Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Robert Evans here and my novel After the
Speaker 1: Revolution is available for pre order now from a k
Speaker 1: press dot org. Now, if you go to a k
Speaker 1: press dot org you can find After the Revolution. Just
Speaker 1: google a k press dot org After the Revolution you'll
Speaker 1: find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
Speaker 1: And if you pre order now from either these independent
Speaker 1: bookstores or from a k Press, you'll get a custom
Speaker 1: signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: You can also pre order it in physical or in
Speaker 1: kindle a form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books
Speaker 1: are sold. So please google a k press after the
Speaker 1: Revolution um or find an indie bookstore in your area
Speaker 1: and pre order it. You'll get assigned a copy and
Speaker 1: you'll make me very happy. Welcome back to what is
Speaker 1: either Behind the doll Up or doll Up the Bastards,
Speaker 1: a podcast that, no matter what name we choose for
Speaker 1: it is about tickling. Absolutely this, finally, is that's how
Speaker 1: you make us feel at home. Thank you. Do you
Speaker 1: think anyone has ever tickled Kissinger? I can't imagine. I
Speaker 1: cannot picture it in my head. This is the way
Speaker 1: he would laugh. Stop that. I'm going to work my
Speaker 1: pants that I just try to imagine him whispering into
Speaker 1: the ears of a sexual partner something about the business
Speaker 1: I'm about. Then I'm going to know it would be
Speaker 1: more like I'm going to end this cannot say burned
Speaker 1: corps and that one of us makes it out a lie.
Speaker 1: I actually did. While we were taking a break in
Speaker 1: between episodes, I had a moment where I actually did
Speaker 1: for the first time in my life, I felt a
Speaker 1: profound sense of solidarity with Henry Kissinger. My cat is
Speaker 1: named Saddam Hussein, and as I was feeding him during
Speaker 1: the break, I realized, like Kissinger did at one point,
Speaker 1: he's gotten much bigger. Saddam has gotten much larger than
Speaker 1: I ever thought he would. You know this is I
Speaker 1: did not anticipate this. Yeah, well that's because a lot
Speaker 1: to love what you just said. Both make the same mistake.
Speaker 1: Oh so uh, let's uh, let's get get right back down.
Speaker 1: What is for Kissinger memory Lane, and is what for
Speaker 1: everyone else is Nightmare Avenue. Um, because this is the
Speaker 1: story about why Vietnam lasted an extra half decade. Um,
Speaker 1: good time, We're gonna have a fun one here. So.
Speaker 1: One of the many downsides of an intellectual upbringing, like
Speaker 1: the one Henry Kissinger experienced, is that he spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time surrounded by people you might call political technologists. Now,
Speaker 1: this is a term I first heard in Ukraine from
Speaker 1: civilians describing Paul Manafort. That's what they called them. Political
Speaker 1: That's yeah, yeah, these like hired guns who come in
Speaker 1: and help anybody who just happens to like have government money,
Speaker 1: like doing literally anything. Right. Um, they're guys like his mentor,
Speaker 1: Professor Elliott, and like Harvard economist Thomas Schnelling, who advised
Speaker 1: powerful elected leaders, and like they all of the way
Speaker 1: in which they think about the mechanisms of government are
Speaker 1: very mathematic and inhuman, right, Um, those are the people
Speaker 1: that Kissinger patterns him self off of. Now, Schnelling, who
Speaker 1: are Shelling? Who we just Thomas Shelling, who's a Harvard
Speaker 1: economists we just introduced, was one of Kissinger's other mentors,
Speaker 1: um and Shelling. At the same time as he's he's
Speaker 1: working at Harvard and mentoring Kissinger is advising the Eisenhower
Speaker 1: administration on moral calculus in the early stages of the
Speaker 1: Cold War. Shelling argues that calculus, moral calculus, have you
Speaker 1: never you never talked about that with anybody. He's not
Speaker 1: a com no sorry no, I mean I was terrible
Speaker 1: at calculus. I was a world So well, you can't
Speaker 1: be moral and no calculus, which is why you know,
Speaker 1: like pole pot, I'm going to eventually set all of
Speaker 1: my listeners after people who know math. That's that's the
Speaker 1: right there. How did we get We're not sure, sir,
Speaker 1: No idea, no way in calculable. People keep trying to
Speaker 1: tell us, and we just kill him. Adam to the
Speaker 1: pile someone at two numbers, but we were unable to
Speaker 1: We can't negotiate it. So Shelling is advising the Eisenhower
Speaker 1: administration on moral calculus in the Cold War, and Shelling's
Speaker 1: argument is that whether you were quote deterring the Russians
Speaker 1: or your own children, the proper tactic was to figure
Speaker 1: out the right ratio of threat to incentive. Already, Shelling
Speaker 1: might be the quickest I've ever described a person and
Speaker 1: had it be clear like, well that's a bastard. That's
Speaker 1: not okay obviously, So since I have no human feelings,
Speaker 1: I have to figure out this and children and yeah,
Speaker 1: children in the Soviet government only understand one thing, threats.
Speaker 1: Can I have more ice cream dead. Put your hand
Speaker 1: in the drawer and find out. Now, I'm gonna tell
Speaker 1: you something, Jimmy, you go for that ice cream. I
Speaker 1: have a loaded thirty eight on the table table. Now
Speaker 1: one of the chambers is empty, Jimmy. So if you
Speaker 1: get that ice cream, I just want to go to bed.
Speaker 1: I don't like dessert. Just feel like moral calculus is
Speaker 1: not the way to go with the ice crea. Maybe
Speaker 1: you could just say no if you don't want him
Speaker 1: to have dessert. Any dad can say no. I'm learning.
Speaker 1: So while Henry was teaching at Harvard, and this is
Speaker 1: before he gets me into the last episode of getting
Speaker 1: that gig with the Council on Foreign Relations writing about
Speaker 1: nuclear policy. In the period before that, when like Shelling
Speaker 1: is his mentor, Henry learns a lot from him, and
Speaker 1: he walks away from their relation and ship with the
Speaker 1: belief that quote bargaining power comes from the capacity to hurt,
Speaker 1: to cause quote sheer pain and damage. She means its
Speaker 1: fucking Christ where you're just kind of waiting for this
Speaker 1: person to step into the vacuum essentially right like you're
Speaker 1: waiting for someone to be like, you know, there's actually
Speaker 1: a bottom that's under the bottom, like, oh, oh my lord,
Speaker 1: it's like this ship Like if that were true, We're
Speaker 1: all watching this situation unfold between Russia and Ukraine where
Speaker 1: you've got like a lot of people with the ability
Speaker 1: to hurt a lot of people on both sides, and
Speaker 1: you know what, it doesn't seem like negotiations are going great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not really. Maybe that's not a good basis to proceed
Speaker 1: from anything. Yeah, I mean, I just I can't believe that.
Speaker 1: It's it's the craziest fucking idea. It's not. It's not.
Speaker 1: It's not negotiating. You go into negotiations, you're like, I'm
Speaker 1: probably not going to get what I want. We're going
Speaker 1: to try and get the best we can. And he's
Speaker 1: just like, how much can I fucking hurt you? And
Speaker 1: you give me if you spend enough time like I
Speaker 1: do around like gun culture people on the right in particular,
Speaker 1: there's these folks who like usually have never done anything
Speaker 1: like in the military themselves, but they read a bunch
Speaker 1: of like books by Navy seals and ship and they'll
Speaker 1: say ship, like you should have a plan to kill
Speaker 1: everyone in every room you walk into, and like their
Speaker 1: frame is that like the world's dangerous. You gotta be ready.
Speaker 1: And I think any reasonable person is like, well, you
Speaker 1: are someone who should not have a gun. You should
Speaker 1: not have a gun. You are out of your entire
Speaker 1: damn mind. It's a guy who should never be negotiating,
Speaker 1: absolutely not ready to kill someone. Is like, you know what,
Speaker 1: don't go into rooms. That's just gonna be your thing.
Speaker 1: You know, don't stay in your house. You got a
Speaker 1: one room. You know, I could I could tell your throat,
Speaker 1: I could reach across the table, tell your throat out
Speaker 1: and stab you in the ice with ice picks. I'm
Speaker 1: just we're just talking about what he wants cream her
Speaker 1: ice cream. Dan. So, Henry gets his gig at the
Speaker 1: at the sea a far and so he's the thing
Speaker 1: he's he's producing for the Council on Foreign Relations for
Speaker 1: his his buddy the Rockefeller. It's supposed to be like
Speaker 1: a report on how the US is it like it
Speaker 1: should use nuclear weapons, different ways in which they could
Speaker 1: approach it. Right. And while he's writing this report, because
Speaker 1: it's it's with this thing takes a very very long
Speaker 1: process getting this out, he also starts working privately on
Speaker 1: a book of his own titled Nuclear Weapons. And foreign policy.
Speaker 1: And this book is a version of the stuff he
Speaker 1: wants to write, and this thing he's like fighting to get,
Speaker 1: yeah kind of. But also it's it's actually very smart
Speaker 1: what he does, well, it'll take us a second to
Speaker 1: get there. So this book that Kissinger writes, that's his
Speaker 1: like own project, criticizes US threats of full nuclear scale
Speaker 1: nuclear attack in response to Soviet aggression. Nil Ferguson sums
Speaker 1: it up in this way quote with his skill for
Speaker 1: simplifying and expressing complex ideas, Kissinger put the issue starkly.
Speaker 1: The dilemma of the nuclear period can therefore be defined
Speaker 1: as follows. The enormity of modern weapons makes the thought
Speaker 1: of ward repugnant, but the refusal to run any risks
Speaker 1: would a'm out to giving Soviet rule as a blank check.
Speaker 1: Kissinger's conclusions were not original. The study group at the
Speaker 1: Council was almost unanimate as Senate's desire to find some
Speaker 1: alternative to Eisenhower's stated policy in Many defense intellectuals, most
Speaker 1: notably Bernard Brodie and Basil little Heart, had also written
Speaker 1: on the subject of limited nuclear war. Kissinger's book demonstrated
Speaker 1: his talent as a creative synthesizer of their ideas, drawing
Speaker 1: out the implications of their work and arguing that for
Speaker 1: America's Cold War diplomacy to have any real substance, the
Speaker 1: US had to accept the possibility of the limited use
Speaker 1: of nuclear weapons. That Kissinger's own solution of limited nuclear
Speaker 1: war was also highly problematic, was less important to many
Speaker 1: contemporary observers than that it broke free from the strait
Speaker 1: jacket of the Eisenhower administration's policy. So, but where does
Speaker 1: he describe, like where you would use it. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like a tactical battlefield book. It's like to win
Speaker 1: battlefield victories to like in Vietnam, he will briefly flirt,
Speaker 1: well not even know all that briefly, but he will
Speaker 1: consider using nuclear weapons to cut off access between Vietnam
Speaker 1: and China, which isn't like as a as a layman,
Speaker 1: you can cut off trains in another way, presumably, right,
Speaker 1: I've seen the general with buster kat and you can
Speaker 1: throw some bogs on it. There there are these other
Speaker 1: things called bombs, just bombs. Yeah, so it really, I mean,
Speaker 1: it is kind of just itchy trigger figure and it
Speaker 1: is like if you live in the realm of this
Speaker 1: sort of dark thinking, how are you not going to start,
Speaker 1: you know, thinking of ways that are just even more
Speaker 1: vicious brutal. He's basically saying, they need to think we're
Speaker 1: a chained mad dog. And if we let the dog
Speaker 1: off the leash once and he attacks the postman and
Speaker 1: then and then everyone's gonna fucking then you can get
Speaker 1: me anymore. Yeah, but then you stop. We've bombed to
Speaker 1: pane already, Like everyone gets already of course, oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like it's this theoretical weapon that's never been
Speaker 1: used him and it worked pretty well as far as
Speaker 1: making people be like, god, damn, they are out of
Speaker 1: their minds. Yeah, the ship. Um. But it's also there's
Speaker 1: a there's a factor here. A part of me wonders
Speaker 1: if he even really believed about this or cared about
Speaker 1: whether or not nukes should be used tactically, and if
Speaker 1: it was more a matter of this is a big
Speaker 1: debate of the day, and if I publicly take the
Speaker 1: most contrarian thing intellectuals who don't really care about what works,
Speaker 1: but who care about who's thinking creatively, right, Like that's
Speaker 1: the thing He's like, Well, it's not about whether or
Speaker 1: not his plan would work. It's about we're getting out
Speaker 1: of this straight jacket. Eisenhower's put us in and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: that's not all that matters. Yeah. Um, you know it's
Speaker 1: really funny, just ironic about this is that funny places
Speaker 1: like the Heritage Foundation for years have been have been
Speaker 1: saying that Putin would use tactical battlefield nukes and that's
Speaker 1: why he's unhinged. That's one of the reasons. You imagine,
Speaker 1: I would say, anyone who would do that, he's crazy.
