna come back
in another form as another spiritual he should trust whatever
I said.

Speaker 3 (02:07:40):
Very funny.

Speaker 2 (02:07:42):
Took all the money and ran, and when he died,
it was found out that he had been paying for
the mortgages and rentals of like fifty two impoverished families.
Like the perfect guy, like the opposite of Kissing. Yeah yeah,
just taking money from the tsar to help pour people out.

Speaker 3 (02:07:58):
What a dude.

Speaker 2 (02:08:00):
Great if he showed up again, Yeah yeah, let's put
that guy in front of Kissinger, see what he can do.
So in private, Kissinger admitted already, while he is doing
all this, while he's a part of this big debate,
you know, while he's taking the side that we should
escalate in private. In his conversations, he admits to his
friends that Vietnam is an unwinnable disaster of a war.

Speaker 3 (02:08:22):
Oh my fucking god. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:08:26):
He defended it in public though, because there was at
least a fifty percent chance the Democrats were going to
stay in power after the next election. That is, he
he didn't want to give up on the chance of
having a job.

Speaker 3 (02:08:36):
You know, I think a lot of times you just
you do. I guess he's a little different because he's
such a shape shifter. Yeah, you know, there, I think,
And it's just the way we are. You are, like,
they can't just be that base evil. Yeah, he sure can.
He yeah, m hmm.

Speaker 2 (02:08:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (02:08:54):
It's something.

Speaker 4 (02:08:54):
It's something I was thinking about with climate change, is
that people can't wraps around the fact that there might
be a significant portion of rich people in control who
actually want everybody to die.

Speaker 2 (02:09:05):
Yeah yeah, or at least don't care, because what really
matters is like maintaining their level of relative power to
everyone else.

Speaker 3 (02:09:14):
What are they going to do? Call themselves out?

Speaker 2 (02:09:16):
Yeah, it's cool. So obviously it's one of those things.
I don't actually know that he really believed that Vietnam
was a disaster because he may have been lying to
his friends when he said that because he wants to
keep like he wants to keep a bridge to the
other side open, you know, like it's impossible to say
because he's fucking Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 3 (02:09:31):
Is it possible there's two Kissingers? Yes, Okay, what if
there's six? Am they ever touched Cambodia will be oh, yeah,
you know what. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:09:43):
So the fact that Kissinger in private be like, yeah, Vietnam,
what a fuck up, and in public would be like,
let me bing Shapiro about Vietnam tea win. This that
really pissed off a lot of his friends, including the
political scientist Hans Morgenthau. Kissinger had admitted to Morgan Thou
that the or was unwinnable, unwinnable, even while he continued
to go on in the media and advocate expanded saturation bombing.

(02:10:06):
Morgan Thou found this deeply disappointing, but Henry was increasingly
tailoring his public statements to the ear of a man
who was already a fan of his work, Richard Millhouse Nixon.
Can we get like, yeah, some sound effects, A lightning
whips across the stream and a screen.

Speaker 10 (02:10:25):
A wolf House.

Speaker 3 (02:10:26):
Yeah, incomes the.

Speaker 2 (02:10:30):
Which we will do a whole Nixon episode one of
these days. A lot of our Kissinger's series will also
be about Nixon, because you can't unwrap the two men, you.

Speaker 12 (02:10:38):
Know, you can't.

Speaker 2 (02:10:40):
So there are two Kissingers. Yeah, one of them is
Richard Nixon. So by the end of nineteen sixty eight,
as the presidential race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey and
former Vice President Richard Nixon heats up, Kissinger's profile had
raised enough that he was seen as the front runner
for a serious foreign policy job in either potential administration.

Speaker 3 (02:11:00):
Time went on either Yeah, he's got a gig, no
matter what, Baby, It's just he's the raytheon of people.

Speaker 2 (02:11:12):
So as time goes on, though, he increasingly leans towards Nixon,
which surprises his friends, whom he had told, quote, Richard
Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running
to have his president.

Speaker 3 (02:11:23):
But I want him to give me a gig. Yeah,
I need job.

Speaker 2 (02:11:33):
So he was heartbroken when his friend Rockefeller lost to Nixon,
and he commented, now the Republican Party is a disaster
and Nixon is not fit to be president.

Speaker 4 (02:11:42):
Oh my god, and over and oh this was they
said about regular about Bush.

Speaker 3 (02:11:52):
Okay, yeah, it's always the same calculus. This is true.

Speaker 2 (02:11:55):
But Kissinger didn't let his complete contempt for Nixon stop
him from trying to get a job with the man.
To explain why, here's the New Yorker. It took Kissinger's
close contemporary, the political theorist Sheldon Wolan, another son of
Jewish immigras, who fought in the War and studied at
Harvard with William Yandel Elliott, to fully dissect Kissinger's careerist
and sincts. On the surface, Wollant observed, Kissinger would have

(02:12:16):
appeared a mismatch for the anti elitist Nixon, but the
pairing was perfect. Nixon needed someone who could elevate his
opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him
feel like a great figure in the drama of history.
As Wolan wrote, what could have been more comforting to
that barren and inarticulate soul than to hear the authoritative
voice of doctor Kissinger, who spoke so often and knowingly

(02:12:37):
about the meaning of history.

Speaker 3 (02:12:39):
Ugh, I mean, it's just an empty sack and an
evil sack, and the evil sacks like I can feel you. Yeah, well,
somebody's gonna off. Somebody's gonna load me with something. He's
not gonna do it. Put all that black pile down astonomy, thank.

Speaker 2 (02:13:01):
You, Oh boy, Gareth, he doesn't call him Hank, but
we'll get to that later.

Speaker 3 (02:13:09):
How come on this panky. It's a lot worse than that, Garethright, So, in.

Speaker 2 (02:13:18):
Nineteen sixty eight, the Johnson administration was carrying out an
extensive series of negotiations between South and North Vietnam and
an attempt to secure an end to the war. LBJ
wants credit for his legacy, right, I'm not going to
give LBJ credit for like caring about human death and suffering,
because he's also a monster.

Speaker 9 (02:13:35):
Yea.

Speaker 2 (02:13:36):
No, not trying to make him seem good by comparison,
But he sees ending the war both as a way
Tolke I want to go out on a good note.
And also this is going to if he could, if
he could even secure a significant like ceasefire, that would
help Humphrey get reelected. Right, because nobody's in the US
is very pro the Vietnam War, within the majority of
most voters are very anti its. So that's kind of

(02:13:56):
the play that that lbj's making he wants to end
the war in order to help Humphrey win. Over the
course of the election year, his Secretary of State, National
Security Adviser, and his Secretary of Defense, Clark Gifford, became
aware that something was a miss. Some of the moves
that the South Vietnamese government made which threatened the negotiation
seemed bizarre. They would like take these wild changes where

(02:14:17):
it's like, suddenly South Vietnam's not willing to negotiate, Like
what the fuck? We had worked all this out. Why
are you guys pulling out at the last minute? North Vietnam,
Noam's willing to come to the table. In the trial
of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchin's rights quote from his seat
in the Pentagon, Clifford, who's again the Secretary of Defense,
had actually been able to read the intelligence transcripts that
picked up and recorded what he terms a secret personal

(02:14:38):
channel between President thw and Saigon. In the Nixon campaign,
the chief interlocutor at the American end was John Mitchell,
then Nixon's campaign manager and subsequently Attorney General. He was
actively assisted by Madame Anna Chanal, known to all as
the Dragon Lady, a fierce veteran of the Taiwan Lobby
and all purpose right wing intriguer. She was a social

(02:14:58):
and political force in the war Washington of her day.
So lbj's administration, this is suspicious as fuck. Let's bug
the Nixon campaign, right, which is not illegal obviously, Like you,
it is an act of fucking treason to try and
extend a war by sabotage negotiations. This is one of
the very few cases where like, yeah, you should wire
tap those people, you should.

Speaker 3 (02:15:20):
You should tap the fuck out of those phones.

Speaker 2 (02:15:22):
But it's also this is they don't want this to
get LBJ doesn't want this shit to get out at all.
This would be number one a hanging crime. You get
executed for doing this kind of shit, like on paper
at least, right, And so lbj's administration, while they're wired
tapping Nixon and getting evidence about like this, what increasingly
becomes clear as a conspiracy, keeps fucking quiet about it

(02:15:43):
because they're worried that revealing this would create a crisis
of confidence in the American government.

Speaker 5 (02:15:48):
My fucking fucking liberals, the fucking liberals.

Speaker 4 (02:15:54):
This is how many times, how many fucking times bustool
two elections this is what they did.

Speaker 3 (02:16:00):
This is what they fucking did. It's really it really is.
I mean yeah, it's just it's I mean the I
that is so fucking crazy to put the clubhouse, Yeah,
I mean above it. It is. It is like the
one time where for president had had his political opponents hanged. Yeah,

(02:16:22):
he'd be like, yeah, that's what you should have done,
and you'd have to that one session of hangings really
would have gone a long way with this country.

Speaker 2 (02:16:30):
You would be in so much a better position. They'd
hung Nixon and several other people were about to talk about.

Speaker 3 (02:16:35):
And would also given Nixon good posture. Finally, yeah, finally I.

Speaker 4 (02:16:40):
Knew about that Nixon had done. I did not know
that the that they knew. I didn't know they knew.

Speaker 3 (02:16:46):
At the time, like that, Oh yes, David fucking scene
the liberal mind.

Speaker 4 (02:16:52):
I always think about this story about when the HUNTA
took over in Chile before Pinochet got into power, and
they asked all the they said, we want to have
interviews with people, and the liberals so believed the government
that they went and lined up for the secret police
interviews because they're like, well, this is what we do.

(02:17:13):
And they're like, no, they're taking your names down to
possibly kill you. But they lined up because they're like, well,
this is we don't want to mess up the system,
like we're supposed to go to get interviewed by the government. Yeah,
they're like it's a hunta like it just the mindset
of just this is how our constitution works, and this
is what we're supposed to do. And you're like, no,

(02:17:35):
it's literally not working. The thing isn't working. This is
a great This is one of the best examples ever.

Speaker 2 (02:17:41):
Of yeah, like yeah, and this is the germ of
truth in Kissinger's whole ideology about conflict is that if
you are in a conflict with someone who is willing
to throw down and you weren't, they're going to win, right,
Like that is a truth of history, right, It's a
truth of fighting fascists. Right. It's not enough to say,
like punching them isn't the entire of it. But if
you're not willing to throw down, they will win, right.

(02:18:04):
And that is a thing that has often taken exactly
the wrong way at the geopolitical level. But like you
see in this that like LBJ was not willing to
throw down and Nixon was, and everything we're going to
talk about in the rest of this series happens as
a result. And it's like LBJ loved throwing down, but yes,
it's amazing that he doesn't in this I think that's.

Speaker 4 (02:18:25):
The craziest thing is that, like that was the fucking
big dick. I'm gonna take a shit and you're gonna
listen to me guy, Like he gave no fox and
threw down with everybody.

Speaker 3 (02:18:34):
You know what I think it is, Dave.

Speaker 2 (02:18:36):
I think for all of his many many mini flaws
and evil acts committed, I think LBJ believed in things yeah,
and Nixon and kissing you downk.

Speaker 3 (02:18:44):
He wouldn't throw down, but he would throw to ads. Yeah,
I would.

Speaker 2 (02:18:52):
Because you know, LBJ was famous for whipping his dick,
which he called jumbo, out at all times. He wants
pissed on a Secret Service agent at a party because
he couldn't get to the bathroom easily enough.

Speaker 3 (02:19:02):
Like that's the secret.

Speaker 2 (02:19:04):
Yeah, all of our sponsors are the same, and that
their dicks are called jumbo and they do piss on
the Secret Service. Every one of our sponsors pisses on
the Secret Service. That's a promise.

Speaker 3 (02:19:15):
So we're back. Oh, boy, good times.

Speaker 2 (02:19:26):
So South Vietnam pulls out of the negotiations, right, I
think they're happening in Paris, and I'm being I haven't
really gotten to detail about what happened up to this
point because those details are very obscure to the American people.
What is publicly possible, like known, is that noth Vietnam
and South Vietnam are supposed to come to the table
have this big negotiation to try to come to like
some way in which the war can come to an end,

(02:19:46):
and South Vietnam, after a bunch of like throwing a
bunch of like wrenches in the process, finally just backs
out entirely, right, and so the negotiations don't happen, and
the war continues. That's what everybody sees, you know, if
you're just like a dude paying attention on the news,
that's what you're aware of happening here. Lbj's administration knows
something sketchy is going on between Nixon and the South
Vietnamese government, but even for them, they don't know precisely

(02:20:08):
what happened. Here's what happened. As part of the negotiations,
LBJ offered the North Vietnamese a bombing halt. Now you
can see why this is very enticing for Hanoi, right,
because being bombed is not pleasant, and the US was
doing a lot of it. So this is like what
Lbj's like, Hey, I will fucking stop bombing Vietnam if
you guys will come to the table and talk about
stuff and the North Vietnamese government not being made entirely

(02:20:30):
of soulis cockroaches is like, well, okay, Like that's a
pretty good offer.

Speaker 5 (02:20:34):
Actually, yeah, we were bombings.

Speaker 3 (02:20:36):
Are we actually dropped John McCain.

Speaker 2 (02:20:39):
Yeah, we did drop John McCain. You guys might have
caught him. Can keep him for a while. He'll come
back into the picture. It'll be a big problem. He'll also,
weirdly enough, be the least objectionable Republican elected leader for
a long time.

Speaker 3 (02:20:54):
So it's just you guys know, that's our future hero.

Speaker 2 (02:20:59):
Yeah, and Jesse the Body Ventura will be the only
conservative voices against torture.

Speaker 3 (02:21:04):
So heads up.

Speaker 2 (02:21:09):
It is amazing watching that old clip of Jesse Ventura
on the view being the most reasonable American in fucking
early two thousands next to Gilbert Godfried. At least.

Speaker 3 (02:21:21):
It's actually not the Gilbert.

Speaker 2 (02:21:27):
So Yeah, this is very enticing offer for Hanoi, the
bombing cessation, and it's good enough if like, if you
won't bomb us anymore, Yeah, maybe we can concede on
some stuff if you're not murdering people in mass like, Yeah,
of course we'll negotiate with that.

Speaker 3 (02:21:38):
That's pretty good.

Speaker 2 (02:21:39):
Nixon cannot let this happen. This would be a disaster.
Vietnam not getting bombed, he sees is like the worst
case scenario, even though he is campaigning on ending the war.
By the way, that's promise, I'm gonna get us out
of that. But yeah, on my watch, it happens before
what am I campaigning on. So Nixon uses his back
channel to the South Vietnamese government to get them to torpedo.
They're end of the negotiations because the government of South

(02:22:01):
Vietnam is frightened obviously that the US is going to
stop bombing North Vietnam. So if you're following along, something
should be obvious at this point. Since the Johnson administration
was negotiating secretly with North Vietnam, there should have been
no way for the government in Saigon to know that
LBJ had proposed a bombing halt. But obviously Sigon knew,
which means there was a secret informant within the Johnson

(02:22:21):
administration passing information to the Nixon administration and sharing a
lot of top secret data with Saigon. So the big
question is who possibly be so deep into both camps
that he could feed information from one to the forest.

Speaker 4 (02:22:40):
Oh, oh my god, that's right, baby, should be executed
for treason.

Speaker 2 (02:22:47):
Absolutely should be executed for treesa my god. Slowly, yeah,
slowly executed. Yeah, it should be that incompetent dude who
hung the Nazis at Nuremberg and like kept sucking up
and making it worse.

Speaker 3 (02:23:01):
Bring that dude badry, Can I just do? Let me
try one more time before you guys get mad.

Speaker 2 (02:23:04):
We should have frozen that motherfucker in carbonite to break
out when the nation needed him.

Speaker 12 (02:23:09):
Yeah, that's amazing. Oh you guys waking be up to
kill me. No, we actually we're huge drunk and do
another hangar huge fans. We've got you a handle of
gin here, and this is very kissinger. Shut up, just
do whatever. You just kill him as fast as you can.

(02:23:30):
That's the only note. But I took a lot of
notes from him back in the day, like he's great,
he's great.

