Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Robert Evans here and my novel After the
Speaker 1: Revolution is available for pre order now from a k
Speaker 1: press dot org. Now, if you go to a k
Speaker 1: press dot org you can find After the Revolution. Just
Speaker 1: google a k press dot org After the Revolution you'll
Speaker 1: find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my book.
Speaker 1: And if you pre order now from either these independent
Speaker 1: bookstores or from a k Press, you'll get a custom
Speaker 1: signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: You can also pre order it in physical or in
Speaker 1: kindle a form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books
Speaker 1: are sold. So please google a k press after the
Speaker 1: Revolution um or find an indie bookstore in your area
Speaker 1: and pre order it. You'll get assigned a copy and
Speaker 1: you'll make me very happy. Ah, I don't how how
Speaker 1: do I, Sophie? How do I introduce Part three of
Speaker 1: the Kissinger series? You just did it. Gareth and David
Speaker 1: are right here, they're waiting for something good, and I
Speaker 1: just I'm just I'm fucking up, Sophie. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you you accidentally introduced the podcast which is behind
Speaker 1: the basket, behind the dollops, dollop the bastard up the
Speaker 1: bastards hybrid podcast, and like all hybrids, it is incapable
Speaker 1: of procreating, but better at getting up steep mountain passes.
Speaker 1: It's getting a little goat. Now we can multiply by
Speaker 1: cell division, but not through sexual Yeah. Yeah we've tried. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have, we have. We're in that processed. So since
Speaker 1: we last recorded a podcast, war has broken out and
Speaker 1: I was just thinking, mister in Europe, God three days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but we like ended it and then it was like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, it's happening, and now it feels like it's
Speaker 1: been two months since. Then had a brief conversation what
Speaker 1: do you think is going to happen? And then immediately
Speaker 1: checked our phones to be like, oh, okay, so they're
Speaker 1: showing all over the plate. Oh so y'all, are are
Speaker 1: we ready to learn about Henry Kissinger and a little
Speaker 1: country you might have heard of called Cambodia and also
Speaker 1: a separate country you might have called Lao, and also Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Still so that energy, let's go, let's do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on February fourteen, Valentine's Day, nineteen sixty five, President
Speaker 1: Lyndon B. Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder. This was a
Speaker 1: long term campaign of aerial bombing against North Vietnam. It's
Speaker 1: primary aims were to help them arout with the South
Speaker 1: Vietnamese and the Psigon government, to persuade North Vietnam to
Speaker 1: stop supporting the Vietcong, and to destroy the North Vietnamese
Speaker 1: transportation infrastructure and industrial base so as to stop them
Speaker 1: from sending men and equipment south. It did not succeed
Speaker 1: as a spoiler. None of this, None of this works.
Speaker 1: Like it's just amazing that, like you have all this firepower,
Speaker 1: you have all these planes, and really you're talking about
Speaker 1: destroying like railroads and shipping and like underground tunnels too.
Speaker 1: This is the hoche Man trail, you know. I mean
Speaker 1: it's not what we're talking about, the Hotimon trail, and
Speaker 1: they we're never going to do that. No, this is
Speaker 1: like a lesson that no one ever learns in warfare.
Speaker 1: Because you can also point to like the saturation bombing
Speaker 1: of Germany, which had a minimal effect on German industrial production.
Speaker 1: You can talk about like what's happening right now in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: which is not succeeded in its strategic games. You could
Speaker 1: talk about a number of wars the US has been involved,
Speaker 1: and you can talk about like World War One where
Speaker 1: the British would drop a million shells in a couple
Speaker 1: of hours on a chunk of trench line and then
Speaker 1: I'll get killed by machine gun fire because the shells
Speaker 1: didn't do enough. Like military leaders always have this idea
Speaker 1: that we can just bomb our problems away and it
Speaker 1: just never really works. Yeah, no, it doesn't. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what it does. It It terrifies the civilian population.
Speaker 1: It sure does, yes, um, And it helps the Pentagon
Speaker 1: a lot. I think it does help the Pentagon. It
Speaker 1: makes money for people, so I guess to that extent
Speaker 1: it succeeds in its goal. And Operation Thunder did make
Speaker 1: some people a lot of money. Um. It continued for
Speaker 1: three straight years until November of nineteen sixty eight. During
Speaker 1: this period, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps planes through
Speaker 1: more than three hundred thousand attack sorties, which dropped more
Speaker 1: than eight hundred and sixty four thousand tons of bombs.
Speaker 1: For reference, the United States dropped half a million tons
Speaker 1: of bombs in the Pacific theater during all of World
Speaker 1: War Two. Um. Yeah, it is hard to exaggerate the
Speaker 1: extent to which we bombed the ship out of North
Speaker 1: Vietnam to no notable effect. According to our trustworthy friends
Speaker 1: at the CIA, the raids did five hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: in damage, killed twenty one people, and injured more than
Speaker 1: thirty thousand more. The CIA says that sevent of all
Speaker 1: casualties were people involved in military operations. US government estimates,
Speaker 1: not by the CIA, however, estimate at least thirty thousand
Speaker 1: civilian fatalities. Other estimates placed the civilian death toll much higher,
Speaker 1: at close to two hundred thousand civilians um. Probably fair
Speaker 1: to say north of a hundred thousand, you know, um
Speaker 1: a lot, a lot of folks. Um. By the time
Speaker 1: Kissing Your and Nixon took office, it was clear that
Speaker 1: Rolling Thunder had failed miserably. This was due in part
Speaker 1: to the existence of the Ho Chiman Trail in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine. This is before US soldiers had officially entered
Speaker 1: the country. The trail had been created under order by
Speaker 1: the Laodong, which is the Communist Party of Vietnam, to
Speaker 1: aid them in what was at that point a building
Speaker 1: conflict with South Vietnam. At the start, it led across
Speaker 1: just the demilitarized zone into Cassan and South Vietnam. Porters
Speaker 1: would carry boxes of ammunition and rifles on their body,
Speaker 1: which they would then hand to insurgents in the south.
Speaker 1: Over time, the trail was expanded to a vast underground
Speaker 1: transit network, more than twelve thousand miles in size, capable
Speaker 1: of moving more than ten thousand troops and thousands of
Speaker 1: trucks per year. As the fighting escalated, the trail veered
Speaker 1: into Lao, where the government was engaged fighting its own
Speaker 1: insurgency and unable to stop the transit of weapons. The
Speaker 1: Ho Chiman Trail allowed North Vietnam to smuggle equipment south
Speaker 1: and to evade the U. S. Naval blockade that sought
Speaker 1: to choke it out. Today, even Defense Department sources recognized
Speaker 1: it as one of the greatest logistical successes of twentieth
Speaker 1: century warfare. It works pretty good. It's amazing to think
Speaker 1: of the number of bombs you're talking about, and then
Speaker 1: they made a tunnel. Yeah, yeah, really good haul. But
Speaker 1: it's like chop out. It's not just it's not just
Speaker 1: a tunnel, it's it's it's in a jungle. Like we're
Speaker 1: talking about, very difficult sort of environment to make a tunnel.
Speaker 1: It's not that like, it's incredible what they did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So lbj's administration sent planes into allow to bomb the
Speaker 1: trail and to escort Lautian planes while they bombed the trail.