Speaker 1: Imagine now, and I'll keep him on as an advisor. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's my feeling on nukes. Um, don't shoot them
Speaker 1: at people ever bad. Maybe an Independence Day kind of situation.
Speaker 1: I'll be honest. When I watch Independence Day, I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I might shoot some new I might at that point
Speaker 1: try an grow too. Yeah, but you have Randy Quaid
Speaker 1: I do. I do hang out with him a lot. Um.
Speaker 1: That's my main plan. Things go wrong, Randy getting the plane.
Speaker 1: He lives in my basement. That actually tracks from the
Speaker 1: Instagram videos I've been saying. So. Kissinger's book was published
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty seven, and it almost immediately sold seventeen
Speaker 1: thousand copies, which is a lot for a wonky book
Speaker 1: on nuclear warfare. It is on the New York Times
Speaker 1: bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Jesus Christ, Yeah it's not great. Now,
Speaker 1: He's timing is perfect. He puts this book out right
Speaker 1: as the Soviets make two big advances in Hungary, there's
Speaker 1: like a revolution that they kind of crush, and then
Speaker 1: in the Suez where like brings the British and the
Speaker 1: franch like sucking around in the Suez Canal and the
Speaker 1: Soviets are like stop or we'll do something bad, and
Speaker 1: NATO like backs the funk off. Right, So the Soviets
Speaker 1: have like two big kind of foreign policy wins in
Speaker 1: this period, and Americans can't look at this as like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe the fucking NATO shouldn't have been sucking
Speaker 1: around the Suez, and yeah that ship in Hungary's sucked up,
Speaker 1: but like maybe we can't do anything about it. They're like,
Speaker 1: we should listen to the guy who says, what if
Speaker 1: we nuked them? You know? Yeah, that's that's where people go, right, Um,
Speaker 1: they don't. They they're they're Americans. They don't take the
Speaker 1: rational route. Now they hate us for our nuclear freedom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they listened to the critiest person in the room about this.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things that you could say about
Speaker 1: both what happened in Hungary and the Suez Crisis that
Speaker 1: are not Why don't we use nukes more often? By
Speaker 1: God kissing your knows his audience, you know, um Kissinger
Speaker 1: writes this book, and The New York Times in their
Speaker 1: review of it, right, for the first time since President
Speaker 1: Eisenhower took office, officials at the highest government levels are
Speaker 1: just playing interest in the theory of the little or
Speaker 1: limited war. The theory of massive retaliation is re examined.
Speaker 1: I love that those are that those go together, those
Speaker 1: are the options. Yeah, and then it's like the little
Speaker 1: war war is the nuclear war, Like it's the baby
Speaker 1: war for us. Yeah, hit me out, hear me out,
Speaker 1: baby nukes, slim tiny nukes. It's it's like if someone's like, look,
Speaker 1: we got to decide if one of which of these
Speaker 1: is going to be legal, Sarah nerve gas bombs for
Speaker 1: civilians or or chlorine gas bombs for civilians. One type
Speaker 1: of poison gas bomb has to be legal. Like we
Speaker 1: all we have to have access. Everyone has to be
Speaker 1: able to have one kind of poison gas is crazy.
Speaker 1: What if nobody has those? God, that's not you know,
Speaker 1: that's not where things go here. Um. So President Eisenhower
Speaker 1: is given a summary of of Kissinger's book, because you know,
Speaker 1: he's a president. They don't they don't read books. He gets, yeah,
Speaker 1: he gets a cliff notes and he recommends it to
Speaker 1: his Secretary of State John Foster Dullas, who we have
Speaker 1: talked about quite a lot of God, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: who like if if he's the rational mind, us is
Speaker 1: being like this dude seems a little out of his
Speaker 1: big problem. That's yeah, that's not great because John Foster
Speaker 1: Dulas fucking monatic. So the vice president at this point
Speaker 1: is a little dude you might have heard of called
Speaker 1: Richard Millhouse Nixon. He gets photographed with a coff copy
Speaker 1: of Henry Kissinger's book, which is not great. I mean
Speaker 1: it's actually great for shats just not writing a screenplay.
Speaker 1: This is great. Really, this is like season one of
Speaker 1: The Nixon Show, and you just like see him with
Speaker 1: Kissinger's book, right right, yeah, yeah, good television, you know.
Speaker 1: So the book is successful enough that it provokes Rockefeller,
Speaker 1: who gotten him the job at the CFR, to rush
Speaker 1: out the report that Nixon had been or that Kissinger
Speaker 1: had been making um and yeah, yeah, the report from
Speaker 1: the CFR concludes, the willingness to engage in nuclear war
Speaker 1: when necessary is part of the price of our freedom. Wow,
Speaker 1: I mean the price of our freedom is pretty good price,
Speaker 1: isn't it? It's expensive? Man? How can we how can
Speaker 1: we live if we're not dead? Yeah? How can we
Speaker 1: live without nuclear fallout? It's it's and it's amazing that
Speaker 1: it like it all like if it was part of
Speaker 1: his plan or not. Like you said, the timing is
Speaker 1: just pretty remarkable to release this book and then it
Speaker 1: actually shifts the way that they view this To me, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it's actually he's got a really good point
Speaker 1: in his best selling book of about how nukes are cool.
Speaker 1: I am. I am excited for Ben Shapiro's book on
Speaker 1: the same subject to lead to the annihilation of Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna live underground. So that's a good idea. So
Speaker 1: this report is a weird like weirdly popular. Like again,
Speaker 1: this is a report from the Center or the from
Speaker 1: the CFR, from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is
Speaker 1: like not you don't expect that to go viral, right,
Speaker 1: you know read this pamphlet. Have you read this on
Speaker 1: this link study by the CFR. I mean, American never
Speaker 1: lets you down when you're like, oh, that won't happen,
Speaker 1: that won't happen, that won't go. It does. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Rockefeller actually goes on the Today Show to talk about
Speaker 1: this report the CFR, like with Kissingers, I know, it's
Speaker 1: it's amazing Macaroni castrole. So next, so he gives people
Speaker 1: on the Today Show an address where they can write
Speaker 1: for a copy of this report. They get forty requests
Speaker 1: the first day and the next Hell's Post Office is overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: The media, the US media called this report quote the
Speaker 1: answer to Sputnik, which is like, hey, the Russian sent
Speaker 1: in sent an unarmed ball into space to further exploration.
Speaker 1: We should we this book about how everyone should be
Speaker 1: nuking everyone. It's the answer to that. We're thinking that
Speaker 1: this report on nuclear weapons will actually show the Russians
Speaker 1: thout and not go to space. Yeah, that's space. If
Speaker 1: you get rid of Russia, they can't go to space.
Speaker 1: Do you understand? Yeah? And it is it's worth noting
Speaker 1: because I think, like in our popular history, the answer
Speaker 1: to Sputnik is the Apollo missions and it's framed beauty,
Speaker 1: which you know did eventually happen. But no, the first
Speaker 1: answer to Sputnik was a report about how we should
Speaker 1: be nuking each other more often. They put a ball
Speaker 1: in the orbit, So we should we should blow up.
Speaker 1: We should be ready to drop thirteen nuclear warheads on
Speaker 1: Berlin at a second's notice. That's what I showed him.
Speaker 1: So this makes Henry kissing You're famous? Um, he is
Speaker 1: all over the part. This is his? Is this? We've
Speaker 1: become famous like some guy. Some guys watched the Today's
Speaker 1: Show and he buys the book so we can tell
Speaker 1: everybody at the Elk Club that we need to use nukes.
Speaker 1: Someone give this accountant a soccer ball. Some people get
Speaker 1: famous because their dad is one of O. J. Simpson's lawyers.
Speaker 1: Some people get famous because they write a book about
Speaker 1: how nuclear warfare is not that bad. You know, it's
Speaker 1: just in fame. It's a crapshoot. Absolutely fuck. I mean,
Speaker 1: imagine being an anti nuke person at this point, You're
Speaker 1: just like, wait, what is what is going on? Read?
Speaker 1: Have you read the report? It's so good. We're gonna
Speaker 1: show him if what they should not be going to space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: next time they put a satellite up, we're gonna kill
Speaker 1: everyone in Paraguay. What we need to there is a
Speaker 1: radiated country. So on July fourteenth, ninety eight, Mike Wallace
Speaker 1: gives Henry Kissinger his first big break into the public sphere.
Speaker 1: So it's happening, It really is. It really is just
Speaker 1: fucking disgusting because I look, there's all the time on
Speaker 1: our show where I'm like, it is the same ship.
Speaker 1: But again, it's just media using its platform irresponsibly to
Speaker 1: normalize things that are fucking batship. Yeah, it's great, like
Speaker 1: sixty minutes having a whole segment on the Havanna fucking
Speaker 1: sound Come on, Dave, you know that's real. I suffered
Speaker 1: from that for two years. Those crickets. Oh man, I
Speaker 1: I will say, like, the stupidest joke that I laugh
Speaker 1: at every time is, yeah, I got Havanna syndrome. Having
Speaker 1: another beer never doesn't get a chuckle out of me.
Speaker 1: But we've we've done, We've had sixty it's come on,
Speaker 1: six minutes. Did the the Satanic Scare ship? Well, yes,
Speaker 1: they were big gamble and like they just run with
Speaker 1: ideas that are crazy there, I mean because for for
Speaker 1: people who are at the level Mike Wallace is, the
Speaker 1: definition of journalist is not afflict the comfortable and comfort
Speaker 1: the afflicted. It's be a giant ship head, right, a
Speaker 1: huge ship head. Oh man. So Mike Wallace introduces Henry Kissinger,
Speaker 1: the guy whose one achievement is a book about how
Speaker 1: nukes are cool. By saying this, in the field of
Speaker 1: foreign policy and military affairs, Dr Kissinger, You're acknowledged to
Speaker 1: be one of the most penetrating minds in the country.
Speaker 1: He's penetrating. Yes, penetrating like an Atlas missile penetrates the
Speaker 1: cloud cover above a city full of women and children. Yeah. Wow. Now,
Speaker 1: during the interview, Kissinger expressed that quote a capitalist society,
Speaker 1: or what is more interesting to me, a free society,
Speaker 1: is a more revolutionary phenomenon the nineteenth century socialism. I
Speaker 1: think we should go on the spiritual offensive. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: spiritual spiritual with a nuclear extension with nukes. So he's connecting.
Speaker 1: He's connecting nineteenth century socialists, member capitalism, current day capitalism,
Speaker 1: and nukes. Those are the options. Yeah, and Mike Wallace
Speaker 1: just empty headed least goes like I really love your property. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just smiles. And behind his eyes as a dial tone.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. So this earns him finally the job
Speaker 1: at Harvard that he'd coveted. This is why they give him.
Speaker 1: Shut shut up. It's like whenever simple, I can't, I
Speaker 1: cannot get over how fucking evil Harvard is. It's so good.
Speaker 1: It is monstrous from it's the beast. It is a
Speaker 1: horrific some of us with their uh anti Harvard action.
Speaker 1: So he gets his Harvard job and he keeps writing.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty what's he doing at Harvard. He's like
Speaker 1: teaching some ship you know, kissing your stuff type classes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: talking about Spangler a lot. Yeahs. Nukes are awesome too.
Speaker 1: Nukes are awesome. Freedom is requires an absence of morality,
Speaker 1: teaching kids good stuff, you know, teaching kids good things.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen sixty one he publishes a book titled
Speaker 1: The Necessity of Choice, which is his manifesto on how
Speaker 1: the United States should approach foreign policy in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: It is not an optimistic piece of writing. Quote, the
Speaker 1: United States cannot afford another decline like the one which
Speaker 1: has characterized the past decade and a half, fifteen years
Speaker 1: of more of a deterioration of our position in the
Speaker 1: world such as we have experienced since World War Two,
Speaker 1: would find us reduced to fortress America in a world
Speaker 1: in which we had become largely irrelevant. Our margin of
Speaker 1: survival has narrowed dangerously. What in the fund is he
Speaker 1: talking about America losing influence? No, this is like the
Speaker 1: height of American power, obviously to anyone who's not. But
Speaker 1: but Kissinger is, he knows this is bullshit. He is
Speaker 1: part of a group of people who are pushing if
Speaker 1: you guys heard the term missile gap. No, in the
Speaker 1: the early stages of the Kennedy administration, there is suddenly
Speaker 1: this huge and this is both like in conversations that
Speaker 1: people are having in d C and in like the media.
