Speaker 1: Hi everybody. Robert Evans here and my novel After the
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Speaker 1: me very happy. So this is episode six. You know,
Speaker 1: we're what eight hours into talking about Mr Kissinger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: really meet me from eight hours ago, buddy. It's like
Speaker 1: when Bill and Ted meet each other halfway through and
Speaker 1: they don't another journey they're about to go upon. Yeah, buddy,
Speaker 1: le up. So the things the thing that Kissinger gets
Speaker 1: the most credit for that we haven't mentioned. We we've
Speaker 1: talked about a bunch of the things that he gets
Speaker 1: credit for is bringing peace to the Middle East. Um,
Speaker 1: he does get credit for being that guy. Obviously he
Speaker 1: did not do that, but he did play a significant
Speaker 1: role in stopping what had been a decade's long cycle
Speaker 1: of wars between Israel and the Arab nations around it. Now,
Speaker 1: to call that bringing peace would be ignoring a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of ongoing violence against the Palestinian people. But Kissinger
Speaker 1: did help ensure Like you know, there were all these
Speaker 1: different like everyone would invade, YadA, YadA, YadA, there'd be
Speaker 1: a bunch of fighting. That doesn't really happen anymore. And
Speaker 1: Kissinger is part of why that doesn't happen anymore. The
Speaker 1: gist of it is that on October sixth, nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: on Yam kapoor Um, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated
Speaker 1: assault on Israel that for a time threatened the state's
Speaker 1: very existence. Kissinger had not spent much of his time
Speaker 1: working on Mid East related stuff up to this point.
Speaker 1: This was partly because Nixon thought having a Jewish man
Speaker 1: negotiate with Arab countries would be a had idea. UM.
Speaker 1: It was also because Kissinger was kind of buried in
Speaker 1: Vietnam stuff right. But by October of seventy three, negotiations
Speaker 1: with Hannoi had been concluded, US forces had stepped back
Speaker 1: from an active role, and Kissinger had been awarded a
Speaker 1: Nobel Peace Prize with his Vietnamese counterpart Le Ducto. Absolutely now,
Speaker 1: I can't. There's no counter argument. Absolutely no, he he
Speaker 1: nailed it. Um, I mean now, Nobel Peace Prize. It
Speaker 1: really doesn't. I mean, they must hit sometimes. I'm just
Speaker 1: familiar with a lot of the nose, though it seems
Speaker 1: mostly to be misss in my experience. When he got that,
Speaker 1: that's called the no. Yeah. And you know who felt
Speaker 1: that way, Gareth Lee Ducto, who was also awarded the
Speaker 1: Noble Peace Prize with Kissinger. I don't want mine. I
Speaker 1: don't want mine. Yeah. He literally was like, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to take it. The war isn't over yet.
Speaker 1: Like all he's done. All we've done is negotiate the
Speaker 1: US no longer murdering people on the scale they had been,
Speaker 1: and he's in charge of it. Yeah. And its specifically,
Speaker 1: he was angry because right before the armistice was signed,
Speaker 1: in order to like try and force Hannoi to agree
Speaker 1: on some points, Kissing Your orchestrated a massive nighttime bombing
Speaker 1: campaign on Christmas of Hanoi. Um, they didn't bomb on
Speaker 1: Christmas Day, just the day before, in a bunch of
Speaker 1: the days after. But it gets called the Christmas bombing.
Speaker 1: We're worried we'll hit center. Jolly blood on my hands.
Speaker 1: So Lee Docto was like, I don't I'm not going
Speaker 1: to take an award for peace with this guy. Suck him.
Speaker 1: So Kissing Your accepted it alone. Oh my god, he's
Speaker 1: such a cool dude. He's such a cool dude. More
Speaker 1: credit for me. I can't believe I'm the only one
Speaker 1: who go out that this year. I must be really
Speaker 1: good at this stuff. So yeah, he's like the con
Speaker 1: wet Kanye of the Nobel Peace Price. Right right right, Sorry,
Speaker 1: you did great, But Kissinger had the best water of
Speaker 1: all time, of all time. It would have been really
Speaker 1: funny if Henry Kissinger had like shoved Taylor Swift off stage.
Speaker 1: You have the great, great piece, but come on talking
Speaker 1: about the baby. So by October of seventy three, Kissinger
Speaker 1: is free and clear and ready to get it on
Speaker 1: in the Middle East. And this actually went better than
Speaker 1: you might think. Weirdly enough, Henry Kissinger was probably one
Speaker 1: of the fairest negotiators the United States ever sent into
Speaker 1: that conflict. In fact, he was more or less in
Speaker 1: constant tension with Israel because he would do stuff like
Speaker 1: try to halt arms shipments there, like during the Okimpor War.
Speaker 1: Right Israel's on a backfoot, They're in real danger of
Speaker 1: being overrun. They want US weapons and like US arms
Speaker 1: and a bunch more F four Phantom planes, and Nixon
Speaker 1: agrees to give them to him, but Kissinger's like, we're
Speaker 1: not giving them anything until they can arrange for commercial
Speaker 1: flights to ship the weapons to them, because I don't
Speaker 1: want I'm trying to negotiate with UM, with Syria and Egypt,
Speaker 1: and if they see US military aircraft landing in UM
Speaker 1: Jerusalem to give the Israeli's weapons, that's gonna funk up
Speaker 1: my negotiations. So like, he's actually really unpopular with a
Speaker 1: lot of folks in Israel because he does stuff like this.
Speaker 1: UM And in fact, Kissingers and obviously like every US
Speaker 1: negotiator in this conflict, Kissinger is more on israel side
Speaker 1: than anyone, but he's it's probably fair to say he's
Speaker 1: less on Israel side than any other negotiator we ever
Speaker 1: put in there, which is like some weird It sounds
Speaker 1: like he's the most progressive because I mean, like obviously
Speaker 1: we had we could give a funk. You know, he's
Speaker 1: not a Zionist. For one thing. He doesn't have like
Speaker 1: there's not a you know, he's Jewish, but he's not
Speaker 1: really that. Like there there is some amount of, like
Speaker 1: as a Holocaust survivor. He believes strongly that, like you know,
Speaker 1: Israel needs to exist, so he does have that going
Speaker 1: for him. Again. He eventually agrees to ship them weapons
Speaker 1: on US planes after it becomes enough of an issue,
Speaker 1: but he like still moment of principles. The fact that
Speaker 1: there's like any of that at all is weird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean like he probably had like a little Nixon
Speaker 1: on his shoulder, who was like, I know, you're just
Speaker 1: gonna be a jew about them, and he was like, no,
Speaker 1: I will not not devil Nixon. It's weird how plugged
Speaker 1: in you are to how Nixon reacts to everything exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh man, So Kissinger's best relationship in the Middle East
Speaker 1: wound up being with anwar Sadat the president of Egypt.
Speaker 1: The two like we're legitimately good buddies. They would kiss
Speaker 1: each other on the cheek like they liked each other.
Speaker 1: They found the one. Yeah. Meanwhile, Kissinger and Gold of
Speaker 1: My Ear, which was the leader of Israel, had a
Speaker 1: really contentious relationship. Um. At the end of the day,
Speaker 1: Kissinger again would always side with Israel on existential issues,
Speaker 1: but he wound up giving them a lot more ship
Speaker 1: than you might expect. Now. The fact that the US
Speaker 1: eventually sends in arms turns the war around for Israel,
Speaker 1: which allows them their forces to deal decisive blows to
Speaker 1: Egyptian and Syrian militaries. But once Israel was out of
Speaker 1: kind of the period of most risk for them as
Speaker 1: a state, Kissinger starts to push back on them even harder.
Speaker 1: He's particularly enraged at the fact that they kept attacking
Speaker 1: while he was trying to negotiate a ceasefire. Um. And again,
Speaker 1: his main concern here this is not because he just
Speaker 1: wants to stop the blood letting. It's really important to
Speaker 1: him to negotiate a peace and it be seen as
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger brought peace to the Middle East, So he's
Speaker 1: pissed that they're fucking over his negotiations. And he cares
Speaker 1: more about his reputation than he does about Israeli military
Speaker 1: success forgetting about the people of Kissinger. Yes, exactly, the
Speaker 1: real chosen people. So when Israeli forces surround the Egyptian
Speaker 1: Third Army and encircle it, violating a ceasefire, Kissinger is
Speaker 1: livid um and he's particularly angry. We're not getting as
Speaker 1: much into this aspect of his beliefs, but his whole
Speaker 1: thing in this period, the reason he organs like as
Speaker 1: we talked about in our China episode, and this like
Speaker 1: three way to a messy thing that he deals with
Speaker 1: China and the Soviet Union. Um, he wants what's called
Speaker 1: a balance of power. That's his whole thing. He's he
Speaker 1: gets a he's a he's a big cold warrior. Obviously
Speaker 1: he overthrows a lot of communist governments, but he's not
Speaker 1: one of these people who thinks we can eliminate communism. Instead,
Speaker 1: he really wants like this balance of power, and he
Speaker 1: wants a balance of power in the Middle East between
Speaker 1: Israel and her neighbors too. And he's lived about in
Speaker 1: part that they violated the ceasefire. But he's also worried that,
Speaker 1: like well, if the Israelis wipe out the Egyptian third Army,
Speaker 1: that's going to mean Egypt is humiliated. And if they're humiliated,
Speaker 1: Sadat can't actually make peace and there's going to be
Speaker 1: another war. And I want to try and stop the
Speaker 1: next war. Which but he is like broadly on the
Speaker 1: right side of this um. Yeah. Over the course of
Speaker 1: several chaotic days, he makes numerous trips between each of
Speaker 1: the belligerent nations in this war, negotiating with their heads
Speaker 1: of state, and one of his primary tactics is to
Speaker 1: mock whoever he'd just been talking to when he's in
Speaker 1: front of the next person. So like that guy, yeah,
Speaker 1: when he's so when he's dealing with Hafes asad Or
Speaker 1: and Sadat, this means talking shit about the Israelis and
Speaker 1: often Jewish people in general to get on their good side.
Speaker 1: So when Israel violates that ceasefire, he has heard to
Speaker 1: complain at a meeting quote, if it were not for
Speaker 1: the accident of my birth, I would be anti Semitic.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. On another occasion, he says, quote, and
Speaker 1: I need to remind you, this is a Holocaust survivor
Speaker 1: saying this, boy, any people who have been persecuted for
Speaker 1: two thousand years. Must be doing something wrong. Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: he fucking said that. Holy sh it, man, we are
Speaker 1: just we are just such fucking assholes. I'm on fire,
Speaker 1: I'm just now is so good down he kills at
Speaker 1: the clubs in Damascus, And yeah, he is actually like
Speaker 1: really popular with not all because there are other we
Speaker 1: have quotes from other like people who are like particularly
Speaker 1: other Egyptian military leaders under Sadat who are like well,
Speaker 1: Sadat's fallen forward. He's obviously just saying whatever he thinks
Speaker 1: will make us like him like he doesn't. Clearly he
Speaker 1: can't believe this ship. He's just trying to like. There
Speaker 1: are people who see through it, but he he's able
Speaker 1: to trick The folks who matter, which is in this
Speaker 1: case are Sadat and and hafez Um. So all that aside.
Speaker 1: This period is again, broadly speaking, the one where Kissinger
Speaker 1: does the most actual good. But it's worth noting that
Speaker 1: even when he's on the right side of things. I
Speaker 1: think negotiating an end to a war is generally the
Speaker 1: right thing to do when there's a war, um. But
Speaker 1: even when he's on the right side of things, his
Speaker 1: ego plays a massive and often toxic role in how
Speaker 1: everything shakes out. See, well, all this is going on,
Speaker 1: Nixon is barreling towards impeachment, and a big part of
Speaker 1: why he's constantly over there, Like while all of the
Speaker 1: big milestones in the Watergate case hit, Like when when
Speaker 1: Nixon is like ordering the cover up and ship and
Speaker 1: doing the things that will get him impeached, Kissinger is
Speaker 1: always away, Like he's like very studiously as soon as
Speaker 1: the story breaks, like I need to be overseas as
Speaker 1: much as fucking possible. So is it possible. He's competently
Speaker 1: trying to negotiate Middle East piece because he's trying to
Speaker 1: save his own ass and does Yeah, that is literally
Speaker 1: what's going on. Because he's he's not a dumb man.
Speaker 1: He sees that Nixon is fucked, and he doesn't like
Speaker 1: when I can't just be doing nothing. Yeah, and why
Speaker 1: don't I actually try to make this work? I guess
Speaker 1: I'm in another trouble domestically. Yeah, I mean that's it.
Speaker 1: Like he wants to because part of it is he
Speaker 1: doesn't want to be near Nixon because Nixon's toxic, and
Speaker 1: part of it is like, well if if the last
Speaker 1: thing everyone remembers about Henry while Nixon is going down
Speaker 1: is that he ended war in the Middle East. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna keep being Secretary of State. You know. There's a
Speaker 1: friend of mine who had this theory when he was
Speaker 1: like he said, when it might even be a bit
Speaker 1: I don't remember. When he's in like a ride share,
Speaker 1: he won't talk, and then the last two minutes he'll
Speaker 1: just take great interest. So he leaves on a real
Speaker 1: high note. And so it's like he's kind of like
Speaker 1: distant and not really doing much, and then the last
Speaker 1: two minutes and be like, oh that sounds great, well,
Speaker 1: good luck with your family. And then so that's kind
Speaker 1: of like he's just trying to leave, like leave on
Speaker 1: a high note. So the last thing he's going to
Speaker 1: try to do is actually decent after a bunch of bullshit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when I when I enter a party, I set off
Speaker 1: an I e ed at the start of it, so
Speaker 1: everyone's really like shaken up. But then at the end
Speaker 1: I handle it a six pack of beer, and right
Speaker 1: that means everybody is like, you know, that was the
Speaker 1: guy who dropped the idea, Oh, come on, he's the
Speaker 1: six pack guy in my opinion. That's who that guy is.