Speaker 1: When US airmen were killed or captured over law, their
Speaker 1: families were told they'd gone down in Southeast Asia to
Speaker 1: allow LBJ to claim he'd abided by his nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: four election promise to avoid a wider war. Cambodia was
Speaker 1: bombed as well, but during lbj's administration, Loo was considered
Speaker 1: a more important target. They thought more stuff was getting
Speaker 1: into Vietnam through law. This changed in nineteen when the
Speaker 1: Tet offense made it clear that North Vietnam had gotten
Speaker 1: very good at running troops in and out of Cambodia.
Speaker 1: Johnson hadn't been willing to escalate the bombing campaign against
Speaker 1: a neutral country, though, especially since again, there was this
Speaker 1: big election going on and he was kind of having
Speaker 1: his vice president run on the promise that, like, we're
Speaker 1: really going to end this thing. So you know, lb J,
Speaker 1: when he's trying to tease North Vietnam with a bombing halt,
Speaker 1: isn't gonna just start laying into Cambodia in the spring
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty nine, after you know, Kissinger and Nixon
Speaker 1: took office, they approved the expanded use of US special
Speaker 1: forces in Lao, along with a campaign of sustained air strikes.
Speaker 1: This was called Operations Steal Tiger. All of these So,
Speaker 1: I mean the stupidest names. Yeah, we, I mean we
Speaker 1: the marketing that we have gone for in this country
Speaker 1: for so long has been so absurd. Steal Tiger. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean they're just taking Y and T album names
Speaker 1: at this point. Yeah. Uh, if only they'd gone with
Speaker 1: like Prince Operate and Purple Rain. But it's like the
Speaker 1: defoliant that gives everyone cancer. Um, so it's I should
Speaker 1: note here that all secret operations carried out by any
Speaker 1: US forces anywhere in the world during the Nixon administration
Speaker 1: were approved personally by Henry Kissinger. Henry was the chairman
Speaker 1: of something called the forty comm Hell sorry, this was
Speaker 1: a semi secret body that had been set up to
Speaker 1: provide management and oversight to c i A covert operations.
Speaker 1: The committee was made up of members of the National
Speaker 1: Security Council. They concerned themselves regularly with the question of
Speaker 1: how to stop weapons from flowing into Vietnam By this point,
Speaker 1: trails ran through parts of Law and Cambodia, but also
Speaker 1: from the Vietnam Chinese border, so Kissinger is ahead of this.
Speaker 1: Committee considers a number of ways to stop weapons from
Speaker 1: getting into New or from getting into and with Vietnam,
Speaker 1: including the use of thermonuclear weapons to annihilate the railways
Speaker 1: between North Vietnam and China out of its entire damn my,
Speaker 1: and to be fair, is nuts enough that even Kissinger
Speaker 1: is like, no, that's a little too far. He also
Speaker 1: considered bombing the dikes that kept North Vietnam's irrigation system
Speaker 1: from flooding all of its fields. Both of these would
Speaker 1: have been war crimes on a Titanic scale. Um. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: Kissinger declined to do either in favor of a completely
Speaker 1: different set of war crimes. So that's good, that's nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do a different thing. He decides which war crimes
Speaker 1: to commit, like we decide like jeans or sweatpants in
Speaker 1: the morning, you know, I mean, I think that would
Speaker 1: go really well with what we're doing now. That a
Speaker 1: really tie the whole thing together. Yeah, that's quite a life.
Speaker 1: So immediately after taking office, Henry helps his new boss
Speaker 1: put together a menu of bombardment targets in Cambodia. This
Speaker 1: is literally called Operation Menu. Now, yeahs before up to
Speaker 1: tip your bomba deer, get the sample that was. That's
Speaker 1: what I don't know. I actually don't recall off the
Speaker 1: top of my head which bombing operation McCain was involved in.
Speaker 1: But there's a good there's a good tip joke to
Speaker 1: be made there. Somebody will figure it out. Um, people
Speaker 1: doing post Yeah, we'll figure it out. Different or parts
Speaker 1: of Operation Menu had code names. Different targets had code
Speaker 1: names like breakfast, lunch sack. What I mean, it is
Speaker 1: one thing to be like so sadistic and it's just
Speaker 1: another thing to tie it into do a lot to
Speaker 1: try brunch yea, yeah, we're going back to brunch finally
Speaker 1: under watch the next Um. So yeah, it's nice that
Speaker 1: slaughter can be fun, like you can find fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the kind of love what you do, Dave. Otherwise
Speaker 1: you're just gonna feel like work, you know. So before
Speaker 1: they began this series of bombings, the Joint Chiefs of
Speaker 1: Staff they warned the White House quote some Cambodian casualties
Speaker 1: would be sustained in the operation. The surprise effective ASTA
Speaker 1: could tend to increase casualties. So they're like the fact
Speaker 1: that we're not warning anyone and that we're keeping this
Speaker 1: a secret means more civilians will die. Like heads up,
Speaker 1: so you know what you're doing. This is this is
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. Um. Now. As they approached the
Speaker 1: question of bombing Cambodia A, Kissinger and Nixon had a choice.
Speaker 1: They could either tell Congress or they could hide what
Speaker 1: they were doing and use the presidential power over the
Speaker 1: Armed services to appropriate funds from other places in order
Speaker 1: to carry out the bombing in secret. Nixon had been
Speaker 1: elected with Kissinger's help in part due to the LBJ
Speaker 1: administration's failure to in the war. He didn't want to
Speaker 1: go in the nineteen seventy two reelection campaign, having to
Speaker 1: defend the fact that he expanded it. Henry Kissinger worked
Speaker 1: with Colonel's Alexander Haig and Race Sitton to figure out
Speaker 1: a way for the president to direct bombing operations in
Speaker 1: a private manner. And I'm gonna quote from Kissinger's shadow,
Speaker 1: Greg Grandon, sitting based on recommendations he received from General
Speaker 1: Creighton Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam, would
Speaker 1: work up a number of targets in Cambodia to be struck.
Speaker 1: Then he would bring them to Kissinger and hag in
Speaker 1: the White House for approval. Kissinger was very hands on
Speaker 1: revising some of Sitton's work. I don't know what he
Speaker 1: was using as his reason for varying them. Sitting later
Speaker 1: recalled strike here in this area. Kissinger would tell him
Speaker 1: or strike there in that area. Once Kissinger was satisfied
Speaker 1: with the proposed target, Sitting would back channel the coordinates
Speaker 1: to Saigon, and from there a career would pass them
Speaker 1: on to the appropriate radar stations, where an officer would
Speaker 1: make a last minute switch. The B fifty two would
Speaker 1: be diverted from its cover target in South Vietnam into Cambodia,
Speaker 1: where it would drop its bomb load on the real target.
Speaker 1: When the run was complete, the officer in charge of
Speaker 1: the deception would burn whatever documents, maps, computer print outs,
Speaker 1: radar reports, messages, and so on that might reveal the
Speaker 1: actual flight. Then he would write up false post strike
Speaker 1: paperwork indicating that the South Vietnam sortee was flown as planned.
Speaker 1: It's so much work. Yeah, reminds me of when I
Speaker 1: used this skip school that like the lengths I would
Speaker 1: go to to get away with cutting class and like that.
Speaker 1: The point would be made always to me, like if
Speaker 1: you put this focus towards studying, you'd probably you'd spend
Speaker 1: less time and it would be more effective. But instead
Speaker 1: you just waste so much. Instead of just stopping you
Speaker 1: you do all this gymnastics just to continue the thing
Speaker 1: that is the problem, that makes the problem compound. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's they really are are going through a lot of
Speaker 1: work to illegally bomb a neutral country look like they're
Speaker 1: not bombing, Yeah, to look like they're not Um, it's gaslighting,
Speaker 1: you know, this is this, that's what. That's what. This
Speaker 1: is kissing you you know, we're finally going to get
Speaker 1: him canceled. This is gonna be what man, it would be.