Speaker 3 (02:23:36):
Just kill him.

Speaker 2 (02:23:37):
Okay, I don't think he could die, though, I will
say I don't think that guy could read.

Speaker 1 (02:23:47):
So.

Speaker 2 (02:23:47):
Obviously, Kissinger is the back channel who was spreading this information.
Now in his own memoirs, Nixon later admitted to hearing
about the proposed bombing Hall through what he termed as
a highly unusual channel. Christopher Hitchen continues, it was more
unusual even than he acknowledged. Kissinger had until then been
a devoted partisan of Nelson Rockefeller, the matchlessly wealthy prince

(02:24:09):
of Liberal Republicanism. His contempt for the person and policies
of Richard Nixon was undisguised. Indeed, President Johnson's Paris negotiators,
led by Avril Harriman, considered Kissinger to be almost one
of themselves. He had made himself helpful as Rockefeller's cheap
foreign policy advisor by supplying French intermediaries with their own
contacts in Hanoi. Henry was the only person outside of

(02:24:29):
the government that we were authorized to discuss the negotiations with,
says Richard Holbrook. We trusted him. It is not stretching
the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a
secret source within the US negotiating team, So the likelihood
of a bombing halt, wrote Nixon, came as no real
surprise to me. He added, I told Haldeman that Mitchell
should stay a continuous liaison with Kissinger and that we

(02:24:49):
should honor his desire to keep his role completely confidential.
So this is all in the open now.

Speaker 6 (02:24:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:24:54):
I also, I mean Nixon really just never shut the
fuck up. I mean he didn't. He really he was
like the drunk guy at a party who had just
sort of tell you whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:25:04):
Like honestly, he's the guy Donald Trump might put a
hand on be like, hey man, you're.

Speaker 3 (02:25:07):
Saying you shouldn't you say some stuff that you probably
shouldn't right now. I think you might not. I think
you might regret this. Sxplode. I just take a lot
of stuff you probably shouldn't. And I'm on Twitter. Yeah,
so that is just so crazy and just says it all,
you know, And this is and it's gotten worse. I mean,

(02:25:28):
it's just fucking bonkers. Now.

Speaker 2 (02:25:30):
The bombing halt was planned for October twenty third, but
thanks to Kissinger, the Nixon campaign was able to lobby
South Vietnam to increase their demands suddenly at the bargaining table,
which wrecked attempted agreements being made with North Vietnam. This,
you know, there's a process. This happens back and forth
until the bombing halt is completely scuttled and peace negotiations
fall apart. Since all this was happening behind closed doors,
Humphrey never got to present the possibility of a bombing

(02:25:52):
halt to the American people. Nixon avoided having to take
into stance of any kind on the issue because obviously,
as the peace candidate, he couldn't say you shouldn't do it, right.
He didn't even want it to come up at all.
The Johnson administration made one final attempt to push through
a bombing halt at the end of October, but the
South Vietnamese government, warned by Kissinger via Nixon, preempted this
with a surprise boycott of the peace talks. Now, while

(02:26:14):
all this is happening, Kissinger is also advising the Humphrey
campaign and is so respected there that he was considered
a shoe in for a senior job if they'd managed
to win.

Speaker 3 (02:26:23):
There's three of them.

Speaker 5 (02:26:24):
Sucking Democrats are so fucking stupid, I know, right.

Speaker 3 (02:26:29):
There's three of them. There's three kiss olers. No, just
are you walking around buddy Henry's I'm gonna give him
a good old job. That's our body. You're talking about men, sir.

Speaker 4 (02:26:41):
And then I can never get over the fact that
Hilary walked around with him during the fucking campaign.

Speaker 3 (02:26:46):
It's amazing, really walking to be fair day he fucking is.

Speaker 2 (02:26:52):
He's like one of those episodes of Fraser where he's
dating two women at the same time and trying to
keep it secret. That's the same restaurant Jack Tripper. Yeah,
it's very funny, except for all.

Speaker 3 (02:27:06):
Of the millions and millions. Yes, let me ask you that.

Speaker 5 (02:27:09):
So do you have the numbers on where the deaths
were at in Vietnam?

Speaker 2 (02:27:15):
I'll yeah, I'll get you that in a minute.

Speaker 3 (02:27:18):
Why did I ask? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:27:20):
Nixon by also like grows convinced of Kissinger's value during
this period of time too, and he becomes a shoe
in for a senior job there. He was particularly impressed
by the skill with which Kissinger protected his identity as
the leaker from the Humphrey campaign. Nixon later wrote, one
factor that had almost convinced me of Kissinger's credibility was
the link to which he went to protect his secrecy.

Speaker 3 (02:27:40):
What a terrible I mean, that's just not a good
personality trait. It's really not it's actually not is but
not this guy.

Speaker 5 (02:27:49):
This guy is the best double agent. He's so fucking great, he'll.

Speaker 3 (02:27:53):
Fuck And this guy's an unbelievable ship bag liar.

Speaker 2 (02:27:56):
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it makes sense that like Nixon
would be super into that. Oh yeah, wow, this guy's
a real piece of shit.

Speaker 3 (02:28:06):
Oh I'm Jick Nixon. This guy can lie to you.
Let me tell you as a liar.

Speaker 2 (02:28:19):
Oh fuck, it's fucking amazing.

Speaker 3 (02:28:22):
It's bad.

Speaker 2 (02:28:24):
Clark Clifford, who would later was again the Secretary of
Defense at the time, would later blame the fact that
the war did not end in nineteen sixty eight and
the loss of the Humphrey campaign in that election, on
the school duggery of the Nixon campaign, which was orchestrated
in part by Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 3 (02:28:38):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (02:28:39):
The activities of the Nixon team went far beyond the
bounds of justifiable political combat. It constituted direct interference in
the activities of the executive branch and the responsibilities of
the chief executive. The only people with authority to negotiate
on behalf of the nation. The activities of the Nix
campaign constituted a gross, even potentially illegal interference in the
security affairs of the nation by private individuals, which is

(02:29:00):
the polite political walk way of saying it. In the
book Kissinger's shadow, Greg Grandon, is even more pointed the
fact that Kissinger participated in an intrigue that extended the
war for five pointless years seven if you count the
fighting between the nineteen seventy three Paris Piece Accords in
the nineteen seventy five Fall of Psygone is undeniable. Adding
to the evidence is Kissinger himself. He's been caught on

(02:29:21):
tape twice on recordings recently released admitting he passed on
useful information to Nixon.

Speaker 3 (02:29:26):
Jesus Christ, my god. It's like killing him isn't enough.

Speaker 5 (02:29:32):
No, he should be gibbeted.

Speaker 4 (02:29:34):
I said, so, we need to bring back Gibbeting and
just hang that motherfucker somewhere in a nice cage box, like, yeah,
leave him out there.

Speaker 2 (02:29:41):
Leave him out, Let people pelt him with stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:29:43):
Yeah, fuck, kill him by throwing potatoes at it, right,
because he's not that strong anymore. And you want it
to last a while, tatoes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:29:54):
Yeah, So we'll talk a bit later about how he
got caught on tape and why we know about all
of this, because that's a fun story, guys. It involves
a different series of crimes. But Grandon makes another point
that's worth acknowledging here. Well, Kissinger definitely had inside information
from the Johnson campaign, which he passed on. He also
didn't have as much information as he pretended to know

(02:30:14):
when he talked to the Nixon campaign.

Speaker 3 (02:30:16):
Oh Jesus quote.

Speaker 2 (02:30:18):
Even with access to Johnson's negotiating instructions, he couldn't have
had exact information about the decisions being made at the
White House. He had to have been winging it, at
least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining
what others would do with that, guess playing the angle,
sussing out the chance a well, giving the appearance of
composure and certainty, he was right winging it.

Speaker 4 (02:30:36):
I mean, yeah, what an absolute fucking psychopath on Like,
that's the kind of shit. Like you said, if you're
dating two women, you're trying to figure it out and
get through some sticky situation. But he's doing this with
fucking Vietnam and two presidential campaigns.

Speaker 13 (02:30:56):
I don't, yeah, craziness, the absolute lack of a soul
is oh yeah, he is pure blackness inside.

Speaker 3 (02:31:07):
M Yeah, Dave, let me push back for a second. God, wow, yeah,
you can't. I mean, it's it's it's hard to even
speak to it because it's like to look, I'll kill
five people for a job, but at some point you

(02:31:30):
have to.

Speaker 2 (02:31:30):
Be a normal share Yeah that's regular.

Speaker 3 (02:31:33):
Yeah, but but to to let, I mean, to just
I don't know, it's it is he killed, he killed.

Speaker 5 (02:31:40):
I mean, how many Vietnamese died after that?

Speaker 3 (02:31:44):
Like so many?

Speaker 5 (02:31:45):
Yeah, we're talking, you know, was it like a million
died in the whole wars?

Speaker 4 (02:31:50):
More than no?

Speaker 2 (02:31:51):
I mean it is because you also have to include
the people who died in cam Radia and and in
in Vietnam. We're gonna get into more of the episode three,
but conservatively an additional couple of million deaths as a
result of this, in addition to an additional twenty thousand
US dead. It's kind of hard the death toll to

(02:32:11):
get precisely like a couple million, like in the million,
A couple of additional dead because this day by the
way because I was just going.

Speaker 5 (02:32:20):
To say die because he wanted a job.

Speaker 14 (02:32:25):
This was he wanted a He's essentially lying in a
job interview like you would if you were I had
no fast food experience in where taco except millions of
people are dying.

Speaker 2 (02:32:38):
Yeah, it's awesome, holy crazy, it's the crazy.

Speaker 4 (02:32:46):
The thing you've done here is you've you've you've humanized
the situation for me, because, like, I can understand that
there's evil people out there and they do stuff like
they want to bomb Camp Cambodia, they want to do
this other stuff. But when you take it to a
level where it's a guy winging it in a meeting,

(02:33:07):
it takes on a whole different flavor of evil. That
is something because now that's something we can all understand.
We've all been a situation where like ah, yeah, this
guy did a thing, and then I did a thing,
and you're just trying to get through a situation.

Speaker 3 (02:33:20):
Yeah, we've all experienced that.

Speaker 4 (02:33:22):
None of us have experienced given the green light to
you know, dropping bombs and killing people. But that I
get and I feel in my bones of like, well,
holy shit, but you're doing that with millions of people's
lives on the line.

Speaker 2 (02:33:35):
It is. It is this thing where the idea I
had always had before I really got into was that like,
well he did you know, he was involved in all
of these horrible things that I knew who was involved in,
but like I assumed it was from a wonky perspective
of like he believed strongly in the need to fight
these wars and that anything was justified, and so he
did these horrible things because he believed we were in
this like civilizational struggle and certain things were necessary in that.
And like he had all of these different kind of

(02:33:57):
very complex moral beliefs that he wrote dozens of books
about explaining why he did the things. At the end
of the day, no motherfucker wanted a gig.

Speaker 3 (02:34:03):
Yeah. And by the way, it's not like he would
have been out of politics, like even in his downtime,
he was like, you know, he was gigging. Like it's
just like he would have been patiently waiting for another
administration or have been working in whatever, like you know,
he didn't. He didn't want to work at job.

Speaker 4 (02:34:23):
Yeah, he didn't want to work at Uncle Chuckle Fox.
He wanted the gig at Charlie Good Nights like he
doesn't want to work at a premier club.

Speaker 2 (02:34:30):
He literally like did the Like that's the thing. He
didn't just do this for a job. He did this
for like one of the two jobs and the one
he kind of didn't want as much.

Speaker 1 (02:34:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:34:38):
Yeah, yeah, the guy. Yeah, I'm un fucking conscionable.

Speaker 2 (02:34:43):
Yeah, it's really hard to like, it is hard and
like it's I think it's easier to understand now what
he did. It's hard to like judge him adequately in
moral terms that are even like comprehensible because it's so
much out.

Speaker 3 (02:34:54):
Yeah, it's hard to process.

Speaker 2 (02:34:56):
It really is one of those like say what you
will about the tenets of nihilism, dude. At least it's
an ethos moments where it's like I'm thinking about like
people like fucking Saddam or whatever, where it's like, yeah,
that was a piece of ship. There were definitely some
things he believed though, like yeah, like there's pieces of
shit out like fucking out there who like there are
things they believe, and Kissinger just believes he should be

(02:35:20):
close to power.

Speaker 3 (02:35:20):
Kissinger. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was like doctrine was Kissinger.

Speaker 4 (02:35:24):
He's like, I'm really smart, I should be in the
top game, and yeah, I just want to be there.

Speaker 3 (02:35:28):
It's awesome. Yeah. I like how he thinks his childhood
didn't fuck with him. Yeah. Yeah, like dude, bro, yeah what.

Speaker 4 (02:35:38):
You know, it would be even better if he if
all of this was happening, and it was just because,
like he he was like, I know, I can get
so many more chicks if I'm in the white House. Yeah,
that was the whole reason for it.

Speaker 3 (02:35:48):
He's just like, I just want to get laid.

Speaker 2 (02:35:50):
Look, it is not a non factor.

Speaker 3 (02:35:52):
Wait is he Is he married right now? Or is
he single? Oh?

Speaker 2 (02:35:56):
Lord, who knows? He's I mean I think he gets married.
It's point. But he's also like, you know, well, I
don't know. Actually, he's kind of like a bachelor dude.
We'll talk about that later. I'm still working on those
episodes because there's a whole thing to be said about
Kissinger and women and sex appeal. He gets he was married, Well, yeah,
he definitely was married at points, but he's also like

(02:36:17):
kind of a playboy.

Speaker 3 (02:36:19):
God.

Speaker 2 (02:36:19):
I'm going to go back in time a little bit
and talk about some.

Speaker 3 (02:36:22):
Of that later.

Speaker 1 (02:36:23):
He was married his first His first marriage was nineteen
forty nine to nineteen sixty four, so I don't think
he's and that he's not remarried again until seventy four,
So that sounds right. He's married in this little hall.

Speaker 2 (02:36:35):
Yeah, I wonder why she left him.

Speaker 3 (02:36:37):
Yeah, no idea.

Speaker 5 (02:36:41):
So he's the only guy who comes black.

Speaker 2 (02:36:44):
I haven't written the episode yet, but I have several
pages of people talking about Henry Kissinger's sex appeal on
the news that are real, real black pilling as the
kids saying, oh my god, not good. Oh. Nixon wins
the sixty eight election. Obviously, he gets inaugurated in nineteen
sixty nine. The Vietnam War continues on for half a

(02:37:07):
decade ish. This was an almost incalculable humanitarian tragedy as
well as disastrous for the future stability and cohesion of
the United States. But it was dope as hell for
Henry Kissinger, who was swiftly appointed Nixon.

Speaker 4 (02:37:18):
Yeah, like to put out there that my uncle went
to Vietnam and nutally, you know, he had to kill
a lot of people and until he fucking runed his
life and he watched Fastey and stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:37:26):
So thank you, Richard Nixon. Thank you Richard Nixon.

Speaker 2 (02:37:29):
Everybody who went to Vietnam after sixty eight, say thank
you to Richard for Nixon and Kissinger for you know,
all of the trauma and the trauma that in some
cases some of you passed on to your family members,
and the trauma that has been passed on societally based
on our attitudes towards war because of how Vietnam went
and the ways in which some people were always looking

(02:37:50):
for a rematch, and it got us into other you know,
thank you, thank you, thank you, Yeah, thank you stuff,
good stuff. Imagine if like that had been the end
of Vietnam, that like there was actually a president realized,
you know, the foolishness of a conflict, and we went
to the table and like negotiations were made and I.

Speaker 4 (02:38:09):
Don't think I don't think the first Iraquis happens, the
evasion Panama doesn't happen.

Speaker 3 (02:38:14):
You would think that for how long Vietnam dragged on,
that that would have actually been a lesson to not
go into conflicts, you know, no aimless conflict.

Speaker 2 (02:38:23):
But no, I guess the problem is we're thinking there's
people should learn lessons.