Speaker 1: That is how Henrica Securr handle everything. So yeah, now again,
Speaker 1: but here here's the thing. The fact that like this
Speaker 1: is all existential for Henry right, ending the war in
Speaker 1: in between Israel and in her neighbors is like he
Speaker 1: knows he has to do this or he's not going
Speaker 1: to keep his gig um. So not only is he
Speaker 1: trying to negotiate peace, but he can't let anyone else
Speaker 1: play a role in bringing peace to the Middle East, right,
Speaker 1: because this is how this is his job interview and
Speaker 1: you know how Henry kissing your treats job. You've seen
Speaker 1: what he'll do for a job interview, right, he won't
Speaker 1: do to get a job. I'd like, I can see
Speaker 1: that list. So this becomes a problem when while this
Speaker 1: is all going on, this Egyptian and Israeli general, you've
Speaker 1: got this massive encircled Egyptian army, the Egyptian general in
Speaker 1: charge of that in the Israeli general like meet each
Speaker 1: other in the field between their armies and like sit
Speaker 1: down and start negotiating a ceasefire and figuring out how
Speaker 1: to pull like they start like talk like people like
Speaker 1: it's one of these weird moments in military history where
Speaker 1: these guys are like, I think we can work something out,
Speaker 1: Like we don't need to be doing this anymore. Shoot
Speaker 1: the bit, kill them quick. So Henry is enraged when
Speaker 1: he hears this happening, and he's still and he starts again.
Speaker 1: All these people who, like in any other situation, neither
Speaker 1: like in Israeli general or in Egyptian general in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, not guys you would expect to be the
Speaker 1: voices of reason, but because his kissingers in the story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he starts maneuvering to make these guys shut the
Speaker 1: funk up. Um. He sends a letter to the Israeli
Speaker 1: ambassador asking what does Yarev? Yarev's the Israeli general selling here,
Speaker 1: tell him to stop. Suppose Yahrev comes out a great
Speaker 1: hero on disengagement, what do you discuss on December eighteenth,
Speaker 1: which is the next round of negotiations. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: such yeah, I mean, it's just what a heinous asshole.
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel like he could still tell the
Speaker 1: credit towards him, but he's like, I love my fingerprint,
Speaker 1: sole I don't want to like get too into like
Speaker 1: what might have happened. Because I'm not an expert on
Speaker 1: either Egyptian or Israeli military history, but you have to
Speaker 1: think maybe it would have and good if like an
Speaker 1: Israeli general and an Egyptian general had like brought peace
Speaker 1: to the conflict, and like maybe that had been part
Speaker 1: of the military legacy in the area. Might have been nice.
Speaker 1: I don't know. We're staring down the battle of a
Speaker 1: tragedy right now not recognized as the one so Kissinger
Speaker 1: A biography continues the story quote at Kissinger's behest, both
Speaker 1: Sadat and my year reigned in their generals at the
Speaker 1: kilometer one on one talks that's like where this army
Speaker 1: is encircled. The Israeli ambassador, although a Kissinger partisan, felt
Speaker 1: that it was largely a matter of ego. Kissinger's view
Speaker 1: was that if any concessions were to be made, they
Speaker 1: should be made by him. Then it's recalled. He was
Speaker 1: very upset when he found out that things were actually
Speaker 1: being settled by the general's at Kilometer one on one.
Speaker 1: We had to make them stop. Ego was a weakness
Speaker 1: of his, but it was also the source of his greatness,
Speaker 1: which I might with the weakness is understating, yes, I'm
Speaker 1: in an air strike. Can we can we kill both generals?
Speaker 1: And if we're going to find no generals, these guys
Speaker 1: are getting a long way too well. And I didn't
Speaker 1: I wasn't there. Listen, Dick, I know the Watergate stuff
Speaker 1: has you, but can we invade both countries? Come? So
Speaker 1: to his sort of credit though, the piece that Henry
Speaker 1: helped negotiate into the Yom Kipper War would prove to
Speaker 1: be durable, and it's set up diplomatic relations between Egypt
Speaker 1: and Israel for the next time. There's this very powerful
Speaker 1: moment when like gold of my Year, because like Sadak
Speaker 1: still can't talk directly to Israel. There's a whole like
Speaker 1: diplomatic thing going on. But he tells Kissinger to tell
Speaker 1: her like I'm taking off my military uniform and I'm
Speaker 1: never going to wear it again, basically like things do.
Speaker 1: Like this is a really like good move in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. Obviously that you could say this also
Speaker 1: like paves the way for nobody ever coming to help
Speaker 1: the Palestinians again, which is worth noting, but it does
Speaker 1: bring it into this series of like constant wars um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, what an amazing risk to take the to
Speaker 1: be like you guys, stop, We'll do my version. We
Speaker 1: gotta do it my way, Yeah, the Franks then of
Speaker 1: Middle East peace negotiations. That is kind of the reputation
Speaker 1: he gets because obviously this plays incredibly well for Americans,
Speaker 1: and so Nick's Kissinger is seen as still this like
Speaker 1: massive hero, even while this is a big part of
Speaker 1: why he's so popular, even as the rest of the
Speaker 1: Edmund goes down in flames. Now, this inaugurates a period
Speaker 1: of what comes to be known as shuttle diplomacy. That's
Speaker 1: a term you'll hear associated with Kissinger all the time,
Speaker 1: and it's him flying all these different countries in the
Speaker 1: Middle East and in Africa, him flying from like capital
Speaker 1: to capital for weeks on end, doing these negotiations where
Speaker 1: he's always the man in the center of things. Um
Speaker 1: Henry actually kind of grew addicted to throwing himself in
Speaker 1: the middle of international crises and flying NonStop between capitals
Speaker 1: to do these negotiations. It was this and the popularity
Speaker 1: he earned from being seen as a peacemaker that arranteed
Speaker 1: him to keep his job in Ford's cabinet. One of
Speaker 1: the few upsides to Kissinger's career prior to the seventies
Speaker 1: is that he hadn't really fucked with Africa to any
Speaker 1: appreciable degree. Now this is not because Henry Kissinger would
Speaker 1: have an issue with fucking with Africa, but it is
Speaker 1: because the US, like, we didn't have a huge footprint
Speaker 1: and the continent until the sixties. You know, that's just
Speaker 1: there's so many to ruin. Yeah, yeah, this is like
Speaker 1: him learning Spanish. He just never found the time. Anyone.
Speaker 1: I'm a little older than I get the times I
Speaker 1: can ruin. So um. Yeah. The the US footprint in
Speaker 1: Africa started up when the c I in like the
Speaker 1: early sixties. I think when the CIA murdered or allowed
Speaker 1: other people to murder. It's a little unclear. Patrice Lamumba,
Speaker 1: the left wing democratically elected leader of the Congo. The
Speaker 1: US backed a right wing general. Well even calling like
Speaker 1: right and left are less useful terms of this, but
Speaker 1: we back a general called Joseph Mubutu, who proceeded to
Speaker 1: spend the next couple decades robbing the country blind. It
Speaker 1: seems like a pattern. Yeah, it happened. It's it's weird
Speaker 1: that it keeps happening all the time. UM. While there
Speaker 1: was other U S factory in Africa throughout the sixties
Speaker 1: and early seventies, it stated a fairly low EBB until
Speaker 1: April of nineteen seventy five, when Saigon fell to North
Speaker 1: Vietnam now known as just Vietnam. Nineteen seventy five was
Speaker 1: known by some in the media as the Year of Intelligence,
Speaker 1: not because any particularly good decisions were being made, but
Speaker 1: because Congress was investigating the presidency over Watergate, and there
Speaker 1: was this big flood of public questions about clandestine foreign
Speaker 1: actions carried out under the ages of Cold War politics.
Speaker 1: A lot of the stuff we were talking about in
Speaker 1: episodes like two, three, and four had started to leak
Speaker 1: by this point, and so people are like, there's this
Speaker 1: big national discussion about like what the what should we
Speaker 1: be doing? All the should we have like a CIA,
Speaker 1: like should we maybe? And there are like the CIA
Speaker 1: gets like the there's a reforming of the CIA that
Speaker 1: occurs in this period. You can, yeah, you a question
Speaker 1: the degree to which it mattered. M Yeah, it may
Speaker 1: have made them less good at doing the bad things
Speaker 1: that they did, um, but not for lack of trying
Speaker 1: hard to imagine it's the reform in the CIA is
Speaker 1: the difference between overthrowing salvador I end and those like
Speaker 1: us guys pissing themselves in Venezuela after getting like arrested
Speaker 1: by fishermen. Um. For Henry Kissinger, though, the Year of
Speaker 1: Intelligence was a year where he spent trying to reorient
Speaker 1: the United States towards a new anti communist conflict. His
Speaker 1: target this time was the nation of Angola. Now, Angola
Speaker 1: is a mid sized African nation located on the southwest
Speaker 1: coast of the continent, directly under the Congo and directly
Speaker 1: above Namibia. It's close enough to South Africa to get
Speaker 1: fucked with, but not so close that they can just
Speaker 1: send troops right over the border. You know, which is
Speaker 1: a better place to be than directly bordering South Africa
Speaker 1: in this period. In nineteen sixty one, the people there
Speaker 1: are decided to have themselves a good old fashioned war
Speaker 1: of independence which lasted thirteen years, killed tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of people, and only ended when a coup overthrew the
Speaker 1: dictator of Portugal. Now this coup was, by the way,
Speaker 1: very weird. Most sources will describe it as a left
Speaker 1: wing coup against the dictator. The reality is a lot
Speaker 1: more muddled. The guy who winds up in charge of
Speaker 1: Portugal on paper is a monocle wearing general um who's
Speaker 1: like him already yeah yeah, and he's not really leftist,
Speaker 1: but the powers behind him are some very left wing
Speaker 1: army officers. They form a new democratic government, which includes
Speaker 1: several elected communist leaders. So Portugal has like elected communist deputies.
Speaker 1: Now Henry Kissinger flips the funk out at this. He
Speaker 1: is certain the country will fall to Soviet influence. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: like this datent he's worked at with the Soviets. A
Speaker 1: big part of it is this idea that like, well,
Speaker 1: the Soviets have their sphere of influence in the East,
Speaker 1: and we have like the West has its sweet sphere
Speaker 1: of influence in Western Europe and the So it's kind
Speaker 1: of hold to that here because they don't get involved
Speaker 1: in Portugal. They don't like try to make push things
Speaker 1: further in their direction. Henry is like convinced they're going
Speaker 1: to and is absolutely wrong because paranoia from Nixon. He
Speaker 1: was like, well, yeah, yeah, um, Portugal eventually elects other people.
Speaker 1: Like again, the government stays fairly left wing by his standards,
Speaker 1: but like it does not as you might notice it
Speaker 1: does not join the Iron curtain, you know, right, It's yeah,
Speaker 1: Kissinger is just like there's we have some quotes from
Speaker 1: He's absolutely certain that like they're about to go full Stalinist,
Speaker 1: because again he's wrong about most things. Actually, he does
Speaker 1: not have a good understanding of like what's going to
Speaker 1: happen anywhere. No, it's just almost at this point he's
Speaker 1: hunt around so long that you're kind of just like,
Speaker 1: I guess he must know. I mean you want to
Speaker 1: know about He's probably like he like he must know something.
Speaker 1: I think it's worth looking at, like what happens, like
Speaker 1: Henry's expectations for what's going to happen in Portugal versus
Speaker 1: what happens, and then think back to Chile where like
Speaker 1: Hendry's like is gonna lead to they're gonna go full
Speaker 1: communeist and it's going to be you know, no, maybe
Speaker 1: if I had stated in power there just wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been a dictator and things would have been fine, and
Speaker 1: they would have had a lot less problems than they
Speaker 1: see how many people die in the communist version, Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably less. The puppets that we put in power are
Speaker 1: not like these amazing like peacekeepers it's just it's just
Speaker 1: like everyone, We're like the Midas of genocides. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So the biggest international result of the coup is that
Speaker 1: the new Portuguese government had no stomach for colonies, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: They negotiate a treaty with the three largest militant groups
Speaker 1: in Angola in seventy five. These were the f n
Speaker 1: l A, the mp l A, and UNITA. Um. The
Speaker 1: non acronym names of all these groups are in French.
Speaker 1: I am I'm not I'm not even gonna try absolute. Um.
Speaker 1: What you need to know is that the mp l
Speaker 1: A were Marxists, right, Um, kind of Marxists. They were
Speaker 1: formed at least the chanization had been formed by members
Speaker 1: of angles intelligencia who were Marxist, and Marxism had like
Speaker 1: a big influence on the m p l A. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: like yeah meanwhile, like kind of so that's one faction.
Speaker 1: The fn l A and UNITA are are generally described
Speaker 1: as being right wing groups. But this is one of
Speaker 1: those things where like grafting Western political terms onto the
Speaker 1: civil war and Angola does not work great. Um. All
Speaker 1: of these groups, even the ostensibly Marxist m p l A,
Speaker 1: are very tribal in origin, and by that I mean
Speaker 1: like they are based on specific tribal grievances and tribal
Speaker 1: like like arguments, right, that are going on in the region.
Speaker 1: Um as opposed to like being clearly like, well we're
Speaker 1: pro communist, we're anti communists, Like that's really less of
Speaker 1: what's going on. Made. Yeah. Um For an example of
Speaker 1: how useless a strict ideological lens is here, UNITA was
Speaker 1: initially very left wing and its messaging attacking the United
Speaker 1: States as quote the notorious agents of imperialism. Unitis fighters
Speaker 1: were literally really trained by North Korean soldiers, but by
Speaker 1: the end of the civil war in Angola, they had
Speaker 1: been receiving arms from the Reagan administration for years, brokered
Speaker 1: via their paid representative, Paul Manifort. So that's the kind
Speaker 1: of war this is where like United starts off being
Speaker 1: like we're gonna end American imperialism, and by the end
Speaker 1: they're like, Paul Manafort, get us weapons. If you're get
Speaker 1: next to this manifest character, it's a good time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just like to show you how weird this is. Technically,
Speaker 1: in the Angolan Civil War, Paul Manafort and North Korea
Speaker 1: are on the same side, I feel like fifty years old. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean and by the end it is fair to
Speaker 1: say that, like by the end of the Civil war,
Speaker 1: United's like leader Jonah Sambi is calling himself an anti communist,
Speaker 1: that's his messaging, but he's less about anti communism. And
Speaker 1: again they're specific local grievances he has with the m
Speaker 1: p l A, and like that's more why they're fighting
Speaker 1: than that he like believes strongly in anti communism. He
Speaker 1: just knows that's how you get weapons. Okay, that's right.
Speaker 1: He speaking the language, right, Yeah, and when North Korea
Speaker 1: is training his guys, he's not into jua, you know,
Speaker 1: He's like he wants to train his guys. Yeah. Right now.