Speaker 1: Imagine we're going to do to kissing on Hannibal Burst
Speaker 1: did to Cosby. Oh man, come on, come on. Uh.
Speaker 1: So you know, obviously this is very illegal. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a lot and there's a lot of parts of it
Speaker 1: that are illegal. For example, the military has a chain
Speaker 1: of command, and Sitton was bypassing his bosses in the
Speaker 1: Department of Defense because he's just a colonel, right, like
Speaker 1: colonels don't get to that's not there, Like you're not
Speaker 1: at that level, right, So he is he is bypassing
Speaker 1: the normal chain of command in order to directly orchestrate
Speaker 1: an a legal bombing campaign with the White House and
Speaker 1: kind of cutting out a chunk of the Pentagon sitting
Speaker 1: knew at the time that it was weird to cut
Speaker 1: his commanding officers out and report directly to Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 1: He later recalled, I kind of felt I was way
Speaker 1: out on a limb and skating on some pretty thin
Speaker 1: ice with all my trips to the West basement of
Speaker 1: the White House where he's meeting with Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to a secret basement. Yeah, and to talk
Speaker 1: about bombing, like maybe maybe this isn't how it's supposed
Speaker 1: to be done. Seemed like a democracy. I feel like
Speaker 1: we shouldn't be doing things like this in a basement.
Speaker 1: You've come to secret democracy basement. Yeah. The people voted
Speaker 1: for this basement knock. So I know, as you I
Speaker 1: noted here that they kind of cut out a large
Speaker 1: chunk of like the military command apparatus to do this,
Speaker 1: which doesn't mean that those guys were against what they
Speaker 1: were doing, and in fact, all of sitton superiors knew
Speaker 1: what he was doing. They just didn't want to be
Speaker 1: involved because again, it was a crime, you know. So
Speaker 1: they so they're like they're down with the cut out
Speaker 1: because they're just like, yeah, you do it, and I
Speaker 1: don't want my name on this ship crazy, but go
Speaker 1: with it for sure. Yeah, yeah we love it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: they didn't know about the bombing Cambodia the same way.
Speaker 1: I have never known a pot dealer, right, So Sitton
Speaker 1: would regularly like, I don't know. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say this is to his credit, but he was like
Speaker 1: this is weird, and he would go He did on
Speaker 1: a couple of occasions go to his superiors and was
Speaker 1: like are you okay with this? And his exact phrase
Speaker 1: what they responded was just do just what you're doing.
Speaker 1: When you get a call to go to the White House,
Speaker 1: go because you don't really have a choice, which is great.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's it's it's straight out of the
Speaker 1: show Snowfall, Like it's just like this ship just happens
Speaker 1: all the time. Yeah, this is what happened with Iran Contra.
Speaker 1: It was the same fucking ship, you know. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: all crimes and It's worth noting that like the United
Speaker 1: States is going to war with a neutral country in secret,
Speaker 1: under the personal direction of a guy who several months
Speaker 1: ago had been a Harvard professor, like Kissinger is not
Speaker 1: even a year distant from being a fucking teacher and
Speaker 1: this and now he is orchestrating a secret war in Cambodia.
Speaker 1: And like, I love the I love the beginning thing
Speaker 1: where you said, there's like a guy whose job it
Speaker 1: is to pick targets, and he's picking targets and nick
Speaker 1: and kissing, just taking them apps and going no, I
Speaker 1: like here, like just totally random. He doesn't have any
Speaker 1: fucking idea what he's doing. He's just like that it
Speaker 1: looks like it should go away. He has not even
Speaker 1: begun to micromanage this, this war crime, Dave. So, the
Speaker 1: purpose of this illegal bombing campaign was not just to
Speaker 1: stop the movement of Vietnamese troops and material. It also paid.
Speaker 1: It also played a role in advancing what Nixon called
Speaker 1: his Madman theory. Now, the President had shared this with
Speaker 1: close confidence prior to the nineteen six election. He told
Speaker 1: his future chief of staff that, in order to negotiate
Speaker 1: an into the war with favorable terms he felt he
Speaker 1: had to make the North Vietnamese quote, believe I've reached
Speaker 1: a point where I might do anything to stop the war.
Speaker 1: We'll just slip the word to them that, for God's sake,
Speaker 1: you know, Nixon is obsessed about communists. We can't restrain
Speaker 1: him when he's angry and he has his hand on
Speaker 1: the nuclear button. And ho Chi Men himself will be
Speaker 1: in Paris in two days begging for peace, which is
Speaker 1: like the idea. Someone's like, so you want us to
Speaker 1: try to convey that you're crazy? Okay, that seems um
Speaker 1: and I think it's coming across her. Honestly, I think
Speaker 1: that's already it's baked into this whole thing a little bit.
Speaker 1: It's also very funny that, like they are trying to
Speaker 1: scare ho Chi Men, who at this point is fighting
Speaker 1: his second winning war against a major world power with
Speaker 1: like a very very small number of people, you know,
Speaker 1: like North North Vietnam not a big country compared to
Speaker 1: say the French Imperial Forces or the United States. He's
Speaker 1: not a kind of You're not going to scare ho
Speaker 1: Chi Men, right, He's not. He's not a guy who
Speaker 1: gets spooked. It's over. It's just absolutely not happening at
Speaker 1: this point. Yeah, Now, Kissinger either believed in his boss's
Speaker 1: plan or understood that he had to play along. Greg
Speaker 1: Grandon argues that Nixon's Madman theory was actually just an
Speaker 1: extension of the foreign policy arguments that Kissinger himself had
Speaker 1: been making for years. Quote. Toughness after all, was a
Speaker 1: late motif that run through much ran through much of
Speaker 1: his state craft, the idea that war and diplomacy are inseparable,
Speaker 1: and that to be effective, diplomats need to be able
Speaker 1: to punish and persuade an equal, unrestricted measure. In fact,
Speaker 1: the Madman theory was an extension of Kissinger's philosophy of
Speaker 1: the deed that power wasn't power unless one was willing
Speaker 1: to use it, that the purpose of action was to
Speaker 1: neutralize the inertia of an action. I mean it like
Speaker 1: it's not I mean, it's not a double down. It's
Speaker 1: like you've it's eighteen double downs. But at some point
Speaker 1: you just I I, at least in my lifetime, had
Speaker 1: a moment where I did believe that there were there
Speaker 1: were people who were who would like point out the
Speaker 1: crazy shit. And the more you learn, the more you go, No,
Speaker 1: there's just there's not They are just all like it's
Speaker 1: like a bunch of junkies figuring out how to get
Speaker 1: more junk. Yeah, I mean, it's just like it's just
Speaker 1: how do you get through the day. It's not long
Speaker 1: term anything. Yep. You know, there's a degree to which
Speaker 1: And this is like one of the things that's most
Speaker 1: frustrating about this part of how this always gets justified
Speaker 1: is there's legitimate logic in that, Yeah, Hitler gobbled up
Speaker 1: a bunch of little chunks of Western Europe and nobody
Speaker 1: stopped him, and they should have, like something should have
Speaker 1: been done, like when he decided to take Czechoslovakia. You know,
Speaker 1: we're during the Angelustre's certainly, you know, like there, and
Speaker 1: they take this logic of like, yeah, if you have
Speaker 1: this like massive military his nation gobbling up its neighbors,
Speaker 1: you can't just necessarily do nothing. And they applied that
Speaker 1: to like, well, okay, we've got a bomb Cambodia because
Speaker 1: some dudes are hiking through it with guns on their back,
Speaker 1: like Chamberlain. Nonsense escalation. Chamberlain also is always in play
Speaker 1: there too, because it's like everyone's like, you don't want
Speaker 1: to be a Chamberlain. Yeah, we're appeasing North Vietnam if
Speaker 1: we don't drop more bombs, and we're dropped in all
Speaker 1: of World War two on Cambodia, Cambodia. It's this nonsense
Speaker 1: escalation of of of logic, of historical logic. That's like
Speaker 1: like someday Nixon's just going to look in the mirror
Speaker 1: and be like, sometimes I think I'm I'm just fighting
Speaker 1: a war inside of myself. They're actually there are some
Speaker 1: quotes from Kissinger that aren't all that far off here.