Speaker 3 (02:38:30):
Yeah, well that war is it anyway like a moral
decision or like actually comes from a place of actual
you know, savior mentality, anything like that. You know, Yeah,
it's good stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:38:44):
Getting disappointment as National Security Advisor required a lot more
politicking from Kissinger, including spreading rumors to Nixon before his
inauguration that Johnson planned to either depose or kill the
president of South Vietnam before he left office. Because you
pushed this rumor to the pre intellect via regular bastards,
pods side character and Rhodesia enthusiast enthusiast William F. Buckley,

(02:39:07):
Buckley's middleman to lighten Nixon.

Speaker 3 (02:39:12):
Translator. Yeah, William F.

Speaker 2 (02:39:15):
Buckley, whose son went on to write, honestly a pretty
fun book. But we don't need to think too much
about that.

Speaker 3 (02:39:24):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:39:25):
Great Aaron Eckart performance in the movie. So Nixon appreciated
Kissinger's hutzpa and connections enough that when he put him
at the head of the National Security Council, he ordered
the professor to reorganize it in order to take foreign
policy control away from the State and Defense departments. This
means that Nixon gave Kissinger it was very close to
a blank check to take total control of US foreign policy. Obviously,

(02:39:49):
Nixon wanted this because he was a paranoid control freak.
He did not want any kind of separation of powers.
He certainly did not want to have a Secretary of
State who could like do things that Nixon might not
be explicitly or uttering. But the result of this was
that Kissinger found himself in a position where he could
exercise near absolute power and foreign policy as long as
the President kept liking him. Oh, now, Justice Kissinger had

(02:40:12):
little love for Nixon. Our buddy Dick Millhouse was not
particularly warm to his new right hand man. Now you
had given a couple of spanky hank. Yeah, you want
to notice real Kissinger was jew boy. Oh my god,
Jesus Christ, it is Nixon. But it's like, I mean,
I thought we would be jumping off of the name

(02:40:33):
a little bit.

Speaker 3 (02:40:34):
He's just like, what am I gonna call you? Spanky Hank?
No little jew boy lord.

Speaker 2 (02:40:42):
And again it says a lot about Henry Kissinger that
he's like, yeah, right.

Speaker 11 (02:40:46):
That's pretty good, funny childhood have no effect on me today,
not whats.

Speaker 5 (02:41:01):
So there must have been.

Speaker 4 (02:41:02):
An element of Nixon then who knew what an ass
kissing little bitch he was. Oh, because he's belittling him
to his face oh yeah, and knowing he'll stick around.

Speaker 3 (02:41:15):
It's why you get hired for these jobs because it's
just like it's not, you know, an empty vacuum. Who
is going to be your right hand man is still
you know, there's security in that, there's there's secrecy in that.

Speaker 2 (02:41:27):
He's like a vacuum Gareth, and that he'll suck Nixon's dick.
But he's also like a toilet, and that he'll take
nixon ship. You know, that's.

Speaker 3 (02:41:35):
He's a dick.

Speaker 5 (02:41:37):
He's a human human human.

Speaker 3 (02:41:40):
Yeah, yeah, he's like the Toto toilet is pretty effective.
But if you ever had a dick sucking toilet, shit
don't come either way. I'm ready for it, baby, Henry Kissing.

Speaker 2 (02:41:52):
So can the title be Henry Kissinger dick sucking toilet?

Speaker 4 (02:41:58):
We got it, draws thinking of dick sucking toilets, It
is time for a commercial break.

Speaker 2 (02:42:08):
That is who sponsors our podcast Raitheon's new dick sucking toilet. Well,
it is going to fire a missile at a busload
of children. But that's that's just the raytheon. You know,
we can't avoid it. We'll be obligated.

Speaker 3 (02:42:25):
Yeah, it's how it works.

Speaker 2 (02:42:28):
So Nixon announced Kissinger's appointment as the National Security Advisor
before he had even picked a Secretary of State, which
is an unprecedented move. He announced Henry as quote, and
this is again in his public announcement to the country
as quote, a man who is known to all people
who are interested in foreign policy, is perhaps one of
the major scholars in America and the world in this area.

(02:42:50):
And he acknowledged that while Kissinger had never held a
full time government job before, he had Nixon's confidence to
bring in a whole new foreign policy team quote, new
men to develop new ideas. Now, the conservative media of
the day immediately roared into gear, hailing Henry Kissinger as
an unprecedented policy genius, the man necessary to get America
back on track after nearly a decade of disastrous war

(02:43:12):
under Democratic presidents.

Speaker 3 (02:43:14):
William F.

Speaker 2 (02:43:15):
Buckley wrote, not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure
received such universal acclamation.

Speaker 3 (02:43:22):
Ruin her William F. Buckley fantastic. Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 2 (02:43:34):
But even ostensibly liberal figures were wooed by Kissinger's titanic
intellect and Henry Kissinger and American power. Thomas Schwartz, writes.
The liberal historian Arthur Slushinger Junior simply referred to it
as the best appointment so far. The New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker noted the collective sigh of relief that
went up from the liberal Eastern establishment and the Ivy

(02:43:55):
League fearing Nixon's cold warrior image, most shared in the
sentiment of Kissinger's Harvard colleague Adam Yarmolinsky. We'll all sleep
a little better each night.

Speaker 3 (02:44:04):
No, mean, Kissinger is down there, you mean, in the toilet,
getting ready to suck that. You know, it's exactly what
happened with Trump. Yes, And it's like it's the way
that I mean again, it's people's natural reaction is normally
kind of there. It's just this, the fears are assuaged
by people who they consider to be, you know, the compass,

(02:44:29):
and they're just not. And so when you're told that
there are the good guys inside the bad camp, it's
like it's just never fucking true. It is rot from
the core. Yeah, and it is.

Speaker 2 (02:44:41):
These liberals are also are also impressed by him and
so comforted by him because they think he's smart, because
he's good at quoting smart dead people. Right. It is
the same thing that happened with Mattis. Maddis, thankfully is
not nearly as toxic a person as Henry Kissinger. But like,
if you actually look at Madis's background, one of the
things he did in the Iraq War was cover up
a war crime. He's not a not a man to
be like I mean, and he was. He was like

(02:45:03):
he was very popular among like people who served under him,
which is part of like why there was this kind
of collective relief. But it's this idea that he's like
the warrior monk, right. They love the idea that like, well,
this guy who's president is a maniac, but this dude
reads books that he hired so that it'll be okay,
And it's never okay.

Speaker 3 (02:45:20):
You continue to lower the bar more and more. You're obvious,
like the people that you're bringing back are part of
a lower bar. But because the bar is even lower,
it seems and feels a little higher. But it is
all just.

Speaker 4 (02:45:35):
It's just this is exactly what happened with Colon Powell
is sucking evil.

Speaker 15 (02:45:43):
We did the exactly evil Monsterson, Yeah, cover up fucking
the massacres in fucking Vietnam. That's like when he started
out like terrible human being. But the press did the
same shit.

Speaker 2 (02:45:56):
If you can quote old books and smile and you're
willing to give journalists time, they will talk about you
as being the secret reasonable person within the war crimes party,
you know, like that's all it takes.

Speaker 3 (02:46:10):
It's great.

Speaker 2 (02:46:10):
It's just the same thing as if you're a Nazi
who reads books. You can get an archtyvee profile, yes
or yeah, or you'll get on sixty minutes or whatever.

Speaker 1 (02:46:20):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:46:22):
It's it's don't trust people who want you to think
they're smart. Yep, that's never a good sign smart. It's
the same thing. It's the same thing with like people
who want you to believe they're dangerous. If they want
you to believe something specific about them, they're lying about it.
That's how people work.

Speaker 4 (02:46:36):
And and if if a doctor wants to get on
the news to talk about COVID and be famous on
the news, that's actually not a doctor you should listen.

Speaker 2 (02:46:44):
To and a great guy.

Speaker 9 (02:46:45):
No.

Speaker 3 (02:46:46):
Also, I mean it's you know, it's from the same
publications and the same networks. The idea that you continue
to listen to these sources about what is right and
what is wrong just because they have fancy terms like
senior policy advised. It's like it's all fucking it's it's
days of our lives. It's they're actors. These are teleprompters. Yeah,

(02:47:10):
and they don't know any more than you about anything
that matters.

Speaker 2 (02:47:13):
As a general rule. Every now and then you get
but like even like within agencies that are heavily like
medical oriented, like the CDC, where you would expect them
to have a lot of specialized knowledge, it doesn't necessarily
mean they're going to do a good job.

Speaker 3 (02:47:24):
But I'll say that much times comfortably lied about Iraq.

Speaker 2 (02:47:30):
Yeah, it's it's not great. So during a transition from
the Johnson to Nixon administration, US Military Command began to
act under what General Creighton Abrams described as a total
war mindset against the infrastructure of the Vietcong insurgency. This
began with a six month operation to clear the Mekong Delta,
code named Operation Speedy Express. This would prove to be

(02:47:51):
the first major military operation that both Nixon and Kitschinger oversaw,
and it was a titanic bloodlet bath. There is a
good article on this operation in the Nation and the
title of the article is A my lie A month.

Speaker 3 (02:48:04):
Oh my god.

Speaker 5 (02:48:06):
Yeah, so it's it's oh my god.

Speaker 2 (02:48:10):
Now the Myli massacre had occurred in nineteen sixty eight,
before Nickson he Kissinger were in power. You know that
ain't on them, and Seymour Hirst didn't like break the
story until sixty nine, which is the year that they
come to power. And this slaughter of five hundred civilians
by US troops was horrific enough, but within a few
months of taking power, speedy express it exceeded it many times.
Quote from the Nation, an inkling that something terrible had

(02:48:31):
taken place in the Mekong Delta appeared in a most
unlikely source, a formerly confidential September nineteen sixty nine senior
officer debriefing report by none other than the commander of
the Ninth Division, then Major General Julian Ewell, who came
to be known inside the military as the Butcher of
the Delta because of a single minded fixation on body count.
In reports, copies of which were sent to west Moreland's

(02:48:51):
office and to other high ranking officials, you will candidly
noted that while the Ninth Division stressed the discriminate and
selective use of firepower in some areas of the day Delta,
where this emphasis wasn't applied or wasn't feasible, the countryside
looked like the Verdun battlefields, the site of a notoriously
bloody World War One battle. That December, a document produced
by the National Liberation Front sharpened the picture. It reported

(02:49:13):
that between December first, nineteen sixty eight and April first,
nineteen sixty nine, primarily in the Delta provinces of Kinhoua
and Din Twog, the Ninth Division launched an express raid
and mopped up many areas, slaughtering three thousand people, mostly
old folks, women and children, and destroying thousands of houses,
hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards. But like most
NLF reports of civilian atrocities, this one was almost certainly

(02:49:35):
dismissed as propaganda by US officials. A United Press International
report that same months month, in which US advisors charged
the division with having driven up the body count by
killing civilians with helicopter gunships and artillery, was also largely ignored.
And it's because they're saying they're soldiers, that they're shooting
from a distance.

Speaker 3 (02:49:53):
And then they justied.

Speaker 4 (02:49:54):
Colin Pale justified it by saying, while they're providing food
for the enemy, so there's no difference.

Speaker 3 (02:50:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:50:03):
By the time Speedy Express comes to an end, US
forces had killed more than ten thousand people. The vast
majority of these were claimed to have been insurgent fighters,
but extensive mop up after operations after the fact found
less than eight hundred weapons on all these bodies they shared.

Speaker 3 (02:50:18):
That is fucking crazy. Yeah, I mean, like we can't
even frame them competently now.

Speaker 5 (02:50:27):
And also, remember you're taking guys that you drafted.

Speaker 3 (02:50:32):
Yeah yeah, right, yeah, right, you know to do this. Yeah,
I mean, like you said with your uncle, I mean,
it is it's like the generational ripple through that and
the lifetime you know what it does really, I mean yeah,
it's pretty beyond who dies, who doesn't live again?

Speaker 2 (02:50:50):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And what you know, what do people
take back with them now? It is fair and necessary
to note that this began in the December before Nixon
and Kissinger took office. This is not entirely on them.
Some of the blame for this ghosts on the LBJA
administration as well, obviously, but it continued under them. This paragraph,
written by Christopher Hitchins, gives you some idea of the
savagery of what occurred in the early days of the

(02:51:11):
Nixon administration's control of the Vietnam War. The people who
still live in pacified Kinhoa all have vivid recollections of
the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in
early nineteen sixty nine. Virtually every person to whom I
spoke had suffered in some way. There were five thousand
people in our village before nineteen sixty nine, but there
were none in nineteen seventy.

Speaker 3 (02:51:30):
One. Village elder told.

Speaker 2 (02:51:31):
Me the Americans destroyed every house with artillery airstrikes or
by burning them down with cigarette lighters. About one hundred
people were killed by bombing, others were wounded, and others
became refugees. Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs,
which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they
were hiding underground. So Nixon's plan, at the beginning, you know,

(02:51:52):
when his people had derailed the peace negotiations in sixty eight,
was that he would win election and then make peace
with Vietnam, right to do the thing that he promised
to do. But it swiftly became clear that peace was
a messy prospect. One of the things he's worried about
is that, like, well, if we withdraw him with Vietnam,
the Saigon government's probably going to fall, right because there
we're just barely propping up this shitty dictatorship, and that'll

(02:52:16):
be it will make me look weak, right, And so
I can't do it because it'll make me look weak.

Speaker 11 (02:52:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:52:21):
If you beer, that'll quit drink it. Yeah, And then
I won't win reelection in nineteen seventy two. And that's unacceptable.
I mean that, and that I mean obviously keeps going
over and over again. It's you get into office and
then you're like, well, what about re election instead of
going like the best direction for.

Speaker 2 (02:52:39):
It is one of the few things I'll give Biden
some credit for because he had the same calculus with Afghanistan.
A lot of criticisms to make about the pull out
from Afghanistan, but he did not make the same decision
Nixon and Kissinger did. He did fucking get out. It
wouldn't yeah, yeah, So withdrawing from Vietnam mean Saigon is
going to fall. The government's going to fall, and that
will be bad in the seventy two elections, and it

(02:52:59):
might push Kissinger and Nixon out of power. Neither of
them can accept this, and this description of a meeting
from December nineteen seventy by H. R. Haldeman shows Kissinger's
role in pulling back from peace. Kissinger came in and
the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam
and the president's big peace plan for the next year,
with kissing, which Kissinger later told me he does not favor.

(02:53:19):
He thinks that any pullout from next year would be
a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could
set in well before the seventy two elections. He favors
instead of continued winding down and then a pull out
right at the fall of seventy two, so that if
any bad results follow, they will be too late to
affect the election.

Speaker 1 (02:53:35):
Ah.

Speaker 4 (02:53:35):
Yeah, And it's you know, that's what our wars always are.
They're all about Yeah, they're all about elections. They fucking
always are. It's you know, I mean, yeah, this led
to Republicans thinking that, you know, they had to get
war back on.

Speaker 3 (02:53:53):
Track at some point.

Speaker 4 (02:53:54):
Yeah, But it's you know, it's always it's never never works,
like it's just such a crazy idea. And you also
like people are watching body bags go home, Like no
one's happy about anything that's going on.

Speaker 2 (02:54:09):
No, and it this they just kind of I mean
this part of why it keeps going is, yeah, this
kind of craven knowledge that like, well, the worst thing
that could happen is we don't get reelected.

Speaker 3 (02:54:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:54:22):
At no point is he thinking about any of the
human beings involved, even any of the American human beings involved.
It's just like, well, we can't be losing reelection.

Speaker 3 (02:54:30):
You know, imagine if Kissinger was damaged from his childhood,
how bad things would get. It could be really bad.

Speaker 2 (02:54:39):
It's like, you know, actually, when we talk about the
story of like American presidents making craven political decisions, one
of the reasons FDR did not approve more effort being
taken to evacuate Jewish refugees from Germany as he did
not want to be seen as pro jew Oh Jesus
the socialist policies and stuff that we're going through. He
knew that that could hurt him. There were a number
of other reasons, but like, yeah, they're like they did

(02:54:59):
not that is like there is there were things that
were done that led to the US government saving fewer
Jewish people from the Holocaust that were done for craven
political reasons by the FDR administration.

Speaker 3 (02:55:10):
Let me hear this Kaiser pitch again. It actually big hat.