Speaker 1: The fn l A is led by a guy named
Speaker 1: and that's the other usually called a right wing faction,
Speaker 1: is led by a guy named Holden Roberto who used
Speaker 1: to work with Sevimbi before sevenby formed United. I know,
Speaker 1: this is a very complicated conflict. I'm sorry. Um. They're
Speaker 1: generally described as like right wing, and they did receive
Speaker 1: aid from the CIA, so that would like okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely right wing getting aid from the CIA. They also
Speaker 1: got military aid from China. Romania, India, Algeria, ZI Year,
Speaker 1: the A f L C I O, and the Ford
Speaker 1: Foundation or at least aid of some sort. So it
Speaker 1: gets like the sides here are just fucking baffling, Like
Speaker 1: the tender Swindler. There's working every side. Yeah, China, the
Speaker 1: C I A and the A f L C I
Speaker 1: O shaking hands over backing. Yeah, it's like big brother,
Speaker 1: what you guys here too? We Foundation, Wow. The m
Speaker 1: p l A, which these again are the kind of
Speaker 1: Marxist guys and if you're of the three factions, they
Speaker 1: are the ones who most do believe in like a
Speaker 1: political thing that like we would recognize in terms of
Speaker 1: like left right sides. They are partly armed by the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, which should not be surprising, but most of
Speaker 1: their military aid comes from Cuba, and we're not really
Speaker 1: going to get into it, but it's worth noting, like
Speaker 1: how substantial Cuban aid is to the m p l A.
Speaker 1: Cuba starts sending soldiers to Angola in November of seventy five,
Speaker 1: and by they had more than fifty five thousand soldiers
Speaker 1: in the country, and like that's a trick. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you guys know this but Cuba in the
Speaker 1: west coast of Africa not super close. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's a bit of a jaunt, yeah uh. And that's
Speaker 1: also a long involvement. You know, they're in there more
Speaker 1: than a decade um. There's a lot of commitment here,
Speaker 1: so as is generally Cuban. Now, as is generally the case,
Speaker 1: all of the communists were not an agreement about Angola.
Speaker 1: The People's Republic of China did not particularly care about
Speaker 1: like a left wing struggle in Angola. They wanted to
Speaker 1: keep Soviet power at bay on a continent where they
Speaker 1: were starting to do some business themselves. So China and
Speaker 1: the US work together to support the fn l A
Speaker 1: and UNITA. This is exactly the sort of thing Kissinger
Speaker 1: had been going for when he pushed to connect the
Speaker 1: U S diplomatically to China. I want to quote now
Speaker 1: from a write up by Maria Gouda of Wilford Laurier University. Quote.
Speaker 1: This was part of Kissinger's grand strategy of triangular diplomacy.
Speaker 1: Triangular diplomacy was essentially the US exploiting the relationship between
Speaker 1: communist China and the Soviet Union to create a three
Speaker 1: way to taunt between the countries with the US at
Speaker 1: the Helm. Kissinger was not pushing for covert operations through
Speaker 1: the CIA in order to elevate American standing in China,
Speaker 1: because Nixon and Kissinger were orchestrating something larger. This was
Speaker 1: to use China as a counterweight against the Soviets. Kissinger's
Speaker 1: emphasis on triangular diplomacy caused him to view regional conflict
Speaker 1: in terms of involvement on the Chinese and the Soviets,
Speaker 1: not in terms of a local struggle. So he very
Speaker 1: much sees this as a battle ground between different ideologies.
Speaker 1: But anyone who knows anything about the angles of orbit
Speaker 1: knows that, like, no, that's not really what's going on.
Speaker 1: Like everyone is, like everyone is in here, and it
Speaker 1: is certainly not like about what kind of political ship
Speaker 1: individual parties believe. Um, yeah, the side. You can't graph
Speaker 1: these easily under like a Western axis. But as Isaacson writes,
Speaker 1: Angla became quote a vivid example of Kissinger's tendency to
Speaker 1: see complex local struggles in an East West context. In
Speaker 1: all respect to Kissinger, wrote Jonathan Quitney in his study
Speaker 1: of the Angolan War, one really has to question the
Speaker 1: sanity of someone who looks at an ancient tribal dispute
Speaker 1: over control of distant coffee fields and sees it as
Speaker 1: a Soviet threat to the security of the United States.
Speaker 1: I mean, what a guy. Yeah, it's like, I mean
Speaker 1: it's also I mean it's it's so again. I mean,
Speaker 1: the ego on this fucking dude to be able to
Speaker 1: just go into things massive conflicts, have no clue and
Speaker 1: make it that binary and think that he's doing anything.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's just he's just so emboldened. Yeah, he's emboldened.
Speaker 1: He just like he's so arrogant that he's like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't do me a favorite. Could some of you
Speaker 1: wear red shirts and some of you wear blue kind
Speaker 1: of time, let's do shirt skins. Huh. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: need to, like Henry Kissinger, don't need to like understand
Speaker 1: the actual dimensions of why these sides are fighting. I
Speaker 1: can just assume that it graphs onto every other conflict
Speaker 1: I've ever cared about. Knowledge is weakers. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is like, He's not the only American to be arrogant
Speaker 1: in this specific way about a conflict in Africa, but
Speaker 1: the last he's the last one. He would be the
Speaker 1: last thing last since then so c i A. Funding
Speaker 1: for UNITA in the f n l A was initially
Speaker 1: quite low, but Kissinger pushed for an escalation, and soon
Speaker 1: the agency had poured twenty two million dollars in covert
Speaker 1: support for both of these groups. Kissinger felt they were
Speaker 1: thinking small, though. He believed that after suffering a public
Speaker 1: defeat in Vietnam, US foreign policy needed to come back.
Speaker 1: And yeah, baby, yeah, yeah, everybody cares what. Everyone's plugged in.
Speaker 1: You're gonna love my new stuff. The problem with Vietnam
Speaker 1: is that it was too distant from American concerns. And
Speaker 1: that's it. That's the problem now. He yeah, So he
Speaker 1: believes that, like Angola is going to be our fucking
Speaker 1: comeback tour. It's the equivalent of I don't know one
Speaker 1: one of the times Elton John did a did a
Speaker 1: did a farewell tour. I got yeah something something like that.
Speaker 1: He's not his night. Yeah, there's a lot of similarities
Speaker 1: between Henry Kissinger and Elton John's musical Yeah Bumming Jets. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: tiny dancer that song is about is about Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 1: He is a tiny dancwer. Um he's he is. He
Speaker 1: is a little guy. So yeah, Kissinger wants to prove
Speaker 1: that the United States is still a global power, and
Speaker 1: he also wants to prove that Henry Kissinger has like
Speaker 1: is still a Secretary of State with some teeth. You know,
Speaker 1: he's just like seated a bunch to the fucking in
Speaker 1: these negotiations with Vietnam. The big piece of mind to
Speaker 1: Hendry Kissinger, Yeah, he is, like everyone is going to
Speaker 1: see Vietnam as an l for me. So so yeah,
Speaker 1: you could kind of see his attitude in Angola as
Speaker 1: like the powerful sociopath version of buying a sports car
Speaker 1: to impress like twenty year olds, like when you're you know,
Speaker 1: an old man. Yeah right, he's his midlife for a crisis.
Speaker 1: And the people around Kissinger are a lot less bullish
Speaker 1: about escalating involvement in Angola. Uh and in fact this
Speaker 1: includes like the fucking CIA, but they had really big
Speaker 1: shoes to fill, to be Yeah, they're just like, we
Speaker 1: don't want any part of this right now. Wow, you
Speaker 1: guys are really negative, you guys. It's ala. Where is
Speaker 1: the wind? Gotta be a fucking hole in one baby.
Speaker 1: In June of seventy five, Kissinger holds a meeting with
Speaker 1: President Ford, the Defense Secretary the Joint chiefs of Staff
Speaker 1: and the head of the CIA. They discussed the invasion
Speaker 1: of Angola, and while most of that meeting is still classified,
Speaker 1: we know Kissinger urged what he called a diplomatic offensive quote,
Speaker 1: if we appealed to the Soviets to not be active,
Speaker 1: it will be a sign of weakness. He played on
Speaker 1: stereotypes of Africa as mysterious and wild, claiming it is
Speaker 1: an area where no one can be sure of its judgments.
Speaker 1: Next Guda rights quote, revealing his talent for manipulation. Kissinger
Speaker 1: used daunting and dramatic language to illustrate the situation in
Speaker 1: Angola as he saw it, by giving the impression that
Speaker 1: there was no way to tell how the Engolden civil
Speaker 1: war would play out, kissing, You're pushed forward the idea
Speaker 1: that the US had better get involved in Angola through
Speaker 1: tangible or covert means before it was too late. The US,
Speaker 1: through the CIA needed to support the f and l
Speaker 1: A and united to repeat to prevent the dominance of
Speaker 1: the Soviet backed m p l A. This view wholly
Speaker 1: disregards the idea that the Angolan Civil War was indeed
Speaker 1: that a civil war. Kissinger was positioning Angola in a
Speaker 1: wider east first his West context. Oh my kids, you
Speaker 1: got biggie, You've got Tupac. I mean, only the United
Speaker 1: States can want to be and like, only the United
Speaker 1: States can be sold on getting involved in a conflict.
Speaker 1: Or he's like, we have no clue what's going on,
Speaker 1: so we gotta get that. Really throw our dicks in
Speaker 1: this one. Come on, guys, let's get moving. It could
Speaker 1: be crazy. And this is one where like the US
Speaker 1: actually doesn't really want to get involved. Like this, Kissinger
Speaker 1: is the one pulling everyone else in here. He's a
Speaker 1: marketing wizard. Yeah, And and based on his urgings, the
Speaker 1: CIA comes up with a plan called I a feature Um.
Speaker 1: It was a covert par paramilitary operation in which US
Speaker 1: military advisors and special forces would be sent to Angola
Speaker 1: in a manner basically identical to how US involvement in
Speaker 1: Vietnam started. Kissingers literally like, let's do that again, baby,
Speaker 1: Let's see it goes pretty good? Will we do it? This?
Speaker 1: This is how I get to bomb Namibia. That's my
Speaker 1: vision board is dreams of flattening the Congo. I woke up,
Speaker 1: I thought that I had done this. Now despite the
Speaker 1: fact that the CIA did come up with this plan
Speaker 1: at his behest. There's intense resistance within the agency, a
Speaker 1: lot of whom think Kissinger has lost his fucking mind.
Speaker 1: And thus CIA director William Colby joins our pantheon of
Speaker 1: bad guys who seem reasonable because Henry Kissinger is involved.
Speaker 1: So Kobe is like pretty rattled by how Vietnam ended
Speaker 1: um and also by the fact that there's all these
Speaker 1: congressional inquiries into like the c A doing a bunch
Speaker 1: of other terrible ship right there actively being investigated right now.
Speaker 1: So this isn't Koby being a good guy. This is
Speaker 1: Kobe being like, I don't want to drive when I've
Speaker 1: got you know, ship in the car basically right like
Speaker 1: I'm holding right now, you know what. Honestly, any other time,
Speaker 1: I'm just fucking angle a crazy, like I'm just sucking
Speaker 1: going nuts. But it's just not the right time. We
Speaker 1: got it right right now. Yeah, he's the guy who's like,
Speaker 1: he's like kiss it just like on a casino floor
Speaker 1: and he's been cheating, and like the securities gathered and
Speaker 1: they're whispering and pointing at him. He notices, and he's
Speaker 1: still playing. He keeps going. He's gonna let it write
Speaker 1: on black one more time many times hit me. So
Speaker 1: the forty Committee, which again kissing your heads, approves I
Speaker 1: a feature, but William Kolby is like, okay, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to insist we actually go to Congress to have
Speaker 1: the funds appropriated. That's branch those guys, what oh my god.
Speaker 1: Versions So while Kissinger argues for his covert operators, South
Speaker 1: Africa sends troops in to support the fn l A
Speaker 1: and Unita, who it again originally been trained by North Korea.
Speaker 1: So there's fin l A troops who received training from
Speaker 1: both South Africa and North Korea. This is just a
Speaker 1: very weird war. So China has the reaction we're all
Speaker 1: having and it's like, you know what, this is too
Speaker 1: messy for me. I don't even need this right now,
Speaker 1: Like I got other ship going on. And they kind
Speaker 1: of bounced from the situation. Okay. The Soviets and the Cubans, though,
Speaker 1: extend more aid to the m p l A, who
Speaker 1: win the war handily and installed themselves in the capital
Speaker 1: Luwanda by the end of nineteen seventy five. So a
Speaker 1: few weeks after this, the CIA holds an inter Agency
Speaker 1: Working Group meeting with Kissinger to discuss how to ask
Speaker 1: Congress to send in US advisors and like, at this point,
Speaker 1: the war is lost and they're Kissingers like, no, we
Speaker 1: gotta get some guys in there. No one else wants this, right,
Speaker 1: they're all everyone else is like, this seems like way
Speaker 1: more of a hassle. Come on, let's keep going shots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the CIA is already puking from how much they've had
Speaker 1: to drink in Vietnam. Come on, I brought absence. Let's go,
Speaker 1: so Kissinger or so, yeah, they have this meeting, um
Speaker 1: and like, so Kissinger has a meeting with h one
Speaker 1: of the like a guy in this with this a
Speaker 1: bunch of people, and then like they hold a separate
Speaker 1: meeting afterwards with the CIA about what Kissinger had said.
Speaker 1: So like basically Kissinger now yeah. So basically they present
Speaker 1: Kissinger with a report on like what would have to
Speaker 1: be done to send US advisors into Angola, and Kissinger
Speaker 1: reads the report and rather than giving a yes or
Speaker 1: a no, he grunts and walks out of his office.
Speaker 1: So after this, all of these CIA guys have to
Speaker 1: sit down and decide like what does Henrykissinger grunting mean?
Speaker 1: But this guy was really good at deciphering what Henry
Speaker 1: grunts mean. Well, gentlemen, it was a pretty long grunt,
Speaker 1: which is never good. It's a sid grunt, which for
Speaker 1: Henry means he's a little agitated. I'm gonna quote about
Speaker 1: writing about this meeting Kissinger, a biography by Walter Isaacson.