Speaker 1: We're back. So the first bombing mission in this operation
Speaker 1: was launched on March eighteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Kissinger was
Speaker 1: in conversation at the time when he was interrupted with
Speaker 1: a note telling him that the bombing run had been
Speaker 1: a success. He smiled and then sent the information on
Speaker 1: to the President. Nixon's chief of staff later recalled historic day.
Speaker 1: Kissinger really excited. He came in beaming with the report. Now,
Speaker 1: it was noted by people who were around the White
Speaker 1: House that Nick's that Kissinger seemed to enjoy. Quote playing
Speaker 1: the bomba deer, taking great pains to direct the destruction,
Speaker 1: saymour seymour Hirsch wrote that quote When the military men
Speaker 1: presented a proposed bombing list, Kissinger would redesign the missions,
Speaker 1: shifting a dozen planes, perhaps from one area to another,
Speaker 1: and altering the timing of the bombing runs. And it does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess no fucking expertise in this area, absolutely none.
Speaker 1: He's a fucking nerd who reads books, like you don't
Speaker 1: know anything about what to bomb Henry. It's like me
Speaker 1: showing up at a hospital and being like, all right,
Speaker 1: give me this surgical schedule. I need to start to
Speaker 1: work in these surgeries and getting him in order, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fucking crazy, it is. I mean, this is a
Speaker 1: there's a human impulse here. We're seeing in Ukraine where
Speaker 1: all these like random people are being like, here's how
Speaker 1: you disable the tank, and it's like, you've never disabled
Speaker 1: to tank. You don't know what the funk you're talking about. Like,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna like throwing paint on it isn't going
Speaker 1: to stop it. You're going to get people killed. If
Speaker 1: anyone's stupid enough to listen to you, shut up. It's
Speaker 1: just like Kissinger is actually in a power to really
Speaker 1: do that. And there's this I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is that makes some people
Speaker 1: certain that like they know how to prosecute an entire
Speaker 1: war based on their experience reading a lot of books
Speaker 1: at a school, and there's and there's. It doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like there's anybody who's going like, no, that doesn't make anything.
Speaker 1: Is this out of its mind? Yeah? Yeah, So so
Speaker 1: it's just like it is. It's just people being like, okay, sure,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot Obviously, the the unrestricted drone warfare
Speaker 1: that that escalated during the Obama administration and continued at
Speaker 1: and even higher pace under Trump is indefensible morally, but
Speaker 1: also the way that it tended to work was like
Speaker 1: you would get, you know, these guys with the administration,
Speaker 1: whichever one it was, would say like these are the
Speaker 1: things we are we are going to target with drones,
Speaker 1: and then the military would bring them like, well, here
Speaker 1: are the different options for strikes that we have, and
Speaker 1: they would like pick which one to do. Kissinger is
Speaker 1: literally taking the maps from them, erasing their plans and
Speaker 1: like writing in his own um, which is like it's
Speaker 1: someone in the huddle with an actually like with coach
Speaker 1: k he's drawing a plan a whiteboard and then a
Speaker 1: fan just scribbles it out and like rubs it all
Speaker 1: down with his arm, and then he's like, instead, I
Speaker 1: don't do it all run out the court at the
Speaker 1: same time, and then we pass the ball a bunch
Speaker 1: tonight to do it. That makes someone head the bat
Speaker 1: into the it's it's not I think, Yeah, I'm just
Speaker 1: upset because I bought forty gallons of paint because you
Speaker 1: were going to try to knock out a couple of
Speaker 1: tanks and now the whole fucking thing shot. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are some things paint is good at when it
Speaker 1: comes to conflict. There were some very funny moments in
Speaker 1: one of the big shud fights we had up in Portland,
Speaker 1: where kids filled the fire extinguisher with paint and like
Speaker 1: ruined thousands of dollars in tactical gear. That was that
Speaker 1: was good. Look. It's not to say that amateurs never
Speaker 1: have good ideas, but they were not amateurs at that point. Though.
Speaker 1: Those kids have been finding those proud boys for a minute.
Speaker 1: So Kissinger's extraordinary degree of control over the situation was
Speaker 1: possible because he had literally reformed the entire national security
Speaker 1: apparatus around himself. Nixon wanted a buffer from his own
Speaker 1: Secretary of State, which prided Henry with the opportunity to
Speaker 1: take as much power and centralize it around the National
Speaker 1: Security Advisor. And he could do this as long as
Speaker 1: he kept Nixon happy. Under Kissinger, the National Security Council,
Speaker 1: which he headed, became the center of US foreign policy.
Speaker 1: A massive bureaucracy fed piles of information embassy kales, cables,
Speaker 1: intelligence reports, et cetera, straight to Henry Kissinger. He decided,
Speaker 1: he's again, Henry is where all of the information from
Speaker 1: this vast apparatus that the US has to gather information
Speaker 1: right the eyes and ears of the president, you know,
Speaker 1: all the things that are supposed to provide the president
Speaker 1: with information. All of that comes directly to Henry, and
Speaker 1: he decides what to give the president. And he was
Speaker 1: a teacher, and he was a year before. He was
Speaker 1: a guy who's primary claim to fame before this was
Speaker 1: we need more nukes. We don't have enough fucking nukes,
Speaker 1: and also we should use them whenever. Um it's I
Speaker 1: was just watching there's a great documentary called Commanded Control
Speaker 1: that's about a nuclear disaster in the U s and
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty that nearly killed half of the people on
Speaker 1: the East coast that enough folks don't know about. A
Speaker 1: guy accidentally dropped a bolt and it ignited part of
Speaker 1: a nuclear missile and it nearly killed everyone in the
Speaker 1: Eastern seaboard. Yeah, it was. It was a big old
Speaker 1: It was a bigger fuffle um. And this guy's there's
Speaker 1: a scrow fell in the thing. That's nuts about it.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that pointed out I think
Speaker 1: we have Sophie can google this for me. I think
Speaker 1: we have about six thousand nuclear weapons right now, which
Speaker 1: is way too many. But as a result we have Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have the Russia as on six thousand, we have
Speaker 1: around so that's too much. Both countries have too many nukes.
Speaker 1: I think we can all I'm not signed enough on that.