Speaker 1: There's this constant talk of a missile gap, this idea
Speaker 1: that these Soviets have outpaced us in missile development and
Speaker 1: in the number of missiles they have, And there's talking
Speaker 1: about like there's bomber gaps, there's tank gaps. There's talk
Speaker 1: about like these gaps between this idea that is totally bullshit,
Speaker 1: Like not that the Soviets have not made a lot
Speaker 1: of weapons, so the Union makes plenty of weapons, but
Speaker 1: the United there is no point in the Cold War
Speaker 1: in which the United States is like out fucking gunned
Speaker 1: to any degree that like has could be anyone reasonable
Speaker 1: could call a missile gap. It just does not happen.
Speaker 1: It feels like we're still responding to that today. To
Speaker 1: be liked, you do first biolog shot, yea, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's this, it's it's this. It's not I
Speaker 1: would say unhinged, but it's very reasonable because the the
Speaker 1: argument comes primarily out of the Defense Department and the
Speaker 1: growing defense industry, who it's great for them if everyone
Speaker 1: thinks there's a missile gap, like of course, yeah, you
Speaker 1: gotta build a lot more weapons. We'll sell them to you.
Speaker 1: I thought it's the place you can get Khaki's on
Speaker 1: your rockets. But you have a missile Thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: welcome and we'll be right back. You know what. Yes,
Speaker 1: actually this is time for an ad break. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you're looking for a way to dress up your
Speaker 1: r n I n X knife missile before firing written
Speaker 1: into some guys, car um, check out the missile gap.
Speaker 1: We are back. So it's bullshit. The idea of the
Speaker 1: missile gap and kids, and you're is smart enough to
Speaker 1: know this. But he is one of the major proponents.
Speaker 1: He's not one of the there's other guys who are
Speaker 1: more influential pushing it, like actually within the halls of power, right,
Speaker 1: because he's not super within the halls of power yet,
Speaker 1: but he is. He's all over TV and ship like
Speaker 1: he's a guy that you call now like once you
Speaker 1: get in the rolodex of media people, you stay there.
Speaker 1: You know, he's the new guy guy, a positive new guy.
Speaker 1: There's people that you got the negative new guy and
Speaker 1: the positive guys. And he's the guy who says we
Speaker 1: don't have enough. You know the thing, We've ever not
Speaker 1: had enough of nuclear weapons. Um. He is a big
Speaker 1: part of why we have so many fucking nukes, um,
Speaker 1: and why the Russians have so many nukes because once
Speaker 1: the US, like, once you start this like we have
Speaker 1: to build a lot more nukes, they're gonna build even
Speaker 1: more nukes and like then you're gonna get to build
Speaker 1: any more nukes because you can say they built so
Speaker 1: many more nukes, we don't have enough nukes now, and
Speaker 1: then you wind up with twelve thousand of them in
Speaker 1: the world. I have a name for that, I can
Speaker 1: I've come of the right now, nuclear arms race. That's cool,
Speaker 1: and that's that's a neat one. Um, we finally a
Speaker 1: term for it. We should nuke him. I mean that
Speaker 1: would just be like the one thing. I would just
Speaker 1: nuke him, Crockett handheld miss whatever we can do. What
Speaker 1: about just a little a little tiny nuke that we
Speaker 1: shoot into him and it explodes, But it's just a
Speaker 1: little guy, just enough to take out Kissinger, just a
Speaker 1: Kissinger clear weapon. Yeah, but he would just ingest And
Speaker 1: I am now more Now I'm bigger and more upset.
Speaker 1: It is. It is amazing to think about how seriously
Speaker 1: this guy gets treated by everyone immediately, and how much
Speaker 1: influence he's allowed to have on an incredibly dangerous thing.
Speaker 1: And this is the same guy who got tricked by Tharainos,
Speaker 1: the same by the fake blood lady and the turtleneck.
Speaker 1: It's really amazing. Yeah, it's so funny. It's so funny.
Speaker 1: So uh, Kissinger is not again, he doesn't come up
Speaker 1: with the idea of the missile gap, but he's like
Speaker 1: a very influential voice in pushing this idea. Right, He's
Speaker 1: a he's a part of this Um, So he doesn't
Speaker 1: get there's if we could out honestly do a whole
Speaker 1: episode on like why there's so many fucking nukes that
Speaker 1: this would be a part of. But he is, he's
Speaker 1: a factor in this massive arms build up. Um. And
Speaker 1: he also starts, uh. But but he's also like he's
Speaker 1: he's just doing this for careerism reasons because it gets
Speaker 1: him in good with people who are in power. And
Speaker 1: part of how you know that is that Kennedy not
Speaker 1: a guy I'll give a lot of credit to. But
Speaker 1: one of the things Kennedy says is that like, limited
Speaker 1: nuclear war is insane, Like fuck you, Henry Kissinger. Um.
Speaker 1: He doesn't say that, but he it. It gets made
Speaker 1: clear the connections that Kissinger has in the in the
Speaker 1: Kennedy administration make it clear that like, JFK does not
Speaker 1: buy your attitudes on limited nuclear war, And so he
Speaker 1: stops talking about that to get he wants to become part.
Speaker 1: He doesn't believe in ship, but he wants to be
Speaker 1: in the JFK administration, right, So he stops pushing this
Speaker 1: thing that makes him famous and saying other ship because
Speaker 1: he'll get it'll get him close to power. And that's
Speaker 1: all Henry Kisinger really cares about. So I wonder if
Speaker 1: like the Today Show is calling up and he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not really doing nukes anymore. No, he comes on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the quote I'm gonna uote actually from Nil Ferguson. Here
Speaker 1: he explains like what he starts doing on the Today
Speaker 1: Showy Kissinger now advocated a convention alarms build up, since
Speaker 1: the dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is more
Speaker 1: familiar and therefore easier to maintain. He continued to insist
Speaker 1: that the United States developed smaller nuclear weapons, but he
Speaker 1: moved his own position to where he thought Kennedy's was.
Speaker 1: In effect, the necessity of choice was something of a
Speaker 1: job application, and Kissinger hoped Kennedy would make an offer.
Speaker 1: So like, again, so doesn't really I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: just Marjorie Taylor Green. I mean it is the same
Speaker 1: ship essentially, and it's like, you know, the sensationalism that
Speaker 1: gets you the headlines and then once you're fit and
Speaker 1: it's any it's really any form of our our pop
Speaker 1: culture entertainment. Now, just get your name in the fucking
Speaker 1: headlines and then define who you are, and then you
Speaker 1: can like figure out what you actually and can actually
Speaker 1: believe or how you're going to ride that to power,
Speaker 1: but just make a bang. It's the it is, it's
Speaker 1: it is like the political equivalent of a comedian like
Speaker 1: saying a racial slur and then listening to the audience
Speaker 1: to determine whether or not they're joking. Like that's like,
Speaker 1: that's what he's doing. He's it's yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: show up to a club, take your dick out, and
Speaker 1: then write your hour. Yeah it's called it's Luis k backwards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the it's the Casey. I'm not going to figure
Speaker 1: out what the it's Casey still. So this he does
Speaker 1: not get exactly what he wants, but he gets part
Speaker 1: of what he wants. His buddy, uh Nelson Rockefeller is
Speaker 1: able to give him a part time consulting gig for
Speaker 1: the National Security Advisor. So it's not but it's not
Speaker 1: everything he wants. But he is now he's he has
Speaker 1: like he's cracked his way, you know, like you you
Speaker 1: start your way in and and it's unless you really
Speaker 1: funk up. And by funk up, I mean don't get
Speaker 1: a lot of people killed. You'll just get closer and
Speaker 1: closer to power because that's how our system works. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know, Kissinger is is obviously very conservative. Rockefeller
Speaker 1: is not. Again, he's part of the Kennedy administration. This
Speaker 1: is what I don't understand. Yeah, well, I we'll talk.
Speaker 1: We're actually we're gonna talk shitload about that over the
Speaker 1: next couple of episodes because this is like a consistent,
Speaker 1: weird thing about him. Um. But like one of the
Speaker 1: things Kissinger does is he oils Rockefeller with effusive claims
Speaker 1: that Kennedy's inaugural a speech, which Rockefeller had helped with,
Speaker 1: was so good he quote might become a registered Democrat, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's the kind of shit he says that, Like, I'm
Speaker 1: almost a Democrat now because how good jfk speech was
Speaker 1: so good. He doesn't believe in ship, Like he just
Speaker 1: can't over emphasize that. Other than that, Henry Kissinger should
Speaker 1: be very close to power. He believes strongly in that. Um,
Speaker 1: and he believes in that as much as anyone's ever
Speaker 1: believed in the Bible. Right. Um. He does not believe
Speaker 1: in ideas at possible. I saw that Maryland did and
Speaker 1: a sort of testament the present day. Would you like
Speaker 1: to see where they called me Kissinger. Oh, I'm not
Speaker 1: standing over this event. And look at what they're doing
Speaker 1: to my sports club. See that's the fan art I
Speaker 1: would him just like trying to fuck JFK with every
Speaker 1: bit of charm in his German body. Oh dude, nobody
Speaker 1: told me subway go over event. Look at this, you're
Speaker 1: going to see everything goes my nuke. So JFK is
Speaker 1: eventually assassinated by Bernard Montgomery Saints and l b J
Speaker 1: takes over. Oh yeah, I mean history is is a
Speaker 1: I got to read this banquet. I've got a pamphlet
Speaker 1: for you myself. That's my length. So lb J is
Speaker 1: the president now and and and lb J is like
Speaker 1: between l G M j K. It's like a decade.
Speaker 1: You know that the Democrats are in power, and lb
Speaker 1: J is very good at exercising power, right, Um, And
Speaker 1: he's also not super into Henry Kissinger. Um, he's not
Speaker 1: against Henry Kissinger either, But Henry kind of is kept
Speaker 1: in this weird like he's on the margins of power
Speaker 1: during this period of time, right, which is yeah, well
Speaker 1: not really because well he's there's no breath, there's there's
Speaker 1: no good to hear. Um. While he's kind of on
Speaker 1: the not you know, on the margins. He's able to
Speaker 1: build connections with his many Republican lawmakers in their rights
Speaker 1: as he does with Democrats, right, Like, that's what he's
Speaker 1: doing while he's doing these like part time gigs with
Speaker 1: the NSC and stuff, is he's he's making friends with
Speaker 1: everybody he can. There is nobody's just he is just
Speaker 1: a supreme networker. There is so much. When I was
Speaker 1: a kid in speech and debate, one of the other
Speaker 1: kids in the debate team with me was obsessed with Kissinger,
Speaker 1: like read his books and stuff. Thought he would And
Speaker 1: this was this thing that I heard too from like
Speaker 1: family mers and stuff that like, well he was you know,
Speaker 1: he wasn't always right, but it was he was doing
Speaker 1: the hardest job anyone's ever had, and he was just
Speaker 1: this really genius man and you can't really argue with him.
Speaker 1: If you read about what he was saying, it's like, no,
Speaker 1: he didn't believe in ship. He was he was a
Speaker 1: genius at making people like him and that allowed him
Speaker 1: to terrible things. Yeah, um, which I guess, like anyone
Speaker 1: who's really dangerous in politics is that's as a version
Speaker 1: of that guy right, like like that's that's all of them. Um.
Speaker 1: But he's he's an interesting kind of that guy and
Speaker 1: as a result, probably the most toxic kind of that
Speaker 1: guy we've ever had in the United States. Um, which
Speaker 1: is saying something bad, Why don't um? But yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: he makes all these connections. Um. He cutivates him, and
Speaker 1: he keeps his name in the news. Right, that's a
Speaker 1: big part of why he's able to do what it is. Later,
Speaker 1: he keeps going on TV, keeps being on the radio,
Speaker 1: he keeps being quoted and like cited and interviewed by
Speaker 1: journalists for articles. Henry makes it known that like, if
Speaker 1: you're a journalist, I'm easy to reach. I will give you,
Speaker 1: always give you a quote. You can always reach Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger for like a line or two on this thing,
Speaker 1: you know, um, which is very smart of him. It's
Speaker 1: it's very dumb and shameful and uh horrible for the journalists.
Speaker 1: But like, God that they've learned. God, that doesn't happen anymore. Now.