Speaker 1: Everyone found this rather disconcerting, especially since Kissinger was heading
Speaker 1: off for Beijing. Well, someone asked, was it a positive
Speaker 1: grunt or a negative grunt? Moka, He paused, it was
Speaker 1: just a grunt, he explained, like mp, I mean, it
Speaker 1: didn't go up or down. Stockwell, the agent in charge
Speaker 1: marveled as a group of Somber officials supervising the nation's
Speaker 1: only extant war sat around a table trying to decipher
Speaker 1: a Kissinger grunt. Malka. He provided his imitation of the grunt,
Speaker 1: once again emphasizing its flatness. Someone else at the other
Speaker 1: end of the table tried it. There were a few
Speaker 1: experiments contrasting positive grunts with the voice rising than a
Speaker 1: negative one with the voice falling. Different people attempted it. Well,
Speaker 1: asked the CIA officer who was cheering the meeting, do
Speaker 1: we proceed with the advisors Malka. He scowled and puffed
Speaker 1: on his pipe. We better not, he finally said, trying
Speaker 1: to decipher his boss's mind. Because since you're just decided
Speaker 1: not to send Americans into the SIGNI there were a
Speaker 1: lot of nods. The request for advisors was shelved. It
Speaker 1: was an amazing way to run a war, Malka, he
Speaker 1: said years later as he recalled the incident. Oh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by the way, this is they accidentally wrote a home
Speaker 1: improvement script at the end of this This is actually
Speaker 1: where the show came from. Tom and Taylor. It was
Speaker 1: it was like no, no, I was like, okay, I
Speaker 1: like that. That sounds a little more positive. It's just like,
Speaker 1: what a moment for the United States, all these fucking
Speaker 1: spooks with blood on their hands being like, well, it's
Speaker 1: like or like you know, because you do, at least
Speaker 1: at some point in your existence, for the most part,
Speaker 1: you do believe that when someone is saying the Central
Speaker 1: Intelligence Agency that it is really like working on intelligence
Speaker 1: and gather and and is intelligent and is a body
Speaker 1: that is actually you know, processing information that potentially you
Speaker 1: don't have access to, and instead they're just sitting around
Speaker 1: a fucking table going like do the grunt again, Jim, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it real again. It reveals And this is I think
Speaker 1: where a lot of folks on the left kind of
Speaker 1: mix up viewing the CIA is like hyper competent, and
Speaker 1: it's where a lot of people everywhere up viewing Kissinger
Speaker 1: is hyper competent. Like no, they have a lot of
Speaker 1: power and they use it badly. But like at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, Kissinger doesn't have the balls to
Speaker 1: like say yes or no on something, and so he
Speaker 1: grunts and then all of these fucking again bloody handed
Speaker 1: monsters spend an entire meeting like repeating the grunt and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out if it means yes or no.
Speaker 1: And there's no like it's so unchecked. I mean there,
Speaker 1: you there, and it's it's still is that it? But
Speaker 1: it's just there's nobody there to be like, hey, this
Speaker 1: is fucking nuts. Yeah. Instead they're like, do the grunt again,
Speaker 1: try to grown again, yes or nod? Dan have the
Speaker 1: best grunt? Dan, do it again, because I want to
Speaker 1: play it slow for everyone. Bro. It's while I think
Speaker 1: it's Sad's ambivalent. Having known Henry for a little while,
Speaker 1: he's pissed. So the CIA's request for another twenty eight
Speaker 1: million in funding, and the discussion of sending an advisors
Speaker 1: was again leaked to see Moore Hirsh. Congress cut off
Speaker 1: all aid. He obviously he puts out an article about it.
Speaker 1: Congress cuts off aid to Angola. As a result of this,
Speaker 1: Kissinger does not get his way, but the CIA money
Speaker 1: he'd already funneled into United helped the group stay alive.
Speaker 1: The Golden Civil War did not officially end until two
Speaker 1: thousand two. Although again this is one of those things.
Speaker 1: This is a really nasty civil war. It lasts a
Speaker 1: ridiculous amount of time. Kissinger gets a lot of the blame,
Speaker 1: but we should also note that like Paul Manafort is
Speaker 1: much more on this, Like he is the guy maniforts,
Speaker 1: the guy who brings Savimbi to you see and gets
Speaker 1: Reagan to send a funk load of weapons over to
Speaker 1: like really escalate things. Thank god for Reagan. Yeah, thank
Speaker 1: god for Reagan. But it is amazing that this fucking
Speaker 1: goes on into two thousand two. Crazy, Yeah, what a legacy,
Speaker 1: What a legacy. So I have teased y'all that Kissinger
Speaker 1: has a Rhodesia connection. Um, And yet again, the funniest
Speaker 1: thing about this is that it's one of the least
Speaker 1: fucked up things he's ever involved in. But the story
Speaker 1: is kind of funny, so I'm gonna tell it anyway.
Speaker 1: So in Rhodesia, you've got this country, we're about eight
Speaker 1: percent of the population at the height of like white
Speaker 1: population in Rhodesia, about eight percent of them are white,
Speaker 1: but they hold effectively a hundred percent of the political power.
Speaker 1: This obviously is not something a lot of the black
Speaker 1: people living there like sure, for reasons I don't think
Speaker 1: I need to explain. So some of them decide to
Speaker 1: fight back, and there's a number of rebel groups and
Speaker 1: soon in an ugly insurgent war between the Rhodesian government,
Speaker 1: which by the way, is an international pariah right there,
Speaker 1: like atually not supposed to exist basically, um so no
Speaker 1: one can legally sell them arms. So everything has to
Speaker 1: get like smuggled through South Africa, and the soldier of
Speaker 1: Fortune magazine winds up sending a bunch of fighters over
Speaker 1: William F. Buckley Jr. Or William F. Buckley raises money
Speaker 1: for them. YadA YadA, YadA. Very nasty war. We've talked
Speaker 1: about it in other episodes. Yeah, it is it is
Speaker 1: a go fund me war. So by the time Kissinger
Speaker 1: is in office, the white minority government of Rhodesia has
Speaker 1: spent years locked into the losing side of a grinding
Speaker 1: insurgent campaign. The international community widely condemns Rhodesia as an
Speaker 1: apartheid state, and there's a bunch of arms embargoes um.
Speaker 1: And in fact, pretty much everyone hates Rhodesia except for
Speaker 1: South Africa and the US right wing, who see the
Speaker 1: Rhodies as anti communist crusaders. Kissinger was locked into an
Speaker 1: awkward position here. He wanted to negotiate an end to
Speaker 1: the fighting and an end to the white supremacist government
Speaker 1: of Rhodesia, but he also doesn't want to piss off
Speaker 1: his right wing base too much. You know, this is
Speaker 1: like a really messy situation for him. Yeah. So policy
Speaker 1: towards Rhodesia in the Nixon years. Um, there's a plan
Speaker 1: Nixon approved to South Africa in nineteen sixty nine that
Speaker 1: is like US policy in Rhodesia for nearly a decade,
Speaker 1: and it is literally called I am sorry for saying this,
Speaker 1: but Nixon calls US plans like the US stance towards
Speaker 1: Rhodesia quote the tar Baby option on the podcast. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, at least there's no stream of white supremacy
Speaker 1: through American This was the one time it's like I
Speaker 1: can't believe the guy fucking recorded himself for like, this
Speaker 1: is not just recorded himself. This isn't just like Nixon
Speaker 1: saying a slur in a conversation with his buds. This
Speaker 1: is an official US government policy. Yeah, we write this
Speaker 1: out places someone it down. I was like, okay, I'll
Speaker 1: hand it in if you're share Mr President's pretty demand.
Speaker 1: This is this is not just towards Rhodesia. This is
Speaker 1: towards all of like South Africa, to these like white
Speaker 1: minority governments in Africa and the premises that quote, the
Speaker 1: whites are here to stay and the only way that
Speaker 1: constructive change can come is through them. So it's so
Speaker 1: and it really hasn't changed that much. We just have
Speaker 1: fancier titles. Yeah, we're we we don't put the slurs
Speaker 1: right in the title. Yeah, we don't reguard the president
Speaker 1: and we don't put the slurs in the title. So
Speaker 1: the policy is sold to American liberals and moderates by
Speaker 1: basically saying the only way to liberate Black Africans is
Speaker 1: to improve their economic outcomes through trade, and that means
Speaker 1: dealing with the white government's right because yeah, it's really
Speaker 1: really tech. We've just changed it to tech essentially. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we would maintain the document declared public opposition to racial repression,
Speaker 1: but relax political isolation and economic restrictions on the white states.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's fucking crazy, Like, you know, the problem
Speaker 1: here is that people don't like the eight percent white
Speaker 1: people that run the entire fucking place. It's one of
Speaker 1: those we continue, and we'll always have debates over like
Speaker 1: sanctions and like when they're good and bad ideas. But
Speaker 1: the argument here is that, like, we can't sanction South
Speaker 1: Africa and Rhodesia because it will hurt black people. And
Speaker 1: the degree to which that's a lie is that, like, well,
Speaker 1: you're saying, we have to start selling them fucking weapons
Speaker 1: so that they can oppress black people in order to
Speaker 1: improve economic outcomes for black people. And perhaps that's fucking insane. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a little more nuanced than that, by not by
Speaker 1: a lot, not much, not much. To his credit. When
Speaker 1: Nixon is out and Ford is in, Kissinger kills the
Speaker 1: racial slur option, and he authors a new plan, one
Speaker 1: that is a lot better and that is actually focused
Speaker 1: on spirited opposition to white minority rule in Rhodesia. Kissinger
Speaker 1: gives a big speech in Lusaka that immediately enrages the
Speaker 1: right wing of the Republican Party. Basically, he's like, our plan,
Speaker 1: like under Ford, we want to bring an end to
Speaker 1: the government in Rhodesia, like government the right way. It's
Speaker 1: like unbelievable. Yes, Ronald Reagan of the Populist you can't
Speaker 1: disenfranchise seven percent of Rhodesia. Have you seen the color
Speaker 1: of their goddamn skin. That is essentially what Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: says um if he denounces Kissinger's plan is undercutting the
Speaker 1: possibility of a quote, just an orderly settlement, and argues
Speaker 1: that it will provoke a massacre of white people. Boy,
Speaker 1: I mean, you want to have a head popping moment.
Speaker 1: Try to find a good guy in a Reagan Kissinger debate.
Speaker 1: It is. It is an amazing fight. It's just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hate everyone involved in this. We should pay more
Speaker 1: attention to the white people. I think we need to
Speaker 1: be careful. I feel like you're both conning me into something.
Speaker 1: I mean like you guys are a good cop, bad copy,
Speaker 1: and you're working for the same outcome. Look, Henry, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure why I think you're wrong in this, but
Speaker 1: you must be. The other guy's got to be wrong too, though,
Speaker 1: So I don't really know what to do here. Don't
Speaker 1: trust Reagan and hate him, but kissing your you're the
Speaker 1: worst person on the planet. So I call a bit
Speaker 1: of a pickle. Yeah, this is a doozy of an issue.
Speaker 1: I've got to go in the other room and do
Speaker 1: some grunning. Yeah, so he Yeah, what's happening here is
Speaker 1: that Kissinger is trying to wrench US government policy in
Speaker 1: Africa away from supporting explicitly racist regimes in Africa, and
Speaker 1: he's trying to get into a country club or something.
Speaker 1: There's gotta be some angle of I mean, obviously, the
Speaker 1: same reason he does anything right. He wants to be
Speaker 1: seen as being the guy who negotiates right into these
Speaker 1: big issues, and he's trying to I think he recognizes
Speaker 1: by this point that like, well, Republicans aren't going to
Speaker 1: stay in power forever. But I him re Kissinger when
Speaker 1: I have a shot that being in power still, and
Speaker 1: maybe if I if I get rid of this bad
Speaker 1: government Rhodesia. People will be like, enri que, let's give
Speaker 1: him a gig. You know. He accidently stumbles into yes,
Speaker 1: the proper outcome because personally he wants to end it,
Speaker 1: and so he sees the way to end it is
Speaker 1: actually the way that's good. It's not we're lining up
Speaker 1: Henry's personal interests with a prudent solution. And happened that
Speaker 1: at Eclipse is very rare. Yeah, it's he's like a
Speaker 1: guy who like stops a home invader from murdering a family.
Speaker 1: But but but it's later found out that it's because
Speaker 1: he was hitting on a fifteen year old girl, like
Speaker 1: he was trying to flirt with their daughters and stuff like.
Speaker 1: It's like that sort of situation where it's like, well, good,
Speaker 1: I guess like he stops a robbery because he was
Speaker 1: peeping through a window that he felt Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It is hard to find the moral lesson
Speaker 1: to take out of it. Um. So yeah, obviously the
Speaker 1: Reagan right loses their minds over what Kissinger's doing here.
Speaker 1: Pat Buchanan, a former Nixon speech writes in a column quote,
Speaker 1: it is too early to determine if Secretary of State
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger's safari through Black Africa did greater damage to
Speaker 1: US policy interests or to President Ford's hopes in the
Speaker 1: remaining primaries. I mean again, I like it, just it
Speaker 1: needs to stop. Where like this this never ending? What
Speaker 1: does it due to your reelection chances? Ship? And it's
Speaker 1: like that we were so conditioned to that being how
Speaker 1: we operate and do everything, as opposed to actually just
Speaker 1: trying to do the thing that does long term good.
Speaker 1: And what would you do the thing that is long
Speaker 1: term good? Is exactly You're right, You're right. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's true, but it's I don't know, it's just it's
Speaker 1: a foregone conclusion now that everything is viewed through the
Speaker 1: prism of what is it due to the poll numbers?
Speaker 1: Can I just say take off your masks? Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Kissinger did not achieve a tremendous amount in Rhodesia while
Speaker 1: he was Secretary of State. He got ian Ian Smith,
Speaker 1: who's the leader of Rhodesia, to agree to a two
Speaker 1: year turnover from minority rule to an actual democracy. But
Speaker 1: the way he did this was by assuring Smith that
Speaker 1: Black moderates had agreed that during the turnover whites would
Speaker 1: remain in control of the military and police. This was
Speaker 1: a lie. The black people in Rhody, like like the
Speaker 1: black moderates in Rhodesia, had never agreed to this. He's
Speaker 1: just lying the Smith to get him to agree to
Speaker 1: this um and the whole anytime there's like a two
Speaker 1: year deal that you're like, that's just your way of
Speaker 1: like letting it sort of settle so that you can
Speaker 1: pushing you the fun or exactly. Yeah, the story of
Speaker 1: the negotiations is classic Kissinger. He's telling everyone what they
Speaker 1: want to hear and then kind of weaseling his way
Speaker 1: into getting people to sign things that make him look good.