Speaker 1: As a result, in part of Kissingers, we have a
Speaker 1: missile gap and we need to build more. By this
Speaker 1: point in the mid sixties, there are thirty two thousand
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons in the United States. That's even an a
Speaker 1: side because it's like a Kardashian with shoes. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: feel my thing has always been every every person who
Speaker 1: owns property should be allowed to have a nuke, your
Speaker 1: own nuke. Look, I think you can all agree. You
Speaker 1: know what you know what, there wouldn't be if everyone
Speaker 1: had a nuke. Dave, no knock raids by the cops.
Speaker 1: That's true. You're not gonna have any of that ship
Speaker 1: they busted down doors. Yeah, guys, fine, real different situation
Speaker 1: are the cops if everybody's got a nuke, other problems, though,
Speaker 1: there would would be some other problems. So um anyway,
Speaker 1: Kissinger is the the Kissinger is effectively turned himself into
Speaker 1: the eyes and ears of the United States military appetatis.
Speaker 1: He decides what. You can argue, he's one of the
Speaker 1: two or three most powerful people who's ever lived at
Speaker 1: this point. An argument could be made um So Marvin
Speaker 1: and Bernard Colb, who were both diplomats at this point,
Speaker 1: describe what Henry builds here as Henry's wonderful machine. Quote Kissinger,
Speaker 1: I know Mr mcgoim's nuclear emporium. Since Kissinger controlled the system,
Speaker 1: he controlled the decision making process. Everyone reports to Kissinger
Speaker 1: and only Kissinger reports to the president. This set up
Speaker 1: allowed Henry to micromanaged bombing campaigns, over order, covert arms deals,
Speaker 1: and engage in secret diplomacy at will. He was not
Speaker 1: merely executing the president's orders. He himself was free to
Speaker 1: make national policy as long as Nixon was happy with him.
Speaker 1: From Kissinger's shadow quote, Kissinger, according to Marvin and Bernard
Speaker 1: called kalb knew almost instinctively that he would be able
Speaker 1: to control the bureaucracy and thus help reorder American diplomacy,
Speaker 1: only to the degree that he became indistinguishable from the
Speaker 1: President and his policies. Rogers at State was opposed to
Speaker 1: the idea of escalating the war into Cambodia. Layered at
Speaker 1: the Pentagon was for it, but thought it needed to
Speaker 1: be done above board, legally and publicly through the normal
Speaker 1: chain of command. This gave Kissinger an opening, letting him
Speaker 1: stake out in a plus ultra position. He wanted to bomb,
Speaker 1: he wanted to bomb in a way that inflicted the
Speaker 1: most pain, and he wanted to bomb an absolute secrecy,
Speaker 1: completely off the books. As a result, every war crime
Speaker 1: committed by the United States during the Nction administration, every
Speaker 1: bad thing U S forces do, particularly under the under
Speaker 1: the ages of special operations at least right has to
Speaker 1: be considered one of Henry Kissinger's crimes, because it is
Speaker 1: his job to personally sign off on all of them
Speaker 1: um and he is Mike. He is not just a
Speaker 1: rubber stamper. He is he is actively pushing for things.
Speaker 1: So we are going into very specific detail about one
Speaker 1: specific crime. If you find a bad thing that the US,
Speaker 1: that US, the CIA or special forces did from nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, Henry Kissinger gave that the old thumbs up.
Speaker 1: So again we have to leave out a lot. It
Speaker 1: doesn't even sound like it's I mean, it's like ego based. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not even I mean, there's there's there's so
Speaker 1: little actual and it just shows you, like what happens
Speaker 1: when you're in a bubble. But I mean, I just
Speaker 1: don't think most people would would be capable of this.
Speaker 1: But it's it is. It's just like it's not really
Speaker 1: for anything other than he is just feels great being
Speaker 1: at the helm of this and it's an extremely powerful position.
Speaker 1: It's such a bad idea, like if you proceed like
Speaker 1: a moment, get ourselves in the headspace. If someone who
Speaker 1: thinks all of this is morally justified, it's a bad
Speaker 1: idea because a person can't competently manage all of this
Speaker 1: like they would, right, they would be like, look, I
Speaker 1: need help. I mean, is we're doing what you came
Speaker 1: to do, like a reasonable warlord would be like level headed, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah. Um. So, when he was signing off
Speaker 1: on bombing runs, Kissinger poured over raw intelligence documents, which
Speaker 1: included information on exactly, in many cases, down to the
Speaker 1: number how many civilians lived in a certain target target area. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: sometimes it was a little bit less specific in this.
Speaker 1: For example, Areas seven oh four, which had quote sizeable
Speaker 1: concentrations of civilians, didn't have an exact number, but was
Speaker 1: bombed two and forty seven times on Henry Kissinger's orders.
Speaker 1: And since we're going to be talking a lot about bombing,
Speaker 1: we should discuss exactly what that meant in this case,
Speaker 1: because all bombings are not created equal. The bombings Kissinger
Speaker 1: directed were carried out by B fifty two bombers. These
Speaker 1: are massive planes. These are like the size of the
Speaker 1: big international commercial aircraft roughly right. These are not like
Speaker 1: fighter jets and stuff. Um. These fly too high to
Speaker 1: be seen from the ground, and they are incapable of
Speaker 1: meaningful discrimination between civilian and military targets. This is not
Speaker 1: an era in which there's much at all in the
Speaker 1: way of precision guided bombing. And that with a B
Speaker 1: fifty two you cannot even attempt precision. You are dropping
Speaker 1: explosives blindly from like a mile up. I want to
Speaker 1: quote now from a write up by Taylor Owen and
Speaker 1: Ben Kiernan for Yale. Quote. A single B fifty two
Speaker 1: D big belly payload consists of up to one hundred
Speaker 1: and eight, two hundred or forty kg bombs, which are
Speaker 1: dropped in a target area of approximately five hundred by
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred meters. In many cases, Cambodian villages were hit
Speaker 1: with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours.
Speaker 1: The result was near total destruction. When US officials stated
Speaker 1: at the time, we had been told as at everybody
Speaker 1: that those carpet bombing attacks by B fifty twos were
Speaker 1: totally devastating, that nothing could survive. It's like a sturgeon
Speaker 1: with eggs. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is just completely indiscriminate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one Cambodian survivor because people did live. As we've stated,
Speaker 1: these are never as good at killing people as the
Speaker 1: military likes to claim, which is not to minimize the horror.
Speaker 1: It's just like it's also not it doesn't work, um exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean. One one Cambodian survivor of US bombing described
Speaker 1: it this way. Three f one one ones bombed right
Speaker 1: center of my village, killing eleven of my family members.
Speaker 1: My father was wounded but survived. At that time. There
Speaker 1: was not a single soldier in the village or in
Speaker 1: the area around the village. Seven other villages were also killed.
