Part One: Kissinger

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everybody. Robert Evans here and my novel After the
Revolution is available for pre order now from a k
press dot org. Now, if you go to a k
press dot org you can find After the Revolution. Just
google a k press dot org After the Revolution you'll
find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
And if you pre order now from either these independent
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(00:22):
signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool.
You can also preorder it in physical or in kindle
a form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold.
So please google a k press after the Revolution um
or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre
order it. You'll get assigned a copy and you'll make
me very happy. Sophie, this plate of behind the Bastards

(00:50):
is so heavy as we walk through this hallway. Oh
my gosh, is that David Anthony and Gareth Reynolds with
with a with a heavy plate of of the dollarp?
Oh no, oh no, I'm losing control. Oh god, you
guys are slipping too. How was how was that? I

(01:12):
couldn't disagree more? That was the most organic, just real thing.
I think I've ever heard that. It was, yeah, like
you're the only thing I'm noticing is you didn't have plates.
So I'm wondering how I was wondering as I started it,
are they going to join in? Or am I going
to just have to commit fully to this? And now

(01:35):
that's something where if it's me, I just let you
go and then let you have I was a dog
in a yard that wanted to leave it, but I
was like, I get I'm not supposed to leave, so
I wanted to join. Oh gosh, well this is this
is just a wonderful time. Obviously. Again you are Dave
Anthony Gareth Reynolds, hosts of The Dollarp, the podcast that

(01:59):
invented being funny about history on the Internet. Um, thank
you so much for for sitting down with us today.
Thank you boys. For a long time, I've wanted to
do something with you so and we've talked about this,
but yeah, we have. 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

(02:20):
do our six part series on Henry Kissinger, it's going
to be the worst thing we've ever had to do. Therapy.
I have a therapy ses right afterwards, Dave married a
therapist in preparation. That's good, really putting in the deep
work to make this, to make this series of success. Um.

(02:42):
So my working title for this, which they probably won't
let us use, is Henry Kissinger Comma a big sack
of donkey balls? Um before can we do that? So funny?
Perfectly fine? What are you talking about? Um? What do
you guys know? Like I kind of think we may
be it's a good idea to start with, like, what
what's your your cliffs notes? We'll have We'll have you

(03:05):
do it, Dave, because because you're the one who reads
things normally, I mean I think that's of Kissinger. Yeah,
you know Kissinger, the thing that you know obviously stands
out of Vietnam and camp and Cambodia, and you know
that's just reprehensible beyond all words. But he's really been
a part of just so many horrific foreign policy decisions

(03:26):
and had his He's always getting in there. He's always
a part of the business release was. I don't know
if he is now, but for a long time he
was always a guy who would come in and go,
why don't you do the worst thing. Yeah, and that's um,
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

(03:47):
him like you can without Saddam who's saying like, oh,
he ordered he started this war on this date, you know,
or he um, he ordered this man. I mean, you
can actually, Um, but he's he's not like he's not
on paper supposed to be a warlord or an elected leader.
The thing that he is good at doing is getting
the ability to do stuff that warlords and dictators do

(04:09):
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. Um. And he's the
best at that there's ever been. We've had a couple
of figures on our podcast who I would relate to like,
and I would say, maybe Kissinger is like the war
Crimes Forrest Gump, where it's like it's kind of you're like, oh, yeah,

(04:33):
he was there, invented shit happens. I don't know that phrase. Yeah,
that's that's incredibly that's that might. I mean, that's honestly
a better title than I mean, obviously, Forrest Gump is
blameless and Kissinger is not. But it does get at
the fact that he's just like, he's just there. He's
just in every fucking photo of like guys doing a

(04:55):
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 in a lot of the worst things that
happened in the twentieth century. Because we're going to spend
episode one. By the time this episode is over, he's not,

(05:17):
you know, in the White House, He's not running shit.
This is an episode where we talk about like his
early life and his ideological roots, because that's what that's
what underpins all of the things that he does. He's
not a guy people talk about like what Kissinger believes,
and Kissinger himself has written a bunch of books about
what he believes. My opinion, as an amateur guy studying

(05:38):
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 and moving between different groups of people who
on paper are ideologically opposed and getting them all to
agree with whatever bullshit he wants to do, because he's

(05:59):
really good bit talking about ideas like a fucking philosopher,
Like that's his superpower. They might just have trouble understanding him.
I know I have whatever. What did we agree to?
Oh god, I was going to ask Gareth before we
get started. Here is your German accent locked and loaded?
I mean, listen as to the disgust of the German people,

(06:21):
it is. 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 That's how It's
like Texans. You know, everyone can do a Texan. Yeah,
that's how. I don't think I can. I can make
any accent sound kind of English and sort of Spanish,

(06:42):
and yet can't do English. It's really just sort of
this amazing ability to see whenever I do a non
American accent, it just drifts Russian at some point of
the time. Yeah, oh my god, well this is your time.
Now you can shine with what's going on. I know,
I know, I'm ready to just yuck it up over

(07:02):
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's 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 Kissinger and
we're leaving some ship out. Yeah you have to. I mean,

(07:24):
he's been around so many years. I mean, just the
fact that he was still paling around with Hillary Clinton
in the election, and you're like, what is that guy
doing there? Don't you know? He's bad? And and he's
the thing that is so interesting about Kissinger is that
he 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 CON's

(07:46):
like he's he's he's I mean, you could I think
you could say that part of what that reveals is
that the ruling class in this country are all in
agreement about things more often than they disagree about things.
But part of it is just that, like he is
so charming. We'll be talking a bit about Kissinger is
a sex symbol, which is a thing that happens. And
I am so sorry that we have to discuss it. No,

(08:06):
I was hoping that he would say this because I've
wanted I've wanted to funk him for so long, Like
that's one of the main things. He's hot. Everyone, sucker,
I've always wanted to kiss. Is not enough kiss that's
just the taste boat. I'm at the boy will a
b test the Forest Gump and the Fuckinger title, and

(08:27):
we'll just see what plays best in Poughkeepsie. Um so
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born on nineteen twenty three in
the city of firsth Germany. The Kissingers were a Jewish family,
and so given that this 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

(08:48):
that begins in a particularly pleasant place. Um. 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 others.
The year he's born Primo de Rivera seized power as
the dictator of Spain Mustafa Kamal took power. In Turkey,
the Bulgarian prime minister minister was assassinated um in a coup.