Speaker 1: I turned to the New York Times story published today
Speaker 1: that described Nazis assaulting a book club as men with
Speaker 1: a swastika flag. Someone pointed out, well, the the article
Speaker 1: calls them Nazis. It's just all of the social media
Speaker 1: they describe them that way. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can't explain to you why I feel worse about that,
Speaker 1: but I do. Yeah, it was not just it was
Speaker 1: not just the dumb error. It was calcular. Yeah, moral calculus.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, moral calculus, right, good good ship. Um. So
Speaker 1: the professor cultivates connections, Yeah, he gets and he also
Speaker 1: he goes to Vietnam at one point, and he makes
Speaker 1: connections with a bunch of people in Vietnam who are
Speaker 1: able to talk to not just the South but the
Speaker 1: North Vietnamese government. Like that's the thing he consciously does
Speaker 1: is like I want to be able to like be
Speaker 1: able to take the temperature of like guys, which is
Speaker 1: not like I would say, actually, like the most reasonable
Speaker 1: thing he does. If you think you're going to be
Speaker 1: in power, like, yeah, it's good, you probably want to
Speaker 1: be able to talk to those guys. Even though we're
Speaker 1: fighting with him. That's not an unreasonable thing. He will
Speaker 1: use it badly. Who's he's doing that on the part
Speaker 1: of it just himself? Yeah, well he he is working.
Speaker 1: He has a gig with a guy he's like an
Speaker 1: advisor to the National Security Council, and he's a known academic.
Speaker 1: You know, he's probably being like, you know, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: an academic. I'm trying to understand the dimensions of this
Speaker 1: and like I want to talk to everybody. I'm a
Speaker 1: very fair minded man. I don't let ideology get in
Speaker 1: the way. YadA YadA, YadA um. Like one of the
Speaker 1: things about Henry Kissinger too, like he's as good he
Speaker 1: can he's he's fucking his buddies with maw, Like he's
Speaker 1: great at talking with people who are communists and stuff.
Speaker 1: As long as you like Henry Kissinger and what he's selling,
Speaker 1: he'll sell it to anybody. You know, it's so crazy,
Speaker 1: it's wild that like he must have eyes that just
Speaker 1: start spinning and hit, Like you just have to get
Speaker 1: close to notice that he's got hypnotic eyes. You're like,
Speaker 1: he isn't so bad now that I'm you know, let's
Speaker 1: think about Vietnam for a second, Right, if you're going
Speaker 1: to war in Vietnam, Gareth, Right, if you decide, Gareth Reynolds,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go to war in Vietnam, how long
Speaker 1: do you think it would take you to realize that
Speaker 1: was a bad idea. It would be I mean, I
Speaker 1: Gareth Reynolds, it would be instantaneous, quickly, very quickly. I mean, David,
Speaker 1: can I okay, can I just can I ask the question?
Speaker 1: Which side am I fighting on? The not Vietnamese side? Okay?
Speaker 1: Then really quick? Yeah, really quick. I feel like you could.
Speaker 1: I feel like you could. You could take Vietnam. David
Speaker 1: not going to see They're not going to see it coming.
Speaker 1: I would certainly be the guy who they'd be like,
Speaker 1: we broke him. We broken before, We've shouted at him,
Speaker 1: and I'm sorry. I didn't mean to show up with
Speaker 1: pants that were already pissed in. I know I know
Speaker 1: one thing about me, and that's if things got really
Speaker 1: really chaotic and bad that I I kind of thrive
Speaker 1: in that embarkment. Yeah, Dave, you'd be like, Dave, we
Speaker 1: don't have time to eat their brains and be like,
Speaker 1: shut up, I'm figuring out what they know. It's like
Speaker 1: Doctor Manhattan ending the Vietnam War. Both sides surrendered to
Speaker 1: Dave in the mid sixties, which is fairly early on
Speaker 1: considering how late the Vietnam War goes. It is clear
Speaker 1: to people, especially a lot of people protesting in the
Speaker 1: United States that like ship, this ain't going great, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's not hard for people. There are people who
Speaker 1: buy into the US propaganda, but like people who are
Speaker 1: actually privy to information on the war are aware that
Speaker 1: it is not going well, Kissinger still decides we should
Speaker 1: escalate things. And I'm gonna quote again from Kissinger's Shadow
Speaker 1: by Greg Grandon. Upon returning from his first visit to
Speaker 1: South Vietnam in late nineteen sixty five, Kissinger threw himself
Speaker 1: often do a campaign to build public support for ongoing intervention.
Speaker 1: In early December, he joined a hundred and eighty nine
Speaker 1: other scholars from Harvard, Yale, and fifteen other New England
Speaker 1: universities in an open letter expressing confidence that Johnson's policies
Speaker 1: would help quote people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny.
Speaker 1: A Vietcam victory will spell disasters, said the letter. Then
Speaker 1: later that month, he led a Harvard team against a
Speaker 1: group of Oxford opponents of the war, and a debate
Speaker 1: held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally in the United
Speaker 1: States on CBS. Kissinger passionately defended the bombing of northern Vietnam,
Speaker 1: insisting that it was not a violation of international law.
Speaker 1: He invoked the analogy of World War Two, saying Washington's
Speaker 1: actions in Indo China were as righteous and justified as
Speaker 1: they were in Nazi Germany. Bob Schroom, who went on
Speaker 1: to become a Democratic political consultant, was on Kissinger's team
Speaker 1: and says that when he today watches a recording of
Speaker 1: the debate, he is quote amazed by two things. How
Speaker 1: long we how young we look, even Kissinger, and how
Speaker 1: wrong we were. So first of you don't feel bad enough.
Speaker 1: I don't know how bad you feel about this. It's
Speaker 1: not enough. Your first reactionly be like, god, we were kids,
Speaker 1: were young, we were young. There's like some Vietnam's dude
Speaker 1: next to him thinking about like bombs raining down on
Speaker 1: the jungle. And we had kissing Jerry. Oh my god
Speaker 1: is jewls. Yeah, he's only got one jowl at that time.
Speaker 1: That's before he got the eight Our hair looked so stupid?
Speaker 1: Am I right? Am I? Right? Where did your legs go?
Speaker 1: By the way, before Henry kissing your looked like weird science.
Speaker 1: After things go wrong, it's amazing, like and it's it's
Speaker 1: there's a lot in that paragraph both like, of course,
Speaker 1: when the debate starts to build, like should we escalate
Speaker 1: this nightmarish war, the first thing, one of the first
Speaker 1: things that happens is that a bunch of fucking New
Speaker 1: England universities decided to have a debate about right, that's
Speaker 1: the right wrest Let everyone here, let's have the best
Speaker 1: arguments of both sides about whether or not the experience. Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: first off, fuck everyone involved in this, even the people
Speaker 1: arguing against the war a little bit like just don't
Speaker 1: do that's is bad? Yeah, um less so certainly, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know. Maybe like it made sense
Speaker 1: virgins debating which position is the best to fucking yea,
Speaker 1: what the hell? Why is this instead of the debate
Speaker 1: like hey, why are we there? Like really why why
Speaker 1: that's we're not we're not debating that debate and it
Speaker 1: is again it's like and you can see just about
Speaker 1: how comprehensively wrong these people are that like number one,
Speaker 1: this idea that this will help the people of South
Speaker 1: Vietnam determine their own destimony, which is Vietnamese government was
Speaker 1: a dictatorship the entire time the war was going on.
Speaker 1: It's not any more democratic in any meaningful sense than
Speaker 1: than the Northern Vietnam. And also like a v Cong
Speaker 1: victory will spell disasters. Like there's plenty of things to
Speaker 1: criticize the Vietnamese government for, but like broadly on an
Speaker 1: international level, it's fine. A country seems seems to be
Speaker 1: doing all right, like better than a lot of places.
Speaker 1: It's fine. Yeah, did a pretty good job at COVID,
Speaker 1: like you know it did. It didn't seem like a disaster.
Speaker 1: Maybe if we hadn't killed five million people, um, things
Speaker 1: would be even better. It seems like it couldn't hurt um.
Speaker 1: Yeahs Again, they're wrong about everything, Like Kissinger in this period,
Speaker 1: everything that he said, like that's he has, this reputation
Speaker 1: is such an intellectual titan, and he's like so constantly
Speaker 1: fucking wrong. But there's always like yeah, it's the same
Speaker 1: as today, all of these people that are constantly fucking wrong.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, keep on getting position media and they're always
Speaker 1: fucking wrong. And there's this ship like people will will
Speaker 1: bring up like well, but there's this nuclear arms treaty
Speaker 1: he helped make, and there's this like peace deal he
Speaker 1: negotiated in the Middle East, and like all of these things, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that was like two percent of the ship that
Speaker 1: he did, and it was largely because other people that
Speaker 1: he wanted to stay in good with. We're pushing for
Speaker 1: that kind of ship too. Like Henry Kissinger, whenever he
Speaker 1: has expressed an idea that is his legitimate idea is
Speaker 1: like really really disastrously wrong. Yeah, amazing, Yeah, nobody cares. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nobody cares. He's gonna get to invest in Thereino still
Speaker 1: supposed to being the one victory, the one victory weekend.
Speaker 1: That's why we should pardon her. Yeah. Yeah, look, you
Speaker 1: stole a lot of money, but you made Henry Kissinger
Speaker 1: look gonna release you to come up with another scheme
Speaker 1: to take more money from this bag of ship. You
Speaker 1: don't get to make a company anymore. But we're gonna
Speaker 1: have cameras fall leaving you think Frank Show. Yeah, have
Speaker 1: you seen Punked? They're talking, but it's just every week Kissinger.
Speaker 1: You gotta put on mustaches and like fake wigs, and
Speaker 1: you just gonna try to find telling me this is
Speaker 1: a way for me to get a longer spine. I mean,
Speaker 1: a little money popcorn has zero calories. What I'm here.
Speaker 1: But you know what's awesome about that story is that
Speaker 1: she's a younger female kissinger. Yeah, yeah, how to percent,
Speaker 1: She's like blood kissing everyone. Everyone's super into her, and
Speaker 1: she was just saying whatever people wanted to hear, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing because there's there's the the good grifters and
Speaker 1: the evil ones. We just finished our four partner on
Speaker 1: the Czar and talked about the fact that, like before resputing,
Speaker 1: there was another spiritualist grifter who pretended to talk to
Speaker 1: like ghosts and stuff named Philippe, who like got a
Speaker 1: bunch of money for them, tricked the Czarina into thinking
Speaker 1: she was pregnant, and then bounced with a bunch of
Speaker 1: their money. And the last thing he did before he
Speaker 1: left was like, I'm gonna come back in another form
Speaker 1: as another spiritual he should trust whatever I said. Very funny,
Speaker 1: took all the money and ran, and when he died,
Speaker 1: it was found out that he had been paying for
Speaker 1: the more egages and rentals of like fifty two impoverished families,
Speaker 1: like the perfect guy for like the opposite of kissing ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just taking money from the Czar to help pour people out.
Speaker 1: What a dude be great if he showed up again, right, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's put that guy in front of Kissinger, Let's see
Speaker 1: what he can do. So in private, Kissinger admitted already
Speaker 1: while he is doing all this, while he's a part
Speaker 1: of this big debate, you know, while he's taking the
Speaker 1: side that we should escalate, in private, in his conversations,
Speaker 1: he admits to his friends that Vietnam is an unwinnable
Speaker 1: disaster of a war. Oh my fucking god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He defended it in public though, because there was at
Speaker 1: least a fifty percent chance the Democrats were going to
Speaker 1: stay in power after the next election, and he he
Speaker 1: didn't want to give up on a chance of having
Speaker 1: a job. You know, I think it a lot of times,
Speaker 1: you just you do. I guess he's a little different
Speaker 1: because he's such a shape shifter, but you know there,
Speaker 1: I think it's just the way he are. You are, like,
Speaker 1: they can't just be that base evil yeah, but he yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's something. It's something I was thinking about climate change,
Speaker 1: is that people can't represence on the fact that there
Speaker 1: might be a significant portion of rich people in control
Speaker 1: who actually want everybody to die. Yeah yeah, or at
Speaker 1: least don't care, because what really matters is like maintaining
Speaker 1: their level of relative power, and it's just like, what
Speaker 1: are they going to do? Call themselves out? Yeah, it's cool,
Speaker 1: so obviously, And it's one of those things. I don't
Speaker 1: actually know that he really believed that Vietnam was a disaster,
Speaker 1: because he may have been lying to his friends when
Speaker 1: he said because he wants to keep like he wants
Speaker 1: to keep a bridge to the other side open, you know,
Speaker 1: like it's impossible to say because he's fucking Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 1: Is it possible there's two Kissingers? Yes, Okay, what if
Speaker 1: there's six? They ever touched Cambodia will be oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what. So the fact that Kissinger in private
Speaker 1: be like, yeah, at Nam, what a funk up, and
Speaker 1: in public would be like, let me bin Shapiro about Vietnam,
Speaker 1: that really piste off a lot of his friends, including
Speaker 1: the political scientist Hans morgan Thou. Kissinger head admitted to
Speaker 1: morgan Thou that the war was unwinnable, unwinnable, even while
Speaker 1: he continued to go on in the media and advocate
Speaker 1: expanded saturation bombing. Morgan Thou found this deeply disappointing, but
Speaker 1: Henry was increasingly tailoring his public statements to the ear
Speaker 1: of a man who was already a fan of his work,
Speaker 1: Richard Millhouse, Nixon, can we get like, yeah, sound effects,
Speaker 1: lightning whips across the stream in a screen house, which
Speaker 1: will do a whole Nixon episode one of these days.