Speaker 1: They had to run into a ditch to hide, and
Speaker 1: then two bombs fell right into it. Fox, Yeah, it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you cannot you cannot exaggerate the the extent to which
Speaker 1: this is indiscriminate. It's just total madness on top of madness.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no people are rightly furious about, like
Speaker 1: bombing in in in Ukrainian cities right now. What the
Speaker 1: United States is doing in Cambodia is eliminating grid squares
Speaker 1: on a map of all life, Like, yeah, which is
Speaker 1: the country. There's nothing to fucking do. Yeah, some are
Speaker 1: walking through it, you know, like it's cop logic. Were like, well,
Speaker 1: a guy who stole a car was seen in this neighborhood,
Speaker 1: so we had to shoot anyone someone we saw in
Speaker 1: the window of their house, you know, like it's that
Speaker 1: kind of ship um which I guess it makes sense
Speaker 1: that cops act the way they do because this has
Speaker 1: always been the way people with guns and power act
Speaker 1: everywhere through all time. Yeah so that's good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the ostensible purpose of all this carnage which to
Speaker 1: put an end to North Vietnam's ability to wage war,
Speaker 1: but a huge factor for both Kissinger and Nixon, even
Speaker 1: larger than any actual like impact on the war itself,
Speaker 1: was to preserve their personal power. Right after the bombing
Speaker 1: of Cambodia began, Nixon sent Kissinger to talk with the
Speaker 1: Soviet ambassador, a fellow named Dobrynan. In Henry Kissinger in
Speaker 1: American Power, Thomas Schwartz writes, quote Kissinger put forward a straightforward,
Speaker 1: put forth a straightforward domestic political account for Nixon's motivation
Speaker 1: and thinking, noting that Nixon is not seeking a military victory,
Speaker 1: but he cannot go down in American history as the
Speaker 1: first U S president who have lost the war in
Speaker 1: which the US participated. I mean, the honest, like you
Speaker 1: think you'd at least lie about no, just the oh
Speaker 1: my god, look, it's murdering. Demicide is one thing, Gareth,
Speaker 1: but dishonesty, it's just it's disgusting. That's I feel like
Speaker 1: a parent. Look someone kissing your drinks with you know
Speaker 1: exactly exact mean, I just I would love to see
Speaker 1: a version where he just keep up with a parents. Look,
Speaker 1: you can't do we just Nixon hates losing. That's what
Speaker 1: this is about. We can't take the people. Yeah, it's so.
Speaker 1: Between March of nineteen sixty nine and May of nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: more than three thousand, six hundred and thirty raids were
Speaker 1: flown across the Campboard Bodian border. Each was approved personally
Speaker 1: by Henry Kissinger. The New York Times broke this story
Speaker 1: to the American public for the first time in May
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty nine. Um so that's pretty good, right,
Speaker 1: Like the New York Times actually is pretty shocking on
Speaker 1: this and reveals what has happened. This prompts protests and
Speaker 1: international outcry. That's one of the frustrating things about the
Speaker 1: New York Times because there's a million things to be
Speaker 1: angry at them all the time, and then it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: and they also were the first people to reveal this
Speaker 1: horrific crime against humanity because these spots where like, well
Speaker 1: like it's like a broken clock though it's you know,
Speaker 1: every now and then it's like a broken clock. But
Speaker 1: when it's right, it's about like the massacre of civilians
Speaker 1: on an industrent scale. But also when it's wrong, it's
Speaker 1: about the massacre of civilians mixed bag um. So there's
Speaker 1: immediately protests in international outcry. Armed students sees a building
Speaker 1: at Cornell University, which is very based. Students at Kissinger's
Speaker 1: own Harvard engage in a two week strike. Ever, pr
Speaker 1: savvy Kissinger agreed to meet with student protesters in order
Speaker 1: to prop up his image among liberals. He told them,
Speaker 1: if you come back in a year and things haven't changed,
Speaker 1: we won't have a morally defensible position. So like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I know it's all funked up. I've got
Speaker 1: to fix this whole messed up It's been going on
Speaker 1: for years. You know I'm working on it. If you
Speaker 1: come back and behind this figured the problem, there's a
Speaker 1: cog in here, give me one year to kill all
Speaker 1: the babies. And it also shows how fucking crazy you are. Like,
Speaker 1: if you're doing this, you know you'd be like, look,
Speaker 1: hide me. I do not want to talk to the
Speaker 1: fact that he's like I would meet them. It's like us,
Speaker 1: he knows him. I'll just tell him what's up. Black.
Speaker 1: We gotta kill him. We gotta kill people for like
Speaker 1: a year. Let's let's see how it goes. Give me here,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bomb the ship out of just villages and
Speaker 1: ship and kill a bunch of babies and ladies. Have
Speaker 1: no idea how. It's just nice, nice to look at
Speaker 1: the campus. You guys have changed a couple of things. Huh.
Speaker 1: You guys just like you guys are like I heard
Speaker 1: something bad. We're just getting started. But a year is
Speaker 1: an amazing thing to say, what this it's on this, Look,
Speaker 1: this is happening in the year, and we'll revisit. It's like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: not a year. You don't get to revisit this, you
Speaker 1: revisit We should revisit where we are in the story
Speaker 1: after this break. Yeah, let's revisit the sponsors of the show.
Speaker 1: You know who else? You know who else need a
Speaker 1: year to keep? Yeah, look, if if if has not
Speaker 1: stopped the carpet bombing of Cambodia in a year, then
Speaker 1: then you can cancel your subscription. You know, by the way,
Speaker 1: talking to that's menus. Those are menu options. Very much like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very much like a white house visit with a
Speaker 1: hell what do you want to make a case of doe?
Speaker 1: Or do you want to do this chickpeace? What do
Speaker 1: you want to do it? There's options? You want to
Speaker 1: do a flood bread mugga eagles though, we're back. So
Speaker 1: there's congressional inquiries about the illegal carpet bombing. What are
Speaker 1: they after? They what they smelled? Some smoke? I should
Speaker 1: also note seizing Cornell offices with with arms, dope, actually
Speaker 1: sitting down with Henry Kissinger to let him talk about
Speaker 1: how things aren't really that bad, not dope. Maybe throw
Speaker 1: a stapler in his face, you know something, hit him,
Speaker 1: really try to hit him. You know, at least give
Speaker 1: him a shoe. You know, you've got options from a
Speaker 1: fucking baseball team at Harvard had to have been able
Speaker 1: to hit him with a fastball. There are people that
Speaker 1: if you're around you should Cheney Bush. You get around
Speaker 1: certain people, you get close to him, you should fucking
Speaker 1: hit them. Hit him. Look, Dick Cheney is basically like
Speaker 1: a charging phone. Just unplug him at this point. What
Speaker 1: happens whatever is turn on a microwave next to Hi.
Speaker 1: Just just have a microwaving an extension cord to put
Speaker 1: a popcorn and throw it in his lap. Yeah. Look,
Speaker 1: we we we all know. Everybody here knows that eventually
Speaker 1: Cheney and and Kissinger shed their human skins to become
Speaker 1: one ball of energy. I think Kissinger currently is shedding
Speaker 1: his human skin. If you've seen him lately, it looks
Speaker 1: like he's halfway through the most crossed. Yeah, but the
Speaker 1: two of the merge and then wings pop. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I get it. So they kind of become like a
Speaker 1: like a cerebus or something like that. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: they're one. It's like, let's get out of here. Finally
Speaker 1: they got through form and then they they locate in
Speaker 1: nuke microbiological life on Europa. No one has done yet,
Speaker 1: so there's congressional inquiries. Kissinger gets brought before the Senate
Speaker 1: where he assures everyone that Kimbodian territories bombed by the
Speaker 1: U S we're all quote unpopulated. He knew this was
Speaker 1: to lie at the time. We know from briefing documents
Speaker 1: Kissinger received that he was warned into tail about such things.
Speaker 1: The breakfast bombing target, he was told, was inhabited by
Speaker 1: six and forty civilians. Dessert had three hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1: Nixon initially, it's just like ice cream. Yeah, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: get angry at me for bombing a baskin Robbins, would you.
Speaker 1: There's no people there hates cake. It's called the magic shell.