(09:10):
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 and its narrow dreariness are
unguarden city city of soot Um. You know, it's it's
a city, it's city, it's city. It's a working class
factory town. But because of that, and this is the

(09:32):
period in which the working class is a lot more
left wing than you know, folks didn't give it credit
for being today. Um, it's a very it's like a
haven for democrats, not like our democrats, but people who
support democracy is opposed to want to go back to
having a kaiser you know, Um, so first I wouldn't
want to go back to having a ki was worked
so good? Yeah, I want to have a king who

(09:56):
gets us into World War one and like wax off
about his mom's hands, that sounds great again now that
I know what we're talking about Let's dance I'm in
So Firth is in some ways you could see it.
It's reputation in Germany is being kind of like Portland today.
It's a very left wing town. It's seen as a

(10:16):
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 and like the
late eighteen hundreds has win a lot of like there's
there's essentially a partheight 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, X's person who does

(10:39):
this job. Because it's 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, Yeah,
like Portland. Yeah, it's 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

(10:59):
hold 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 Kim of Agent, a period
in which a Jewish boy could actually build a professional
life for the first time in mainstream German society. He
was a member of the first and almost the last
generation that this would be true of Um, what happens,

(11:21):
oh day, we may need to do it a separate podcast. Seriously,
never read any German history, Oh my, kind of exciting.
So he starts work 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. Um,
he's he's also like he has an Orthodox jew so
he's very religious, but he considers himself a German first

(11:45):
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 fighting for the Kaiser. And
when the war ins in German defeat. You know, there's
all these rumors spread throughout the far right that the
nation has been stabbed in the back by an alliance
of Jewish boogeman um hinz or sorry, Louis kind of
he sees this as happening, but he doesn't think that

(12:07):
it's ever going to like take hold. He's Henry would
later recalled that his father would regularly say, we live
in an age of tolerance. So his dad is not right. Yeah,
I'm sorry. Are you talking about America? Are you talking Germany? Yeah,
we are talking about this on the day that Texas
just announced a fun new Um. Yeah, this is this

(12:29):
is like, you know, Henry is wrong about a lot
of stuff. His father is also wrong, but for a
much sadder recent because there was a psychic Jane in
the family. I see us being tolerant for generation. Germany
will be a watchword for tolerance. We would be a
beast gent for all types. Oh poor buddy. Um yeah,

(12:51):
so he's Uh, it's interesting because like the Zionist movement
is rising in this time and Kissinger's family rejects this
wholeheartedly because they're so aman right. Um, like they don't
they don't want to ever leave. Um. 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

(13:13):
far right organizations hold a German Day in Nuremberg. Several
caravans of them passed through Firth, sort of like Nazis
do today in a lot of places. Um. 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. Uh. This
is like right after Hinton he is born, a mob
of brown Shirts are assaulted by a hundred strong crowd screaming,

(13:35):
killed him and down with Hitler, which is let's end
the story. It's a great and there's the tale of
Henry kissing Jeris a kid who was a baby when
some dudes did some rad stuff. Um. So Firth was
integrated enough that Hines initially attended a public school with

(13:55):
Christian classmates, which was not common for Jewish kids in
this time. Yeah, he's like going to school with with
other like kids who are not Jewish. Um. Eventually his
dad puts him in his private school, but that's also
an integrated private school. So while his education is secular
her family, his family's very strict Orthodox. He attended Hebrew school,
which he hated. I found a quote from another Jewish

(14:16):
guy who grew up in Firth at the same time.
That gives an idea as to why Henry was not
a big fan of his early religious education. Quote. Religion
was a study and not a pleasant one, a lesson
taught soulless lye by a soulless old man. Even the
day I see his evil conceded 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

(14:39):
he taught was paltry, dead, mummified, and that I think
is broadly in line with how Henry feels because he's not.
He doesn't grow up very religious. So Henry is as
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 um and his dad's interests
in classical music and theater. Instead, Henry Kissinger falls in
love with soccer. He is a huge soccer head. Oh yes,

(15:07):
um Firth has like a locally renowned team. They're one
of the best teams in Germany, and so like their
kids teams which are feeders into this whatever team are
very competitive to Henry starts playing in a youth league
when he's six years old. Um, and he later recalled quote,
I wasn't really very good, though I took the game seriously.
But what about soccer? We should talk about that. Sorry.

(15:31):
So his real prowess early on was in strategy, as
this quote from Nile Ferguson's Kissinger, a book named Kissinger
Like the Guy, makes clear the no great athlete Heinz
Kissinger was already a shrewd tactician, devising for his team
a system that, as he 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

(15:51):
by 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, we'll help us win and
also make this game no fun at all. Yeah, Henry,
what are you talking about? Fire bombs er? I know

(16:13):
we are six, but we will park the bus. There
will be no joy in soccer. Remove the keeper's hands.
He is 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 banns him from playing for a while. Um.

(16:36):
The older he gets, Henry has more and more conflicts
with his dad. So I thing that no one else
has ever experienced. Um and Yeah, he would regularly, after
fighting with his father, bicycle over to the home of
a friend who later recalled he liked 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 his homework and kept a

(16:57):
close watch on him. Hines told me more than once
that he didn't discuss anything with his father, especially not girls.
So his dad's not like hitting him or anything. He's
just like really really annoying to him, and just like,
just like, pay attention to your studies beyond anything else.
Like I think I like this girl, Like, well she doesn't.
She's not going to the same school. The focus handed
it focus. Yeah, and he's clearly a dick who's like,

(17:21):
you know, you can't be a professional soccer player eight
you have to go to school, like he's clearly an asshole.
Yeah yeah, I mean he's definitely the villain of the story,
no doubt, no doubt. So Henry is magnetic to women
from a well girls at this point, from a very
young age. But the funk is happening. I know, it's
really weird. It's weird. And this is the quotes about

(17:42):
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 is probably telling the truth.
I mean, at no point have I seen any version
of Henry kissing very like man. I mean, it's weird.
That's got memory hold because there were there were New

(18:03):
York Times stories about how much women like her because
he looks like a lump of clay you could mold
into anything potentially that would be good. No, yeah, no, no,
but it's it's weird. I mean, yeah, he's the guy like, yeah, well,
we'll talk about some of the things he said about
sexuality later. Um, I know you're all getting real excited

(18:24):
for that episode. Yeah. Yeah. 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, little

(18:44):
little Henry come Rocket Kissinger. The first time I sex
was nine, So you know, like at this point, he's
rebelling against the family religion, he's hanging out with girls,
he's playing a hell of a lot of soccer um,
which seems like a decent childhood. But obviously you know
the Nazis. So in the mid twenties, the German nation

(19:05):
goes on strike against some ship fans was doing Versailles stuff.
We don't need to get into it. Inflation goes crazy, right,
this is the wheelbarrows full of cash time. Um. 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,
you can generally like strike and organize to get your
salary adjusted to deal with inflation somewhat like it's still bad,

(19:27):
but it's less bad. If you're a public servant, you
don't get ship, your salary stays the same while inflation
jumps up. So this is really a disaster for the
Kissing Singer family. And of course economic trouble coincides with
a constant acceleration of far right violence. Later as an adult,
Kissinger would note without emotion that he was somewhat regularly
chased through the streets and beaten up by Nazi thugs

(19:48):
as a child. Um, yeah, that's tough. No punch lines, no,
no punch lines. But there is something weird about that.
Because he's talked about this a few times, but everything
time he talks about this, it is so that he
can emphatically state that this part of his life had
no impact on him. Yeah, it's you're really weird. It's

(20:09):
very strict, literal impact of fists had no impact upon him. Yeah.
In nineteen fifty eight, he declared, quote, my life and
firth seems to have passed without leaving any deeper impressions.
You don't get to say that, by the way, that
you don't like, I feel like you don't. I feel
like I said that to a shrink once about my
parents divorce and then wept. I didn't do anything. What's this?