Speaker 1: A lot of our Kissinger series will also be about Nixon,
Speaker 1: because you can't unwrap the two men. You know, A yeah,
Speaker 1: they're one of them is Richard Nixon. So by the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen sixty eight, as the presidential race between
Speaker 1: Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Vice President Richard Nixon
Speaker 1: heats up, Kissinger's profile had raised enough that he was
Speaker 1: seen as the front runner for a serious foreign policy
Speaker 1: job in either potential administration. Either yeah, he's got a gig,
Speaker 1: no matter what. Maybe it's just he's the raytheon of people.
Speaker 1: So as time goes on, though, he increasingly leans towards Nixon,
Speaker 1: which surprises his friends, whom he had told, quote, Richard
Speaker 1: Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running
Speaker 1: to have his president. But I want him to give
Speaker 1: me a gig. I need jobs. So he was heartbroken
Speaker 1: when his friend Rockefeller lost to Nixon, and he commented,
Speaker 1: Now the Republican Party is a disaster, and Nixon is
Speaker 1: not fit to be president. Oh my god, and over
Speaker 1: and oh this is what they said about this. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's always the same calculus. This is true. But Kissinger
Speaker 1: didn't let his complete contempt for Nixon stop him from
Speaker 1: trying to get a job with the man. To explain why,
Speaker 1: here's the New Yorker. It took Kissinger's close contemporary, the
Speaker 1: political theorist Sheldon Wolan, another son of Jewish emigres who
Speaker 1: fought in the War and studied at Harvard with William
Speaker 1: Yandel Elliott, to fully dissect Kissinger's careerist instincts. On the surface,
Speaker 1: Woland r observed Kissinger would have appeared a mismatch for
Speaker 1: the anti elitist Nixon, but the pairing was perfect. Nixon
Speaker 1: needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher
Speaker 1: plane of purpose and make him feel like a great
Speaker 1: figure in the drama of history. As Wolan wrote, what
Speaker 1: could have been more comforting to that barn and inarticulate
Speaker 1: soul than to hear the authoritative voice of doctor Kissinger,
Speaker 1: who spoke so often and knowingly about the meaning of history.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just an empty sack and an evil sack,
Speaker 1: the evil sacs, Like I can feel you yelled. Somebody's
Speaker 1: trying to throw me off. Somebody's gonna load me with something.
Speaker 1: He's not gonna do it. Put all that black piled on.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, Gareth, he doesn't call him Hank, but we'll
Speaker 1: get to that later. It's a lot worse than that, Garrett. Alright,
Speaker 1: So in nineteen sixty eight, the Johnson administration was carrying
Speaker 1: out an extensive series of negotiations between South and North
Speaker 1: Vietnam and an attempt to secure an into the war.
Speaker 1: Lb J wants credit for his legacy, right, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to give LBJ credit for like caring about human
Speaker 1: death and suffering, because he's also a monster. Not trying
Speaker 1: to make him seem good by comparison, But he sees
Speaker 1: ending the war both as a way to like, I
Speaker 1: want to go out on a good note, and also
Speaker 1: this is gonna if he could, if he could even
Speaker 1: secure a significance like ceasefire, that would help Humphrey get reelected. Right,
Speaker 1: because nobody's in the US is very pro the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: Uh within the majority of most voters are very anti it. So,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of the play that that LBJ is making.
Speaker 1: He wants to in the war in order to help
Speaker 1: Humphrey win. Over the course of the election year, his
Speaker 1: Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and his Secretary of Defense,
Speaker 1: Clark Gifford, became aware that something was amiss. Some of
Speaker 1: the moves that the South Vietnamese government made which threatened
Speaker 1: the negotiations seemed bizarre. They would like take these wild
Speaker 1: changes where it's like, suddenly South Vietnam is not willing
Speaker 1: to negotiate, Like what the funk? We had like worked
Speaker 1: all this out. Why are you guys pulling out at
Speaker 1: the last minute with Vietnam? Noam's willing to come to
Speaker 1: the table. In the trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens writes,
Speaker 1: quote from his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford, who's again
Speaker 1: the Secretary of Defense, had actually been able to read
Speaker 1: the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he
Speaker 1: terms a secret personal channel between President Thu and Saigon.
Speaker 1: In the Nixon campaign, the chief interlocutor at the American
Speaker 1: end was John Mitchell, then Nixon's Camp Haine manager and
Speaker 1: subsequently Attorney General. He was actively assisted by Madame Anna Chanal,
Speaker 1: known to all as the Dragon Lady, A fierce veteran
Speaker 1: of the Taiwan Lobby and all purpose right wing and triguer,
Speaker 1: she was a social and political force in the Washington
Speaker 1: of her day. So lbj's administration, this is suspicious as fuck.
Speaker 1: Let's bug the Nixon campaign, right, which is not illegal obviously,
Speaker 1: like you have it is an act of fucking treason
Speaker 1: to try an extend a war by sabotage negotiations. This
Speaker 1: is one of the very few cases we're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you should wire tap those people, you should tap you
Speaker 1: should tap the funk out of those phones. Um. But
Speaker 1: it's also this is they don't want this to get
Speaker 1: lb J doesn't want this ship to get out at all. Um.
Speaker 1: This would be number one hanging crime. You get executed
Speaker 1: for doing this kind of ship like on paper at least, right, um.
Speaker 1: And So lbj's administration, while they're wire tapping Nixon and
Speaker 1: getting evidence about like this would increasingly becomes clear as
Speaker 1: a conspiracy, keeps fucking quiet about it because they're worried
Speaker 1: that revealing this would create a crisis of con fidence
Speaker 1: in the American government. Fucking fucking liberals. Liberals, this is
Speaker 1: how how many fucking times bustole two elections? This is
Speaker 1: what they did. This is what they fucking did. It's
Speaker 1: really it really is. I mean it's just it's I
Speaker 1: mean the eye that is so fucking crazy to put
Speaker 1: the clubhouse, Yeah, I mean above it. It is. It
Speaker 1: is like the one time wherefore president had had his
Speaker 1: political opponents hanged, it would be like, yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: you should have done, and you have to that one
Speaker 1: session of hangings really would have gone a long way
Speaker 1: with this country would be in so much a better
Speaker 1: position if they'd hung Nixon and several other people were
Speaker 1: about to talk about it would also give a Nixon
Speaker 1: good posture. Finally, yeah, finally I knew about that Nixon
Speaker 1: had done. I did not know that that they knew.
Speaker 1: I didn't know they knew at the time. Like that
Speaker 1: fucking insane the liberal mind. I always think about this
Speaker 1: story about when the junta took over in Chile before
Speaker 1: Pinochet got into power, and they asked all the they said,
Speaker 1: we want to have interviews with people, and the liberals
Speaker 1: so believed in government that they went and lined up
Speaker 1: for the secret police interviews because they're like well, this
Speaker 1: is what we do. And they're like, no, they're taking
Speaker 1: your names down to possibly kill you. But they lined
Speaker 1: up because they're like, well, this is we don't want
Speaker 1: to mess up the system, like we're supposed to get
Speaker 1: interviewed by the government, like it's a hunta like it
Speaker 1: just the mindset of just this is how our constitution works,
Speaker 1: and this is what we're supposed to do. And you're like, no,
Speaker 1: it's literally not working. The thing isn't working. This is
Speaker 1: a great This is one of the best examples ever
Speaker 1: of yet. And this is the germ of truth in
Speaker 1: Kissinger's whole ideology that conflict is that if you are
Speaker 1: in a conflict with someone who was willing to throw
Speaker 1: down and you aren't, they're going to win, right, Like
Speaker 1: that is a truth of history, right, It's a truth
Speaker 1: of fighting fascists. Right. It's not enough to say, like
Speaker 1: punching them isn't the entirety of it. But if you're
Speaker 1: not willing to throw down, they will win, right um.
Speaker 1: And that is a thing that has often taken exactly
Speaker 1: the wrong way at the geopolitical level. But like you
Speaker 1: see in this that like lb J was not willing
Speaker 1: to throw down and Nixon was, and everything we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in the rest of this series happens
Speaker 1: as a result. And it's like lb J loved throwing down.
Speaker 1: But yes, it's amazing that he does. I think that's
Speaker 1: the craziest thing is that, Like that was the fucking
Speaker 1: big dick. I'm gonna take a ship and you're gonna
Speaker 1: listen to me guy, like he gave no fox and
Speaker 1: threw down with everybody. You know what I think it is, Dave.
Speaker 1: I think for all of his many, many, many flaws
Speaker 1: and evil acts committed, I think lb J believed in
Speaker 1: things and Nixon and kissing you down. He wouldn't throw down,
Speaker 1: but he would throw two ads. Yeah I would, because
Speaker 1: you know, lb J was famous for whipping his dick,
Speaker 1: which he called jumbo, out at all times. He wants
Speaker 1: piste on a Secret Service agent at a party because
Speaker 1: he couldn't get to the bathroom easily enough. Yeah, all
Speaker 1: of our sponsors are the same, and that their dicks
Speaker 1: are called jumbo and they do piss on the Secret Service.
Speaker 1: Every one of our sponsors pisses on the Secret Service.
Speaker 1: That's a promise. So we're back, ah boy, good times.
Speaker 1: So South Vietnam pulls out of the negotiations, right. I
Speaker 1: think they're happening in Paris, uh, And I'm being I
Speaker 1: haven't really gotten into the tail about what happened up
Speaker 1: to this point because those details are very obscure to
Speaker 1: the American people. What is publicly possible, like known, is
Speaker 1: that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are supposed to come
Speaker 1: to the table, have this big negotiation to try to
Speaker 1: come to like some way in which the war can
Speaker 1: come to an end, and South Vietnam, after a bunch
Speaker 1: of like throwing a bunch of like wrenches in the process,
Speaker 1: finally just backs out entirely, right, and so the negotiations
Speaker 1: don't happen, and the war continues. That's what everybody sees,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're just like a dude paying attention
Speaker 1: on the news, that's what you're aware of happening here.
Speaker 1: Um lb j's administration knows something sketchy is going on
Speaker 1: between Nixon and the South Vietnamese government, but even for them,
Speaker 1: they don't know precisely what happened. Here's what happened. As
Speaker 1: part of the negotiations, lb J offered the North Vietnamese
Speaker 1: a bombing halt. Now you can see why this is
Speaker 1: very enticing for Hanoi, right, because being bombed is not pleasant,
Speaker 1: and the US was doing a lot of it. Um,
Speaker 1: so this is like what lb J is like, Hey,
Speaker 1: I will fucking stop bombing Vietnam if you guys will
Speaker 1: come to the table and talk about stuff. And the
Speaker 1: North Vietnamese government not being made entirely of soulless cockroaches
Speaker 1: is like, well, okay, Like that's a pretty good offer. Actually,
Speaker 1: we were bombings. Are we actually chopped John McCain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did drop John McCain, and you guys might have
Speaker 1: caught him. You can keep him for a while. Um,
Speaker 1: he'll come back into the picture. It'll be a big problem.
Speaker 1: He'll also, weirdly enough, be the least objectionable Republican elected
Speaker 1: leader for a long time. So that's our future hero. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He and Jesse the Body Venschera will be the only
Speaker 1: conservative voices against torture. So heads up. It is amazing
Speaker 1: watching that old clip of Jesse Ventura on the view
Speaker 1: being the most reasonable American in fucking early two thousands
Speaker 1: next to Gilbert Godfried at least. Um, it's actually so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is very enticing offer for Hannoy that the bombing cessation,
Speaker 1: and it's good enough if like, if you won't bom
Speaker 1: us anymore, Yeah, maybe we can concede on some stuff
Speaker 1: if you're not murdering people in mass like, yeah, of
Speaker 1: course we'll negotiate with that. Nixon cannot let this happen.
Speaker 1: This would be a disaster. But Vietnam not getting bombed,
Speaker 1: he sees, is like the worst case scenario, even though
Speaker 1: he is campaigning on ending the war. By the way,
Speaker 1: that's promise, I'm going to get us out of there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, on my watch, that happens before what am
Speaker 1: I campaigning on? So Nixon uses his back channel to
Speaker 1: the South Vietnamese government to get them to torpedo their
Speaker 1: end of the negotiations because the government of South Vietnam
Speaker 1: is frightened obviously that the US is going to stop
Speaker 1: bombing North Vietnam. Um, So if you're following along, something
Speaker 1: should be obvious at this point. Since the Johnson administration
Speaker 1: was negotiating secretly with North Vietnam, there should have been
Speaker 1: no way for the government and Saigon to know that
Speaker 1: lb J had proposed a bombing halt. But obviously Saigon knew,
Speaker 1: which means there was a secret informant within the Johnson
Speaker 1: administration passing information to the Nixon administration and sharing a
Speaker 1: lot of top secret data with Saigon. Um. So the
Speaker 1: big question is who possibly be so deep into both camps?