Speaker 1: So Nixon eventually initially blamed Kissinger for the leaks that
Speaker 1: had revealed the story of the bombing of Cambodia to
Speaker 1: the New York Times. Um, and this is because Kissinger
Speaker 1: brings in a lot of like liberals, Like a lot
Speaker 1: of Kissinger's staff are not Republicans, are not like right
Speaker 1: wing guys. They're like Northeastern liberals. Because yeah, and then
Speaker 1: this is charming print. They are not. But Nixon is like,
Speaker 1: it must have been one of these East Coast liberals
Speaker 1: you brought in that leaked at the Times. He right,
Speaker 1: So he thinks it's an extension of Kissinger, not Kissinger. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: he doesn't Kissinger. That would be someone's really up to something,
Speaker 1: somebody's sucking around some But this like brain Woody Allen,
Speaker 1: and he's funny, he's good. This is some good context
Speaker 1: on how comprehensively shitty a person Kissinger is, how incapable
Speaker 1: of real loyalty. He is. Thomas Schwartz writes that in
Speaker 1: order to preserve his own position, Kissinger had to throw
Speaker 1: large numbers of his team members under the bus quote.
Speaker 1: Kissinger called FBI Director J Edgar Hoover and gave him
Speaker 1: a list of those staffers in his office with access
Speaker 1: to the information, telling Hoover that he would destroy whoever
Speaker 1: did this if we can find him, no matter where
Speaker 1: he is. Among the first to be wire wire tapped
Speaker 1: was Morton Halperin, who had helped devise the NSC system,
Speaker 1: Helmett Sonnenfeldt, Kissinger's fellow German Jewish refugee, and even Winston Lore,
Speaker 1: the man Kissinger leader called his conscience on peign policy
Speaker 1: issues and all. There would be seventeen FBI wire taps
Speaker 1: up by the White House, thirteen on government employees including
Speaker 1: Kissinger staff, and four on newsmen, among them Kissinger's British
Speaker 1: friend who was a reporter for the London Times. It's
Speaker 1: a meteoric rock. It's like American idol level sudden impact
Speaker 1: as far as because I mean, as you pointed to
Speaker 1: he wasn't like this crazy. I mean he was crazy.
Speaker 1: But now it's like he's just it's on Royd's the
Speaker 1: level that he the level he's gotten to, and the
Speaker 1: level of insanity that he's gotten to is really even
Speaker 1: for this country historic. Yeah, it's um, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: And just like it's great he is he's not capable
Speaker 1: of even like treating his very loyal friends. Well. Um
Speaker 1: so yeah, this would come back to bite Kissinger and
Speaker 1: Nixon and the ass in the not too distant future.
Speaker 1: But we're gonna take a while to get to that
Speaker 1: because there's a lot in between there and now. So
Speaker 1: let's return to Cambodia. It is worth noting that Operation
Speaker 1: Menu achieved nothing. It was useless in a military sense.
Speaker 1: The enemy commanded control facilities they were ostensibly trying to destroy.
Speaker 1: We're never taken out. And it was useless from a
Speaker 1: negotiating standpoint because North Vietnam did not bulge budge they
Speaker 1: post they have teen seventy. Nixon decided to escalate again
Speaker 1: by ordering a ground invasion of Cambodia. He announced this
Speaker 1: with a typically unhinged speech. And again this is public
Speaker 1: because at this point, you know, the New York Times
Speaker 1: is revealed things. So we live in an age of anarchy.
Speaker 1: We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which
Speaker 1: have been created by free civilizations in the past five
Speaker 1: hundred years. That's happening because kids are like protesting incologists. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, he framed as a test of the nation's
Speaker 1: quote will in character. Um. Seriously, he's right. When one
Speaker 1: of his staff members Balkman Kissinger staff members balked it
Speaker 1: plans to illegally invade Cambodi with ground troops. Troops, Henry
Speaker 1: told him, quote, your views represent the cowardice of the
Speaker 1: Eastern establishment. This staff member, William Watts, tried to physically
Speaker 1: attack Henry Kissinger, who was hid behind his desk. It's
Speaker 1: just like if that if he was only able to
Speaker 1: just kill him. What imagine if only there'd been a
Speaker 1: sharper letter opener on the desk just penned and put
Speaker 1: it like a pen through his neck. Yeah. Um, it's
Speaker 1: very funny that Kissinger did. It's some point have to
Speaker 1: hide behind a desk to stop staff from a strong
Speaker 1: bombing everywhere, and that he's hiding under his desk. Relax.
Speaker 1: So this staff member Watts resigns right after this, and
Speaker 1: when staff member Anthony Lake echoes Watts's concerns. Kissinger, presumably
Speaker 1: still hiding behind his desk, calls Lake not manly enough
Speaker 1: to do what was necessary, and Lake resigns too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: bold words from behind, hiding behind a desk. Yeah, big
Speaker 1: tough guy. Four days after Nixon's speech announcing the invasion
Speaker 1: of Cambodia, four students were shot dead at Kent State
Speaker 1: during a protest over the invasion. Nine more were wounded.
Speaker 1: Two weeks later, at Jackson State, police shot into a
Speaker 1: crowd of black students protesting the war. Two were killed
Speaker 1: and twelve wounded. The invasion prompted some of the first
Speaker 1: consequences and only consequences. Kissinger, ever, faced stern rebukes from
Speaker 1: fancy academics he respected. A group of them, men who
Speaker 1: had often acted as his brain trust and advised him
Speaker 1: and other presidential advisors on issues, marched into his office
Speaker 1: after the invasion. One of the men, Thomas Shelling, opened
Speaker 1: by saying that he supposed he should explain who they were.
Speaker 1: Kissinger responded with confusion that I know who you are.
Speaker 1: You're all good friends from Harvard. Next from Nil Ferguson's
Speaker 1: Kissinger no, said Shelling. We're a group of people who
Speaker 1: have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White
Speaker 1: House to conduct our foreign policy. And we have come
Speaker 1: to tell you so we are no longer at your
Speaker 1: disposal as personal advisors. Each of them then proceeded to
Speaker 1: rate him, taking five minutes apiece. Now sounds at this
Speaker 1: point if it's seen from Rudy when they all hand
Speaker 1: in there, yeah, form to get ready to play. That's
Speaker 1: it's like that. And this is stories like Rudy if
Speaker 1: you have, um, oh god, what's his fucking name, I'm
Speaker 1: spacing the West Wing motherfucker Aaron's description of him. If
Speaker 1: Aaron Sorkin is writing this, this is like the heroic
Speaker 1: moment where like the conscience of like the American ruling
Speaker 1: class that comes in. It's like, this is not right, Henry,
Speaker 1: and and really that's bullshit, that's not what's happening. And
Speaker 1: Ferguson goes on to note that these guys were kind
Speaker 1: of foolish it they're all Washington insiders. They have advised
Speaker 1: Shelling advised LBJ to massively escalate violence throughout the war
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. Ferguson continues, and this is his explanation of
Speaker 1: what they were really doing. Quote for these men publicly
Speaker 1: breaking with Kissinger with journalists briefed in advance about the
Speaker 1: breach was a form of self exculpay, not to say,
Speaker 1: an insurance policy. A student radicals back on the Harvard
Speaker 1: campus ran riot when new Stat told the Crimson, I
Speaker 1: think it's safe to say we're afraid. He did not
Speaker 1: specify of what others were more candid, as Shelling put it,
Speaker 1: if Cambodia succeeds, it will be a disaster, not just
Speaker 1: because my Harvard office may be burned down when I
Speaker 1: get home, but it will even be a disaster in
Speaker 1: the administration zone terms. So it's amazing it. Fox say, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, that's what this happens on the dollar
Speaker 1: p a lot where I'm like, all right, we got
Speaker 1: a hero, and then immediately I'm like more villains. God
Speaker 1: damn it. I mean to the extent that there's some heroes,
Speaker 1: the kids on these campuses who are actually like lighting
Speaker 1: buildings on fire and destroying things. They do make Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger and his academic friends afraid and uncomfortable briefly, which
Speaker 1: is more than anyone else does. Yeah, and what I
Speaker 1: mean this this would kind of be the last time
Speaker 1: that that even happens really, right, that like that that
Speaker 1: people in the that level of power do feel any
Speaker 1: sort of like threat from the regular folk. Yeah, credit
Speaker 1: where it's do. They are the only people that I'm
Speaker 1: aware of who made Henry Kissinger briefly feel something that
Speaker 1: vaguely resembles shame. Yeah, like seriously good work. Um, But
Speaker 1: of course you know that doesn't stop anything, obviously. You
Speaker 1: know he's got Yeah, he's got he's got many desks. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh So Cambodia falls into chaos as a result of
Speaker 1: the as most places would when bombed on this level. Right,
Speaker 1: hard to maintain a state with this level of things exploding. Um.