Speaker 1: This right up from The New York Times sums it
Speaker 1: up well. Mr Smith has said he agrees to the
Speaker 1: five point plan he made in public because he had
Speaker 1: received assurances from Mr Kissinger that the black leaders had
Speaker 1: accepted the whole package, including Mr Smith's edition on white
Speaker 1: menace on the white ministers. In his view, either the
Speaker 1: blacks have renegged or Mr Kissinger misled him. The Blacks,
Speaker 1: such as President Julius Neurere of Tanzania, insists that they
Speaker 1: did not give their approval to the details of the
Speaker 1: five point plan only to the general thrust of majority
Speaker 1: rule in two years, leaving it to Britain to work
Speaker 1: out details later with black and white Rhodesians. They say
Speaker 1: they would have rejected the proposal for white ministers. Mr
Speaker 1: Kissinger and his aids have been evasive. On October, Mr
Speaker 1: Kissinger said on television that I think everybody is telling
Speaker 1: the truth. What an incredible guy. Wow, the baddest. That
Speaker 1: is the best bullshit statement ever ending. I believe. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure everyone's lying. It's awesome. I think everyone who
Speaker 1: is the bad guy in Rhodesia nobody ever you need
Speaker 1: a bad guy. In the end, the talks collapsed. The
Speaker 1: war continued on for two more years until the Rhodesian
Speaker 1: Strategic Fuel Reserve was blown up by insurgents and the
Speaker 1: government was forced to the table. Kissinger and his supporters
Speaker 1: would later claim that the eventual piece was negotiated on
Speaker 1: the terms laid out during Kissinger's negotiations. That's kind of questionable.
Speaker 1: It's probably it is fair to say that that by
Speaker 1: coming in very strongly, and he was very unequivocal about
Speaker 1: condemning the government of Rhodesia by doing this as the
Speaker 1: Secretary of State, Kissinger caused a shift that led to
Speaker 1: a significant increase in trust of the US by Black
Speaker 1: African nations. Um, you know, yeah, obviously it's one of
Speaker 1: his better moves from an ethical standpoint, but an ego
Speaker 1: move still, everything is an Obviously, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: sign of how much more fucked up things become that
Speaker 1: doing this broadly good thing causes the beginning of the
Speaker 1: end of his career in politics. Of course, it's like
Speaker 1: I can't help the black people. That's it. You're done. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's it for you, kissing. But to be fair,
Speaker 1: at worked for me. That's why I did it. We know,
Speaker 1: but we know, buddy. But you know what won't fail
Speaker 1: to bring peace to Rhodesia. What's that the sponsors of
Speaker 1: this podcast, who orchestrated the destruction of the Rhodesian Strategic
Speaker 1: Field reserve that that is, we are sponsored entirely bye
Speaker 1: by the Rhodesian rebel forces. Um, here's an ad ah,
Speaker 1: we're back. Good stuff. Yes, so yeah. On the whole,
Speaker 1: Kissinger's last year or so as Secretary of State involved
Speaker 1: his least number of war crimes per month, which point
Speaker 1: to personal growth, but probably points to the fact that
Speaker 1: he and Nixon had just exhausted the US government's ability
Speaker 1: to do shady ship. We needed a breather, right, we
Speaker 1: had to take a breather. It took us a few
Speaker 1: years to get geared up for Reagan. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like he's been go ahead, Dave, We've just kidded
Speaker 1: so many It's like, no, Like why do we dig up?
Speaker 1: We dig them up and kill them again, Like it's
Speaker 1: we're out of ammunition. He's like, he's no longer a
Speaker 1: starting QB's being traded. He's riding the pine. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: got like he got a wrist injury, you know, he's yeah,
Speaker 1: he's on I R for the year. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: last one of his escapades were going to cover them.
Speaker 1: His Kissinger's relationship with the Kurds not yeah, baby christ.
Speaker 1: The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group on Earth
Speaker 1: without a nation of their own. They make up large
Speaker 1: chunks of southern Turkey, southern Iran, Northern Iraq, in northeast Syria. Now,
Speaker 1: if you look at this kind of broad Kurdistan region
Speaker 1: on a map, you'll notice a couple of things. For one,
Speaker 1: it's all landlocked, which means if if you were and
Speaker 1: there was a lot of talk when like colonial powers
Speaker 1: left started to leave the Middle East after World War
Speaker 1: Two that like should and promises were in fact made
Speaker 1: to the Kurds. Um. One of the issues that comes
Speaker 1: up is that it's going to cause like severe economic
Speaker 1: difficulties because they would be landlocked. Um. You'll also note
Speaker 1: that their territories all tend to exist in chunks of
Speaker 1: states that have wound up fighting each other repeatedly over
Speaker 1: the last half century or so, right, Turkey and Syria
Speaker 1: around and exactly, and the Kurds were used on purpose
Speaker 1: by basically everyone as buffer zones and proxy fighters in
Speaker 1: these conflicts. Now, starting in the Niction administration, the Shot
Speaker 1: of Iran had a problem. He was engaged in an
Speaker 1: escalating conflict with a new sexy, young dude on the block,
Speaker 1: Saddam Hussein of a rat. Now, can I just say
Speaker 1: right away, I like both these guys. They seem like
Speaker 1: they're both gonna go good places. So the shot acides
Speaker 1: he wants to arm. He wants the US to arm
Speaker 1: Kurdish fighters in order to give Saddam some trouble in
Speaker 1: ease up pressure. Um, the ostensible leader of the Kurdish
Speaker 1: people struggle in Iraq at this time as a guy
Speaker 1: named Mustapha Barzani. Now, Mustafa had been leading his people
Speaker 1: in battle against the Iraqi state prior to Saddam taking
Speaker 1: power for like a decade at this point, and he
Speaker 1: had repeatedly begged the United States for aid. The US
Speaker 1: traditionally did not like Barzani because he had spent a
Speaker 1: decade exiled in the Soviet Union and had some socialist
Speaker 1: e tendencies. But the Israelis and the Shah had experienced
Speaker 1: great luck in using the Kurds to keep Saddam, who
Speaker 1: taken power pretty recently, off of their back. Kurdish rebels
Speaker 1: tied up eighty percent of the Iraqi military during the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven war against Israel and are probably a
Speaker 1: big part of the reason why Iraq did not join
Speaker 1: in that war. In April of nineteen seventy two, Saddam
Speaker 1: signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. This
Speaker 1: finally tipped things with the friendship is just a great term.
Speaker 1: I mean, it is a nice term. When I was
Speaker 1: seven at a tree, Yeah, can you sign my broke contract?
Speaker 1: It comes with a K forty seven. We are signing
Speaker 1: the BFF treaty. So this finally tips things for the
Speaker 1: NIXT administration, and Kissinger gives the go ahead for CIA
Speaker 1: Director Richard Helms to express American sympathy with the Kurds
Speaker 1: and to clare our quote readiness to consider their requests
Speaker 1: for exist for assistance. Next from a write up in
Speaker 1: Foreign Policy, in early nineteen seventy four, Saddam violated the
Speaker 1: terms of the March Accord and unilaterally imposed a watered
Speaker 1: down version of autonomy for the Kurds. Barzani responded by
Speaker 1: traveling to Iran, where he met with the SHAW and
Speaker 1: the CIA station chief to request US backing for a
Speaker 1: plan to set up an Arab Kurdish government that would
Speaker 1: claim to be the sole legitimate government of Iraq. As
Speaker 1: Kissinger wrote in his nineteen ninety nine memoir Years of Renewal,
Speaker 1: Barzani's request triggered a flood of communications among US officials
Speaker 1: focused on two questions, whether the United States would support
Speaker 1: a unilateral declaration of autonomy and what level of support
Speaker 1: the United States was willing to give the Kurds. The
Speaker 1: c A in particular warned against increasing US assistants, but
Speaker 1: Kissinger was dismissive of CIA director William Colby's caution, writing
Speaker 1: quote Colby's resistance was as unrealistic as Barzani's enthusiasm. Nixon
Speaker 1: ultimately decided to increase to increase US assistants to the Kurds,
Speaker 1: including the provision of nine hundred thousand pounds of Soviet
Speaker 1: made weapons that the CIA had stockpiled and a one
Speaker 1: million dollar lump sum of refugee assistants. In April of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, Kissinger, why why the Soviet weapons? Is
Speaker 1: that confuse things you don't want people see in them?
Speaker 1: With US weapons, that's gonna make it seem like we're
Speaker 1: involved in what an amazing move? I mean, it's dope murder. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in April of nineteen seventy four, kiss Kissinger sent
Speaker 1: Nixon's orders to the US ambassador in Tehran. This cable
Speaker 1: was important because it laid out a succinct proclamation of
Speaker 1: US interests of VISA VI the Kurds. The objectives, he
Speaker 1: wrote were to a give the Kurd's capacity to maintain
Speaker 1: a reasonable base for negotiating recognition of rights by Baghdad government.
Speaker 1: B to keep present Iraqi government tied down, but see
Speaker 1: not to divide Iraq permanently because an independent Kurdish area
Speaker 1: would not be economically viable. And US and Iran have
Speaker 1: no interest in closing the door on good relations with
Speaker 1: Iraq under moderate leadership. But there are are I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not crazy, but there are landlocked countries that stands
Speaker 1: a huge amount of oil. Yeah, it's such a crazy
Speaker 1: thing that they're saying, like, it's just it's fucking insane
Speaker 1: what they are doing. What Kissinger is establishing and writing
Speaker 1: here is US policy towards Kurdish people for more than
Speaker 1: half a century. And the idea comes down to, we
Speaker 1: will provide them with aid and weapons when they fight
Speaker 1: our enemies, but only to such an extent that they
Speaker 1: achieve minor tactical successes, never enough to allow them permanent autonomy,
Speaker 1: because that's going to upset the balance of power. Right,
Speaker 1: This has been ever since. This is what we do
Speaker 1: with the curs right, And Kissinger is the guy who
Speaker 1: lays it out first. Now, Mustapha Barzani made the terrible
Speaker 1: mistake of believing that the US actually supported his people's independence.
Speaker 1: For three years, the Kurds battled Saddam, sustaining thousands of
Speaker 1: casualties but then, in nineteen seventy five, the Shaw and
Speaker 1: Saddam made peace, and the SHAW asked the CIA to
Speaker 1: cut off all aid to the Kurds. As part of
Speaker 1: a deal with Iraq. The weapons Kurdish fighters had relied
Speaker 1: upon suddenly dried up. Barzani's fighters were massacred. Thousands fled
Speaker 1: to Iran, but were turned away by the Shaw. Desperate,
Speaker 1: Mustafa cabled Kissinger, whom he had gratefully sent three rugs
Speaker 1: and a golden pearl necklace's wedding gifts just months earlier,
Speaker 1: Your excellency, the United States has a moral and political
Speaker 1: responsibility to our people. Kissinger never replied. Later that year,
Speaker 1: the House Intelligence Committee asked him to justify this betrayal.
Speaker 1: He responded, covert actions should not be confused with missionary where,
Speaker 1: oh my god, so cool, Like you don't understand that
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm also just doing missionary stuff. Yeah. The key
Speaker 1: is that I don't give a ship as he stands
Speaker 1: naked on his rug with just his pearl necklace song
Speaker 1: speaking of mission narity. So in the nineteen seventy six
Speaker 1: presidential elections, Ronald Reagan attempted to primary Gerald Ford from
Speaker 1: the right. The Reagan campaign targeted Kissinger heavily, not for
Speaker 1: his numerous war crimes, but because of the fact that
Speaker 1: he had made a de taunt with the Soviet Union. Right,
Speaker 1: that's why there because it's amazing to be like, you
Speaker 1: know what, the rights actually got a point. He committed
Speaker 1: war crimes in Vietnam. I mean, you're talking about a
Speaker 1: guy who's killed millions of innocent people. No, that's actually
Speaker 1: not that said. We're at the peace stuff. We're pissing
Speaker 1: there a little angry at some of this peace stuff
Speaker 1: he's been lacking in. They are specifically they're livid that
Speaker 1: like part of the Dean means Kissinger was like, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna funk with Soviet spheres of influence in Eastern Europe,
Speaker 1: and Reagan and his college to like, well, this means
Speaker 1: they're just giving up Eastern Europe to communism. You know
Speaker 1: right Away's communism exactly, it's fascist communists, I mean, and
Speaker 1: Kissinger's political instincts and charm we're sufficient to find off
Speaker 1: an attempt because there's within the Ford administration, there's an
Speaker 1: attempt to get forward to promise to fire him in
Speaker 1: a second term, largely because they think it will help
Speaker 1: him win the primary against Reagan and Nixon beats everyone here.
Speaker 1: He manages to get forward to be like, no, I
Speaker 1: would never fire Henry Kissinger, but this is no, no, no no, not.
Speaker 1: Kissinger succeeds in doing that with four okay, So I thought, like,
Speaker 1: it's like, if you're listening to it at this point,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of mixing in the area. You know,
Speaker 1: you mix it up. He's just at a cupboard in
Speaker 1: the White House. Still, Gerald can't be some Gin also
Speaker 1: keep Hank around. So the fact that Henry wins the
Speaker 1: fight within the Ford administration means that he becomes like
Speaker 1: a major marketing term for the Reagan campaign, right, Like
Speaker 1: they not stop. In fact, they institute a plank in
Speaker 1: the Republican Party that year that's basically the anti Kissinger
Speaker 1: plank that says, like, you will never accept that like
Speaker 1: communist states should exist anywhere. Essentially, that's kind of what
Speaker 1: they do, stabbing him in the heart. Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: It's amazing, um, And it's amazing. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: mark of like how much he fucked things up that
Speaker 1: you can't even feel good about his downfall because he's
Speaker 1: replaced by people who just suck even more. Yes, um, So,
Speaker 1: Ronnie felt the spheres of influence that Kissinger had established
Speaker 1: with the Soviet Union were giving up the Eastern like
Speaker 1: block to communism. He also attacked Kissinger for negotiating with
Speaker 1: Panama's new government because Henry was willing to give the
Speaker 1: Panama Canal back to the Panamanian people, to the Panama
Speaker 1: So and Reagan wrote that thing, but they were so No,
Speaker 1: there's no clay, have no claim to that canal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Reagan said in the speech, we built it, we paid
Speaker 1: for it, and we're going to keep it. Um. Refer
Speaker 1: to our two part on the US and Panama. More
Speaker 1: on that one. So Reagan's primary attempt failed, but by
Speaker 1: struggling against the rising far right, Kissinger had hammered the
Speaker 1: final nail into his political career's coffin. In the Ford
Speaker 1: administration's last days, a dark alliance materialized, and, smelling blood
Speaker 1: in the water, they acted to cut Kissinger off from
Speaker 1: any future career in Republican politics. The three main members
Speaker 1: of this alliance were Paul Wolfowitz from the CIA, Vice
Speaker 1: President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald ru God baby, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like for Kissingers, it's like killing Satan and then
Speaker 1: three winged demons fly out of him. Yeah, it's so funny.