Speaker 1: But he could feed information the forest. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's right, baby, absolutely should be executed for treason, my god. Slowly, yeah,
Speaker 1: slowly executed. Yeah, it should be that incompetent dude who
Speaker 1: hung the Nazis at Nuremberg and like kept sucking up
Speaker 1: and making it worse. Bring that dude back, all right?
Speaker 1: Can I just let me try one more time before
Speaker 1: you guys get out. We should have frozen that motherfucker
Speaker 1: and carbonite to break out when the nation needed him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. How you guys wake ing me up to
Speaker 1: kill me? No, we actually we're drunk, and do another
Speaker 1: hang huge fans, We've got you a handle of gin
Speaker 1: here and this is a grey Kissinger. Shut off. Just
Speaker 1: do whatever. You just kill him as fast as you can.
Speaker 1: That's the all they know. But I took a lot
Speaker 1: of notes from him back in the day. He's great,
Speaker 1: he's great. Just kill him. I don't think he could
Speaker 1: die though I will say I don't think that guy
Speaker 1: could read so. Obviously, Kissinger is the back channel who
Speaker 1: was spreading this information. Now when his own memoirs, Nixon
Speaker 1: later admitted to hearing about the proposed bombing halt through
Speaker 1: what he termed as a highly unusual channel, Christopher Hitchins continues,
Speaker 1: it was more unusual even that he than he acknowledged.
Speaker 1: Kissinger had until then been a devoted partisan of Nelson Rockefeller,
Speaker 1: the matchlessly wealthy prince of liberal Republicanism. His contempt for
Speaker 1: the person and policies of Richard Nixon was undisguised. Indeed,
Speaker 1: President Johnson's Paris negotiators, led by Avril Harriman, considered Kissinger
Speaker 1: to be almost one of themselves. He had made himself
Speaker 1: helpful as Rockefeller's cheap foreign policy adviser by supplying French
Speaker 1: intermediaries with their own contacts in Hanoi. Henry was the
Speaker 1: only person outside of the government that we were authorized
Speaker 1: to discuss the negotiations with, says Richard Holbrook. We trusted him.
Speaker 1: It is not stretching the truth to say that Nick
Speaker 1: the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the US
Speaker 1: negotiating team. So the likelihood of a bombing halt, wrote,
Speaker 1: Nixon came as no real surprise to me. He added,
Speaker 1: I told Haldeman that Mitchell she stay continuous liaison with Kissinger,
Speaker 1: and that we should honor his desire to keep his
Speaker 1: role completely confidential. This is all on the open now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also, I mean Nixon really just never shut the
Speaker 1: funk up. I mean he should didn't. He really just
Speaker 1: he was like the drunk guy at a party who
Speaker 1: would just sort of tell you whatever. Like honestly, he's
Speaker 1: the guy Donald Trump might put a hand and be like,
Speaker 1: hey man, you're saying you say, it's some stuff that
Speaker 1: you probably shouldn't right now. I think you might not.
Speaker 1: I think you might regret this sticks. But I'm just
Speaker 1: saying a lot of stuff you probably shouldn't. And I'm
Speaker 1: on Twitter. Yeah that's so. That is just so crazy
Speaker 1: and just says it all, you know, and this is
Speaker 1: and it's gotten worse. I mean, it's just fucking bonkers. Now.
Speaker 1: The bombing halt was planned for October twenty three, but
Speaker 1: thanks to Kissinger, the Nixon campaign was able to lobby
Speaker 1: South Vietnam to increase their demands. Suddenly, at the bargaining table,
Speaker 1: which wrecked attempted agreements being made with North Vietnam. This,
Speaker 1: you know, there's a process. This happens back and forth
Speaker 1: until the bombing halt is completely scuttled and peace negotiations
Speaker 1: fall apart. Since all this was happening behind closed doors,
Speaker 1: Humphrey never got to present the possibility of a bombing
Speaker 1: halt to the American people. Nixon avoided having to take
Speaker 1: into stance of any kind on the issue because obviously,
Speaker 1: as the peace candidate, he couldn't say you shouldn't do
Speaker 1: it right. He didn't even want it to come up
Speaker 1: at all. Um. The Johnson administration made one final attempt
Speaker 1: to push through a bombing halt at the end of October,
Speaker 1: but the South Vietnamese government, warned by Kissinger via Nixon,
Speaker 1: preempted this with a surprise boycott of the peace talks. Now,
Speaker 1: while all this is happening, Kissinger is also advising the
Speaker 1: Humphrey campaign, and it's so respected there that he was
Speaker 1: considered a shoe in for a senior job if they'd
Speaker 1: managed to win. There's three of them. Democrats are so
Speaker 1: fucking stupid. I know there's three of them. There's three Kissingers,
Speaker 1: just free walking around. I got my buddy Henry's I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give him a good old job. That's our party
Speaker 1: you're talking about, Mr. And then I can never get
Speaker 1: over the fact that Hilary walked around with him during
Speaker 1: the campaign. It's really walking to be fair day. He
Speaker 1: fucking is. He's like one of those episodes of Frasier
Speaker 1: where he's dating two women at the same time and
Speaker 1: trying to keep it secret. That's the same rest Jack Trapper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very funny, except for all of the millions and millions.
Speaker 1: Do you have the numbers on where the deaths were
Speaker 1: at in Vietnam where they ended up? Like, yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: get you that in a minute. Why did I ask? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Nixon by also like grows in convinced of Kissinger's value
Speaker 1: during this period of time too, and he becomes a
Speaker 1: shoe in for a senior job there. He was particularly
Speaker 1: impressed by the school with which Kissinger protected his identity
Speaker 1: as the leaker from the Humphrey campaign. Nixon later wrote,
Speaker 1: one factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility
Speaker 1: was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy.
Speaker 1: What terrible, I mean, that's just not a good personality train.
Speaker 1: It's really not. It's actually not, but doubt is. But
Speaker 1: not this guy. This guy is the best double agent.
Speaker 1: He's so fucking great. And this guy's an unbelievable ship
Speaker 1: bag liar. Yeah, I mean, honestly, it makes sense that
Speaker 1: like Nixon would be super ended. All. Yeah, wow, this
Speaker 1: guy's a real piece of ship. I'm jick Nixon. This
Speaker 1: this guy can lie to you. Let me tell you
Speaker 1: as a liar. Oh fuck, it's it's fucking amazing. It's bad. Um.
Speaker 1: Clark Clifford, who would later was again the Secretary Defense
Speaker 1: of the time, would later blame the fact that the
Speaker 1: war did not end in nineteen sixty eight and the
Speaker 1: loss of the Humphrey campaign in that election on the
Speaker 1: schoolduggery of the Nixon campaign, which was orchestrated in part
Speaker 1: by Henry Kissinger. Quote. The activities of the Nixon team
Speaker 1: went far beyond the bounds of justifiable political combat. It
Speaker 1: constituted direct interference in the activities of the executive branch
Speaker 1: in the response abilities of the chief executive, the only
Speaker 1: people with authority to get to negotiate on behalf of
Speaker 1: the nation. The activities of the Niction campaign constituted a gross,
Speaker 1: even potentially illegal interference in the security affairs of the
Speaker 1: nation by private individuals, which is the polite political wonk
Speaker 1: way of saying it. In the book, Kissinger's shadow, Greg Grandon,
Speaker 1: is even more pointed the fact that Kissinger participated in
Speaker 1: an intrigue that extended the war for five pointless years
Speaker 1: seven if you count the fighting between the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: three Paris Piece Accords in the nineteen seventy five Fall
Speaker 1: of Saigon is undeniable. Adding to the evidence is Kissinger himself.
Speaker 1: He's been caught on tape twice on recordings recently released
Speaker 1: admitting he passed on useful information to Nixon. Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: my god. It's like killing him isn't enough. He should
Speaker 1: be gibbited. I said, so it would. We need to
Speaker 1: bring back gibbeting and just hang that motherfucker somewhere in
Speaker 1: a in a nice cage box, like, yeah, leave him
Speaker 1: out there, leave him out, Let people pelt him with stuffy.
Speaker 1: Let's kill him by drawing potatoes at it, right, because
Speaker 1: he's not that strong anymore and you wanted to last
Speaker 1: a whit? Yeah, yeah, Um, So we'll talk a bit
Speaker 1: later about how we got caught on tape and why
Speaker 1: we know about all of this, because that's a fun story, guys,
Speaker 1: and involves a different series of crimes. But Grandon makes
Speaker 1: another point that's worth acknowledging here. Well, Kissinger definitely had
Speaker 1: inside information from the Johnson campaign, which he passed on.
Speaker 1: He also didn't have as much information as he pretended
Speaker 1: to know when he talked to the Nixon campaign. Quote.
Speaker 1: Even with access to Johnson's negotiating instructions, he couldn't have
Speaker 1: had exact information about the decisions being made at the
Speaker 1: White House. He had to have been winging it, at
Speaker 1: least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining
Speaker 1: what others would do with that, guests playing the angle,
Speaker 1: sussing out the chance, well, giving the appearance of composure
Speaker 1: and certainty, he was right winging it. Yeah, an absolute
Speaker 1: fucking psychopath. Like that's the kind of ship. Like he said,
Speaker 1: if you're dating to women, you're trying to figure it
Speaker 1: out and get through some stinky situation. But he's doing
Speaker 1: this with fucking Vietnam and to presidential campaigns. I don't craziness.
Speaker 1: The absolute lack of a soul is dounding he is
Speaker 1: pure blackness inside. Yeah, Dave, let me push back for
Speaker 1: a second. God, wow, yeah, you can't. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to even speak to it because it's
Speaker 1: like to look, I'll kill five people for a job,
Speaker 1: but at some point you have that's regular. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: but to to let I mean, to just I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's he is he killed, he killed? I mean, how
Speaker 1: many Vietnamese died after that? Like so many? But we're
Speaker 1: talking to uh, you know, wasn't like a million died
Speaker 1: in the whole wars more than no, I mean it
Speaker 1: is because you also have to include the people who
Speaker 1: died in um, Cambodia and and in in Vietnam. We're
Speaker 1: we're gonna get into more of this an episode three,
Speaker 1: but conservatively an additional couple of million deaths as a
Speaker 1: result of this, in addition to an additional twenty thousand
Speaker 1: US dead. Um, it's kind of hard the death toll
Speaker 1: to get precisely like a couple million, like in the
Speaker 1: millions aditional dead because to this day, by the way,
Speaker 1: because he was just gonna say because he wanted a job,
Speaker 1: this was he wanted a gig. He's essentially lying in
Speaker 1: a job in a view like you would if you
Speaker 1: were had no fast food experience and where del Taco
Speaker 1: except millions of people are dying. Yeah, it's awesome. Holy
Speaker 1: the crazy such a bad person, the crazy that that's
Speaker 1: the thing you done here is you've you've you've humanized
Speaker 1: the situation for me because, like, I can understand that
Speaker 1: there's evil people out there and they do stuff like
Speaker 1: they want to bomb Camp Cambodio, they want to do
Speaker 1: this other stuff. But when you take it to a
Speaker 1: level where it's a guy winging it in a meeting,
Speaker 1: it takes on a whole different flavor of evil. That
Speaker 1: is something because now that's something we can all understand.
Speaker 1: We've all been a situation where like ah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: guy did a thing, and then I did a and
Speaker 1: you're just trying to get through a situation we've all
Speaker 1: experienced that none of us have experienced given the green
Speaker 1: light to you know, dropping bombs and killing people. But
Speaker 1: that I get and I feel in my bones of like, well,
Speaker 1: holy sh it, but you're doing that with millions of
Speaker 1: people's lives on the line. It is. It is this
Speaker 1: thing where the idea I had always had before I
Speaker 1: really got into with that, Like, well he did you know,
Speaker 1: he was involved in all of these horrible things that
Speaker 1: I knew he was involved in, but like I assumed
Speaker 1: it was from a wonky perspective of like he believed
Speaker 1: wrongly in the need to fight these wars and that
Speaker 1: anything was justified, and so he did these horrible things
Speaker 1: because he believed we were in this like civilizational struggle
Speaker 1: in certain things were necessary in that. And like he
Speaker 1: had all of these different kind of very complex moral
Speaker 1: beliefs that he wrote dozens of books about explaining why
Speaker 1: he did the things. At the end of the day,
Speaker 1: no motherfucker wanted a gig. Yeah, And by the way,
Speaker 1: it's not like he would have been out of politics,
Speaker 1: like not even in his downtime. He was like, you know,
Speaker 1: he was gigging. Like it's just like he would have
Speaker 1: been patiently waiting for another administration, working whatever, like you know,
Speaker 1: you know, he didn't don't want to work. He didn't
Speaker 1: want to work at Uncle Chuckle Fox. He wanted to
Speaker 1: gig at Charlie Goodnights, Like he doesn't want to work
Speaker 1: at the Premier Club. He literally like did the like
Speaker 1: that's the thing. He didn't just do this for a job.