Speaker 2 (02:55:15):
I learn the hat, biggest hat you've ever seen, big,
very spiky now loves this mom's hands. But oh god.
So the fun thing about this episode is that everything
we're going to talk about in part three is even
worse because in part three we're going to talk about

(02:55:37):
fucking Cambodia. Soo y well, you guys want to plug
anything after my ears three hours.

Speaker 4 (02:55:48):
Yeah, I'm going to be I'm going to be in
a toilet trying to get clean.

Speaker 3 (02:55:55):
After that, you can go to the Dollar Go to
Dollar podcast dot com for two more information and my
website Karen Reynolds dot com. I'm on tour, but not
like tours of duty, just like stand up and podcast
tours with the aim of bringing joint of people. I
don't want to talk like that anymore. Dave, Dave, shit

(02:56:17):
your fucking mouth and you can.

Speaker 5 (02:56:19):
Just listen to the last last time I saw you
do a seay. You just fucking murdered the whole fucking
shit your.

Speaker 3 (02:56:23):
Fucking face, like kill that crowd.

Speaker 2 (02:56:28):
You left unexploded ordnance in the crowded.

Speaker 3 (02:56:31):
Over should have been over fifteen minutes earlier.

Speaker 2 (02:56:36):
And like with unexploded ordinance in low forty percent of
the people who loved your jokes after the set and we're.

Speaker 3 (02:56:42):
Children no more.

Speaker 9 (02:56:44):
There'll be no more relating. There'll be no more correlating. Yeah, anyway,
that's part two. You got two more weeks of innardy kissing.
You'r ahead of you, folks, to strap in gets a
lot uglier. But also we'll be talking about his sex life.
So you know, I was going to say something to
look forward to, but like not really.

Speaker 2 (02:57:05):
Yeah, yeah, come back next week for more of the
dick Sucking toilet Henry Kissinger.

Speaker 3 (02:57:12):
That's a pretty good title.

Speaker 2 (02:57:15):
Sophie's not happy with it.

Speaker 3 (02:57:17):
No, Sophie is not on board. I don't love it.
But you know, all right, Oh I don't.

Speaker 2 (02:57:33):
How do I, Sophie, how do I introduce part three
of the Kissinger series?

Speaker 3 (02:57:38):
You just did it? Gareth and David are right here,
they're waiting for something good and I just I'm just
I'm fucking it.

Speaker 2 (02:57:44):
Up, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (02:57:45):
I mean, yeah, but you you accidentally introduced the podcast
which is behind the.

Speaker 2 (02:57:50):
Bastards Behind the doll Ups doll Up the Bastard the
Bastards hybrid podcast, and like all hybrids, it is incapable
of procreating, but better at getting up steep mountain passes.

Speaker 3 (02:58:05):
It's getting a little goading.

Speaker 4 (02:58:06):
Now we can multiply by cell division, but not through
sexual Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:58:14):
Yeah, we've tried.

Speaker 2 (02:58:15):
Yeah, we have, we have. We're in that process.

Speaker 3 (02:58:18):
We tried.

Speaker 2 (02:58:20):
So since we last recorded a podcast, war has broken
out and I was.

Speaker 3 (02:58:24):
Just thinking, mister in Europe, God, three days yeah, but
we like ended it and then it was like, oh wow,
it's happening, and now it feels like it's been two
months since. Then had a brief conversation what do you
think is going to happen?

Speaker 2 (02:58:37):
And then immediately checked our phones to be like, oh, okay,
so they're shipping all over the place. Oh so, y'all
are we ready to learn about Henry Kissinger and a
little country you might have heard of called Cambodia, Oh god,
and also a separate country you might have called Lao,
and also Vietnam. Still so that energy, I.

Speaker 3 (02:58:59):
Am, let's go, let's do it.

Speaker 11 (02:59:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:59:02):
So on February fourteenth, Valentine's Day, nineteen sixty five, President
Lyndon B. Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder. This was a
long term campaign of aerial bombing against North Vietnam. It's
primary aims were to help them morale with the South
Vietnamese and the Sikon government, to persuade North Vietnam to
stop supporting the Viet Cong, and to destroy the North
Vietnamese transportation infrastructure and industrial base so as to stop

(02:59:25):
them from sending men.

Speaker 3 (02:59:26):
And equipment south. It did not succeed. As a spoiler,
none of this, none of this works.

Speaker 4 (02:59:33):
Like it's just amazing that, like you have all this firepower,
you have all these planes, and really you're talking about
destroying like railroads and shipping.

Speaker 2 (02:59:45):
And like underground tunnels too. This is the ho Chiman Trail,
you know.

Speaker 4 (02:59:48):
Yeah, yeah, I mean is that what we're talking about,
the Hochiman Trail?

Speaker 3 (02:59:50):
Yes, okay, And we're never going to do that. No.

Speaker 2 (02:59:54):
This is like a lesson that no one ever learns
in warfare. Because you can also point to like the
saturation bombing of Germany, which had a minimal effect on
German industrial production. You can talk about like what's happening
right now in Ukraine, which has not succeeded in its
strategic games. You could talk about a number of wars
the US has been involved, and you can talk about
like World War One, where the British would drop a
million shells in a couple of hours on a chunk

(03:00:16):
of trench line and then all get killed by machine
gun fire because the shells didn't do enough. Like military
leaders always have this idea that we can just bomb
our problems away and it just never really works.

Speaker 3 (03:00:27):
Yeah, no, it doesn't. Yeah, you know what it does.
It terrifies the civilian population.

Speaker 2 (03:00:33):
It sure does, yes, and it helps the Pentagon a lot.
I think it does help the Pentagon. It makes money
for people, so I guess to that extent it succeeds
in its goal. And Operation Rolling Thunder did make some
people a lot of money. It continued for three straight
years until November of nineteen sixty eight. During this period,
Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps planes through more than
three hundred thousand attack sorties, which dropped more than eight

(03:00:55):
hundred and sixty four thousand tons of bombs. For reference,
the United States dropped half a million tons of bombs
in the Pacific theater during all of World War two Christ. Yeah,
it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which we
bomb the shit out of North Vietnam to no notable effect.
According to our trustworthy friends at the CIA, the raids
did five hundred million dollars in damage, killed twenty one

(03:01:17):
thousand people, and injured more than thirty thousand more. The
CIA says that seventy five percent of all casualties were
people involved in military operations. US government estimates, not by
the CIA, however, estimate at least thirty thousand civilian fatalities.
Other estimates placed the civilian death toll much higher, at
close to two hundred thousand civilians, probably fair to say

(03:01:37):
north of one hundred thousand. You know, a lot, a
lot of folks. By the time Kissinger and Nixon took office,
it was clear that Rolling Thunder had failed miserably. This
was due in part to the existence of the Hochiman
Trail in nineteen fifty nine, this is before US soldiers
had officially entered the country. The trail had been created
under order by the Loudong, which is the Communist Party

(03:01:59):
of Vietnam, to aid them in what was at that
point a building conflict with South Vietnam. At the start,
it led across just the demilitarized zone into Quaisan and
South Vietnam. Porters would carry boxes of ammunition and rifles
on their body, which they would then hand to insurgents
in the South. Over time, the trail was expanded to
a vast underground transit network, more than twelve thousand miles

(03:02:19):
in size, capable of moving more than ten thousand troops
and thousands of trucks per year. As the fighting escalated,
the trail veered into Lao, where the government was engaged
fighting its own insurgency and unable to stop the transit
of weapons. The Hochiman Trail allowed North Vietnam to smuggle
equipment south and to evade the US naval blockade that
sought to choke it out. Today, even Defense Department sources

(03:02:39):
recognized it as one of the greatest logistical successes of
twentieth century warfare. It works pretty good for this trail.

Speaker 3 (03:02:46):
It's amazing to think of the number of bombs you're
talking about. And then they made a tunnel. Yeah, it
turns out they dug a hole. Yeah, a really good haul.
But it's like Chopak, it's not just a tunnel.

Speaker 4 (03:03:03):
It's in a jungle, like we're tying him out a
very difficult sort of environment to make a tunnel.

Speaker 3 (03:03:10):
It's not that like it's incredible what they did. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:03:15):
So lbj's administration sent planes into Lao to bomb the
trail and to escort Laochian planes while they bombed the trail.
When US airmen were killed or captured over Lao, their
families were told they'd gone down in Southeast Asia to
allow LBJ to claim he'd abided by his nineteen sixty
four election promise to avoid a wider war. Cambodia was
bombed as well, but during lbj's administration, Lao was considered

(03:03:38):
a more important target. They thought more stuff was getting
into Vietnam through Lao. This changed in nineteen sixty eight,
when the Tet Offensive made it clear that that North
Vietnam had gotten very good at running troops in and
out of Cambodia. Johnson hadn't been willing to escalate the
bombing campaign against a neutral country, though, especially since again
there was this big election going on and he was
kind of having his vice president run on the promise

(03:03:58):
that like we're really going to end this thing. So
you know LBJ when he's trying to tease North Vietnam
with a bombing halt, isn't gonna just start laying into Cambodia.
Right In the spring of nineteen sixty nine, after you know,
Kissinger and Nixon took office, they approved the expanded use
of US special forces in Lao along with a campaign
of sustained air strikes. This was called Operation Steel Tiger.

(03:04:20):
All of these so, I mean, the stupidest names. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we.

Speaker 3 (03:04:26):
I mean we the marketing that we have gone for
in this country for so long has been so absurd.

Speaker 4 (03:04:32):
Steel Tiger, well, I mean they're just taking y and
T album names at this point.

Speaker 2 (03:04:37):
Yeah, if only they'd gone with like Prince Operation Purple Rain.
But it's likely the folianth that gives everyone cancer. So
I should note here that all secret operations carried out
by any US forces anywhere in the world during the

(03:04:58):
Nixon administration were approved personally by Henry Kissinger. Henry was
the chairman of something called the forty committ Hell oh
sorrys This was a semi secret body that had been
set up to provide management and oversight to CIA covert operations.
The committee was made up of members of the National
Security Council. They concerned themselves regularly with the question of

(03:05:20):
how to stop weapons from flowing into Vietnam. By this point,
trails ran through parts of Flow and Cambodia, but also
from the Vietnam Chinese border. So Kissinger is the head
of this committee. Considers a number of ways to stop
weapons from getting into new or from getting into North Vietnam,
including the use of thermonuclear weapons to annihilate the rail
waste between North Vietnam and China Jesus out of its

(03:05:43):
entire damn mind, and to be fair, is nuts enough
that even Kissinger is like, no, that's a little too far.
He also considered bombing the dikes that kept North Vietnam's
irrigation system from flooding all of its fields. Both of
these would have been war crimes on a Titanic scale. Thankfully,

(03:06:03):
Kassinger declined to do either in favor of a completely
different set of war crimes.

Speaker 3 (03:06:07):
So that's good, that's nice. Yeah, don't let's do a
different thing.

Speaker 2 (03:06:12):
He decides which war crimes to commit, like we decide
like jeans or sweatpants in the morning.

Speaker 3 (03:06:17):
I mean, I think that would go really well. With
what we're doing. Now that a really tie the whole
thing together. Yeah, it's quite a life.

Speaker 2 (03:06:25):
So immediately after taking office, Henry helps his new boss
put together a menu of bombardment targets in Cambodia. This
is literally called Operation Menu.

Speaker 10 (03:06:35):
Now, yeah, what before some great ideas to tip your bombardier.

Speaker 3 (03:06:47):
Get this?

Speaker 2 (03:06:49):
That was That's what I don't know. I actually don't
recall off the top of my head which bombing operation
McCain was involved in. But there's a good there's a
good tip joke to be made there. Somebody will figure
it out. Well people do in post. Yeah, we'll figure
it out. Different parts of Operation Menu had code names.
Different targets had code names like breakfast, lunch, certain.

Speaker 3 (03:07:11):
What I mean? It is one thing to be like
so sadistic, and it's just another thing to tie it into.
Wanted to try brunch. Yeah, we're going back to brunch
finally under the watchful.

Speaker 4 (03:07:33):
So slaughter can be fun, like you can find fun.

Speaker 2 (03:07:37):
Yeah, it's you should got to love what you do, Dave,
otherwise you're just going to feel like work, you know.

Speaker 1 (03:07:43):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (03:07:47):
So, before they began this series of bombings, the Joint
chiefs of Staff they warned the White House quote, some
Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation. Surprise effectiveness
would tend to increase casualties. So they're like the fact
that we're not warning anyone and that we're keeping this
a secret means more civilians will die. Like, heads up,
so you know what you're doing. This is what's going

(03:08:08):
to happen.

Speaker 1 (03:08:10):
Now.

Speaker 2 (03:08:10):
As they approached the question of bombing Cambodia a Kissinger
and Nixon had a choice. They could either tell Congress
or they could hide what they were doing and use
the presidential power over the Armed Services to appropriate funds
from other places in order to carry out the bombing
and secret. Nixon had been elected with Kissinger's help in
part due to the LBJA administration's failure to end the war.
He didn't want to go into nineteen seventy two's re

(03:08:31):
election campaign having to defend the fact that he expanded it.
Henry Kissinger worked with colonels Alexander Haig and Race Sitten
to figure it away for the president to direct bombing
operations in a private manner. And I'm going to quote
from Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandon Sitton based on recommendations
he received from General Creighton Abrams, the commander of military
operations in Vietnam, would work up a number of targets

(03:08:52):
in Cambodia to be struck. Then he would bring them
to Kissinger and Hague in the White House for approval.
Kissinger was very hands on revising some of Sitten's work.
I don't know what he was using as his reason
for varying them. Sitting later recalled strike here in this area,
Kissinger would tell him or strike there in that area.
Once Kissinger was satisfied with the proposed target, Sittin would
back channel the coordinates to Saigon, and from there a

(03:09:13):
courier would pass them on to the appropriate radar stations,
where an officer would make a last minute switch. The
B fifty two would be diverted from its cover target
in South Vietnam into Cambodia, where it would drop its
bomb load on the real target. When the run was complete,
the officer in charge of the deception would burn whatever documents, maps,
computer printouts, radar reports, messages, and so on that might
reveal the actual flight. Then he would write up false

(03:09:35):
post strike paperwork indicating that the South Vietnam sortie was
flown as planned.

Speaker 3 (03:09:39):
It's so much work. Yeah, reminds me of when I
used to skip school, that like the lengths I would
go to to get away with cutting class, and like
the point would be made always to me, like if
you put this focus towards studying, you'd probably you'd spend
less time and it would be more effective. But instead
you just waste so much. Instead of just stopping, you

(03:10:01):
do all this gymnastics just to continue the thing that
is the problem, that makes the problem compound.

Speaker 2 (03:10:08):
Yeah, it's they really are are going through a lot
of work to illegally bomb a neutral country to look
like they're not bombing. Yeah, to look like they're not.
It's gaslighting, you know, this is that's what That's what
this is kissing.

Speaker 11 (03:10:22):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:10:23):
We're finally going to get him canceled.

Speaker 3 (03:10:24):
This is going to be what it would be. Imagine
a Canceler book.

Speaker 4 (03:10:32):
We're gonna do Kissinger on Hannibal Burst did to Cosby.

Speaker 3 (03:10:36):
Oh man, come on, come on.

Speaker 2 (03:10:42):
So you know, obviously this is very illegal. There's a
lot of and there's a lot of parts of it
that are illegal. For example, the military has a chain
of command and Sitton was bypassing his bosses in the
Department of Defense, because he's just a colonel, right, Like
colonels don't get to that's not there, Like you're not
at that level, right, So he is he is bypassing
the normal chain of command in order to directly orchestrate

(03:11:06):
an a legal bombing campaign with the White House and
kind of cutting out a chunk of the Pentagon sitting
knew at the time that it was weird to cut
his commanding officers out and report directly to Henry Kissinger.
He later recalled, I kind of felt I was way
out on a limb and skating on some pretty thin
ice with all my trips to the West basement of
the White House where he's meeting with Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:11:25):
I mean yeah, like, yeah, I'm going to a secret basement, Yeah,
to talk about bombing, Like maybe maybe this isn't how
it's supposed to be done.