(20:33):
What's this coming out of it? And it's like Yeah.
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,

(20:56):
which is really interesting. Right and so I know, right,
like I'm sure the reporter is like, I'm ready to
ask follow ups whatever he stops talking. You're not supposed
to remember anyway. I mean, I wouldn't. That's how I
can kill I went not at nine. I don't feel anything.

(21:17):
It is It's like, you know, I got assaulted by
a Nazi when I was thirty three, and it left
a market any but any time, it's just growing up
in that environment without being assaulted is going to leave
psychological damage. If your parents you completely safe from street violence,
it would it could not. Yeah, It's like, Henry, this

(21:40):
is the only time I'm going to speak sympathetically to you.
But it's fine. If being beaten by Nazis is a
child left a market, it's the only time you want
to Matt damon him with Robin Williams are, yeah, like
it's okay, many, Um, It's interesting the way he explain,
the ways he explains why this didn't leave any mark
on him are very interesting. And I want to quote

(22:02):
from Henry Kissinger in two thousand 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 for order over justice and that I
translated it into profound interpretations of the international system. I

(22:23):
wasn't concerned with the international system. I was concerned with
the standing of the football team of the town in
which I lived, which, like, you can't do both. You
can't pay attention to soccer. Obviously, as as a 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. What I'm
Secretary of State in several decades, I'm gonna just like

(22:47):
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,
you know, like I'll hate I'll hate freeway merging like
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

(23:08):
have this childhood, maybe you don't want to give the
Nazis anything, you know, even the like this left an
impact on me, right because like funck him, I don't
want to say that it had an influence on me,
which I get. No having grown up in a traumatic
you know, it's sort of childhood. You can shut it
down and tell yourself that you're fine, like you he
The way he survived it was to to shut his

(23:30):
emotions down a little bit and tell him self 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. Naturally, it
did not nature versus nurture. I would have killed just

(23:51):
as many people if despicable piece of ship. Either way,
don't judge my family. 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 and Firth, Hitler himself had called it the citadel

(24:12):
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 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

(24:32):
the Nazis flagging poll members. As first 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 eighteen point three percent. In
first they won twenty three point six percent of the vote,
which is four times better than they've done two years
earlier and very frightening for a lot of relevant reasons.

(24:53):
To today. Um yeah uh. Nazis electoral successes continue to
pace the next year and by nineteen thirty three, more
than two were Nazi voters. I want to quote from
Nil Ferguson's book again. On April ninth, ninety two, fifteen
s A men were set upon by Iron Front members
as they left the pro Nazi Yellow Lion pub. Two

(25:14):
months later, Nazi supporter Fritz reine Gruber was beaten up
for being a swastikist. The same fate Befell another Nazi
caught selling the n s d AP newspaper the Vocabeo Bactor.
The police watched helplessly on the evening of July thirty
as a mob through potatoes and stones at a Nazi
motorcade going from the First Airport to the Nuremberg Stadium.
The car carrying Hitler himself was among the vehicles. But

(25:35):
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 three, there's another torchlit
parade by the Nazis through Firth, and on the evening
of March nine, a crowd of between ten and twelve
thousand people's gathers outside one of the bars there to
watch the raising of the red Nazi flag. Um, so

(25:56):
you know it gets bad pretty fast. Can I just
flag the person who brought the potatoes to the rock
throwing event? Yeah? I feel like he turned first. Yeah
we're doing rocks. Oh I know that was a drawing
of a rock. Don't look like potatoes? Al good lord?

(26:17):
You know what I'm gonna say it right now. If
that guy had brought rocks, he might have killed Hitler.
Could we could have avoided the guy for want of
a rock? World War two? Oh you guys, see my
potato hit that car. It really smushed it. I do

(26:40):
left the idea that he also boiled it before. Yeah, well,
I don't want to look weird. So Louis Kissinger lost
his job teaching once the Nazis came to power. Henry, again,
who had never gotten along with his dad, watches his
father collapse into what biographer Thomas Alan Schwartz describes as
a quote state of immobility and psychological depression. Lewis withdrew

(27:04):
into his study, according to Henry's brother Walter, while the
world outside veered closer to nightmare. In his book, Henry
Kissinger and American Power, Schwartz writes, Kissinger and his brothers
saw the progressive segregation, isolation and humiliation the Jews of
Firth experienced. Even their attempt to watch soccer games came
with the risk of their being beaten by the young
Nazi thugs. The world of Heinz's childhood rapidly collapsed, and

(27:26):
his parents and the older generation of First Jews could
not protect their young from the hatred around them. 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 Heinz saw

(27:47):
his father cry for the first time, the family headed
to New York. Only three months later, during Christal Knocht,
the synagogue and Firth, like hundreds of others throughout Germany,
burned to the ground in a night of orchestrated violence. Yeah,
I mean that is when Henry leaves first. There are
two thousand Jews in the Jewish community at the end
of World War Two, there are forty Oh my god, yeah,

(28:11):
three months is so, I mean, that is fairly mean.
That's like they stay as late as they possibly came. Um.
At least 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 easy. It's not super easy
to get exact numbers. But like, his family is as
devastated as you would expect of a German Jewish family.

(28:34):
And he does acknowledge for the first time, he likes it,
admits that like some part of this had an influence
on him. It was moving away from Germany and like
going across the world to the United States. Um. 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

(28:54):
many of the people that once had that one had
considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into a enormous
turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities. People will say, we'll
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, um yeah, I mean
that's very common for that happened in you know, Chile

(29:15):
and other places where it all falls apart into authoritarianism.
They there's a lot of people who are like I
just wanted to be the same. Yeah, well, and yeah
you hear that all the time here too. I mean,
not 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 ship here, who keep being
like I just wanted to go back to normal, and

(29:36):
you're just like that ship that's sucking sale. 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
fun like like Henry, like your dad hadn't collapsed into

(29:57):
like and unable to handle him just like look, it's
too aggressive and like oh my god, we don't have money. Yeah,
you went from oh my gosh, you know, um, the O. J.
Simpson trial, what a mess? Too. Well, now a plague
has killed a million people. Oh my god, it's Arry.