Speaker 1: He did this for like one of the two jobs
Speaker 1: and the one he kind of didn't want as much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking conscionable. Yeah, it's really hard to like, it is hard,
Speaker 1: and like it's at it's easier to understand now what
Speaker 1: he did. It's hard to like judge him adequately in
Speaker 1: mortal terms that are even like comprehensible because it's so
Speaker 1: much out it's hard to process. It really is one
Speaker 1: of those like say what you will about the tenants
Speaker 1: of nihilism, dude. At least it's an ethos moments where
Speaker 1: it's like I'm thinking about like people like fucking Saddam
Speaker 1: or whatever, where it's like, yeah, that was a piece
Speaker 1: of ship. There were definitely some things he believed though,
Speaker 1: like like there's pieces of ship out like sucking out there,
Speaker 1: who like there are things they believe, and Kissinger just
Speaker 1: believes he should be close to power. Yeah yeah, he's
Speaker 1: like all doctrine was Kissinger. He's like, I'm really smart.
Speaker 1: I should be in the top game, and yeah, I
Speaker 1: just want to be there. It's awesome. Yeah, Like I
Speaker 1: like how he thinks his childhood didn't funk with him. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't be even better if he if all this
Speaker 1: was happening and it was just because like he's like,
Speaker 1: I know, I can get so many more chicks if
Speaker 1: I'm in the White House, because that was the whole
Speaker 1: reason for it. He's just like, I just want to
Speaker 1: get laid. It is not a non factor. Wait is
Speaker 1: he Is he married right now? Or is he single?
Speaker 1: Who knows? He's still think he gets married at some point.
Speaker 1: But he's also like, you know, well, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Actually he's kind of like a bachelor dude. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about that later. I'm still working on those episodes. Um,
Speaker 1: because there's a whole thing to be said about Kissinger
Speaker 1: and women in sex appeal. Um, he gets he was married.
Speaker 1: He definitely was married at points, but he's also like
Speaker 1: kind of a playboy. Um. I'm gonna go back in
Speaker 1: time a little bit and talk about some of that later.
Speaker 1: He was married, his first his first marriage was nineteen
Speaker 1: forty nine to nineteen sixty four, So I don't think
Speaker 1: he's and then he's not remarried again until seventy four.
Speaker 1: Sounds right. He's married in this little hall. I wonder
Speaker 1: why she left him. Yeah, he's the only guy who
Speaker 1: comes black I haven't written the episode yet, but I
Speaker 1: have several page is that people talking about Henry Kissinger's
Speaker 1: sex appeal on the news that are real real black
Speaker 1: pilling is the kids say not good. So Nixon wins
Speaker 1: the sixty eight election. Obviously, he gets inaugurated in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine. The Vietnam War continues on for half a decade.
Speaker 1: Ish uh. This was an almost incalculable humanitarian tragedy as
Speaker 1: well as disastrous for the future stability and cohesion of
Speaker 1: the United States. But it was dope as hell for
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger, who was appointed. Nixon like to put out
Speaker 1: there that my uncle went to Vietnam and it totally
Speaker 1: you know, he had to kill a lot of people
Speaker 1: and then totally run his life and he watched and stuff.
Speaker 1: So thank you Richard Nixon, Thank you Richard Nixon. Everybody
Speaker 1: who went to Vietnam after sixty eight saya. Thank you
Speaker 1: to Richard for Nixon and Kissinger for um. You know,
Speaker 1: all of the trauma and the trauma that in some
Speaker 1: cases some of you passed on to your family members, um,
Speaker 1: and the trauma that has been passed on societally based
Speaker 1: on our attitudes words war because of how Vietnam went
Speaker 1: and the ways in which some people were always looking
Speaker 1: for a rematch, and it got us into other you know,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Good stuff.
Speaker 1: Imagine if like that had been the end of Vietnam,
Speaker 1: that like there was actually a president realized, you know,
Speaker 1: the foolishness of a conflict, and we went to the
Speaker 1: table and like negotiations were made. And I don't think
Speaker 1: I don't think the first Iraq war happens, the Panama
Speaker 1: doesn't happen. You would think that for how long Vietnam
Speaker 1: dragged on, that that would have actually been a lesson
Speaker 1: to not go into conflicts, you aimless conflict. But I
Speaker 1: guess the problem is we're thinking there's people should learn
Speaker 1: lessons countries. Well, that war is in any way like
Speaker 1: a moral decision or like actually comes from a place
Speaker 1: of actual you know, uh, savior mentality, anything like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good stuff. Getting disappointment is national secure. The advisor
Speaker 1: required a lot more politicking from Kissinger, including spreading rumors
Speaker 1: to Nixon before his inauguration that Johnson planned either deposed
Speaker 1: or killed the president of South Vietnam before he left office.
Speaker 1: Kissinger pushed this rumor to the President elect via regular
Speaker 1: Bastards pod side character and Rhodesia enthusiast enthusiast William F. Buckley,
Speaker 1: Buckley's middleman delight to Nixon translator. Yeah, William F. Buckley,
Speaker 1: whose son went on to write honestly a pretty fun book. Um.
Speaker 1: But we don't need to think too much about that. Um.
Speaker 1: Great Aaron eck Art performance in the movie. So Nixon
Speaker 1: appreciated Kissinger's hutzpat and connections enough that when he put
Speaker 1: him at the head of the National Security Council, he
Speaker 1: ordered the professor to reorganize it in order to take
Speaker 1: foreign policy control away from the State in defense departments.
Speaker 1: This means that Nixon gave Kissinger it was very close
Speaker 1: to a blank check to take total control of US
Speaker 1: foreign policy. Obviously, Nixon wanted this because he was a
Speaker 1: paranoid control freak. He did not win any kind of
Speaker 1: separation of powers. He certainly did not want to have
Speaker 1: a Secretary of State who could do things that Nixon
Speaker 1: might not be explicitly ordering. But the result of this
Speaker 1: was that Kissinger found himself in a position where he
Speaker 1: could exercise near absolute power in foreign policy as long
Speaker 1: as the President kept liking him. Justice Kissinger had little
Speaker 1: love for Nixon. Our buddy Dick Millhouse was not particularly
Speaker 1: warm to his new right hand man. Now you had
Speaker 1: given a couple of um spanky Hank. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to notice real nickname for jew boy? Oh my god,
Speaker 1: she says christ it is Nixon. But it's like, I mean,
Speaker 1: I thought we would be jumping off of the name
Speaker 1: a little bit. He's just like, what am I gonna
Speaker 1: call you? Spanky Hank? No, little drew boy, good lord?
Speaker 1: And again it says a lot about Henry Kissinger that
Speaker 1: he's like, yeah, all right, that's the funny that mans,
Speaker 1: not childhood have no effect on me today, not what
Speaker 1: So there must have been an element of Nixon then
Speaker 1: who knew what an ass kissing little bit he was?
Speaker 1: Because he's belittling him to his face and he'll stick around.
Speaker 1: It's why you get hired for these jobs, because it's
Speaker 1: just like it's not you know, and an empty vacuum.
Speaker 1: Who is going to be your right hand man is
Speaker 1: they'll you know, there's security in that, there's there's secrecy
Speaker 1: in that he's like a vacuum Gareth, and that he'll
Speaker 1: suck Nixon's dick, but he's also like a toilet and
Speaker 1: that he'll take Nixon Ship. You know, that's very kissing chair.
Speaker 1: He's he's a dick. Yeah, yeah, he's like the total
Speaker 1: toilet is pretty effective. But have you ever had a
Speaker 1: dick sucking toilet? Come either way, I'm ready for it, baby,
Speaker 1: Henry kissing her? So be can the title be Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger dick sucking toilet? Speaking speaking of dick sucking toilets,
Speaker 1: it is time for a commercial break. That is who
Speaker 1: sponsors our podcast, Raytheon's new dick sucking toilet. Well, it
Speaker 1: is going to fire a missile little bus loaded children.
Speaker 1: But that's that's just the Raytheon. You know, we can't
Speaker 1: avoid it. We're contractually obligated. Yeah, it's how it works.
Speaker 1: So Nixon announced Kissinger's appointment as the National Security Advisor
Speaker 1: before he had even picked a Secretary of State, which
Speaker 1: is an unprecedented move. He announced Henry as quote and
Speaker 1: this again in his like public announcement to the country
Speaker 1: as quote, a man who is known to all people
Speaker 1: who are interested in foreign policy is perhaps one of
Speaker 1: the major scholars in America and the world in this area.
Speaker 1: And he acknowledged that while Kissinger had never held a
Speaker 1: full time government job before, he had Nixon's confidence to
Speaker 1: bring in a whole new foreign policy team quote newman
Speaker 1: to develop new ideas. Now. The conservative media of the
Speaker 1: day immediately roared into gear halan Henry Kissinger as an
Speaker 1: unprecedented policy genius, the man necessary to get America back
Speaker 1: on track after nearly a decade of disastrous war under
Speaker 1: Democratic presidents. William F. Buckley wrote, not since Florence Nightingale
Speaker 1: has any public figure received such universal acclamation. William F.
Speaker 1: Buckley ship fantastic. Yeah, it's amazing. But even ostensibly liberal
Speaker 1: figures were wooed by Kissinger's court titanic intellect and Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger and American power, Thomas Schwartz, writes. The liberal historian
Speaker 1: Arthur Schlessinger Jr. Simply referred to it as the best
Speaker 1: appoint meant so far. The New York Times columnist Tom
Speaker 1: Wicker noted the collective scient of relief that went up
Speaker 1: from the liberal Eastern Establishment and the Ivy League fearing
Speaker 1: Nixon's cold warrior image, most shared in the sentiment of
Speaker 1: Kissinger's Harvard colleague Adam yr Yarmolinsky. Will all sleep a
Speaker 1: little better each night. No mean, Kissinger is down there,
Speaker 1: you mean, and the toilet getting ready to suck bit.
Speaker 1: You know. Again, it's exactly what happened with Trump. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's it's like it's the way that I mean again,
Speaker 1: it's people's natural reaction is normally kind of there. It's
Speaker 1: just the fears are assuaged by people who they consider
Speaker 1: to be, you know, the compass, and they're just not.
Speaker 1: And so when when you're told that there are the
Speaker 1: good guys inside the bad camp, it's like, it's just
Speaker 1: never fucking true. It is rot from the core. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is. These liberals are also are also impressed
Speaker 1: by him and so comforted by him because they think
Speaker 1: he's smart, because he's good at quoting smart dead people. Right.
Speaker 1: It is the same thing that happened with Maddie. Maddie Thankfully,
Speaker 1: it's not nearly as toxic a person as Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 1: But like, if you actually look at Mattie's background, one
Speaker 1: of the things he did in the Iraq War was
Speaker 1: cover up a war crime. Like he's not a not
Speaker 1: a man to be like, I mean, and he was.
Speaker 1: He was, like he was very popular among people who
Speaker 1: served under him, which is part of like why there
Speaker 1: was this kind of collective relief. But it's this idea
Speaker 1: that he's like the warrior monk, right. They love the
Speaker 1: idea that like, well, this guy who's president is a maniac,
Speaker 1: but this dude reads books that he hired, so that'll
Speaker 1: it'll be okay, And you know it's never okay. You
Speaker 1: continue to lower the bar more and more. You're obvious,
Speaker 1: like the people that you're bringing back are part of
Speaker 1: a lower bar. But because the bar is even lower,
Speaker 1: it seems and feels a little higher. But it is
Speaker 1: all just it's just this is exactly what happened with
Speaker 1: Colin Powell. Evil We did exactly, Yeah, over it up,
Speaker 1: sucking the massacres and fucking Vietnam. That's like when he
Speaker 1: started out like terrible human being. But the press did
Speaker 1: the same. Ship. If you can quote old books and
Speaker 1: smile and you're willing to give journalists time, they will
Speaker 1: talk about you as being the secret reasonable person within
Speaker 1: the war crimes party. You know, like that's all it takes.