Speaker 3 (03:11:34):
Him seem like a democracy I feel like we shouldn't
be doing things like this in a basement. I can't
come to secret democracy basement. Yeah. Yeah. The people voted
for this basement. A knock, so I know it's you.

Speaker 2 (03:11:53):
I noted here that they kind of cut out a
large chunk of like the military command apparatus to do this,
which doesn't mean that those guys were against what they
were doing. And in fact, all of Sitton's superiors knew
what he was doing. They just didn't want to be
involved because again, it was a crime, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:12:08):
Like so they so they're like they're down with the
cutout because they're just like, yeah, you do it.

Speaker 2 (03:12:13):
I don't want my name on this shit.

Speaker 3 (03:12:15):
It's crazy, but go with it for sure. Yeah I
love it. Yeah we love it. Give me out of
the loop.

Speaker 2 (03:12:20):
But yeah, they didn't know about the bombing f Cambodia
the same way. I have never known a pot dealer, right,
So Sitting would regularly like, I don't know. I'm not
going to say this is to his credit, but he
was like this is weird, and he would go he did,
on a couple of occasions go to his superiors and
was like, are.

Speaker 3 (03:12:38):
You okay with this?

Speaker 2 (03:12:39):
And his exact phrase about what they responded was just
do just what you're doing. When you get a call
to go to the White House, go because you don't
really have a choice.

Speaker 3 (03:12:48):
Just great, Oh my god.

Speaker 4 (03:12:49):
It's so it's it's straight out of the show snowfall.
Like it's just like this shit just happens all the time. Yeah,
this is what happened with Iran. Contract was the same,
fucking know. Yeah, it's all crimes. And it's worth noting that,
like the United States is going to war with a
neutral country in secret under the personal direction of a
guy who several months ago had been a Harvard professor

(03:13:11):
like Kissinger is not even a year distant from being
a fucking teacher this and now he is orchestrating a
secret war in Cambodia. I mean, and like, I love
the I love the beginning thing where you said there's
like a guy whose job it is to pick targets,
and he's picking targets and Nick guessn't just taking them
maps and going No, I like most bomb here, like

(03:13:33):
just totally random. He doesn't have any fucking idea what
he's doing. He's just like that hill looks like it
should go away.

Speaker 2 (03:13:39):
He has not even begun to micromanage this, this war
crime day. So the purpose of this illegal bombing campaign
was not just to stop the movement of Vietnamese troops
and materiel. It also it also pleaded a role in
advancing what Nixon called his Madman theory. Now, the President
had shared this with close confidence to the nineteen sixty

(03:14:00):
eight election. He told his future chief of staff that
in order to negotiate an into the war with favorable terms,
he felt he had to make the North Vietnamese quote,
believe I've reached a point where I might do anything
to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to
them that, for God's sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed
about communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry, and
he has his hand on the nuclear button. And Ho
Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days

(03:14:22):
begging for peace, which is.

Speaker 3 (03:14:24):
Like the idea someone's like, so you want us to
try to convey that you're crazy? Okay, that seems I
think it's coming across her. Honestly, I think that's already
baked into this whole thing a little bit.

Speaker 2 (03:14:35):
It's also very funny that, like they are trying to
scare Ho Chi Minh, who at this point is fighting
his second winning war against a major world power with
like a very very small number of people, you know,
Like no, North Vietnam not a big country compared to
say the French imperial forces or the United States. He's

(03:14:56):
not a kind of you're not going to scare ho
Chi minh.

Speaker 3 (03:14:59):
Right, he's not. He's not a guy who gets spooked.

Speaker 2 (03:15:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:15:02):
No, it's over.

Speaker 5 (03:15:03):
That's just absolutely not happening at this point.

Speaker 3 (03:15:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:15:06):
Now, Kissinger either believed in his boss's plan or understood
that he had to play along. Greg Grandon argues that
Nixon's mad Man theory was actually just an extension of
the foreign policy arguments that Kissinger himself had been making
for years. Quote toughness after all was a late motif
that run ran through much of his state craft, the
idea that war and diplomacy are inseparable, and that to

(03:15:26):
be effective, diplomats need to be able to punish and
persuade an equal unrestricted measure. In fact, the mad Man
theory was an extension of Kissinger's philosophy of the deed
that power wasn't power unless one was willing to use it,
that the purpose of action was to neutralize the inertia
of an action.

Speaker 3 (03:15:42):
I mean it like it's not I mean it's not
a double down. It's like it's eighteen double downs. But
at some point you just I at least in my
lifetime had a moment where I did believe that there
there were people who were who would like point out
the crazy shit. And the more you learn, the more

(03:16:04):
you go, No, there's just there's not They are just
all like it's like a bunch of junkies figuring out
how to get more junk. Yeah, I mean, it's just
like it's just how do you get through the day.
It's not long term anything. Yep.

Speaker 2 (03:16:16):
You know, there's a degree to which and this is
like one of the things that's most frustrating about this
part of how this always gets justified is there's legitimate
logic in that, Yeah, Hitler gobbled up a bunch of
little chunks of Western Europe and nobody stopped him, and
they should have, like something should have been done, like
when he decided to take Czechoslovakia, you know, or during

(03:16:36):
the Angelis there's certainly you know, like there, and they
take this logic of like, yeah, if you have this
like massive militarized nation gobbling up its neighbors, you can't
just necessarily do nothing. And they applied that to like, well, okay,
we've got a bomb Cambodia. Because some dudes are hiking
through it with guns on their back, like Chamberlain.

Speaker 3 (03:16:55):
Nonsense escalation. Chamberlain also is always in play there too,
because it's like everyone's like, you know, want to be Chamberlain.

Speaker 2 (03:17:03):
Yeah, we're appeasing North Vietnam if we don't drop more
bombs than we're dropped in all of World War Two
on Cambodia.

Speaker 3 (03:17:09):
Yeah, I have Cambodia.

Speaker 2 (03:17:10):
It's this nonsense escalation of logic, of historical logic that's
like like someday Nixon's just gonna look in the mirror
and be like, sometimes I think I'm I'm just fighting
a war inside of myself. There actually are some quotes
from Kissinger that aren't all that far off here.

Speaker 3 (03:17:36):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (03:17:37):
So the first bombing mission in this operation was launched
on March eighteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Kissinger was in conversation
at the time when he was interrupted with a note
telling him that the bombing run had been a success.
He smiled and then sent the information on to the President.
Nixon's chief of staff, later recalled historic day. Kissinger really excited.
He came in beaming with the report. Now, it was

(03:18:00):
noted by people who are around the White House that
nick that Kissinger seem to enjoy quote playing the bombadier
taking great pains to direct the destruction. Seymour Hirsch wrote
that quote. When the military men presented a proposed bombing list,
Kissinger would redesign the missions, shifting a dozen planes, perhaps
from one area to another, and altering the timing of
the bombing runs.

Speaker 3 (03:18:21):
And it does.

Speaker 4 (03:18:22):
Yeah, I guess no fucking expertise in this area, absolutely none.

Speaker 2 (03:18:27):
He's a fucking nerd who reads books like you don't
know anything about what to bomb, Henry.

Speaker 4 (03:18:32):
It's like me showing up at a hospital and being like,
all right, give me this surgical schedule. I need to
start to working these surgeries and getting them in order
like that. Yeah, it's fucking crazy, it is. I mean,
this is there's a human impulse here, right.

Speaker 2 (03:18:47):
We're seeing it in Ukraine where all these like random
people are being like, here's how you disable a tank,
and it's like, you've never disabled a tank. You don't
know what the fuck you're talking about. Like you're not
gonna like throwing paint on it isn't going to stop it.
You're going to get people killed. If any one's stupid
enough to listen to you shut up. It just like
Kissinger is actually in a power to really do that.
And there's this I don't know what it is. I

(03:19:08):
don't know what it is that makes some people certain
that like they know how to prosecute an entire war
based on their experience reading a lot of books at
a school.

Speaker 3 (03:19:17):
And there's and there's. It doesn't sound like there's anybody
who's going like, no, that doesn't make any sense. Is
this out of its mind? Yeah? Yeah, it's just like
it is. It's just people being like, okay, sure.

Speaker 2 (03:19:27):
Because there's a lot Obviously, the the unrestricted drone warfare
that that escalated during the Obama administration and continued at
an even higher pace under Trump is indefensible morally, but
also the way that it tended to work was like
you would get, you know, these guys with the administration
at whichever one it was, would say like, these are
the things we are we are going to target with drones,

(03:19:48):
and then the military would bring them like, well, here
are the different options for strikes that we have, and
they would like pick which one to do. Kissinger is
literally taking the maps from them, erasing their plans, and
like writing in his his own, which is like.

Speaker 3 (03:20:02):
Like a it's a coach and it's someone in the
huddle with an actually with coach k he's drawing a
plan on a whiteboard and then a fan just scribbles
it out and like rubs it all down with his arm.
And then he's like, instead, I don't we all run
up the court at the same time, and then we
passed the battle bunch. Try to do it. That would
make someone head the butt into the.

Speaker 4 (03:20:20):
It's it's I think, yeah, I'm just upset because I
bought forty gallons of paint.

Speaker 2 (03:20:25):
Because you were going to try to knock out a
couple of tanks.

Speaker 3 (03:20:29):
Tank war, and now the whole fucking thing shot.

Speaker 2 (03:20:32):
Like yeah, yeah, there are some things paint is good
at when it comes to conflict. There were some very
funny moments in one of the big HUD fights we
had up in Portland, where kids filled a fire extinguisher
with paint and like ruined thousands of dollars in tactical gear.

Speaker 4 (03:20:48):
That was that was good.

Speaker 6 (03:20:50):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:20:52):
Look, it's not to say that amateurs never have good ideas,
but they were not amateurs at that point though.

Speaker 3 (03:20:59):
Those kids.

Speaker 2 (03:21:00):
I've been finding those proud boys for a minute, so
Kissinger's extraordinary degree of control over the situation was possible
because he had literally reformed the entire national security apparatus
around himself. Nixon wanted a buffer from his own secretary
of State, which provided Henry with the opportunity to take
as much power and centralize it around the National Security Advisor.

(03:21:20):
And he could do this as long as he kept
Nixon happy. Under Kissinger, the National Security Council, which he headed,
became the center of US foreign policy, a massive bureaucracy
fed piles of information embassy cables, intelligence reports, etc. Straight
to Henry Kissinger. He decided, he's again, Henry is where
all of the information from this vast apparatus that the

(03:21:40):
US has to gather information right the eyes and ears
of the president, you know, all of the things that
are supposed to provide the president with information. All of
that comes directly to Henry, and he decides what to
give the president.

Speaker 3 (03:21:51):
And he was a teacher, and he was a year before.

Speaker 2 (03:21:55):
He was a guy whose primary claim to fame before
this was we need more new we don't have enough
fucking nukes, and also we should use them. Whenever it's
I was just watching there's a great documentary called Commanded Control.
That's about a nuclear disaster in the US in nineteen
eighty that nearly killed half of the people on the
East Coast. That enough folks don't know about. A guy
accidentally dropped a bolt and it ignited part of a

(03:22:18):
nuclear missile and it nearly killed everyone on the East seyboard. Yeah,
it was.

Speaker 3 (03:22:22):
It was a big old It was a big kerfuffle.
And say so the guys there's a profile and the thing.

Speaker 2 (03:22:30):
That's nuts about it. But one of the things that
pointed out I think we have Sophie can google this
for me. I think we have about six thousand nuclear
weapons right now, which is way too many.

Speaker 4 (03:22:38):
But as a result we have yeah, we have the
Soviet Russia is around six thousand. We have around forty
eight hundred.

Speaker 2 (03:22:46):
I think forty eight hundred, So that's too much. Both
countries have too many nukes. I think we can all
say that's fair.

Speaker 3 (03:22:52):
It's a lot. I'm not sign enough on that.

Speaker 2 (03:22:54):
As a result, in part of Kissingers, we have a
missile gap and we need to build more. By this
point in the mid sixties, there are thirty two thousand
nuclear weapons in the United States.

Speaker 3 (03:23:03):
It is that's even an aside because it's like a
Kardashian with shoes. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:23:10):
I feel my thing has always been every every person
who owns property should be allowed to have a nuke.

Speaker 3 (03:23:16):
Your own nuke.

Speaker 2 (03:23:18):
Look, I think you can all agree, you know what,
you know what there wouldn't be if everyone had a nuke. Dave,
no knock raids by the cops.

Speaker 3 (03:23:25):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (03:23:25):
You're not gonna have any of that shit.

Speaker 3 (03:23:28):
They're gonna be busted down doors. Yeah, come on, guys,
are fine doors of mesole.

Speaker 2 (03:23:39):
Real different situation are the cops if everybody's got a nuke?

Speaker 3 (03:23:42):
Other problems though there would there would be some other
problems I don't seem Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:23:48):
So anyway, Kissinger is the the Kissinger is effectively turned
himself into the eyes and ears of the United States
military applats.

Speaker 3 (03:23:57):
He decides what it's great.

Speaker 2 (03:24:00):
You can argue he's one of the two or three
most powerful people who's ever lived at this point. An
argument could be made so Marvin and Bernard Kolb, who
were both diplomats at this point, describe what Henry builds
here as Henry's wonderful machine.

Speaker 3 (03:24:15):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (03:24:16):
Since Kissinger, I know, Willy Wonka mister Magoriam's nuclear emporium.
Since Kissinger controlled the system, he controlled the decision making process.
Everyone reports to Kissinger and only Kissinger reports to the president.
This set up allowed Henry to micromanage bombing campaigns, over order,
covert arms deals, and engage in secret diplomacy at will.

(03:24:39):
He was not merely executing the president's orders. He himself
was free to make national policy as long as Nixon
was happy with him. From Kissinger's shadow quote, Kissinger, according
to Marvin and Bernard kaulb knew almost instinctively that he
would be able to control the bureaucracy and thus help
reorder American diplomacy, only to the degree that he became
indistinguishable from the President and his policies. Rogers at State

(03:25:01):
was opposed to the idea of escalating the war into Cambodia.
Laired at the Pentagon was for it, but thought it
needed to be done above board, legally and publicly through
the normal chain of command. This gave Kissinger an opening,
letting him stake out in naplus ultra position. He wanted
to bomb. He wanted to bomb in a way that
inflicted the most pain, and he wanted to bomb an
absolute secrecy, completely off the books. As a result, every

(03:25:23):
war crime committed by the United States during the Nition administration,
every bad thing US forces do, particularly under the ages
of special operations at least right has to be considered
one of Henry Kissinger's crimes because it is his job
to personally sign off on all of them, and he
is He is not just a rubber stamper. He is

(03:25:44):
actively pushing for things. So we are going into very
specific detail about one specific crime. If you find a
bad thing that that US, the CIA or Special Forces
did from nineteen sixty nine to nineteen seventy three, Henry
Kissinger gave that the old thumbs up. Again, We're gonna
have to leave out a lot.

Speaker 3 (03:26:03):
It doesn't even sound like it's I mean, it's like
ego based. Yeah, it's it's not even I mean there's
there's there's so little actual. It just shows you, like
what happens when you're in a bubble. Yeah, but I mean,
I just don't think most people would would be capable
of this. But it's it is. It's just like it's
not really for anything other than he is just feels

(03:26:26):
great being at the helm of this and it's an
extremely powerful position.

Speaker 2 (03:26:30):
And it's such a bad idea, Like if you proceed
like a moment, get ourselves in the headspace. If someone
who thinks all of this is morally justified, it's a
bad idea because a person can't competently manage all.

Speaker 3 (03:26:42):
Of this, right they would, right, they would be like, look,
I need help. I mean, we're doing what we're going
to do, like a reasonable warlord would be like delegated, rational,
level headed, Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:26:58):
So when he was signing off on bombing, Kissinger poured
over raw intelligence documents, which included information on exactly, in
many cases, down to the number how many civilians lived
in a certain target area. Now, sometimes it was a
little bit less specific in this. For example, Area seven
oh four, which had quote sizable concentrations of civilians, didn't

(03:27:18):
have an exact number, but was bobbed two hundred and
forty seven times on Henry Kissinger's orders. And since we're
going to be talking a lot about bombing, we should
discuss exactly what that mint in this case. Because all
bombings are not created equal. The bombings Kissinger directed were
carried out by B fifty two bombers. These are massive plans.
These are like the size of the big international commercial
aircraft roughly right. These are not like fighter jets and stuff.