(30:17):
Better give me that time capsule. 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 nor authoritarian
and his dad shut himself in his house and isolated.
It's it's so weird how these things if you, i mean,

(30:38):
just to continue off of that, Dave hit, there's dad
dies when he's a little kid, pluges the family finances
in situation and insecurity and chaos. Yeah, yeah, it's it
when when something that seemed stable from your early childhood collapses,
perhaps it has an influence. Yes, despite what Kissinger said,
Despite what Kissinger said, but you know what, Henry Kissinger

(31:01):
loves the products and services that support this podcast. Look,
Henry is one of the few v I p s
on its island where you can hunt children anytime he wants.
He gets a free three bedroom apartment on the child
hunting Island. Sophie. That yeah, because for some fucking reason

(31:23):
he is still alive. Yes, well, let's be honest here.
This is essentially as eulogy because when we finished this
podcast and it's published, Kissinger should die. It's possible. I'm
planning a dark occult ritual using my own blood and
a candle I bought in Mexico to deals like I'm

(31:46):
not gonna say I'm not doing it, you know. Um anyway,
here's here's some ads. Ah, we're back. Have you guys
gone to the island where you can hunt little kids?
First sports? It's amazing. It's also fresh. It's very the brisk,

(32:10):
expecting to be that fresh. So good. Um. So Kissinger
today has I sofish just shaker. Kissinger today has idyllic
recollections of his early years in the United States. He
often talks about walking down the streets of his new neighborhood,
seeing a group of boys walking towards him and crossing

(32:31):
the street because he's, you know, he's afraid he's going
to get beata like um. And then he would realize like, oh,
that doesn't happen here, which obviously, yeah, he's just wearing
brown shirts because they like brown. Yeah, Henry, this is
a country where some people who wear brown aren't Nazis.
Some of them are, some of them are, Henry. Um.

(32:54):
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 ship. 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

(33:17):
from the help of several community organizations and getting back
on their feet. He 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 um have built support networks to make it easier
for new folks coming um. Henry's teen years were a
mix of school in synagogue. He failed his first driving

(33:38):
test but excelled at soccer, and he grew to admire
many aspects of his new home, including quote American technology,
the American tempo of work, and American freedom, which I
might say is in direct opposition to the American tempo
of work. But whatever um Kissinger was frustrated to the
though by the casual approach to life that he saw
in his new peers, um he thought they were super.

(34:00):
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, al right,
Hank Fair. I like, if you come over from Nazi
Germany and you're like people here seem carefree and shallow.
Probably yeah, and your schooling was basically like some old

(34:21):
dude being like you didn't read this right, you know,
like you're gonna be like, jeez, these guys are really
not focused on what matters. Yeah. Look, maybe I don't
want to I don't want to be too critical, but
New York could use a little bit of Nazism, you
know what I mean. It's good lord. So because of
all of this, um, this is this is why one
of his biographers, Schwartz, describes young Henry as socially inept.

(34:43):
He's not not great at talking, too, He's not great
at dealing with his new peers. He did start dating again, though,
first a girl who was a refugee from nearby Nuremberg,
but most of his focus was on schoolwork in soccer, Kass,
since you graduated, George Washington high school and started at
the City College of New York. He took classes at
night so he could work during the day at a
brush cleaning factory. Some of his cousins owned these brushes

(35:06):
fail They've always keep going. It's the most amazing like
old timey job. Ever, it's basically like all I can picture.
It is just like the jobs are either like pressing
sheets or washing brushes. These brushes, I'm not going to
claim themselves, gentlemen, how many times do I have to
tell you? Well, in the corollarya is some mom being like, Billy,

(35:29):
you didn't take your sister's brushes to the cleaning shop. Now,
it's very funny. Um, 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 him Rey's
ambition in life was to get quote a nice job,

(35:51):
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, he's you're you know whatever, like
he's a kid. Yeah, we're about to get to the
studio fifty four years. I feel like, yes, So World

(36:15):
War two happens, um starts for the United States at
least it started elsewhere earlier, but for for the US, Right,
we'll do it ye when Henry is twenty one. Um.
He did not initially feel called to volunteer for service,
but when he got his draft notice in nineteen forty three,
he complied and joined the roughly sixteen million Americans who

(36:35):
became soldiers during this period. And if it weren't for this,
Henry Kissinger probably never would have been a figure of
historical importance. Again, he just kind of wanted to be
an accountant, but being drafted successfully disrupted his plans for
a quiet, boring life and thrust him into the world.
Yeah it's not maybe don't draft this guy, right, I

(36:59):
did not actually see your venmo this year, so the process. Yeah,
there's a future where he just has really strong opinions
on W two's Yeah, exactly nine, But I feel like
it was actually more like W four or he does
like a Bernie made Off thing. But either way, it's

(37:21):
a much better feature than the one we got. We'll
take the maide off ending for him for sure. Um.
So we have letters that Henry sent to his brother
Walter during training. He purported to like the quote middle
Americans he met there, but warned his sibling, don't become
too friendly with the scum you invariably meet there. He

(37:43):
did pick up, he did pick up a little something
from the Nazis. He's a little bit right, yeah. Um.
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 Everyone at camp as syphilis.

(38:09):
Every girl I had syphilis, one girl that syphilis. Every
one of them has it. That's why they zero of
the syphilis epidemics. You're surrounded by counselors. So the Army
administered a series of tests, which Kissinger excelled at, and

(38:31):
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
and Henry finished twelve engineering classes. During his off hours,
he would hitchhike home and see his girlfriend. He was
a brilliant student, recognized by his roommates as the quote

(38:53):
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, with
his mumbling criticisms. More salt if I would be other
than the sounds like a book. This is really a
weird way to describe it, dude. It's kind of what

(39:15):
but the way it looks now is like he eats books.
What had like a visual like reaction to that, to
that line, like I kind of want the story of
that classmate. Like caused you to describe a dude reading
books that way? Well, in my college, I ate analogies

(39:36):
and I just would just just devour them. I eat
him like a synonym, you know. Um. 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,

(39:57):
D day we decide America's like, we're going to do
us a normandy landing, and the army is like, well,
we probably don't need smart people for that, So let's
police kids out of the class and shine how to
get shot by guys actually want to talk to you
over here about something totally different. No, no, not you,
not you, Chad. You stay right there, Chad talking about
these other guys. Thank you. Good luck. So Henry and

(40:18):
his classmates get sent back to basic training with a
drill sergeants. According to Henry took glee and tormenting the
college kids, um, 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 peoplelied Henry Kissinger. I hope my grandpa got a
chance to give Henry Kissinger's some ship. Did he did?

(40:42):
He did, absolutely so, while he was preparing to go overseas,
his biographer Schwartz rights, 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

(41:06):
to Camp Claiborne in May nineteen forty four to speak
about the meaning of war. After Kramer's in passion talk,
Kissinger wrote him a note, Dear Private Kramer, I heard
sorry basically yeah, he literally like it's like I liked
what you had to say. Can I help you something like?
It's it's literally what the note is scared Yeah. Um.