Speaker 1: It's great. It's just the same thing as if you're
Speaker 1: a Nazi who reads books. You can get a time
Speaker 1: file addressed nicely. Yeah, or you'll get on sixty minutes
Speaker 1: or whatever. You know. Um, it's it's don't trust people
Speaker 1: who want you to think they're smart. That's never a
Speaker 1: good sign smart. It's the same thing. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing with like people who want you to believe they're dangerous.
Speaker 1: If they want you to believe something specific about them,
Speaker 1: they're lying about it. That's how people work. And and
Speaker 1: if a if a doctor wants to get on the
Speaker 1: news to talk about COVID and be famous on the news,
Speaker 1: that's actually not a doctor you should listen to. Had
Speaker 1: a great guy also, I mean it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: from the same publications and the same networks. It the
Speaker 1: idea that you continue to listen to these sources about
Speaker 1: what is right and what is wrong just because they
Speaker 1: have fancy terms like senior policy advice. It's like it's
Speaker 1: all fucking it's it's days of our lives. It's their actors.
Speaker 1: These are tele prompters. Yeah, and they don't know any
Speaker 1: more than you about anything that matters. As a general rule.
Speaker 1: Every now and then you get but like even like
Speaker 1: within agencies that are heavily like medical oriented, like the CDC,
Speaker 1: where you would expect them to have a lot of
Speaker 1: specialized knowledge. It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do
Speaker 1: a good job. Much times comfortably lied about Iraq. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not great. So during the transition from the
Speaker 1: Johnson to Nixon administration, US Military Command began to act
Speaker 1: under what General Creighton Abrams described as a total war
Speaker 1: mindset against the infrastructure of the Vietcong insurgency. This began
Speaker 1: with a six month operation and to clear the Meet
Speaker 1: Kong Delta code named Operations Speedy Express. This would prove
Speaker 1: to be the first major military operation that both Nixon
Speaker 1: and Kissinger oversaw, and it was a titanic blood bath.
Speaker 1: There is a good article on this operation in the
Speaker 1: Nation and the title of the article is A my
Speaker 1: Lie a month, Oh my God. Yeah, so it's it's
Speaker 1: all god. Now, the Myli massacre had occurred in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, before Nixon or Kissinger were in power. You
Speaker 1: know that ain't on them, uh, and seymour Hurst didn't
Speaker 1: like break the story until sixty nine, which is the
Speaker 1: year that they come to power. And this slaughter of
Speaker 1: five hundred civilians by US troops was horrific enough, but
Speaker 1: within a few months of taking power, speedy express had
Speaker 1: exceeded it many times. Quote from the Nation, an inkling
Speaker 1: that something terrible had taken place in the Meet Kong
Speaker 1: Delta appeared in a most unlikely source, a formerly confidential
Speaker 1: September nineteen sixty nine senior officer debriefing report by none
Speaker 1: other than the commander of the Ninth Division, then Major
Speaker 1: General Julian Ewell, who came to be known inside the
Speaker 1: military as the Butcher of the Delta because of his
Speaker 1: single minded fixation on body count. In reports, copies of
Speaker 1: which were sent to Westmoreland's office and to other high
Speaker 1: ranking officials, you will candidly noted that while the Ninth
Speaker 1: Division stressed the discriminate and selective use of firepower, in
Speaker 1: some areas of the Delta, where this emphasis wasn't applied
Speaker 1: or wasn't feasible, the countryside looked like the Verdun battle fields,
Speaker 1: the site of a notoriously bloody World War One battle.
Speaker 1: That December, a document produced by the National Liberation Front
Speaker 1: sharpened the picture. It reported that between December first, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight and April first, nineteen sixty nine, primarily in
Speaker 1: the Delta provinces of Kanhua and Din twong, the ninth
Speaker 1: Division launched an express rate and mopped up many areas,
Speaker 1: slaughtering three thousand people, mostly old folks, women and children,
Speaker 1: and destroying thousands of houses, hundreds of hectares of fields
Speaker 1: and orchards. But like most in Left reports of civilian atrocities,
Speaker 1: this one was almost certainly dismissed as propaganda by US officials.
Speaker 1: A United Press International report that same months and month
Speaker 1: in which US advisors charged the Vision with having driven
Speaker 1: up the body count by killing civilians with helicopter gunships
Speaker 1: in artillery was all so largely ignored. And it's because
Speaker 1: they're saying they're soldiers, that they're shooting from a distance,
Speaker 1: and then they just have like Colin pal justified it
Speaker 1: by saying, well, they're they're providing food for the enemy,
Speaker 1: so there's no difference. Yeah. By the time Speedy Express
Speaker 1: comes to an end, US forces had killed more than
Speaker 1: ten thousand people. The vast majority of these were claimed
Speaker 1: to have been insurgent fighters, but extensive mop up after
Speaker 1: operations after the fact found less than eight hundred weapons
Speaker 1: on all these bodies they share. That is fucking crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like we can't even frame them competentity now.
Speaker 1: And you also remember you're taking guys that you drafted. Yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: yeah right, you know to do this. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: like you said with your uncle, I mean it it is,
Speaker 1: it's like the generational ripple through that and the lifetime
Speaker 1: you know what what it does? It really? I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: just it's pretty beyond who dies, who doesn't live again? Yeah, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and what you know, what do people take back with them? Um? Now,
Speaker 1: it is fair and necessary to note that this began
Speaker 1: in the December before Nixon and Kissinger took office. This
Speaker 1: is not entirely on them. Some of the blame for
Speaker 1: this ghost on the LBJ administration as well, obviously, but
Speaker 1: it continued under them. This paragraph, written by Christopher Hitchens,
Speaker 1: gives you some idea of the savagery of what occurred
Speaker 1: in the early days of the Nixon administration's control of
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War. The people who still live in pacified
Speaker 1: Kinhoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American
Speaker 1: firepower brought to their lives in early nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in
Speaker 1: some way. There were five thousand people in our village
Speaker 1: before nineteen sixty nine, but there were none in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one. Village elder told me the Americans destroyed every
Speaker 1: house with artillery airstrikes or by burning them down with
Speaker 1: cigarette lighters. About a hundred people were killed by bombing,
Speaker 1: others were wounded, and others became refugees. Many were children
Speaker 1: killed by concussion from the bombs, which their small bodies
Speaker 1: could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground. So
Speaker 1: Nixon's plan at the beginning, you know, when his people
Speaker 1: had derailed the peace negotiations in sixty eight, was that
Speaker 1: he would win election and then make peace with with Vietnam. Right,
Speaker 1: then he's going to do the thing that he promised
Speaker 1: to do. But it swiftly became clear that peace was
Speaker 1: a messy prospect. One of the things he's worried about
Speaker 1: is that, like, well, if we withdraw them with Vietnam,
Speaker 1: the Saigon government's probably going to fall, right because there
Speaker 1: we're just barely propping up this shitty dictatorship. Um, and
Speaker 1: that'll be it will make me look weak, right, And
Speaker 1: so I can't do it because it will make me
Speaker 1: look weak if um, Yeah, and then I won't win
Speaker 1: re election in nineteen seventy two, and that's unacceptable. I
Speaker 1: mean that and that and that. I mean obviously keeps
Speaker 1: going over and over like it's you get into office
Speaker 1: and then you're like, well what about re election instead
Speaker 1: of going like the best direction for it is one
Speaker 1: of the few things I'll give Biden some credit for
Speaker 1: because he had the same calculus with Afghanistan. A lot
Speaker 1: of criticisms to make about the poet from Afghanistan, but
Speaker 1: he did not make the same decision Nixon and Kissinger did.
Speaker 1: He did fucking get out. Yeah, I would like to
Speaker 1: be I have a much more darker outlook on that,
Speaker 1: and I mean it's yeah, it's he knew that Ukraine
Speaker 1: was was kicking off because that's been kicking off since
Speaker 1: um he actually two thousands one election, but you know
Speaker 1: it was Zelinski was largely for peace until all of
Speaker 1: a sudden Biden got elected and then he flipped and
Speaker 1: I was like, I want today to all this ship. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, if you can pull out of Afghanistan, if
Speaker 1: you know there's another area cooking up, I mean negative, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's probably too complicated to want to get into here. Um,
Speaker 1: because that's a whole another several it's worth of stories.
Speaker 1: It's a ship hole of just unbelievable garbage all over
Speaker 1: the place. Yeah. So withdrawing from Vietnam and Saigon is
Speaker 1: going to fall, with the government's gonna fall, and that
Speaker 1: will be bad in the seventy two elections, and it
Speaker 1: might push Kissinger and Nixon out of power. Neither of
Speaker 1: them can accept this. And this description of a meeting
Speaker 1: from December nineteen seventy by H. R. Haldeman shows Kissinger's
Speaker 1: role in pulling back from peace. Kissinger came in and
Speaker 1: the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam
Speaker 1: and the president's big peace plan for the next year,
Speaker 1: with Kissinger later which Kissinger later told me he does
Speaker 1: not favor. He thinks that any pullout from next year
Speaker 1: would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to
Speaker 1: it could set in well before the seventy two elections.
Speaker 1: He favors instead of continued winding down and then a
Speaker 1: pull out right at the fall of seventy two, so
Speaker 1: that if any bad results follow, they will be too
Speaker 1: late to effect the election. Yeah, And it's you know,
Speaker 1: that's what our wars always are they're all about Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all about elections. They fucking always are. It's you know,
Speaker 1: I mean there. Yeah, this led to Republicans thinking that,
Speaker 1: you know, they had to get war back on track
Speaker 1: at some point. Yeah, but you know it's always it's
Speaker 1: it's never it never works like it's it's just such
Speaker 1: a crazy idea. And you also, like people are watching
Speaker 1: bodybags go home, like no one's happy about anything that's
Speaker 1: going on. No, and it um this they just kind
Speaker 1: of I mean this part of why it keeps going
Speaker 1: is um this kind of craven knowledge that like, well,
Speaker 1: the worst thing that could happen is we don't get reelected. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At no point is he thinking about any of the
Speaker 1: human beings involved, even any of the American human beings involved.
Speaker 1: It's just like, well, we can't be losing reelection. You know,
Speaker 1: imagine if Kissinger was damaged from his childhood, how bad
Speaker 1: things would get bad. It's like, you know, actually, when
Speaker 1: we talk about the story of like American presidents making
Speaker 1: craven political decisions, one of the reasons FDR did not
Speaker 1: approve more effort being taken to evacuate Jewish refugees from Germany,
Speaker 1: as he did not want to be seen as pro
Speaker 1: Jewess the socialist policies and stuff that we're going through.
Speaker 1: He knew that that could hurt him. There were a
Speaker 1: number of other reasons, but like, yeah, they're like they
Speaker 1: did not that is like there is there were things
Speaker 1: that were done that led to the US government saving
Speaker 1: fewer Jewish people from the Holocaust that we're done for
Speaker 1: craven political reasons by the FDR administration. Let me hear
Speaker 1: this Kaiser pitch again. It actually big hat, I learned
Speaker 1: the hat. This hat you've ever seen big, very spiky
Speaker 1: now loves his mom's hands. But god, So the fun
Speaker 1: thing about this episode is that everything we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about in part three is even worse because in
Speaker 1: part three we're going to talk about fucking Cambodia. UM.
Speaker 1: So you guys want to plug anything after my ears
Speaker 1: three hours? Yeah, I'm going to be I'm going to
Speaker 1: be in a toilet trying to get clean. You can
Speaker 1: go to the Dollar go to Dollar podcast dot com
Speaker 1: for tour information and my website ads dot com. I'm
Speaker 1: on tour, but not like tours of duty, just like
Speaker 1: stand up and podcast tours. UM with the aim of
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk like that anymore, Dave, Dave,
Speaker 1: shut your mouth and you can just listen to you
Speaker 1: just fucking murdered the whole fucking face. Like you left
Speaker 1: unexploded ordinance in the crowd they tripped over. Should have
Speaker 1: been over fifteen minutes earlier. And like with unexploded ordinance
Speaker 1: in law of the people who loved your jokes, after
Speaker 1: the said ended, we're children no more. There'll be no
Speaker 1: more relating. There'll be no more correlating. Yeah, anyway, that's
Speaker 1: part two. You've got two more weeks of Henry kissing
Speaker 1: your ahead of you folks, to strap in gets a
Speaker 1: lot uglier. But also we'll be talking about his sex life.
Speaker 1: So you know, I was going to say something to
Speaker 1: look forward too, but like not, Yeah, yeah, come back
Speaker 1: next week for more of the dick sucking toilet Henry
Speaker 1: kissing Jerre look a pretty good title. So if he's
Speaker 1: not happy with no, so, if he's not on board,
Speaker 1: I don't love it. But you know, all right, Hi, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here and my novel After the Revolution is
Speaker 1: available for pre order now from a k press dot org. Now,
Speaker 1: if you go to a k press dot org, you
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