(03:27:41):
These fly too high to be seen from the ground,
and they are incapable of meaningful discrimination between civilian and
military targets. This is not an era in which there's
much at all in the way of precision guided bombing,
And with a B fifty two you cannot even attempt precision.
You are dropping explosives blindly from like a mile up.
I want to quot now from a write up by
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan for Yale quote, A single

(03:28:04):
B fifty two D big belly payload consists of up
to one hundred and eight two hundred and twenty five
kilogram or forty two three hundred and forty kilogram bombs,
which are dropped in a target area of approximately five
hundred by fifteen hundred meters. In many cases, Cambodian villages
were hit with dozens of payloads over the course of
several hours. The result was near total destruction. When US
officials stated at the time, we had been told, as

(03:28:26):
had everybody, that those carpet bombing attacks by B fifty
twos were totally devastating that nothing could survive.

Speaker 3 (03:28:32):
It's like a sturgeon with eggs.

Speaker 2 (03:28:34):
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is just completely indiscriminate. Yeah,
one Cambodian survivor, because people did live. As we've stated,
these are never as good at killing people as the
military likes to claim, which is not to minimize the horror.
It's just like it's also not it doesn't work except
I mean, one Cambodian survivor of US bombing described it

(03:28:56):
this way. Three f one on ones bombed right center
of my village, killing eleven of my family members. My
father was wounded but survived. At that time, there was
not a single soldier in the village or in the
area around the village. Twenty seven other villages were also killed.
They had to run into a ditch to hide, and
then two bombs fell right into it.

Speaker 3 (03:29:13):
Oh for fucks, Yeah, it is. Yeah. You cannot you
cannot exaggerate the extint to which this is indiscriminate. Yeah,
it's just total madness on top of madness. Yeah, I mean,
there's no Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:29:30):
People are rightly furious about like bombing in Ukrainian cities
right now. What the United States is doing in Cambodia
is eliminating grid squares on a map of all life, like, yeah, which.

Speaker 5 (03:29:45):
Is a country that has nothing to fucking do.

Speaker 2 (03:29:47):
Yeah, some d these are walking through it, you know,
like it's cop logic, where like, well, a guy who
stole a car was seeing in this neighborhood, so we
had to shoot anyone someone we saw in the window
of their house, you know, like it's that kind of shit,
which I guess it makes sense that cops act the
way they do because this has always been the way
people with guns and power act everywhere through all time. Yeah,

(03:30:08):
so that's good.

Speaker 3 (03:30:09):
Yeah, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:30:10):
So the ostensible purpose of all this carnage which to
put an end to North Vietnam's ability to wage war,
but a huge factor for both Kissinger and Nixon, even
larger than any actual impact on the war itself, was
to preserve their personal power. Right after the bombing of
cambodi began, Nixon sent Kissinger to talk with the Soviet ambassador,
a fellow named Dobrynyan. In Henry Kissinger in American Power,

(03:30:33):
Thomas Schwartz writes, quote Kissinger put forward a straightforward, put
forth a straightforward domestic political account for Nixon's motivation and thinking,
noting that Nixon is not seeking a military victory, but
he cannot go down in American history as the first
US president to have lost a war in which the
US participated.

Speaker 3 (03:30:50):
H Oh, I mean the honest, like you'd think you'd
at least lie about it. No, No, just the Oh
my god, Look, it's murdering. A demicide is one thing, Gareth,
but dishonesty, t christs, It's just it's disgusting. That's I

(03:31:11):
feel like a parent. Look the ambassador someone Kissinger drinks with,
you know, yeah, exactly lie to him. I mean, I
just I would love to see a version where he
just keep up an appearance. Look, he can. We just
Nixon hates losing. That's what this is about. We can't
think the people. Yeah, it's so.

Speaker 2 (03:31:29):
Between March of nineteen sixty nine and May of nineteen seventy,
more than three thousand, six hundred and thirty rates were
flown across the cam Bodium border. Each was approved personally
by Henry Kissinger. The New York Times broke this story
to the American public for the first time in May
of nineteen sixty nine. So that's pretty good, right, like
the New York Times actually is pretty shocking on this

(03:31:50):
and reveals what has happened. This prompts protests, an international outcry.
That's one of the frustrating things about the New York Times,
because there's a million things to be angry at them
all the time, and then it's like, oh, and they
also were the first people to reveal this horrific crime
against humanity, because.

Speaker 3 (03:32:04):
These bright spots where you're like, you fuckers, Well, it's
like a broken clock.

Speaker 2 (03:32:08):
Though it's you know, every now and then, it's like
a broken clock. But when it's right, it's about like
the massacre of civilians on an industrial scale. But also
when it's wrong, it's about the massacre of civilians. Southern investors,
so mixed bag. So there's immediately protest, an international outcry.

(03:32:30):
Armed students sees a building at Cornell University, which is
very based. Students at Kissinger's own Harvard engage in a
two week strike. Ever, pr savvy Kissinger agreed to meet
with student protesters in order to prop up his image
among liberals. He told them, if you come back in
a year and things haven't changed, we won't have a
morally defensible position. So like, hey, you know, I know
it's all fucked up. I've got to fix this whole

(03:32:52):
messed up. It's been going on for years. You know
I'm working on it. If you come back behind this,
but I figured the problem. There's a coug in here.

Speaker 3 (03:33:03):
Give me, give me one year to kill all the babies.
And it also shows how fucking crazy you are, Like
if you're doing this, you know you'd be like, look,
hide me. I do not want to talk to the
fact that he's like, I'll meet them, it's like you
can make it work.

Speaker 4 (03:33:18):
Yeah, I'll just tell him what's up. Like, look, we
gotta kill him, but we gotta kill people for like
a year. Let's let's see how it goes. Give me
a year. I'm gonna bomb the ship out of just
villages and ship and kill a bunch of babies and ladies.

Speaker 15 (03:33:35):
Have no idea year.

Speaker 3 (03:33:36):
It's just nice. Nice to be back at Look at
the campus. You guys changed a couple of things.

Speaker 11 (03:33:43):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (03:33:44):
You guys are just like you guys are like I
heard something bad.

Speaker 5 (03:33:49):
We're just getting started.

Speaker 3 (03:33:50):
But give me a year is an amazing thing to say.
What it's on this Look, yeah, this is happening. In
the year, we'll revisit. It's like, yeah, no, not a year.
You don't get to revisit this, you revisit we should
revisit where we are in the story after this break.

Speaker 2 (03:34:11):
Yeah, let's revisit the sponsors of the show.

Speaker 4 (03:34:14):
You know who else?

Speaker 3 (03:34:15):
You know who else need a year to keep killing?

Speaker 1 (03:34:19):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (03:34:19):
Look, if if it has not stopped the carpet bombing
of Cambodia in a year, then then you can cancel
your subscription, you know.

Speaker 3 (03:34:28):
Either way talking, that's menus. Those are menu options operate
very much like Yeah, it's very much like a white
House visit with a hell, well, do you want to
make a case of deal or do you want to
do this checkpiece? What do you there's options? You want
to do a flood bread? Oh we're back?

Speaker 2 (03:34:55):
So uh, there's congressional inquiries about the illegal carpet bombing?

Speaker 3 (03:35:00):
What are they after? What they smell some smoke?

Speaker 2 (03:35:03):
I should also note seizing Cornell offices with arms, dope,
actually sitting down with Henry Kissinger to let him talk
about how things aren't really that bad, not dope. Maybe
throw a stapler in his face, you know something, You
you hit him really hard to hit him. You know,
at least give him a shoe. You know, you've got

(03:35:23):
options from a fucking baseball team at Harvard had to
have been able to hit him with a fastball.

Speaker 5 (03:35:29):
There are people that if you're around you should be
Cheney Bush.

Speaker 4 (03:35:34):
Get around certain people, you get close to him, you
should fucking hit them, hit him hard.

Speaker 3 (03:35:40):
Look, dig Cheney is basically like a charging phone. Just
unplug him at this point and see what happens. Whatever
is little plugging a microwave. Next time, just have a
microwaving an extension cord.

Speaker 1 (03:35:52):
Put a.

Speaker 3 (03:35:54):
Yeah, look we we we all know.

Speaker 4 (03:35:57):
Everybody here knows that eventually Cheney and and Kissinger shed
their human skins and become one ball of energy.

Speaker 3 (03:36:06):
I think Kissinger currently is shedding his human skin. If
you've seen him lately, it looks like he's halfway through
the moor's crossed. Yeah, but the two of them merge
and then you know wings, Oh yeah, I get it.
So they kind of become like a like a cerebus
or something like that. Yeah, then they're one. It's like, Henry,
let's get out of here. Find that they got through,
and then they.

Speaker 2 (03:36:28):
And they locate in nuke microbiological life on Europa.

Speaker 3 (03:36:38):
No one has done yet. I love that it is coming.

Speaker 2 (03:36:43):
So there's congressional inquiries. Kissinger gets brought before the Senate
where he assures everyone that Cambodian territory is bombed by
the US were all quote unpopulated. He knew this was
a lie at the time. We know from briefing documents
Kissinger received that he was warned into tail about such things.
The breakfast bombing target he was told wasn't he but
by sixteen hundred and forty civilians, dessert had three hundred
and fifty.

Speaker 3 (03:37:04):
Nixon, it's just like ice cream. Yeah, you wouldn't get
angry at me for bombing a baskin Robbins, would you?

Speaker 5 (03:37:14):
There are no people there, senator who hates cake.

Speaker 3 (03:37:18):
It's called the magic shell.

Speaker 2 (03:37:22):
So Nixon eventually initially blamed Kissinger for the leaks that
had revealed the story of the bombing of Cambodia to
the New York Times. And this is because Kissinger brings
in a lot of like liberals. Like a lot of
Kissinger's staff are not Republicans, are not like right wing guys.
They're like Northeastern liberals.

Speaker 3 (03:37:39):
Because yeah, and he's charming. They are.

Speaker 2 (03:37:45):
But Nixon is like, it must have been one of
these East Coast liberals you brought in that leaked at
the Times.

Speaker 3 (03:37:50):
Heath right, so he thinks it's an extension of Kissinger,
not Kissinger. No, no, no, he doesn't kissing. That would
be someone's really up to something. Somebody's fuckinglogy. I won't
tell you who those.

Speaker 4 (03:38:03):
But this is just like bringing Woody Allen in. He's funny,
he tells you he's good.

Speaker 2 (03:38:09):
This is some good context on how comprehensively shitty a
person Kissinger is, how incapable of real loyalty he is.
Thomas Schwartz writes that in order to preserve his own position,
Kissinger had to throw large numbers of his team members
under the bus quote. Kissinger called FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover and gave him a list of those staffers in
his office with access to the information, telling Hoover that

(03:38:31):
he would destroy whoever did this if we can find him,
no matter where he is. Among the first to be
wiretapped was Morton Halperin, who had helped devise the NSC system.
Helm At Sonenfeld, Kissinger's fellow German Jewish refugee, and even
Winston Lord, the man Kissinger later called his conscience on
foreign policy issues. And all there would be seventeen FBI
wiretaps up by the White House, thirteen on government employees,

(03:38:53):
including Kissinger's staff, and four on newsmen, among them Kissinger's
British friend who was a reporter for the London Times.

Speaker 3 (03:38:59):
It's a media or raw. It's like American idol level
sudden impact as far as because I mean, as you
pointed to, he wasn't like this crazy. I mean he
was crazy, but now it's like he's just it's on roids.
The level that he the level he's gotten to, and

(03:39:20):
the level of insanity that he's gotten to is really
even for this country historic.

Speaker 2 (03:39:27):
Yeah, it's it's pretty cool. And just like it's great
he is he's not capable of even like treating his
very loyal friends. Well, so, yeah, this would come back
to bite Kissinger and Nixon and the ass in the
not too distant future. But we're gonna take a while
to get to that because there's a lot in between
there and now. So let's return to Cambodia. It is

(03:39:49):
worth noting that Operation Menu achieved nothing. It was useless
in a military sense. The enemy command and control facilities
they were ostensibly trying to destroy. We're never take it out.
And it was useless for a negotiating standpoint because North
Vietnam did not bulge, budge bulge, They post baby.

Speaker 1 (03:40:08):
They have.

Speaker 2 (03:40:09):
Nineteen seventy, Nixon incited to escalate again by ordering a
ground invasion of Cambodia. He announced this with a typically
unhinged speech. And again this is public because at this point,
you know, the New York Times is revealed things. So
we live in an age of anarchy. We see mindless
attacks and all the great institutions which have been created
by free civilizations in the past five hundred years. It's

(03:40:30):
happening because kids are like protesting and colleges yeah, like yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:40:36):
He framed it as a test of the nation's quote
will and character. Serious. Now he's right.

Speaker 2 (03:40:41):
When one of his staff members balkman, Kissinger's staff members
balked at plans to illegally invade Cambody with ground troops troops,
Henry told him, quote, your views represent the cowardice of
the Eastern establishment. This staff member, William Watts, tried to
physically attack Henry Kissinger who hid behind his desk.

Speaker 3 (03:41:00):
Ah, it's just like that, if he was only able
to just kill him. What imagine the ripple, if only
there'd been a sharper letter opener on the desk, put
it like a pen through his neck.

Speaker 2 (03:41:11):
Yeah, it's very funny that Kissinger did at some point
have to hide behind a desk to stop his staff from.

Speaker 3 (03:41:18):
So strong bombing everywhere. And then he's hiding under his desk.
The relax.

Speaker 2 (03:41:24):
So this staff member, uh Watts resigns right after this,
And when staff member Anthony Lake echoes Wats' concerns, Kissinger,
presumably still hiding behind his desk, calls Lake not manly
enough to do what was necessary, and so Lake resigns too.

Speaker 3 (03:41:39):
Yeah. Bold words from behind the hiding behind a desk. Yeah,
big tough guy.

Speaker 2 (03:41:44):
Four days after Nixon's speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia,
four students were shot dead at Kent State during a
protest over the invasion. Nine more were wounded. Two weeks later,
at Jackson State, police shot into a crowd of black
students protesting the war. Two were killed and twelve wounded.
The invasion prompted some of the first consequences and only consequences. Kissinger, ever,

(03:42:05):
faced stern rebukes from fancy academics he respected. A group
of them, men who had often acted as his brain
trust and advised him and other presidential advisers on issues,
marched into his office after the invasion. One of the men,
Thomas Shelling, opened by saying that he supposed he should
explain who they were. Kissinger responded with confusion that I
know who you are. You're all good friends from Harvard.

(03:42:27):
Next from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger no, said Shelling. We're a
group of people who have completely lost confidence in the
ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy,
and we have come to tell you so we are
no longer at your disposal as personal advisors. Each of
them then proceeded to berate him, taking five minutes apiece.

Speaker 4 (03:42:44):
Now sound at this point you've seen from Rudy when
they all hand in there.

Speaker 3 (03:42:52):
Yeah for to get ready to play. It's like that
and stories.

Speaker 2 (03:42:58):
If you have oh god, what's his fucking name, I'm
spacing the West Wing, motherfucker.

Speaker 3 (03:43:06):
If Aaron is a description of him.

Speaker 2 (03:43:11):
If Aaron Sorkin is writing this, this is like the
heroic moment where like the conscience of the American ruling
class that comes in is like, this is not right, Henry,
and really that's bullshit, that's not what's happening. And Ferguson
goes on to note that these guys were kind of
full of shit. They're all Washington insiders. They have Shelling
advised LBJ to massively escalade violence throughout the war in Vietnam.

(03:43:34):
Ferguson continues, and this is his explanation of what they
were really doing. Quote for these men publicly breaking with Kissinger,
with journalists briefed in advance about the breach was a
form of self exculpation, not to say, an insurance policy.
As student radicals back on the Harvard campus ran riot.
When Newstat told the Crimson, I think it's safe to
say we're afraid, he did not specify of what others
were more candid, as Shelling put it, if Cambodia succeeds,

(03:43:56):
it will be disaster, not just because my Harvard office
may be burned down when I get home, but it
would even be a disaster in the administration zone terms.