(41:29):
Kramer responded almost immediately to the simple fan letter, returning
a few days later to seek Kissinger out for conversation
and dinner, insistently speak in German, not English. The Lutheran
Kramer later said that he was taken with this quote
little Jewish refugee he had met, who he believed as
yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything. Wow, that's
an interesting way to describe him. It sounds like, yeah,

(41:53):
and this guy Kramer is um. Kramer is a Prussian,
which I don't know the degree to which that that
means anything to a lot people, the Prussians. So there
was most of the resistance to the Nazis was from
the left. Once the Nazi has gotten to 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

(42:15):
to fight on take over all of Europe, but like
with a kaiser who has royal blood, not this like
gross little corporal and stuff. And it's complicated because like
a lot of those Prussians got murdered by the Nazis,
and as a general rule, your sympathy is with the
people who get murdered by the Nazis, but it's also like, yeah,
you got murdered by the Razi Nazis for the wrong
recent's yeah. They were like, we have one small note,

(42:38):
but everything else is working great for They were the
guys who were like Hitler's bad because he's not going
to win the war against Russia. Okay, 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 an idea of how fucking German Fritz

(42:58):
Kramer is. He wears a uncle to make his wife
I work harder, to make his weak eye work, Like,
my god, I'm the craziest asshole. Ever, and you know,
Fritz hated the Nazis, which good good. He also hated

(43:20):
the Communists, which you have to think there was some
some some some stuff there. Um, you know, Communists as
a mixed bag like everybody, but I don't think he's
very nuanced about it. Schwartz also credits Fritz with expressing
quote a respect for international law and emphasis on the
moral basis of civilization. And what Fritz Kramer means by

(43:41):
the moral basis of civilization is not the same as
what I think maybe you or I might mean, yeah
now that Yeah. I think the most important influence Kramer
had was he's Kramer is very conservative, and he Henry
is kind of a natural conservative. And Kramer really reinforces
this feeling in Henry, which is rest by a growing

(44:01):
sort of revulsion in Kissinger towards any ideas outside of
the political median right. Um, which you get why he
has a tendency towards this. If your life, if your
childhood is this like battle of extremes in your hometown,
I get why you would kind of veer towards the middle.
And this guy, Cramer really turns that up to eleven
in him. One right up in the New Yorker notes
quote he warrant Kissinger not to emulate cleverling intellectuals and

(44:25):
their bloodless cost benefit analyzes. Believing Kissinger to be musically
attuned to history, he told him, only if you do
not calculate, will you really have the freedom which distinguishes
you from the little people. So that's bad. So that's
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 by the way, have you

(44:46):
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, he is. He has
found a kid who like has problematic history of starting
fires and is now teaching him how to build a
fertilizer bob. Yeah, he's a bad influence matches so so,

(45:09):
but have you ever seen a zippo? Yeah? Great. So
Kissinger finishes training and is deployed with the eighty four
Entrant Infantry Division as it moves towards Nazi europe Um.
His division sees a decent amount of combat, He does
not he's a back ranker. He handles administrative and management
tasks um, and he finds the power and authority he

(45:30):
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. Um.
In nineteen forty five, he participates in the liberation of
a concentration camp alum um a h L E M.

(45:50):
I'm not sean how to pronounce it um. One prisoner
at the camp remembered him as the young American who
announced you are free. For Kissinger, the overwhelming mem of
this experience was seeing inmates he described as being barely
recognizable as humans and feeling the instinct to feed them
before learning that some were so starved that solid food
would kill them shortly thereafter. Yeah, I mean one thing

(46:13):
you got to say, he does not like, he's not
a sheltered upbringing, and you I mean, like you would
be like, oh, maybe that could be the influence that
made him be like, oh, you know, you can there's
there's good you can provide, like provide the people who
are tortured and starved some you know, you could take
away from this like my god, war is evil and
we should do everything we can as opposed to Yeah, baby, well,

(46:38):
let's see how it plays out, Dave. Maybe this is
the sixth part behind the Bachard's episode about a cool
dude who does nice things. I just brought you guys
here to talk about a chill guy. Um. So, shortly
after liberating this concentration camp, Kissinger writes an essay on
his experience where he asked, quote who was lucky the

(47:01):
man who draws circles in the sand and mumbles I
am free? Or the bones that are interred in the hillside.
He concludes from the experience that this is humanity in
the twentieth century. So, I mean an understandably bleak take
from liberating a concentration Yeah, like that, that's fair. Um,

(47:22):
you know what is a bad time to move to
an ad plug. I didn't think you're gonna be brave
enough to do this, but fair enough, boy, Yeah, you
know what makes me hungry. Probably shouldn't go too far

(47:42):
down that road. Let the ads do the talk. Let
the ads do the talking. The ads are gonna come
and win, the same way the Soviet Union did, wave
after wave of men into Nazi trenchet. Anyway, I think
we lost it. We had it for a minute right there.

(48:03):
I took it too far, you know, I took it there.
Here we go. 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

(48:25):
small village named bin Shim. He enjoys this experience. He
really starts to like having power. One thing that we're
getting here is he adores having power over people. Yeah,
he really likes it. In his letters, he celebrates repeatedly
to his family that he has quote absolute authority to
arrest people. Um, and it's this is this is problematic

(48:50):
because of what he does later. I will say, if
you are a Jewish kid who has to flee Germany
and then you come back and get made like the
military head of a town that's full of former Nazis,
I get reveling in it a little bit. Yeah. Well
for me, I'm having beheading tuesdays if that's yeah. So

(49:10):
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 in a fancy car, both
of which had to have belonged to some Nazi, which
is like, it's what you do, right. He gets a butler.
He brags back to his family that butler, a fucking
Nazi butler. That's artested for not giving butler. Yeah, that

(49:37):
is that is obvious now. That said, he's also, to
his credit, really aware of not wanting the Germans in
town to identify this guy who's absolute ruler as being Jewish.
I think because he doesn't want it to make things
up problems for people who's Jewish, people who stay behind
in Germany. He makes other soldiers referred to him as Mr.

(49:57):
Henry rather than by his last name. He's consciou. He
doesn't want them to think quote that the Jews were
coming back to take revenge. Um. 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 and similar positions in general. Henry counseled accommodation and
rapprochema with one exception Communists as the civil of course,

(50:23):
that's like understandable period, yeah, the Nazis, but the coming yeah,
and that's literally what happens. 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 and Nazis just like, yeah that the leftist due,

(50:54):
the leftist due. He doesn't want them. He also wants
to ban Communists from taching at the local schools, which, again,
what the fuck? He went straight Nazi all of a sudden. Now, yeah,
he's he's definitely well, let's say fascist. Let's let's say fascist. Okay,
he does a bit. He does a bit. He starts

(51:16):
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. Um, They're they're like,
you're losing your your faith, and Henry gets very combative
with them. He sees them as a rational 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

(51:39):
of the soul, provoking agonies which you and your world
of black and white can't begin to comprehend. How's the dog?
How's the dog? Love you? Mom? Good is his and
his parents? His parents have very actually we all did,

(52:00):
where they're like, hey, how are you, Hay, But it
seems like the war may have had an effect. I've
said this ever since you met the monocle guy, but
you're really intense. Maybe maybe all of the things you've
seen have had an impact on you. And in response
to this, by getting enraged and saying not everybody came

(52:23):
out of this war as a psycho neurotic. Oh, that
shows him. That'll teach them that that's exactly. That's fine,
that's fine, that's exactly. That's the right reaction of a
non psycho neurotic when you're when you're screaming, I'm not
a psycho neurotic. In letters, you're a psychoneurotic. Garland Camp.
If all they're saying is like, hey, Henry, do you
think maybe seeing a concentration camp has left some mental

(52:47):
scars that you need to like heal from. Maybe I
should draw that to the toilet. Okay, alright, buddy, alright, Pa,
We're just okay, just tough. We're just writing letters here, buddy.
We're just writing some letters. That's all we're doing. That's
what those things. 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

(53:08):
go to war and a bunch of them get traumatized,
and they come back to a world where like their
dad was always like, if you talk about your feelings,
I'm going to hit you. Pory's family doesn't seem to
be like that. His parents are like, hey, do you
want to talk about your feelings, and he's like, I'm
not crazy. Yeah. Um. Obviously, obviously the fact that this

(53:29):
is a time in which like men don't fucking do
therapy does have an impact on it. But I think
his family is probably more understanding than well. He also
has no i mean even now, he has no acknowledgement
of like his trauma. So he probably even in the
in the actual moment, I mean, you're probably even more defensive,
you know. Yeah. Um. In seven, Kissinger finally decides to
leave Germany for the second time. On Fritz Kramer's advice.