Speaker 1: It is so funny. Um, really funny. Um and in
Speaker 1: fact so uh kissing your Kissinger like Rumsfeld, he sees
Speaker 1: is almost like a protege. Like Hei and Rumsfeld are
Speaker 1: very close, and when Rumsfeld turns against him, Kissinger describes
Speaker 1: him as quote the rottenest person I've known in government,
Speaker 1: which is henry from you, utterly absolutely meaningless from you.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're not allowed. Yeah, it's so funny. It's
Speaker 1: so funny. So it's not funny for all the people
Speaker 1: who are going to die, but it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: funny in like an existential sense, like if you're if
Speaker 1: you're an alien looking at all, this like a TV show,
Speaker 1: it's pretty funny. Yeah, you'd be like why, why don't
Speaker 1: think you're a good guy. You're like, well, it's really
Speaker 1: kind to explained, but they just don't. If you can't
Speaker 1: laugh at all the people dying, Are you an American? Yeah? No,
Speaker 1: the answer was no. By the way, the first time
Speaker 1: that Nixon heard that Kissinger was working with the guy
Speaker 1: named Rumsfeld, he was like, well, I pour him in
Speaker 1: a glass for me gets mice on it. So Rumsfeld
Speaker 1: and Cheney worked within the White House. But I can't
Speaker 1: believe I got to hear their name. I know, I know, baby,
Speaker 1: I know. While wolf A Witz is part of the
Speaker 1: CIA's Team B. Now, Team B is an intelligence review
Speaker 1: board set up by Gerald Ford as a sop to
Speaker 1: the far right the Reagan Conservatives, who he's again trying
Speaker 1: to win over and get behind him so we can
Speaker 1: win election against Carter. The Reagan Conservatives were certain the
Speaker 1: agency had been the CIA, I mean, had been under
Speaker 1: reporting Soviet military power because the Soviet military and like
Speaker 1: the early chunk of the Ford administration is like they're
Speaker 1: actually not doing great, Like they're like, we we really
Speaker 1: don't need to keep buying a shipload of weapons. Like
Speaker 1: they're not. They they're not they don't have the kind
Speaker 1: of military assets that we've been saying for years. Um,
Speaker 1: so we now are getting a shady CIA inside of
Speaker 1: shady c I A. Yes, this is like this it's
Speaker 1: like a Russian nesting doll of the CIA inside the cia'
Speaker 1: I A. So the Reagan Conservatives were certain that the
Speaker 1: CIA had been under reporting Soviet military power, and Team
Speaker 1: B like was basically Ford gave them Team Beast so
Speaker 1: that they could get new appraisals that showed that the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union was actually increasing their military assets. So basically
Speaker 1: what we like what like I mean essentially like what
Speaker 1: would eventually happen with a rack where you're like, look,
Speaker 1: I'm not liking the uh, I'm like the non distilled information,
Speaker 1: give me a bunch of bullshit. That's exactly what's happening.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that's fascinating here is that,
Speaker 1: in essence, this is a return of missile gap logic, right,
Speaker 1: which Kissinger helped get off the ground, but now because
Speaker 1: he supports the state tent policy, and that's like his
Speaker 1: big claim to like fame within you know, his his
Speaker 1: career that he reached the talk with the Soviet Union.
Speaker 1: He's on the opposite side of like a missile gap
Speaker 1: bullshit myth right man, slepards my face. Yeah, I never
Speaker 1: thought it could happen to me. Yeah, And then they
Speaker 1: came for the Kissingers and there was Kissingers. It's the
Speaker 1: same thing as like Dick Cheney speaking out against the
Speaker 1: Trump administration, his daughter gets slandered and stuff, and it's
Speaker 1: what and it's what It's gonna be in twenty years
Speaker 1: when you know Trump is welcomed at the President's funeral
Speaker 1: and we're gone. You know, Trump really wasn't that bad.
Speaker 1: I like the way he said we shouldn't knuke everyone
Speaker 1: on Earth as opposed to the next guy who knuked
Speaker 1: everyone on Earth. Yeah, I mean yeah, Jill Biden handed
Speaker 1: him a piece of peppermint candy. He's not that bad. So,
Speaker 1: former CIA analyst Melvin Goodwin later said of Team b quote,
Speaker 1: they wanted to toughen up the agency's estimates. Cheney wanted
Speaker 1: to drive the CIA so far to the right that
Speaker 1: it would never say no to the generals. How estimates
Speaker 1: and this is the st estimate, like their estimates. Pause
Speaker 1: this and listen to our episodes on the Dulless Brothers.
Speaker 1: And then we wize that, and he's like, I want
Speaker 1: them further right than that. That's not nearly right wing enough.
Speaker 1: That is the craziest fucking thing yet, bug a gang bang,
Speaker 1: being like, I want more orifices, not enough holes here.
Speaker 1: I can't expect my deck and enough stuff. So in
Speaker 1: December of nineteen seventy six, as the Ford administration prepared
Speaker 1: pre prepared to hand over power to Jimmy Carter, the
Speaker 1: CIA finished and released a fifty five page report. Greg
Speaker 1: Grandon describes this as quote the rights answer to the
Speaker 1: Pentagon Papers, a nearly perfect negation of the document Daniel
Speaker 1: Ellsberg had leaked three years earlier. The scholars and policymakers
Speaker 1: who composed the Pentagon Papers represented the kind of men
Speaker 1: Kissinger disdained, experts enthralled to facts. In contrast, the members
Speaker 1: of Team B were admitted idealogues. It's members, as j.
Speaker 1: Peters Scope Scope look notes, saw the Soviet threat not
Speaker 1: as an empirical problem, but as a matter of faith.
Speaker 1: What kind I mean, it just it's a church. It's
Speaker 1: it's a church. It's also what's happening here because this
Speaker 1: they are against Kissinger. But as Grandon notes, they're using
Speaker 1: the kind of logic he right, he's not. He's there
Speaker 1: with him on all of the murder crazy American ship.
Speaker 1: But they're like, he's just not racist. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: basically like, we got to get rid of Kissinger so
Speaker 1: we can worship his tactics properly. That's exactly what's going
Speaker 1: on here and in Kissinger's shadow, Grant Grandon continues, quote
Speaker 1: previewing what would become known as Dick Cheney's one percent doctrine.
Speaker 1: Team BE interpreted threats with the smallest possibility probability of
Speaker 1: occurring as likely to occur. Absence of proof of Russian
Speaker 1: superiority was taken as as proof of superiority. Team be's
Speaker 1: failure to find a Soviet non acoustic anti submarine system
Speaker 1: was evidence that there could well be one, which makes
Speaker 1: sense that of course, I mean it would be U.
Speaker 1: There is no evidence that I have got it, and
Speaker 1: and you know one an Emmy and an Oscar and
Speaker 1: a Grammy, so that that's pretty solid evidence that I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. In December of nineteen seventy seven, The New
Speaker 1: York Times published a front page story on the intelligence
Speaker 1: findings of Team B, which provided legitimacy to the bogus
Speaker 1: and then shared the next decade of defense spending was
Speaker 1: geared towards stopping a rising Soviet Titan that did not exist.
Speaker 1: You know, thanks nailed on that one. Star Wars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Star Wars proceeds directly, yeah yeah, and it proceeds directly
Speaker 1: like Team B is laying the groundwork for Star Wars. Right, So,
Speaker 1: while these tactics ran directly countered a Kissinger's current positions.
Speaker 1: They rested directly on what Grandon calls his philosophy of history.
Speaker 1: Henry had been an advocate on the value of intuition
Speaker 1: and assessing threats and guiding responses history, and Anna hescent
Speaker 1: Khn writes that they used Kissinger's own philosophy to quote
Speaker 1: the little besmirch and tarnish Henry Kissinger had to be
Speaker 1: a tough spot for Kissinger, where he was like, it's
Speaker 1: a shame that I've been vilified, but goddamn do I
Speaker 1: love the way they did it? So everything, we everything.
Speaker 1: That's that's why when people, you know, you look at
Speaker 1: the current situation in in Russia and everyone's like, you
Speaker 1: gotta get rid of him, And I'm always like, just
Speaker 1: but just remember, whenever the US gets what it wants,
Speaker 1: it's always worse. Yeah, every time that it can be worse,
Speaker 1: Like he can be gone. He's a fucking monster, but
Speaker 1: don't be surprised what comes after. It's really fucking bad.
Speaker 1: And the idea of not questioning shit, like we're the
Speaker 1: country who cried war. At some point you have to
Speaker 1: be like, look, sorry, everybody, you're really gonna need to
Speaker 1: step up with a lot of evidence because you you
Speaker 1: constantly just fucking invention. I mean, if you if you
Speaker 1: are forming organizations inside of bullshit, organizations meant to bring
Speaker 1: like that. If there's no submarines, it means there are submarines.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just kind of like and the fact
Speaker 1: that it's still effective, it's constantly effective. It's never it's
Speaker 1: never stopped. This is just a continuation, and it's even
Speaker 1: like this is a domestic version of what we what
Speaker 1: happens everyhere else. We just create more and more worse things. Yeah, internally,
Speaker 1: externally it's what we do. Don't worry, We'll make it worse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that is That is the promise that the United
Speaker 1: States makes itself in the world. Don't worry, don't worry.
Speaker 1: We can funk this up. More lifeguard waits to throw
Speaker 1: on you. Yeah, I mean we fucking created Putin. If
Speaker 1: you go back and look at it, like yeah, and
Speaker 1: all that ship it looks looking at the at the
Speaker 1: bombing of Kevan, going, you know what'll fix this? If
Speaker 1: Bangladesh doesn't get COVID nineteen, which is something is going
Speaker 1: to be like we will at some point solve something.
Speaker 1: Just totally on accident. Like, yeah, so when he left
Speaker 1: office in nineteen seventy seven, Henry Kissinger would never return
Speaker 1: to direct political power. Um, he desperately wants to. He
Speaker 1: really wanted to. Then he has always wanted to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's nice now now I understand two. Yeah, he really
Speaker 1: wanted it to happen, but he never quite made it
Speaker 1: pulled it off. He eventually started a consulting firm, which
Speaker 1: he would rapidly grow into an eight to ten million
Speaker 1: dollar a year business for himself. Um, he makes a
Speaker 1: ton of money doing this. Ship. Of course, he goes
Speaker 1: into consulting like absolutely, consultings job is to get the
Speaker 1: worst advice yea, and to make people feel good, and
Speaker 1: he's great at that now. Walter Isaacson, author of the
Speaker 1: biography Kissinger, claims that Henry was actually much more ethical
Speaker 1: in this period of his life than most former government
Speaker 1: officials who start consulting businesses. Um, he waited an unusually
Speaker 1: long time to start his business. He avoided for years
Speaker 1: directly connecting his clients to people he'd worked with in
Speaker 1: the State Department. It may be accurate that he is
Speaker 1: more ethical in his conduct here than most people. But again,
Speaker 1: that's a low ass bar um. Most of his business,
Speaker 1: the business he does in this period, can be boiled
Speaker 1: down to like, he's helping oil and gas and other
Speaker 1: extractive industries. So he's doing stuff. Yeah yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's just destroying the world. Well yeah, absolutely, he's a
Speaker 1: middleman for the people destroying the world. Let's let's let's
Speaker 1: be clear about you know, he's he's he's making he's
Speaker 1: making connections between people whoever linked. To be fair, he's
Speaker 1: pining to be in charge of it again. He is
Speaker 1: um probably his most morally questionable moment, And like I
Speaker 1: guess a conventional sense is that, uh so, like right
Speaker 1: after the Tenement Square crackdown, he shows up on Peter
Speaker 1: Jennings Show um to argue that, like whatever went on,
Speaker 1: the U S should not impose any economic consequences on China.
Speaker 1: And this is again not due to a principled stand
Speaker 1: against sanctions. It's because Kissinger was working on a massive
Speaker 1: business deal that involved the Chinese government in several large corporations.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing. He's he's working as a journalist
Speaker 1: at that point. He is a regular columnist for The
Speaker 1: l A Times, in the Washington Post and he advocates
Speaker 1: in both magazines not putting any kind of economic like
Speaker 1: like doing any economic harm to China over this, which
Speaker 1: is like ethical issue as a journalist because again he
Speaker 1: does not disclose that he has any of these business relationships,
Speaker 1: and it causes a minor uproar um. It's one of
Speaker 1: those things where it's like, yeah, that's unethical behavior, but
Speaker 1: also in Kissinger terms, like not even on the fucking
Speaker 1: radar right is an abhorrent act. But congratulations on turning
Speaker 1: over Lea Henry. Yeah, yeah, wow, Henry, you've really improved.
Speaker 1: You really are less ship. You waited until after the
Speaker 1: thing to do something bad. So in his post power years,
Speaker 1: he became even more of an international celebrity. He's actually
Speaker 1: surprised when he's when he starts doing this job, he's raking,
Speaker 1: racking up huge amounts of money as like a public speaker,
Speaker 1: and he and his his like accountant expect the value
Speaker 1: of him as a speaking like well, it's obviously it's
Speaker 1: going to decline over a time, hor it just gets bigger.
Speaker 1: He just becomes more and more valuable as a public speaker.
Speaker 1: Now for some insight into his life, uh, in what
Speaker 1: we might call retirement. I found a New York Magazine
Speaker 1: article from two thousand six quote he bonds with Oprah
Speaker 1: Winfrey over their shared love of dogs. She recommended an
Speaker 1: artist to paint a portrait of Kissinger's lab, and with
Speaker 1: Alex Rodriguez over their shared love of the Yankees. He
Speaker 1: and a rod had lunch at the Four Seasons. Last year,
Speaker 1: he and his wife of thirty two years, Nancy McGinnis,
Speaker 1: spent every Christmas with close friends Oscar and Annette de
Speaker 1: la Rena. In The Dominican Republic. Asked about the nature
Speaker 1: of that friendship, given the unlikely connection between a former
Speaker 1: statesman and a fashion mogul, Kissinger says, they are dear
Speaker 1: friends of line. They have no utility. I'm going to
Speaker 1: try to kill them. Yeah, I will kill them in
Speaker 1: some plans to kill them soon. Can we just can
Speaker 1: we finally agree that Oprah Winfrey is a fucking monster? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean right. Oprah buddies with Henry K. Winfrey. Yes,
Speaker 1: I meant to Phil. Yes, your oz like she creates.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to stick everybody dr shit talk, but
Speaker 1: the other ones you got me don't forge Grett, don't
Speaker 1: forget John of God. Yeah, right, under your Sue Harto tattoo,
Speaker 1: Garrett doctor Oz high fiving. Henry Kissinger not to be
Speaker 1: this before he got his show. So I liked him early.