Speaker 3 (03:44:04):
So it's amazing it fuck sake, Yeah, I mean, honestly,
that's what this happens on the dollop a lot where
I'm like, all right, we got a hero, and then
immediately I'm like more villains. God damn it.

Speaker 2 (03:44:16):
I mean to the extent that there's some heroes, the
kids on these campuses who are actually like lighting buildings
on fire and destroying things. They do make Henry Kissinger
and his academic friends afraid and uncomfortable briefly, which is
more than anyone else does.

Speaker 3 (03:44:30):
Yeah, and I mean this would kind of be the
last time that that even happens, really, right, that like
that people in that level of power do feel any
sort of like threat from the So the regular folk.

Speaker 2 (03:44:43):
Yeah, credit where it's due. They are the only people
that I'm aware of who made Henry Kissinger briefly feel
something that vaguely resembles shame.

Speaker 3 (03:44:51):
So emotion.

Speaker 2 (03:44:52):
Yeah, good, like seriously good work.

Speaker 3 (03:44:55):
But of course, you know that doesn't stop anything, obviously,
you know he's got of course, he's got many desks. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:45:03):
So Cambodia falls into chaos as a result of the
as most places would when bombed on this level. Right,
hard to maintain a state with this level of things exploding.
It is unclear precisely how many people die in Operation Menu,
the subsequent invasion of Cambodia and the bombing campaigns that followed.
The low estimate is fifty thousand. The high estimates are

(03:45:24):
one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. Thirty to
fifty thousand. Lotions die in the bombing campaign, which makes
the sparsely populated nation the most densely bombed place on Earth.
Thirty percent of these bombs failed to detonate, and in
the years since the bombing, another twenty thousand people have
died from the estimated eighty million bombs left in the soil.
Forty percent of the victims or children. One AID worker

(03:45:45):
set of the situation. There are parts of law where
there is literally no free space. There are no areas
that have not been bombed. And when you are in
the villages now, you still see the evidence of that.
You see the bomb craters, You still see an unbelievable
amount of metal and wreckage and an exploded ordinance just
lying around in and it's still injuring and killing people today.

Speaker 3 (03:46:02):
What a legacy.

Speaker 2 (03:46:03):
Now, If any of this concerned Nixon and Kissinger.

Speaker 4 (03:46:06):
I would like you to just throw out there that
I do feel that gardening should be more dangerous.

Speaker 2 (03:46:12):
So yes, and nobody's in disagreement about that. And we
have enough bombs in this country to make gardening a
lot more dangerous.

Speaker 4 (03:46:19):
Yeah, four fucking beans.

Speaker 2 (03:46:25):
If there's not a one in three chance digging up
a potato loses you a goddamn arm, you're not really
a gardener.

Speaker 3 (03:46:34):
So how are the tomatoes? Ken's dead?

Speaker 2 (03:46:41):
If any of this concerned Nixon and Kissinger, we have
no evidence of it. We know that in nineteen seventy two,
Nixon asked how many did we kill in LAO, and
the Press Secretary ron Ziegler responded with a guess, maybe
ten thousand fifteen. Kissinger agreed in motion in the lotion
thing killed about ten fifteen. This is how they talk about.

Speaker 3 (03:47:02):
It's the showcase showdown three to five, nine eleven's worth
of people.

Speaker 4 (03:47:06):
I mean, it's the way you talking about. Did you
get like one bag of grapes or two?

Speaker 3 (03:47:12):
Yeah? I think I had two bags of grapes.

Speaker 2 (03:47:14):
Oh, what's the cover fee to get into that? To
get into that concert? It's like ten or fifteen bucks?

Speaker 3 (03:47:18):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (03:47:18):
Yeah, except for this is they're just complete and total
fucking psychopaths and.

Speaker 2 (03:47:23):
They're off by a half at least. You know, it's
hard to get accurate. You know, death tolls here and
the bombs were not the only thing left behind by
the campaign that Kissinger orchestrated. Greg Brandon Wrights defoliation chemicals
did their work just over a two week period April
eighteenth to May second, nineteen sixty nine. US dropped agent
Orange caused significant damage. Andrew Wells Dang, who has long

(03:47:44):
been involved in relief aid to Southeast Asia rights. Both
the US government and independent inspection teams confirmed that one
hundred and seventy three thousand acres were sprayed seven percent
of Kompong Cham Province, twenty four thousand, seven hundred of
them seriously affected. The rubber plantations totaled approximately one third
of Cambodia's total and represented a loss of twelve percent
of the country's export earnings. Washington agreed to pay over

(03:48:06):
twelve million in reparations, but Kissinger tried to defer the
payment to fiscal year nineteen seventy two, when the money
could be paid without a specific without a special request
that would have revealed US cross border activity. Every effort
Kissinger road should be made to avoid the necessity for
a special budgetary request to provide funds to debate his claim.

Speaker 5 (03:48:24):
Oh my god, look, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're going
to get the money.

Speaker 3 (03:48:28):
You're gonna get the money.

Speaker 5 (03:48:29):
You're gonna get the money.

Speaker 3 (03:48:30):
The money. It's just gonna take a lot. I just
need to it's a thing. Move.

Speaker 5 (03:48:33):
Yeah, I need to move some stuff around. Just but
you're gonna get it.

Speaker 3 (03:48:36):
It's fine. I don't know.

Speaker 4 (03:48:38):
Let's just keep it on the on the d L,
you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (03:48:40):
Yeah, it's yeah, it is.

Speaker 3 (03:48:42):
Hecret Service wasn't calling Trump Agent Orange by the way, Uh,
if that wasn't his code name, that's a disappointment, that is.

Speaker 2 (03:48:49):
I mean, yeah, there's a lot of reasons to be
disappointed in the Secret Service, but that is one of them.

Speaker 3 (03:48:53):
That's my mom one.

Speaker 2 (03:48:54):
So the loss of life and economic damage caused Cambodia
to spiral into chaos, or at least was a factor.
Other stuff's going on. We have a couple episodes about
King Notre Dam Sahanok, who is a real piece of shit.
In the King of Cambodia. In this period, a lot's happening,
but unrest by the caused by the bombings and the
economic devastation helped to spark a right wing coup, which
was likely orchestrated with CIA help.

Speaker 3 (03:49:16):
And US with the direct input it. You guys are
looking to change things up here. We've got a plan,
We got an idea. Well do no matter what happened,
someone bomb you will Why don't we provide some help? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:49:28):
And the coup, you know, overthrows the king, who then
starts backing the.

Speaker 3 (03:49:32):
Khmer Rouge then wins. They're great.

Speaker 2 (03:49:35):
Yeah, their counter revolution against the right wing coup, and
this leads to the establishment of Polpot's Khmer Rouge government.

Speaker 3 (03:49:41):
Yay.

Speaker 2 (03:49:43):
Once the Rouge took over in nineteen seventy five, Nixon
had left office. Kissinger, though, was still in power. In
November of nineteen seventy five, he told Thailand's foreign minister,
you should also tell the Cambodians that we will be
friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't
let that stand in our way. We are prepared to
improve relations.

Speaker 3 (03:50:00):
That's what I mean. Yeah, I mean we get it.
We get a Kissinger. I mean my people were I
get it. Murderous thugs. I'm all about murderous thugs. I
think we could find common ground. This man wants to
kill a million people.

Speaker 2 (03:50:14):
I think that is a cute start.

Speaker 3 (03:50:17):
I've got adorable. In nineteen eighty.

Speaker 2 (03:50:20):
Eight, when questioned on this, Kissinger explained that quote, the
Tie and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese dominated
into China. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I
don't believe we did anything for pole Pot, but I
suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something
for pole Pot. Of course, the United States attempted at
least to provide direct military aid to the Khmer rouge
in order to help them oppose Vietnam, and there's a

(03:50:41):
lot of debate and uncertainty. It seems that very little
if any actually made it to the Khmer, but this
is primarily because of difficulty getting shipped into Cambodia at
this point in time. But it is fair to say
that Kissinger and Nixon's actions were crucial in creating the
circumstances that brought Polepot to power, and once he was
in charge in massacring people, they tacitly supported his government

(03:51:01):
because they thought it would styley the Vietnamese. In total,
from the killing that started when the US bombing rates began,
to the people killed by Polpot's regime, to those who
died fighting in the fighting with Vietnam that finally brought
the rouge to an end. One point seven million Cambodians died,
more than a quarter of the population of the country
pre war.

Speaker 4 (03:51:18):
It's it's so incredible how their ideology of just communism bad.
They're like, well, communism will kill a bunch of people,
and they're just.

Speaker 3 (03:51:29):
Fucking everything they can to say people well.

Speaker 2 (03:51:33):
And it's also like they don't even really believe communists
because the Khmara or communists hell, and they're fine with
working with them because it's Vietnam is the ones who
beat them.

Speaker 3 (03:51:41):
And so they're angry at Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (03:51:42):
And it's like and Vietnam fights Cambodia, Like it's not
there's no these people don't believe in anything. Yeah, there's
not good lessons to take from this, but no, it's
it's really someone should have stabbed Henry Kissinger, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (03:51:58):
Oh I stabbed him.

Speaker 4 (03:52:01):
Yeah, there's so many people we should have stabbed.

Speaker 3 (03:52:03):
I mean there's so many, but Kissinger's.

Speaker 2 (03:52:06):
Way up there and in this story right, like we're not. Obviously,
you can't blame all of the deaths in Cambodia on
Kissinger a lot, just like you can't blame all of
the deaths in Vietnam on Kissinger and Nixon, but like
just so many lead to which he's central to a
lot of the worst actions in these wars.

Speaker 3 (03:52:21):
Well, And so the I I keep thinking about the
point you made in the last episode where it you know,
the idea that LBJ, that that he broke up the
LBJ plan to sort of end all of this, and
just for political reasons made that not happen, and that
just that the avenue that we are down now is

(03:52:44):
just I mean, it's unconscionable.

Speaker 4 (03:52:47):
And there's there's so many also we also besides just
the straight bombings, we destabilize areas, we change the trajectory.

Speaker 3 (03:52:58):
Look putin is our fucking doing.

Speaker 5 (03:53:01):
Yeah, we fucking took out the government, We did Yelsen,
all that shit.

Speaker 3 (03:53:06):
That was a fucking I'm not gonna let you sit
here and touch shit on Yeltsen. He was very in
control of what he was doing to it.

Speaker 2 (03:53:12):
I definitely knew what was happening.

Speaker 3 (03:53:14):
It wasn't like having a bottle of sphar enough in charge.
Nothing that happened.

Speaker 5 (03:53:18):
Everything we get involved with turns into a fuck pie.
I mean, it's just we just create chaos.

Speaker 3 (03:53:24):
Yeah, we're murder midas.

Speaker 2 (03:53:26):
It's this, it's this thing where we're talking about like
how how insane it is that Kissinger is micromanaging these bombings.
Which is not to say that like the military men
who were doing it before were particularly better. And this
is the problem that like we're going to have, you know,
with Ukraine and whatnot too. It's just that like, well,
now we have all of these people who are supposed

(03:53:46):
to be are the people we call experts who are
now going to be doing things, and like if you
actually look at their resumes, it is not a wide
ranging history of successes, you know. And it is the
same thing with Russia. You could look at like Russian
intervention a bunch places. It's a nightmare. The kind of
people who are in a position to make calls when
the conflicts get to this level are always ghoules, and

(03:54:09):
they're always bad at anything but causing devastation. And that's
why all of this keeps happening, because none of these
people are any good at it.

Speaker 3 (03:54:18):
And no one gets punished and nobody ever mean.

Speaker 4 (03:54:22):
Yeah, the fact that Bill Crystal is still saying what
anybody do anywhere in the world, You're like, what in.

Speaker 3 (03:54:28):
The fuck is going on? Guess who gets to go,
who goes away? Who goes away favoring his tweets?

Speaker 2 (03:54:36):
I imagine I know somebody who lost their job at
a grocery store because they got arrested protesting for like
protesting against police violence.

Speaker 3 (03:54:45):
Meanwhile, meanwhile, Bill Crystal's like a guest on an media show.

Speaker 2 (03:54:50):
Yeah, it's it's Bill. What do you think I mean, Yeah,
it's it's frustrating. Every now and then, far too seldom
you get a story like that billionaire Russian arms dealer
who's yacht got partially sunk. But there's like three of
those stories for every thousand kissingers. Yeah, and they don't
ever mean anything because that guy can afford to fix

(03:55:11):
his fucking yacht.

Speaker 3 (03:55:12):
So, yes, when they were they were egging Bezos's boat,
when when he was getting that bridge torn down, Yeah,
you're like, I mean people, Yeah, it's like, yeah, he's
gonna have someone hoes it down, and that he's fine.
You look, yachts burn. We know yes, we've it.

Speaker 2 (03:55:31):
They burn, that's the thing. Yachts burn, and so do
Bill Crystals. Bill Crystal, I think.

Speaker 3 (03:55:36):
It's like anals. No, yeah, actually when you burn and
he just turns into a few crystals.

Speaker 1 (03:55:43):
So.

Speaker 2 (03:55:43):
Greg Grandon, author of Kissinger's Shadow, sees the bombing campaign
in Cambodia and Lao is the terminal phase in what
he calls the crack up of America's domestic consensus, which
had begun under Johnson. Kissinger considered conditions in the country
at the time of Kent State to be quote near
civil war conditions. The paranoia Nixon had felt led him
to push for illegal expansions of domestic surveillance, which eventually

(03:56:05):
led to his ouster from office. The Senate investigation into
the Watergate scandal concluded quote Kent State marked a turning
point for Nixon, the beginning of his downhill slide towards Watergate.
Nixon grew increasingly unhinged, which is a story for another time.

Speaker 3 (03:56:21):
Nixon's starting to lose a gang.

Speaker 2 (03:56:23):
It is worth noting that for all of the things
happening at this point, Nixon is as a rule, anytime
I quote him and Kissinger talking, Nixon is as a rule,
drunker than you have ever been. Like then you have
ever been. I don't care how drunk you've gotten, you
have never gotten. Nixon in the White House hammered. So,
with Kissinger's help, Nixon cooks up a plan to pursue

(03:56:46):
an arms control treaty in order to discredit his political rivals.
Kissinger agreed that attacking the left was the right way
to distract from the disaster they'd created in Southeast Asia.
He told his boss, we've got to break the back
of this generation of Democratic leaders. Had responded an agreement,
we've got to destroy the confidence of the people in
the American establishment. Good news on that one, buddy. Yeah,

(03:57:07):
I mean, you know what a rare swish and he's
drunk and he's right. Yeah, that is a hole in
one for you, my friend. No nuts so prescient.

Speaker 3 (03:57:20):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:57:20):
Re Election in nineteen seventy two was always going to
be dicey for Nixon and Kissinger. Nixon's plan was the
infamous Southern strategy, cultivating racial resentment in order to turn
whites into a reliable Republican voting block. There's a lot
to be said about this. Obviously, we were just kind
of breezing past it. But part of the strategy, part
of his strategy for doing this, to get these Southern
whites on his side, was to continue carpet bombing huge

(03:57:43):
chunks of Southeast Asia, even though this had no impact
on the war's course, and he knew it. Grandon described
the continued bombing as quote blood tribute paid to the
growing power of the American right, and.

Speaker 3 (03:57:55):
As yeah, just and I mean it is like I mean, you,
it's what our politics is now, which is just constantly
the optics on how to get re elected. It's just
the number crunch on how do you get reelected by
doing things illegally or you know, shifting priority whatever it is.
Butasking you, yeah, yeah, whatever it is. I mean, you know,

(03:58:18):
like we all know that war helps pull numbers, so
well some of them do. Yeah, right, But I mean
in the in the short term, it seems like it's
it's a short there's a short term gain to be made,
certainly if.

Speaker 2 (03:58:30):
You're on the right, for sure. Yeah, And it's it
is worth noting because I always had this idea, even
at past the point where I stopped believing Henry Kissinger
was a hero, that he was doing what he was
doing in Southeast Asia because there were like very specific
wonky things he believed about the conduct of the war

(03:58:51):
and how to win it. It was just like willing
to do these horrible things. But no, they know what's
not winning the war. This is for votes.