(53:51):
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, and tramp House did a tournament
of evil people from Harvard's and Kissinger one that makes sense. Boy,

(54:12):
the IVY League good at producing bad people. Um, 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. Um. One of his classmates
recalls that he quote worked harder and studied more than
anybody else on campus. He stays school. He school's been

(54:34):
stop him from shoven pencils in his mate the campus
like Godzilla would have. He nearly 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

(54:56):
had started him off on. He agreed with Girtha I
believe is the as the name of the German philosopher
that if he quote had to choose between justice and
disorder on the one hand, and injustice and order on
the other. I would always choose the latter. So well,
there we go. He's made his choice. That's very telling,
Like we know, we know. Yeah, it's just nice to

(55:18):
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,
had an impact on you. Yeah. Yeah, but it's just
such a it's a strange thing that he it's so
consciously like he he's so completely aware of it. Yeah,

(55:42):
like he's like a psychopath. He might be. I mean,
I think if you're I try not to do too
much like the psychoanalyzing people, but like fucking maybe right, Well,
psychopaths are very good at the stuff you talked about,
leaving people over in the room. Um, you know ladies,
man like is they they learn how to be a
human and then they sort of and a lot of

(56:05):
you got syphilis ad camp and a lot of symphilicit
camp like Henry Kissinger. Well, Sophie, can we let's green
light some Henry kissing some some T shirts that are
just Henry Kissinger with his face riding off from syphilis.
People are gonna want to wear them. He's making the kiss.
He kiss he lips and his lips are falling off.

(56:26):
What you like a kissing? Let French Kissinger you. So
he meets his second mentor at Harvard. Henry Kissinger has
a lot of mentors. And this is maybe a lesson
to never mentor anybody. Um, you never know they might
become Henry Kissinger. Don't teach people things. Sabotage them at

(56:48):
every step. Right next time you drive past a kindergarten,
throw him a textbook that's all lies, you know, just
slow him down. So his second mentor is this guy,
William Yandel 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. Uh. And Kissinger was drawn

(57:11):
to this guy because not only is he a respected educator,
but he's really well connected to people with power um
and Elliott. One of the things that like he is
famous for being a big advocate of is what is
what's called real politique UM 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 mean,

(57:33):
like Klauswitz and Bismarck, these these these guys who are
like Bismarck is the dude who makes Germany right, we
have it, We get a Germany because Bismarck orchestrates, over
a period of like I think it's decades, gradually he
welds all these different German principalities and kingships together and
then helps to orchestrate this war, which out of which
emerges Germany. Like that's the kind of dude that Otto

(57:55):
von Bismarck is, and he is kind of the master
of the kind of politics that Kissinger comes to respect.
And he Kissinger calls cloud Fits and Bismarck philosophers of history.
That's how he sees this guy, these guys um, which
is not really what I would call out of on Bismarck,
Like he's very good at what he does, obviously, um,
but but not I wouldn't call him a philosopher. UM.

(58:18):
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 was not a
story of liberal progress, or of class consciousness, or of
cycles of history, or 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,

(58:41):
Kissinger had learned that Victor's ransacked history for analogies to
guild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out historical causes
of their misfortune. So yeah, yeah, you know stuff, it's
it's maybe not yeah, yeah, you can think about however
you want. So a lot of folks who analyze the

(59:07):
Kissinger in this period sees 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. It is, right, I mean, honestly,
he's not a dude who makes like little leaps, right, yeah, yeah,
why do we love? This is the line The realm

(59:31):
of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except by an
inward experience, which is you know, we read it again,
The realm of freedom and necessity cannot be reconciled except
by an inward experience. Wow, and this is this is
a like a heavily influenced by French French existentialism. His

(59:51):
thesis cites Jean Paul Start a lot, and both Start
and Kissinger think that morality is not an inward thing,
is determined by actions, which it is not an unreasonable
thing to believe, right that, like what matters is what
you do. You know is 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. Start Um. He believes that

(01:00:13):
like action creates the possibility of intellection, individual and collective responsibility. Right,
that morality is determined by action, but that our actions
create this possibility of like individual and collective moral responsibility
for things. Kissinger does not come to that conclusion. Kissinger
believes that morality is determined by action, but he also
thinks that, like you, moral indeterminacy is a condition of

(01:00:37):
human freedom. It's this idea that you can't be bound
by morality, and to be free, if you want to
freely act, you have to be able to act above morality.
That's just giving yourself an excuse to do heinous acts.
I mean a lot of his intellectual development as him.
And you know, also a lot of this is obviously

(01:00:59):
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,
so including from him and from like the people who
are sources who were saying this is what he was
like as a kid. There is that degree of biasing, right,
like that this is after he is the person that
he is. Because if he had gone on to like
just to be a professor, nobody would have given a

(01:01:21):
ship about what the accountant said that I would be like, yeah, look,
just would you what do I owe? Yeah? Yeah, tell
me what the I R S gets man, I I don't.
I don't need another lecture on this um and Kissingers,
the fact that he becomes so kind of 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

(01:01:44):
lot of people around him, including people who are like
his big supporters, including that professor Elliott guy at his
retirement party, Henry Kissinger. Elliot's retirement party, Henry Kissinger in
a number of students gather to like bid him farewell,
and journalist David Halberston 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,

(01:02:07):
he began, You're brilliant, but you're arrogant. In fact, you're
the most arrogant man I've ever met. Kissinger became ashen faced.
Mark my words. Elliot continued, your arrogance is going to
get you in real trouble one day. That is amazing levels,
like at your retirement party to be like hey and
you listen, chip bag, chill out, and then for that

(01:02:29):
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 what makes a native American? And the guy
just goes, sir, I'm glad You're never going to get
into any real power and you're like yeah, dude, oh dude. Well,

(01:02:50):
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 ship like he's a major
bags and I think this is kind of him belated
Lee being like, Boo, I'm gonna go patronize a Cambodian
restaurant just to make myself feel of them. Yeah. Real, Well, Ever,

(01:03:11):
when he went to like, just give me the tip slip, don't,
I haven't did just give me a tip slip? I
owe you guys. I'm not going to tell you why
you go. Don't worry about it. Take my take everything.
Here's my hang. I gotta go. Do you know if
there's a Bangladeshi restaurant nearby. I'm actually having a lot
of spots tonight and not eating. I'll be on a
long list. I'm going to a lot of places. No, no,