Speaker 1: This was just this was just like aspirational. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know. It's a great pal. So Kissinger became
Speaker 1: a New York socialite and was reputed to enjoy the
Speaker 1: city social scene because quote, Manhattan social life is more
Speaker 1: generous than Washington's political life. Wanted to pick where he
Speaker 1: wants to go out. I mean, he should have to
Speaker 1: get food raised to his sell in a bucket. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing, is that? What the cook was it?
Speaker 1: David Cooke, the one that just died, But it was
Speaker 1: the same thing. Everyone just accepted him in those circles
Speaker 1: and it's like, yeah, he's a fucking And then Charles
Speaker 1: Coke is the one who's like, you know, was like
Speaker 1: on a rehabilitation tour for like six months and you
Speaker 1: and you know, major news outlets are reporting like, look,
Speaker 1: he recognizes they fucked up a lot. It's like he
Speaker 1: feels bad. He feels bad to give a fuck de
Speaker 1: genitalize him. So was regularly and I think probably still
Speaker 1: is regularly seen on the arm of Barbara Walters, who
Speaker 1: calls him a loyal friend. She was hanging out with
Speaker 1: Henry and his wife one night at a dinner party
Speaker 1: when kissing You're endured one of his few public shamings.
Speaker 1: It came courtesy as the real the only real hero
Speaker 1: of these episodes, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who sees
Speaker 1: Kissinger at a restaurant and is fucking in raged and
Speaker 1: screams out, how does it feel to be a war criminal? Henry?
Speaker 1: Peter Jennings baby, And of course Peter Jennings is gone,
Speaker 1: so he died. Yeah, kissing You're probably like invaded his lungs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: should happen every restaurant, every and to all these people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jennings is basically the only person at Kissinger's social level
Speaker 1: who calls him out. And imagine, and I mean he's
Speaker 1: he's a nightly news anchor on a major network. Imagine
Speaker 1: if you had that sort of vitriol pointed at some
Speaker 1: of these people that we have in present day, who
Speaker 1: are again not only allowed to walk around but you're
Speaker 1: still in spheres of power. But but Dick, like we
Speaker 1: were saying about Dick Cheney, Like you know, George w.
Speaker 1: Bush should not he should not be in public. He
Speaker 1: should not be releasing thoughts on Russian invasion. He certainly
Speaker 1: shouldn't be picking. Yeah, he shouldn't be, shouldn't he should fingers? No,
Speaker 1: his daughter should not be on the fucking Today Show,
Speaker 1: like I don't know stronger on. So I want to
Speaker 1: continue the story because I'm not telling with the story
Speaker 1: of Peter Jennings like calling Kissinger out at a restaurant.
Speaker 1: And to finish that tale, I'm gonna quote from the
Speaker 1: New York magazine again. The subject of Kissinger's past sins
Speaker 1: was very much in the air at the time. Judges
Speaker 1: in both France and Spain were seeking Kissinger for questioning.
Speaker 1: Is the long simmering debate over his connection to Chilean
Speaker 1: General Augusto Pinochet's brutal killing of dissidents in the seventies
Speaker 1: returned with a vengeance, not least in Christopher Hitchens right
Speaker 1: ringing indictment the trial of Henry Kissinger. These developments clearly
Speaker 1: rattled Kissinger, who had preemptively written a lengthy article for
Speaker 1: Foreign Affairs decrying the dangerous legal precedent of using universal
Speaker 1: jurisdiction to try state actors for past actions, the same
Speaker 1: precedent under which German courts hoped to try Donald Rumsfeld.
Speaker 1: The question in the question by Peter Jennings, how does
Speaker 1: it feel to be a war criminal? Stunned the dinner guests,
Speaker 1: who included Time Inc. Editor Henry Grunwald, who also died
Speaker 1: last year and Yeah, and former ABC chairman Thomas Murphy.
Speaker 1: Gruenwald told Jennings the comment was unsuitable. Yeah, as unsuitable
Speaker 1: as fucking bombing Cambodia, Like Jesus fucking Christ. This is
Speaker 1: the manners they care about, manners they don't care about
Speaker 1: all the And to to his credit, when like Gruenwald
Speaker 1: is like Peter, that's really unsuitable, Peter's like, I don't
Speaker 1: give a ship. He's a fucking criminal. He doesn't say
Speaker 1: that exactly, Peter, he says the emotional equivalent of that.
Speaker 1: Barbara Walters later said, at the moment, I tried to
Speaker 1: change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment
Speaker 1: talk about reacted very strongly and hurt Kissinger said nothing, man,
Speaker 1: it really is like you know it. You see this
Speaker 1: a lot when like protesters will go into events and
Speaker 1: they will you know, they'll have a message, they'll have signs,
Speaker 1: they'll have something orchestrated set up. And not only will
Speaker 1: the politicis and the people on the politicians days sort
Speaker 1: of be like okay, okay, but the people at the
Speaker 1: event will be the ones who are like, you know,
Speaker 1: like a congressional here, this isn't the time or place,
Speaker 1: This isn't the time. It's like, there's no time or
Speaker 1: fucking place. What what do you fucking expect? That's all
Speaker 1: we have at this point is that's the only thing
Speaker 1: you can really do is try to make them hate
Speaker 1: living in the world they're ruining. It is a fucking
Speaker 1: mark of how fucked up any kind of accountability to
Speaker 1: the political classes in our society that the most consequence
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger ever faces is Peter Jennings yelling at him dinner,
Speaker 1: a man who has been dead for twenty years, fifteen years.
Speaker 1: I mean, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was out to dinner
Speaker 1: and some people yelled at her, I mean you saw
Speaker 1: both sides condemning it. Some fucking dude yell at fucking
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson from people, and there are there are Republicans
Speaker 1: and Democrats who always condemn that sort of stuff. And
Speaker 1: it's not because people believe in public decorum. It's because
Speaker 1: they don't want it to show up on their fucking
Speaker 1: doorsteps right right, because they don't want like that ship
Speaker 1: to come back on them. And I'm sure if someone's
Speaker 1: gonna point out Peter Jennings did something fucked up, he
Speaker 1: must have. He was in media for very eleven. He'd
Speaker 1: oh right, he did nine eleven. That was Peter Jennings.
Speaker 1: He threw those planes right into those towers. I'd forgotten
Speaker 1: about that, um, But at the at fucking least he
Speaker 1: was there and and didn't mince words, just like your
Speaker 1: a war criminal, not like how does it feel to
Speaker 1: be here where American boys are dying? But like no, no,
Speaker 1: you did war crimes, Henry Kissinger, Fuck you. Someone has
Speaker 1: to say it. Um. In his many decades worth of
Speaker 1: declining years, Henley Henry has focused his remaining powers in
Speaker 1: an attempt to secure his legacy. In two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: he opened up his White House archives to a British
Speaker 1: history and named Nil Ferguson, whose book also just titled Kissinger.
Speaker 1: I've cited a few times in these episodes. Ferguson claimed
Speaker 1: his biography would quote provide a warts and all look
Speaker 1: at the man. But quotes he made about the relationship
Speaker 1: with the light of that and this is Ferguson like
Speaker 1: writing about how jazz he is to be hanging out
Speaker 1: with Henry. I'm in Henry Kissinger's swimming pool talking about
Speaker 1: his meetings with mouse dung, thinking I must be dreaming
Speaker 1: ship in that pool. I know, fucking hell nile everyone. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously I have quoted from this biography because of the
Speaker 1: details the information Kissinger provides about his early life, it
Speaker 1: is not without value. It's probably the most detailed look
Speaker 1: at his childhood we have. It also only goes up
Speaker 1: to nineteen, which neatly avoids the most controversial moments of
Speaker 1: Kissinger's life. Right, that's not great the story. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was the end of Henry Kissinger. Blah blah blah. Even
Speaker 1: when journalists and historians that Henry hasn't authorized specifically interview him,
Speaker 1: they are likely to find themselves enraptured or at least
Speaker 1: tripped up by his clever word play. Bob Woodward, who
Speaker 1: first interviewed Kissinger in seventy four, wrote, he wants to
Speaker 1: control not just what he says, but people's perceptions of
Speaker 1: what he says, and it's kind of like one long
Speaker 1: book review where he is arguing with the reviewer of
Speaker 1: his book, or his life, or his policy. Seymour Hirsch
Speaker 1: was more blunt in nineteen eighty three when he wrote
Speaker 1: he lies like most people Breathe now the most comprehensive
Speaker 1: biography of Henry Kissinger and the one if you were looking.
Speaker 1: If you're looking for just a book on Kissinger's influence
Speaker 1: in Like the US and how toxic it was, I
Speaker 1: recommend Kissinger's Shadow by Grandon. If you want an actual
Speaker 1: biography of Kissinger's whole life and time and power, I
Speaker 1: recommend Walter Isaacson's book Kissinger. I actually think Isaacson is
Speaker 1: too fair to Henry Kissinger. But even so, even though
Speaker 1: he clearly like does not wholly condemn the man, I
Speaker 1: find the book utterly damning. Right like the book condemns him,
Speaker 1: even I Isaacson doesn't such a piece of shape. It's
Speaker 1: just impossible if you're accurate, and I think is pretty
Speaker 1: at Yeah. Now, the best thing I can say about
Speaker 1: Isaacson's book Kissinger is that Henry Kissinger himself complained endlessly
Speaker 1: about it. He wind to Isaacson's boss, Henry Grunwald, who
Speaker 1: defended Isaacson and said he felt the book was balanced
Speaker 1: and down the middle. Kissinceer responded, what right does that
Speaker 1: young man have to be balanced and down the middle
Speaker 1: about me? I mean, wow, just it just shows you.
Speaker 1: I mean, like he should never be in the position
Speaker 1: where he should be pointing out that other people are crazy. No, no,
Speaker 1: you don't get to say that, Henry. Yeah. As New
Speaker 1: York Magazine notes, Kissinger denies that exchange ever happened. Um,
Speaker 1: I believe Henry. I mean, the guy does a lie.
Speaker 1: He seems like an honest man. I bet Nixton still
Speaker 1: had him wire tapped. And here here's a quote from
Speaker 1: that article. It's very funny. I've never read the Isaacson book,
Speaker 1: he says, then quickly clarifies. I've read a few parts
Speaker 1: of the isaacs which I didn't like, but I understand
Speaker 1: that there are many parts of the books that are
Speaker 1: very positive. I missed those, he says, with a sly smile.
Speaker 1: That is so, that is so trumpy. I know it
Speaker 1: really is right. I didn't read it. I read parts
Speaker 1: one through. Isaacson says, Kissinger wrote him a series of
Speaker 1: letters contesting numerous passenges. My view, and this is Isaacson,
Speaker 1: My view is that if Kissinger reread his own memoirs,
Speaker 1: who would be outraged that they did not treat him
Speaker 1: favorably enough? Kissinger, who wrote this? You did? That's sort
Speaker 1: of a bit I gotta get me. Kissinger claims to
Speaker 1: be unconcerned about his place in history. I cannot defect
Speaker 1: my legacy, he says. And what does he think his
Speaker 1: legacy is? I have no view, he says. I can't
Speaker 1: control it by what I say. I tell him I
Speaker 1: don't believe him. You're not in your eighties yet, he replies. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot has been made about Kissinger's purported role in
Speaker 1: like the invasion of Iraq. He did it apparently like
Speaker 1: urge Bush and Cheney to go through with it. I
Speaker 1: think crediting him with specifically with having an impact on
Speaker 1: that is not realistic because this is Bush and Cheney.
Speaker 1: By the time they talked to Kissinger about this, they
Speaker 1: had made up their you know, it's probably didn't push
Speaker 1: them into invading Iraq. It's like similar when like the
Speaker 1: Queens of the Stone Age have Dave Groll on drums. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: He's a player for sure, but he's not writing all
Speaker 1: the songs. I mean, Josh, he's got. Kissinger is definitely
Speaker 1: the Dave Groll of the Bush administration. Um. And I
Speaker 1: think that rather than like actually being a meaningful role
Speaker 1: in arranging consent for the invasion of Iraq, I think
Speaker 1: Kissinger was doing here what he always did. He was
Speaker 1: sucking up to powerful people to tell them by telling
Speaker 1: them what they wanted to hear. And the best example
Speaker 1: of this comes from two thousand eight, when during a
Speaker 1: presidential debate, both John McCain and Barack Obama cited Kissinger
Speaker 1: as supporting their positions towards Iran. Both men held opposite
Speaker 1: views of what the U. S Should do in regards
Speaker 1: to that country. So, Mike, like you might expect, like,
Speaker 1: and I don't think either of them is lying. I
Speaker 1: think they're both because I think Kissinger just would be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course that's the right call. Absolutely. Look, look what
Speaker 1: the start date to be, just so I can put
Speaker 1: it in my good call. Guys, we should invade them
Speaker 1: and leave them alone. Yeah. So um yeah. As a
Speaker 1: young law student at Yale, Hillary Clinton had taken part
Speaker 1: an outrage protests against Kissinger's bombing of Cambodia as Secretary
Speaker 1: of State. She praised the astute observations he shared with her,
Speaker 1: and wrote in a review of one of his books,
Speaker 1: Kissinger is a friend. And again the astute observations are
Speaker 1: Kissinger saying whatever she wanted to do was the right
Speaker 1: thing to do, right, Like, that's that's what That's why
Speaker 1: these people like like him and think he's astute. He's not.
Speaker 1: I think he does today get kind of like looked
Speaker 1: at his this secret power pulling the strings. I think
Speaker 1: instead he's just like the ultimate kiss ass. He's just like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're in power. Nout. Yeah, whatever you want to do
Speaker 1: is the is the good thing to do? Absolutely right?