Speaker 4 (03:58:58):
Yeah, and Kissinger they yeah, So, I mean you're basically
just saying it is just a white supremacist thing.

Speaker 5 (03:59:09):
They're killing people of color to make whites in the
South happy.

Speaker 3 (03:59:15):
Yeah, that's all we're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, m hmm. Yeah,
that's supremacist the country. But that doesn't fit on a
lawn placard.

Speaker 2 (03:59:23):
Yeah, get one of those, like in this in this house,
we believe in.

Speaker 3 (03:59:27):
The nick administration. We believe in covering up doubling down
on racism in order to And so it's.

Speaker 2 (03:59:34):
Worth noting too Kissinger isn't just micromanaging the the actual
racist bombing campaign that they're doing to get votes. He
is also the frontman Nixon sends out to talk to
right wing leaders to try and like pump them up
about this. Nixon sent him to talk to Ronald Reagan,
then the governor of California. Kissinger sat down on Nixon's
behalf with Billy Graham with William F. Buckley, with Bob Hooking,

(03:59:57):
name God. His pattern went like this. The President wanted
me to give you a brief call to tell you
that with all the hysteria on TV and in the
news on LAO, we feel we have set up everything
we set out to do. Destroyed more supplies than in
Cambodia last year, set them back many months. We achieved
what we were after.

Speaker 3 (04:00:15):
Well, I tell you, I really am. I can't wait
to go out there and rally.

Speaker 4 (04:00:18):
That was true, Sir Hank having just been doing some research.
He is friends with Frank Sinatra. Frank would call him
on the phone.

Speaker 2 (04:00:26):
Yeah, that sounds right, That fucking sounds right.

Speaker 3 (04:00:29):
When I get a nuclear weapon? Is that possible?

Speaker 2 (04:00:34):
Frank Sinatra with a nuke?

Speaker 3 (04:00:35):
That's yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:00:36):
There's no people left if that had happened.

Speaker 3 (04:00:38):
I imagine on Dean Martin's drink, and he didn't notice.

Speaker 2 (04:00:41):
Baby Kissinger spent a particularly long time bragging to Ronald
Reagan about the administration's achievements. Quote, we wouldn't have had Cambodia,
we wouldn't have had LAO, and we wouldn't have had
an eighty billion dollar defense budget, you know, without Nixon
getting elected. He also told Reagan, we wouldn't have had Amchitka.

Speaker 9 (04:00:59):
No.

Speaker 2 (04:01:00):
Chica is an island off the coast of Alaska in
the early nineteen seventies. The White House wanted to nuke
it for a lot of complicated reasons.

Speaker 4 (04:01:06):
Maybe I get that. Yeah, this is one thing.

Speaker 2 (04:01:08):
I'm actually I was from, not other islands, but specifically Amchitka. Yeah,
we're like am Shitka. So the White House wants to
nuke this island off the coast of Alaska. And as
you have like environmentalists and indigenous people, just folks who's brain.

Speaker 3 (04:01:28):
Yeah, freedom, I hate freedom.

Speaker 2 (04:01:34):
Here's Greg Grandon again. The test had no military or
scientific benefit, but was seen as something of a ritual
by the right fireworks to celebrate the end of Johnson's
presidency when many Hawks, like Curtis LeMay, felt the United
States had fallen behind on nuclear development. Then, when public
opposition to the detonation began to grow, Nixon had a
chance to show conservatives that he would stand up to liberals.

(04:01:56):
He let me known that we're the Supreme Court to
issue an injunction against the test. He would go forward anyway.
Didn't block the test but Haldman told Kissinger to play
it for politics anyway. Tell Reagan, we're taking an unmitigated heat.
In order to keep that thing going, we need all
the support of the right. Later after the test was conducted,
Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater and mocked the fears
of environmentalists. The seals are still swimming. The President said,

(04:02:19):
I'm damn proud of you. Goldwater told him.

Speaker 3 (04:02:22):
I need to get a bucket to Barfin.

Speaker 4 (04:02:25):
When people when people think like, oh, we've become dumb recently,
we've always been so fucking stupid.

Speaker 5 (04:02:33):
It cannot be emphasized enough. We're just really dumb.

Speaker 3 (04:02:37):
I honestly, I definitely thought that we've I mean, it
is a shocking level of dumb. It's the fact that
it's just this dumb. Yeah, it's just been going on
the island because because they wanted the fireworks. Yeah, because
he wanted fireworks.

Speaker 4 (04:02:57):
And it's as they could tell Reagan, it's like his
gender reveal fucking party, like right right, Jesus Christ, the bomb.

Speaker 2 (04:03:06):
It is worth noting for the sake of talking about
how dumb we still are today. Curtis LeMay, who was
one of the people cheering on the bombing of this
random island is essentially the hero of Malcolm Gladwell's book
The Bomber Mafia, which talks about how cool the bombing
apparatus we set up was and how it helped keep
things peaceful and built the wonderful packs Americana. That that's

(04:03:28):
I'm sure these Cambodian civilians we've talked about appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (04:03:32):
Well, that's the one where you need to Once you
have ten thousand bombs, you're an expert. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.

Speaker 2 (04:03:37):
If you drop ten thousand bombs, you're a bombing Yeah,
that's right. That's exactly. So in order to be able
to do it right, yeah, you have to do it wrong.
For those bomb you gotta.

Speaker 3 (04:03:48):
Log the bombs.

Speaker 2 (04:03:49):
That's exactly right here. So part of what made Kissinger remarkable, though,
was his ability to rope conservatives in line for mass
murder while also charming the entire liberalistat plishment of the
East Coast. Nixon's chief of staff later recalled we knew
Henry is the Hawk of hawks in the Oval office,
But in the evenings, a magical transformation took place. Touching
glasses at a party with his liberal friends. The belligerent

(04:04:11):
Kissinger would suddenly become a dove, and the press, beguiled
by Henry's charm in humor, bought it. They just couldn't
believe that the intellectual, smiling, humorous Henry the Ka was
a hawk like that bastard Nixon. It really is all
about like if if if Donald Trump had had talked
like an Aaron Sorkin character and like quoted books that

(04:04:32):
people don't read but know are smart books, he would
have been the most popular president in a generation.

Speaker 3 (04:04:38):
Like well, and I mean that'll happen. Yeah, No, one
of them will figure it out.

Speaker 2 (04:04:43):
Yeah, yeah, cracked, And you gotta dial the racism down
a little, you gotta dial the polite up and then
kind of equalize them, and then you can yeah, and then.

Speaker 3 (04:04:55):
And then the right access to the right people in media.

Speaker 2 (04:04:58):
Yeah, you know, I mean we already saw that. I
mean even under Trump, where you've got all these fucking
reporters who had these like bombshells about horrible crimes being
committed that they didn't release for a year in change
because they got a book deal.

Speaker 3 (04:05:10):
Yeah yeah, right right, yeah, yeah, I mean John Bolton
was basically just there to write a book.

Speaker 2 (04:05:15):
Yeah, everyone was. The whole administration was. Yeah, they're like
fucking navy seals with the books. Yeah. So, Kissinger's reputation
was as a brilliant, computer brained policy wonk, but his
success came from his charm. He was able to win
reporters over with a mix of leaks and effusive praise
for their work, something that made them feel like insiders
and thus sympathetic. He had a regular series of lunches

(04:05:37):
with Arthur Slshinger, a liberal historian, whom he made sure
to confidentially inform quote, I have been thinking a lot
about resignation after the invasion of Cambodia. Slushinger was not
privy to the information that proved Kissinger had planned the
whole thing, so he believed Kissinger when Henry said that
he'd only kept working for Nixon to prevent more damage
to quote institutions of authority. Kissinger would warn his liberal

(04:06:00):
friends that if he resigned, Spiro Agnew would run foreign policy.
He was basically threatening, if I'm not here, the far
right's going to be totally in power in foreign policy.
I'm the only one keeping things from going crazy.

Speaker 3 (04:06:12):
It's like sessions and with Trump. I mean there are
multiple people like that, but the amount of times when
people would be like, oh, McMasters, you know, these are
the good guys inside of the you.

Speaker 2 (04:06:20):
Know, but this too as he's drawing on a map
where to annihilate. Yeah, oh yeah, and it works. It
always works. It works, and it works over and over
and over again. As a rule, if their job is
to be a journalist who spends their time face to
face with powerful people, they're bad at their job. As

(04:06:41):
a rule, every now and then you get an exception, but.

Speaker 3 (04:06:44):
As a rule, no, it's like when Chomsky points out
to that reporter that he has the rye, he's sitting
in that seat.

Speaker 2 (04:06:50):
Yeah, you get the odd people who are willing to
like report on the Penanon papers or whatever, and like
do you know you get or the Afghanistan papers with
the Washington Post. Not to not to down play the
fact that there are people in those institutions who do
do damning reports on power, but also the level of
complicity within the broader media apparatus means that even when

(04:07:10):
you get a damning report on, for example, the war
in Afghanistan, which the Washington Post, if you've read that
it's utterly damning.

Speaker 3 (04:07:17):
Been do anything doesn't matter. Yeah, like this doesn't stop
anything very I mean, you know, and the reason why
people do it less and less is because you're attacked. So,
I mean it works. The public attacks discredit you, and
then you are you are what you are, You're no
longer you no longer get access to that information.

Speaker 2 (04:07:35):
Yeah, it's great. So A good example of how Kissos
used his charm is a speech he gave at MIT
in January of nineteen seventy one. He started off by
feigning a confidential air and telling the students that Nixon
had not been his quote first choice, but that in
time he'd come to see the bombing of Cambodia as
the only quote sensible path towards the Vietnamization. Vietnamization is

(04:07:56):
like the process of the US getting out in South
Vietnam taking over, Right, that's the big buzz Nixon and
his jury using. When one student asked him what it
would take to make him resign from the Nixon administration,
Kissinger said he wouldn't quote unless gas chambers were set
up or some horrendous moral outrage.

Speaker 3 (04:08:12):
What wait, wait, what is it? What does that mean? Exactly?

Speaker 2 (04:08:16):
He wouldn't get out unless and less Nixon was setting
up gas chambers.

Speaker 3 (04:08:20):
I mean, what the fuck? U child? His childhood didn't
affect him in any way. Yeah, outrageous, And it's confidence
the student.

Speaker 2 (04:08:31):
And it's interesting because then the student who asked this
question of Kissinger later realized, like, is there really a
difference between forcing people into a gas chamber and incinerating
from them from the sky with a bombing campaign. I
guess not. But at the moment, this doesn't really occur
to him. And at the moment he writes quote, he
had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one of us,

(04:08:53):
and right' I'll blame the journalists, like I'm not going
to blame a student for falling for Henry, because like
he's essentially still a child, And Henry Kissinger is the
most powerful man in the world. Of course, he's good
at wat talking circles around these fucking kids. The week
after that speech, Kissinger and Nixon sent ground troops into
Lao after another massive round of aerial bombardment. This involved

(04:09:13):
seventeen thousand South Vietnamese troops supported by US air power.
It was a catastrophe. Eight thousand South Vietnamese soldiers were
killed or wounded. The United States lost two hundred and
fifteen men. Nixon considered it a victory because it played
well with conservatives in the media.

Speaker 9 (04:09:28):
Fu.

Speaker 3 (04:09:28):
Oh god, and he's drunk, and he's drunk, and he's
he is that's pretty good.

Speaker 2 (04:09:36):
He just pounded back an entire bottle of vodka before
saying that. When the media savaged Lao as a pointless bloodbath,
Kissinger ran to his boss and complained about vicious coverage,
saying if Britain had pressed like this in World War Two,
they would have quit. In forty two. Both Kissinger and
Nixon saw LAO as a win because it benefited their
domestic chances of re election. As Nixon told his right

(04:09:58):
hand man, the main thing on Lao, I don't care
what happens there.

Speaker 3 (04:10:02):
It's a win. See a win. See he's a little
gangstere that's right. Henry to Orange started coppers.

Speaker 11 (04:10:10):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (04:10:11):
And as the re election campaign turned forward, Kissinger was
about to help his boss engineer another win. And this one, boy,
how do you think we've seen a body count so far?

Speaker 5 (04:10:22):
My god, what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (04:10:25):
But that's still morning that island. So now they're in sweeps. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:10:30):
Yeah, now they're hitting sweeps. And if you think hundreds
of thousands of cambodi and dead, plus aiding in the
deaths of another millionaire.

Speaker 6 (04:10:37):
So was bad.

Speaker 1 (04:10:38):
It was.

Speaker 2 (04:10:39):
It's really bad. It's a historic crime. But also Henry
Kissinger's just getting started.

Speaker 3 (04:10:45):
So I'm just you guys want to plug anything my
ears death? Yea, I remember because when I did an
episode on our podcast about Tim Leary and there's a
lot of the you know, Nixon law and Order president

(04:11:05):
stuff in there, and how drunk he was. But also
his lunch every day was pineapple circles with cottage cheese
in the middle, and so that was his that was
his daily drunk lunch. And then there's the one night
where he's starting to feel the heat. Well maybe I
don't know if you'll get it into that. Well, he
basically he goes out hammered with his valet and he

(04:11:28):
goes and talks to some of the people protesting him,
and like one of the he wakes one of these
guys up and he's like, you really think I'm a
bad guy, And the guy's just like, what the fuck
is going on?

Speaker 11 (04:11:38):
Right?

Speaker 3 (04:11:40):
Nixon out cruising? Yeah, Well, we'll we as you know, Look,
it sounds like the world loves America after hearing some
of this stuff. So we will be going to Australia
on a tour. You can go to dollapodcast dot com
for those tour dates. We'll be touring America, and even

(04:12:01):
if we do badly, we won't bomb as hard as
Kissinger Nixon.

Speaker 2 (04:12:04):
Yeah, I mean it would be hard to.

Speaker 3 (04:12:09):
Bomb on that level.

Speaker 2 (04:12:10):
I honestly, we still have a lot of bombs. I
don't know if we have enough bombs to bomb that
hard anymore.

Speaker 3 (04:12:15):
I don't think so. I honestly think we could pull
our pants down and fight with our penises and still
people be like, that's not that I've seen. I've heard
of Wor's bombings.

Speaker 2 (04:12:24):
I have seen a couple of cities leveled by American
bombs at this point, and it's still not as much
as fucking law got bombed.

Speaker 3 (04:12:32):
And christ yeah he cannot process it. And well I'm
on the road to go to Garethronolds dot com for
tour dates. Yeah, but feels feels wrong to do that. Yeah,
hard promotion.

Speaker 4 (04:12:47):
Well it's great.

Speaker 2 (04:12:47):
I will put in a plug for the concept of
death because as long as as long as men die.
You know, there's all of these ghouls eventually had to
face the end of of everything in the same way
that that those people in Cambodia did. And one day
it will come for Henry Kissinger and he will be
frightened and alone and left.

Speaker 3 (04:13:09):
I feel like he bombed the reaper. I mean he
like he is the level of melting. I mean he is.
I hope he dies.

Speaker 4 (04:13:17):
I hope he just I hope he shits himself and
then slowly dies over eight hours.

Speaker 3 (04:13:21):
Well, yes, it needs to be like that. He needs
to be. It needs to be a letting.

Speaker 2 (04:13:25):
There's a you know, the one war criminal in all
of history who got close to what he deserved is
Ryan Hard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, who stupidly
charged a bunch of assassins and got wounded by a
bomb and shatted into his own guts for several days
until he died of sepsis over the course of a
week and change. That's that's the kind of death. And

(04:13:46):
and not just Kissinger. There's like thirty people we've named
in this story. You deserve that kind of death. There's
a lot of folks, I mean, pot died old and
relatively you know, unpunished. You know, they all, most of
them do at all that.

Speaker 3 (04:14:00):
It's great to hear a judge sentence Kissinger to that,
like it would be you to shitting in your own
guts for about a week after a bomb just embowels you.
That's that's the right that's the right punishment for this
kind of stuff, all right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:14:18):
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