(01:03:34):
not German, No, not no, not German. You know what,
They're actually fine. I don't think I need Yeah. So
his thesis that that thing that that he says to Kissinger,
it it should be what happens, but our society rewards
psychopaths above anybody else, and most societies, yeah should be

(01:03:59):
is the opposite. What he's talking about is a just world,
which isn't what this is. And it's it's one of
those things. This is something like that 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 it's helpful to

(01:04:22):
have a guy like Henry Kissinger. You can say, like, well,
these these six people are too old and sick, and
we have to let them die otherwise we'll all starve. Right,
that's a situation 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 and tends to just

(01:04:42):
get millions and millions of people killed. Um. It's it's
not great. Um Anyway. Henry's thesis is published in nineteen fifty.
It 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 in
a example of the East quote testing the civilization of

(01:05:03):
the West. Yeah, people doing their own thing in their
own country is a test to us, Like the Koreans
and the Vietnamese having completely their own ship going on
as a test of us in the United States. Damn
you you know, Ho Chi Min not wanting to be
ruled over by the French is really a test of

(01:05:23):
American I mean. And obviously they see that like the
Soviet Unions or frustrating all of this, and the Soviet
Union is involved too, but like it, they're looking at
us in the eyes. They've got their own ship going on. Dude,
they are on the same level. How dare they do this? So,
as the US increased its commitments to a growing series

(01:05:46):
of wars in Southeast Asia, kissing you more dedicated to
the work of a guy named Oswald Spangler. Spangler's book
The Decline of the West is not something I am
well equipped to describe or explain in detail, but Greg
Grandin is, so I'm gonna quote from Hi again. Spangler
waged a relentless assault on the very idea of reality.
He insisted that there existed a higher plane of experience

(01:06:08):
that was inaccessible to rational thought, a plane where instinct
and creativity reigned. We have, Spangler thought hardly yet an
inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences.
Is only disguise, only image and expression. To get behind
image and expression, to penetrate perceived material power and interests,
and grasp what Spengler called destiny. One needed not information

(01:06:30):
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. Oh my god,
and that is George W. Bush crawl out of a pilogoon.
Now like this for our freidom. George Bush like pops

(01:06:56):
out of Henry's Kissinger's back. Is a poll that's like
since it's like dr headed rumsfeld Bush like thing like
where they are there in the east, west, north, and
south um Kissinger finds this logic intoxicating, but he did
disagree with Spengler about Spengler's primary contention, which is that

(01:07:18):
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, Um, which is I think a pretty
reasonably like, yeah, any civilization is going to have like
a life cycle, right, that's the thing. Like historically you
can argue pretty well Kissinger doesn't believe this everything. Yeah,

(01:07:43):
that's actually not what kissings. And of course the man,
of course, the man who is like living way beyond
his shelf life is like told you so, yeah, doesn't die.
So here's Grandon again talking about Kissinger. Kissinger grapples with
this aspect of Spengler having lost a sense of purpose.
Civilizations lurch outward defined, meaning they get caught up in

(01:08:03):
a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by
history's cosmic beat power for power's sake, blood for blood.
Imperialism is the inevitable product of this final stage, Kissinger wrote,
summing up the decline of the West's argument an outward
thrust to hide the inner void. Kissinger accepted Spangler's critique
of past civilizations, but rejected his determinism. Decay was not inevitable. Spengler,

(01:08:27):
Kissinger said, merely described a fact of decline and not
its necessity. There is a margin, he would write in
his memoirs between necessity and accident, in which the statesman,
by perseverance and intuition, must choose and thereby shape the
destiny of his people. So Spengler's like, yeah, it seems
like when civilizations lose their purpose and start to age,
they lurch outward, engage in wars of imperial conquest and

(01:08:49):
a search for meaning, and that leads to disaster which
destroys them. And Kissinger's like, but what if you did
the wars right? But what was involved in everyone? But
if it was like Mickey in the corner of Rockie, Yeah,
it's it is an amazing like this guy being like,
here is what happens to empires every single time there's

(01:09:09):
an empire. This is a thing you can go through
history and see constantly occurs through thousands of years, and
kiss You're just like, no, I can do it right.
But to be like, no, you're You're pretty You're pretty close.
You're pretty close. So I'm just thinking kill more. Like
I heard what you said ups and downs, but I
think you wipe everybody out. You know, it is the

(01:09:32):
same logic I have seen every time I've seen more
than one person get get stuck in the mud. It's
always either one person gets stuck in the mutter 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 and can get around. Yeah. It's almost like when
you enter Congress. I've got a plan. I've got a plan.

(01:09:54):
Oh I get money. Yeah, well, I have a plan,
but it's a different You're not going to like it
a bit more about a pool. Yeah. In nineteen fifty one,
Henry got a gig working as a consultant with the
Army on psychological warfare while he finished his graduate studies.

(01:10:14):
Kissinger's doctoral thesis on the Congress of Vienna did not
seem overly relevant to politics, but his 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 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

(01:10:36):
went badly? Was that a factor in them? A sword
A Kissinger believes he sees that containment is a failure,
which it is because people do not like being colonies. Um.
And if the the opposition to being a colony is communism,
they'll be like, well, let's try communism. Being a colony

(01:10:57):
seems to suck. Um. Sokissinger sees that containment is a failure. Um,
but he also believes believes not that, like, well, why
don't we just like let people do things and like
just take care of our own ship. He's like, no,
because containments of failure. War with the Soviet Union is inevitable. Now,
in Kissinger's view, this has nothing to do with the
actions of the United States, but is instead quote because

(01:11:19):
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. Yeah, Like that's
that's that's where he's starting down. Obviously, a lot of
people are saying ship like this right, this is not
a Kissinger invention. You know, you've got the John Birch Society,
all sorts of ships on this period. I don't want
to give him too much credit there. It's clear by

(01:11:40):
this point that Henry was going to get into politics. Um.
Although law enforcement was a possibility too, because when 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. 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,

(01:12:02):
he calls the FBI and volunteers to spy on people
for as as. I mean, honestly that 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 gotta give him credit. The man
covers some ground. Man is a Batman villain. Yeah, so yeah.