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah. I would tell people like if you're
Speaker 1: if you're young and you don't understand what it means
Speaker 1: to see Hiller Clinton standing there with with Kissinger. It's
Speaker 1: no different than in in ten years, if all a
Speaker 1: sudden your Democrat candidate standings to Cheney, You're like, what
Speaker 1: the fun is going on? And I guarantee you that
Speaker 1: lost her. A bunch of people didn't vote for because
Speaker 1: they saw her standing. Yeah, I guarantee guarantee h and um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think though when you're trying to talk about like
Speaker 1: his actual influence and like the fucked up things that
Speaker 1: have been happening in the last couple of decades. It's
Speaker 1: less than whatever advice he was giving politician Airby, And
Speaker 1: it's more in the way he shaped the way the
Speaker 1: US government functions in terms of foreign policy. He centralized
Speaker 1: power and set the precedent of allowing the executive branch
Speaker 1: to execute military actions without consent of anyone outside the
Speaker 1: White House. And obviously there were like things that were
Speaker 1: done to restrict the power of the executive branch from
Speaker 1: doing that, but then those things were all undone after
Speaker 1: the like right like if this, if this kind of
Speaker 1: tuggle war thing. Um. But Kissinger, even though he did
Speaker 1: not set obviously the policy after nine eleven that that
Speaker 1: expanded the executive government's ability to to do military ship abroad,
Speaker 1: he did set the present of like how you would
Speaker 1: actually centralize power in that way within the executive and
Speaker 1: he made up he set a lot of ideological and
Speaker 1: philosophical trends that are still shaping the way the US
Speaker 1: government functions in regards to foreign policy today. And if
Speaker 1: you're looking for perhaps the most direct and succinct explanation
Speaker 1: for how Kissinger influenced the world of modern American politics,
Speaker 1: you can find it in this quote he himself wrote
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty three. There are two kinds of realists,
Speaker 1: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The
Speaker 1: West requires nothing so much as men able to create
Speaker 1: their own reality. Wow. Wow, wow to not to not
Speaker 1: be able to define realists and you're two to definite
Speaker 1: tear two tier definition of realism is absolutely deliverable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for neither of your definitions of realists to involve people
Speaker 1: who care about material reality. Yeah, what did you say
Speaker 1: in the first one? I was like, Oh, the second
Speaker 1: one is gonna be realists. It's like no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: No other one is realists. No. So that's Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 1: It's it's so unbelievable. And to what you like, you know,
Speaker 1: he really he his legacy, like you're sort of saying,
Speaker 1: is not just directly connected to the things he's connected
Speaker 1: to because there was no um prosecution for what Nixon did,
Speaker 1: and there's no prosecution for Reagan did, and there's no
Speaker 1: prosecution because we never prosecute and we never actually hold
Speaker 1: any of these people accountable. You know, you do see
Speaker 1: the seeds of that flourish now like you can invade.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're at the point where most people don't
Speaker 1: even know we've invaded countries we've invaded, Like at least
Speaker 1: with Vietnam, people had access to seeing it and being
Speaker 1: disgusted by it. And then under Bush it was like, well,
Speaker 1: we're not going to show the coffins returning, And you said,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not just Republicans. You see it under
Speaker 1: democratic presidents to it just as kind of more egregious
Speaker 1: at times under Republican presidents. But you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: every president gets more powerful, does more, and it does
Speaker 1: kind of boil down to they're going to be evil.
Speaker 1: Journalists and media need to recognize what they're fucking jobs are.
Speaker 1: If you're in some of these jobs, like it's it
Speaker 1: should not be a popularity contest for access only there
Speaker 1: should be you should be beholden to doing good and
Speaker 1: and making these people held accountable. Because it's so relevant
Speaker 1: in what you're talking about with Kissinger that they just
Speaker 1: let the access to him because he became a popular figure,
Speaker 1: completely blind i'd them as to what was actually going on. Well,
Speaker 1: it's actually worse than not punishing them. Remember when when
Speaker 1: Obama was elected, everyone was like, these guys have to
Speaker 1: be tried for war crimes, and he said, we got
Speaker 1: to move on. And you know that we're talking about
Speaker 1: torture in war crimes and everything else. But it went,
Speaker 1: it went further than that, because they gave Bush like
Speaker 1: the Medal of Freedom. I mean, there's a picture of
Speaker 1: fucking Biden hanging on his chest. And they also they
Speaker 1: also honored this guy named Henry Kissinger did honored him.
Speaker 1: So it's beyond not doing anything. Well, it's not even
Speaker 1: just it's not even just him. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: it's systemic. It's just and you know what if you
Speaker 1: are if you are one of these, if you are
Speaker 1: a fucking anchor at CNN, like if you're Jim Acosta,
Speaker 1: think of how fucking popular you would be if you
Speaker 1: did just start using your access to just be like
Speaker 1: Peter Jennings likes here, we are craving this fucking figure.
Speaker 1: But they would be immediately fired. I mean but they
Speaker 1: would be, but you would also, I mean, having even
Speaker 1: a moment of that would carry your career. Like if
Speaker 1: we had that Peter Jennings ship now, it would go
Speaker 1: so viral and people would talk about that person endlessly.
Speaker 1: That I mean, it's like, it's like when you know
Speaker 1: when billionaires started competing over being philanthropists. You know you
Speaker 1: at some point you're so far in the other direction
Speaker 1: that you're not that far off from just doing the
Speaker 1: thing that is you're supposed to do is going to
Speaker 1: be such a radical move. It's this, it's very frustrating.
Speaker 1: Like right now you have all of these big media
Speaker 1: figures like moving their shows to Ukraine to be able
Speaker 1: to film shelling in the distance, and obviously to be
Speaker 1: a journalist in combat up close, covering war crimes up
Speaker 1: close requires a lot of physical courage. Those like Sky
Speaker 1: News reporters who got fucking shot and Ship the Daily
Speaker 1: Beast reporters got shot that but like being like Lester Holt,
Speaker 1: like having your show filmed with like shelling in the distance.
Speaker 1: They have massive security teams, they have massive resources invested
Speaker 1: in making sure they are in as little danger as
Speaker 1: they can possibly be, and more than anything, they are
Speaker 1: out there and doing it for the fucking cloud. Because
Speaker 1: that that is easy to like feels like I'm brave.
Speaker 1: What's actually brave is Peter Jennings yelling at Henry Kissinger
Speaker 1: at a fucking dinner party full of powerful people and
Speaker 1: making sure that for just a second he has a
Speaker 1: moment of accountability. And if one of them was willing
Speaker 1: to do fucking that to any of these goals, I
Speaker 1: would have a lot more respect than I would have
Speaker 1: them filming Shelling and Key from a mile and a
Speaker 1: half away. Yeah. Look, there there was Wolf Blitzer who
Speaker 1: during the First Gulf War put on a helmet and
Speaker 1: was in Saudi Arabia where st those were flying, and
Speaker 1: it's saying how danger he was. At the same time
Speaker 1: there were journalists, American journalists in the fucking bag that
Speaker 1: hotel being being shot at and rocketed by American troops,
Speaker 1: and those guys didn't work anymore. And will Blitzer got
Speaker 1: his own TV show on seeing it. Or Brian Williams
Speaker 1: when he talked to when he was like the way
Speaker 1: that he embellished his his story about like getting off
Speaker 1: of a helicopter and taking RPG fire. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I don't know, we could use another Jennings
Speaker 1: or two at least in this regard. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's hard because it's like, what would you, I mean,
Speaker 1: what would like you're like, we want like we want
Speaker 1: a politician for the people, and it's like I like
Speaker 1: that's like that's what you wish for, but you like
Speaker 1: the step first is to just have these people vilified
Speaker 1: for the things they should be vilified for. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: would be nice if there was a journalist. That's the
Speaker 1: end of the state. Well, honestly, like this was, I
Speaker 1: mean just fucking incredible and just such a ridiculous stick.
Speaker 1: He's a pretty bad one, right, I don't think I
Speaker 1: don't think he is. He I know that there was
Speaker 1: talk of like into the countries, of like trying him
Speaker 1: outside of you know, not having him there. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: can he travel anywhere he wants or is he he
Speaker 1: restricted he can't I'm not aware of. I mean there
Speaker 1: may be. Like he also now like he's become like
Speaker 1: this watery figure. So he's kind of like the T
Speaker 1: one thousand where if you just get close to him,
Speaker 1: he turns into silver goo and just can go through
Speaker 1: a drain or something. You can't put a handcuff around
Speaker 1: a pile of watery goo. I mean, he's he's a
Speaker 1: big part. Like he he argues vociferously for why like
Speaker 1: Rumpsfeld shouldn't be able to be charged, and I think
Speaker 1: Germany it is. And he's doing it like selfishly. He
Speaker 1: would put his and Jerry danger right like I'm giving
Speaker 1: it enough loyalty to Rummy, who he probably hates at
Speaker 1: this point. Although I don't know that Kissinger can take
Speaker 1: things personally actually, so maybe, like I don't know, he's
Speaker 1: almost he's like the Bill Walsh coaching Tree of War Criminals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know what that means. Well, Bill Walsh like
Speaker 1: coach the forty Niners and invented the West Coast offense
Speaker 1: and you just see the ripple effect through the NFL
Speaker 1: for generations and decades changed football. It just changed everything.
Speaker 1: And it's like that's what he did. He just was
Speaker 1: the guy who was like, you know, I came up
Speaker 1: with a new offense, and it's like everyone's just reading
Speaker 1: off of that playbook and tweaking it. Yeah. That guy
Speaker 1: you said robber football is when uh okay the title
Speaker 1: of this episode like that guy, Garrett said of the football,
Speaker 1: but the politics. I liked the two yeahs that preceded
Speaker 1: your I don't know who that guy? Yeah, hey, who
Speaker 1: is that? Yeah? It's like it's like in basketball when
Speaker 1: Phil Jackson made the offense triangle diplomacy, it's like the
Speaker 1: triangle thing. Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah, alright, alright, ale an
Speaker 1: offense is the opposite of defense, right, what everyone said,
Speaker 1: That's what everyone said. In my opinion, it definitely is.
Speaker 1: You know, the team with the most points wins, well,
Speaker 1: for sure that's going to be critical. Yeah. Absolutely. And
Speaker 1: you know when the overtime gets the first down, that's
Speaker 1: really that's that's causing finishing. You've nailed it already. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: three pointer a touchdown for Robert. Let's go Globetrotters. Well, honestly,
Speaker 1: thank you for allowing us to enter your dojo and
Speaker 1: mess around for a little while. I don't know if
Speaker 1: thank you was the right thank you. I thank you
Speaker 1: for listening to me read one thousand words about Hinry Kissing,
Speaker 1: because we talked about it and I was like, I
Speaker 1: can't do it because it's not one episode. It's so
Speaker 1: any episode. Yeah, this is like the minimum I think
Speaker 1: you can responsibly cover Henry Kissinger. Like we could have
Speaker 1: done another couple episodes. Hey, let's do it it, Garett, Yes,
Speaker 1: let's just rip a couple. Yeah, we'll get a couple
Speaker 1: of photos of him hanging out with Jill st John
Speaker 1: joke about his hog. Yeah, let's take it on the road.
Speaker 1: We can get another forty minutes of content out of that. Honestly,
Speaker 1: we could just keep redoing parts of this on the
Speaker 1: road for a year and a half. The Doll Up
Speaker 1: and Behind the Bastards present three guys going through shots
Speaker 1: of Henry Kissinger at fancy parties and talking about the
Speaker 1: shape of his dick under his pants. Honestly, honestly, should work.
Speaker 1: Looks like he was having a chubb day to day.
Speaker 1: What do you think, Dave all nuts on the table.
Speaker 1: That the only one I'm focused on. Look at those
Speaker 1: tennis shorts. This is how we make our millions. Well, genuinely,
Speaker 1: thank you. I am generally super scared having having watched
Speaker 1: how Colin Powell was treated. Yes, when he died, people
Speaker 1: are going to react to death. Yeah, you're gonna watch
Speaker 1: liberals be like he was fucking awesome and you're just
Speaker 1: like everything about him was bad. Yeah, yeah, w it'll
Speaker 1: be fun. Any plug doubles at the end here, sure? Yeah? Listen. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, we've got the Kissinger. We should do
Speaker 1: Kissinger live, and we should use the kiss font and
Speaker 1: we should also wear like the kiss makeup and we
Speaker 1: should just do kissing. Um yeah we uh. We will
Speaker 1: be in Australia and America. Best country on Earth will
Speaker 1: be in Australia in the middle of April to May.
Speaker 1: You can go to Dollar podcast dot com for all
Speaker 1: that information. Were all over the place and then I
Speaker 1: am doing stand up in Australia and I'll so over
Speaker 1: the summer. So you can go to Gareth Reynolds dot
Speaker 1: com for all that information, and you can follow us
Speaker 1: on social media's with our I'm at Reynolds Gareth, Dave's
Speaker 1: at Dave Underscore Anthony on Instagram, I'm at Reynolds Gareth
Speaker 1: on Twitter, Dave's at Dave Anthony on Twitter, and um
Speaker 1: whoo who all right, thank you for having us again, motherfucker. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone go pray for Henry Kissinger's painful tomise. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: have Let's all hope that Tim tim Allen takes him
Speaker 1: out somehow. He smuggled he smuggles coke into a party
Speaker 1: Kissinger's at and it just blows out the old man's
Speaker 1: art or he just starts doing war improvement with kissing
Speaker 1: James's character. Yeah, Kissinger would be the you know, the
Speaker 1: the owl. He's the owl, right right, right right? No,
Speaker 1: you got a bomb Cambodiat Tim all right, and there's
Speaker 1: a good that's the note thing. Hi, everybody, Robert Evans
Speaker 1: here and my novel After the Revolution is available for
Speaker 1: pre order now from a k press dot org. Now,
Speaker 1: if you go to a k press dot org, you
Speaker 1: can find After the Revolution. Just google a k press
Speaker 1: dot org After the Revolution you'll find a list of
Speaker 1: participating indie bookstores selling my book. And if you pre
Speaker 1: order now from either these independent bookstores or from a
Speaker 1: K Press, you'll get a custom signed copy of the book,
Speaker 1: which I think is pretty cool. You can also preorder
Speaker 1: it in physical or in kindle a form from Amazon
Speaker 1: or pretty much wherever books are sold. So please google
Speaker 1: a k press after the Revolution um or find an
Speaker 1: indie bookstore in your area and pre order it. You'll
Speaker 1: get assigned a copy and you'll make me very happy.