(01:12:27):
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 what the ideas fly. It's like a Ted
Talk kind of pitch. But he's he's really vague about
he doesn't really seem to care about what particular discussions

(01:12:49):
he encourages Um, and his critics would later claim that
this journal was quote a fake, primarily an enterprise design
to make Kissinger known to powerful people. Right, Like he's
just giving let powerful people write articles because then then
he gets them and he gets their their phone number. Right,
it's they're they're mailings. Yeah, he's not working um. Confluence

(01:13:09):
leads to Henry's first mention in the pages of The
New York Times, and despite what his critics claim, which
is probably broadly accurate, the journal did also publish some
really significant figures, including Reinhold Neighbor and Hannah A. Rent.
But while he claimed commitment to free discourse, Kistener had
a real tendency to publish right wing ship heads, including
Enoch Powell, a conservative British politician famous for comparing immigration

(01:13:32):
to quote rivers of blood. Well, I mean I've always
agreed with that. I mean that is like blood rivers.
I love a blood river. That's the laziest of rivers. Yeah,
because you float real good. Yeah, it's molasses. But that's freedom.
If you can, if you can say immigrants are like

(01:13:53):
a river blood, that's the freedom he's talking about. That's
the freedom. You want to know what other kinds of
freedoms he's interested. I'm going to quote from Nile Ferguson
from the book Kissinger. Here an article by Ernst von Solomon,
a right wing German writer who had been convicted for
his role in the assassination of Walter Rathanaw, a German

(01:14:15):
foreign minister in the Weimar Republic. The article provoked an
angry letter from Shepard Stone of the Ford Foundation, who
had provided money from 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

(01:14:35):
representative of the Ford Foundation complaints. I mean, you're crossing
that if the Ford Foundation is like, your connection to
a Nazi worries me. And that's coming from us, who
are really who we are? Like to pfend that. Look,
I have the protocols of the Elders of Zion tattooed

(01:14:57):
on my chest. But Ford Foundation and eployees to throw
a flag on the play, I'm still flagging the play
and are there cars coming OUTA? Yeah? Oh man? So quote.
Stone was appalled that Kissinger would publish an article by

(01:15:17):
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
our readers sufficiently mature to make their own judgments. Kissinger

(01:15:39):
argued that what Solomon represented was a symptom of certain
tendencies of our age, but that by appearing in a
liberal journal like Confluence, Solomon was the one who was compromised.
Kissinger was not simply defending free speech. He had solicited
the article from Solomon, telling the German about quote, having
long admired your writings, I could not share your point
of view. What so it gets better and more relevant

(01:16:03):
to today because when there's an outcry against this. Kissinger
writes a letter to his friend Kramer and says, I
have now joined you as the cardinal villain in liberal demonology.
Oh my god, he's just doing it now. What he's
just doing it now? He's got the monocle now too.
It's like you're Glenn Greenwald talked to Joe Rogan. Yes,

(01:16:24):
it's like, what the how? How is this still happening?
How are you the pioneer of this? Henry Kissinger? How
are you the pioneer of this? That's his explanation if
you're if you're me just listening to like, Okay, I'm
not sure what he's saying, but all right, okay, so

(01:16:45):
we got to hear from this nazi who shot at Okay,
because alright, is it will anger the lips? As he said,
it's cool. And next next month we have ed Gean
is doing a little number and Gaine's gonna want us
through lamp workings. So and then we're having the Zodiac

(01:17:08):
Killer on to teach us about proper parking technique pentagram.
He actually be pretty good at that. Yeah. So once
he had finished his dissertation graduated, Henry found himself in
need of like a steady guy. He's doing like he
wasn't a professor at that point. He was, but he
was like doing like graduate students, you know, helping to

(01:17:28):
teach whatever. I didn't do a college, so but you
know how grad students teach it and stuff, but he
wants like a full on gig. He's trying to get
an actual full time job as an assistant professor, but
he's not able to because most people don't like Henry Kissinger.
I wanted any reason why. A lot of people at
Hervard not loving it, not not a huge fan of

(01:17:50):
loving the Nazi publishing. Yeah, they are, they are. They
consider him slightly problematic. 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 not not he's
he's he's kind of a drift in his career until
in nineteen fifty four he runs into a friend, Arthur
Sleshinger Jr. At Harvard. Sleshinger had a letter in his

(01:18:13):
possession from a former Secretary of the Air Force defending Eisenhower.
The Eisenhower administration standard of threatening massive retaliation for the
so 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 and in
hale of nukes. Right, then those lines won't get crossed. Right,

(01:18:35):
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. Um. Kitschinger 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, he's gonna
make it worse. He's gonna make it worse. He shared us.

(01:18:58):
That's exactly what he does, Gareth, because because Kissingers, yeah, well,
we'll talk about what he doesn't 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 every everyone is in
this period. Um. When the President rejects Kissinger's analysis, at

(01:19:19):
the advice of John Foster Dullus, Rockefeller resigns and he
resigns from his job with the administration, which like temporarily
like closes a door to Henry. But the letter that
Kissinger had received was well enough, like popular enough among
other thinkers in Washington that it earns him a job
offer heading a study group at the Council on Foreign
Relations studying nuclear weapons and foreign policy. But of course,

(01:19:42):
Henry's problem with massive retaliation wasn't that using nuclear weapons
was unconscionable. It was that the world inding nature of
the threats the Eisenhower administration was making meant they would
never knew anybody, and Kissinger thought this was a terrible idea.
He thought that nuclear weapons should be used tactically to
secure battle field victories against the communists. What's happening? He thinks?

(01:20:05):
He thinks it's bad to have nukes and not used them.
He's yeah, that's his that's his angle. What in the fuck? 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 to kill everybody, guys have the
more reasonable take. I mean, really, you're close, you're close together. Yeah,

(01:20:32):
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 ship 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,

(01:20:53):
maybe it makes sense. We've got to be using these
like tactical nuclear what should the possibility? You know, he
makes a good point. He uses smart words and helotes
about nuking folks. You've got a lot of words. So
that is part one of our epic series Henry Kissinger
Jesus Christ dude, maybe become an accountant? Um what a guy.

(01:21:14):
In part two we'll talk about how he gets into power.
So that's got to be a hoot for everybody. But
I feel like before we do that, you guys, do
you guys like do like um like a like a
like a giant influential popular podcast that maybe this this
podcast is heavily influenced by. Is that something you guys do?
Are you talking about Rogan? Yes, yes you are both
Joe Rogan Right. The Dollar? The Dollar? It is your podcast.

(01:21:42):
We believe, yes that that was that your six part
series The Dollars, Why we Need the Nuke people? Go
for it. Check out with the Dollar if you have
not already. Um, just a very very funny podcast. You
guys wouldn't plug anything else before we we roll out
into part two. I mean my ears a couple of

(01:22:03):
times during this, but well you can do podcast dot com.
We tore all over the place in Australia and uh
and domestically soon that will be very exciting. I am
exciting toured touring to exist again in our lives. Uh,
fingers crossed until part two. Go home and read some

(01:22:27):
Oswald Spangler and then disagree with it in a way
that makes you much much worse. Yes, put the monocle
in the bad eye. Yeah, all right, Hi everybody. Robert
Evans here and my novel After the Revolution is available
for pre order now from a k press dot org. Now,
if you go to a k press dot org you

(01:22:48):
can find After the Revolution. Just google a k press
dot org After the Revolution you'll find a list of
participating indie bookstores selling my book. And if you pre
order now from either these independent bookstores or from a
k us, you'll get a custom signed copy of the book,
which I think is pretty cool. You can also preorder
it in physical or in kindle a form from Amazon
or pretty much wherever books are sold. So please google

(01:23:12):
a k press after the Revolution um or find an
indie bookstore in your area and preorder it. You'll get
assigned a copy, and you'll make me very happy.

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