Speaker 1: It is unclear precisely how many people die in Operation Menu,
Speaker 1: the subsequent invasion of Cambodia and the bombing campaigns that followed.
Speaker 1: The low estimate is fifty thousand. The high estimates are
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. Thirty to
Speaker 1: fifty thousand. Lotions die in the bombing campaign, which makes
Speaker 1: the sparsely populated nation the most densely bombed place on Earth.
Speaker 1: Of these bombs failed to detonate, and in the years
Speaker 1: since the bombing, another twenty thousand people have died from
Speaker 1: the estimated eighty million bombs left in the soil of
Speaker 1: the victims or children. One Aid workers set of the situation.
Speaker 1: There are parts of low where there is literally no
Speaker 1: free space. There are no areas that have not been bombed.
Speaker 1: And when you are in the villages now, you still
Speaker 1: see the evidence of that. You see the bomb craters,
Speaker 1: You still see an unbelievable amount of metal and wreckage
Speaker 1: in an exploded ordinance just lying around in villages and
Speaker 1: it's still injuring and killing people today. What a legacy. Now,
Speaker 1: If any of this concerned Niction and Kissinger, I would
Speaker 1: like to just throw out there that I do feel
Speaker 1: that gardening should be more dangerous. So yes, and nobody's
Speaker 1: in disagreed about that, And we have enough bombs in
Speaker 1: this country to make gardening a lot more dangerous. Yeah. Beans,
Speaker 1: If if there's not a one in three chance digging
Speaker 1: up a potato loses you a goddamn arm, you're not
Speaker 1: really a gardener. So how are the tomatoes? Ken's dead?
Speaker 1: If any of this concerned Nixon and Kissinger, we have
Speaker 1: no evidence of it. We know that in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: Nixon asked how many did we kill in Lao and
Speaker 1: the Press Secretary Ron Ziegler responded with the guests maybe
Speaker 1: ten thousand fifteen. Kissinger agreed emotion in the lotion thing,
Speaker 1: we killed about ten fifteen. This is how they talk
Speaker 1: about the showcase showdown three to five, nine elevens worth
Speaker 1: of people. Obviously, Uh, did you get like one bag
Speaker 1: of grapes or two? Yeah? I had two bags of grapes.
Speaker 1: What's the cover fee to get into that? To get
Speaker 1: into that concert? It's like bucks, you know, yeah, except
Speaker 1: this is they're they're just complete and total fucking psychopaths,
Speaker 1: and they're off by a half at least. You know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to get accurate, you know, death tolds here. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the bombs were not the only thing left behind
Speaker 1: by the campaign that Kissinger orchestrated. Greg Grandon writes defoliation
Speaker 1: chemicals did their work just over a two week period
Speaker 1: April eighteenth to May second, nineteen sixty nine. US dropped
Speaker 1: agent Orange caused significant damage. Andrew Wells, who has long
Speaker 1: been involved in relief aid to Southeast Asia rights. Both
Speaker 1: the US government and independent inspection teams confirmed that a
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy three thousand acres were sprayed seven percent
Speaker 1: of Kompong Cham Province, two thousand, seven hundred of them
Speaker 1: seriously affected. The rubber plantations totaled approximately one third of
Speaker 1: Cambodia's total and represented a loss of twelve percent of
Speaker 1: the country's export earnings. Washington agreed to pay over twelve
Speaker 1: million in reparations, but Kissinger tried to defer the payment
Speaker 1: to fiscal year nineteen seventy two, when the money could
Speaker 1: be paid without a specific without a special request that
Speaker 1: would have revealed US cross border activity. Every effort Kissinger
Speaker 1: road should be made to avoid the necessity for a
Speaker 1: special budgetary request to provide funds to pay his claim.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Look, we're gonna, we're gonna. We're gonna
Speaker 1: get the money. You're gonna get the money. You're gonna
Speaker 1: get the money. Of the money. I just need to
Speaker 1: take this thing moved. Yeah, I need to move some
Speaker 1: stuff around. Just but you're gonna get it. It's fine.
Speaker 1: Let's just keep it on the on the d L,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Yeah, it's yeah. He service
Speaker 1: wasn't calling Trump Agent Orange, by the way. Uh, if
Speaker 1: that wasn't his code name, that's a disappointment. That is.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be disappointed
Speaker 1: in the Secret Service, but that is one of them.
Speaker 1: So the loss of life and economic damage caused Cambodia
Speaker 1: to spiral into chaos, or at least it was a
Speaker 1: factor other stuff's going on. We have a couple episodes
Speaker 1: about King Notre Dame Sahannock, who was a real piece
Speaker 1: of ship in the king of Cambodia. In this period,
Speaker 1: a lot's happening. Um, but unrest by the caused by
Speaker 1: the bombings and the economic devastation helped to spark a
Speaker 1: right wing coup, which was likely orchestrated with c I
Speaker 1: a help and thus with the direct input. You guys
Speaker 1: are looking to change things up here. We've got a plan,
Speaker 1: We got an idea. Does no matter what happened someone by,
Speaker 1: why don't we provide some help? Yeah, exactly. And the coup,
Speaker 1: you know, overthrows the king, who then starts backing the
Speaker 1: Khmer Rouge. Uh the win. Yeah, their counter revolution against
Speaker 1: the right wing coup, and this leads to the establishment
Speaker 1: of pulpots camer Rouge government YA. Once the Rouge took
Speaker 1: over in nineteen seventy five, Nixon had left office. Kissinger
Speaker 1: still though, was still in power. In November of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five, he told Thailand's foreign minister, you should also
Speaker 1: tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them.
Speaker 1: They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand
Speaker 1: in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean we get we get kissing you.
Speaker 1: I mean my people murderous thugs. I'm all about murderous thugs.
Speaker 1: I think we could find common ground. This man wants
Speaker 1: to kill a million people. I think that is a
Speaker 1: cute start. In nineteen eight, one questioned on this, Kissinger
Speaker 1: explained that quote, the Tie and the Chinese did not
Speaker 1: want a Vietnamese dominated Indo China. We didn't want the
Speaker 1: Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for
Speaker 1: Paul Pot, but I suspect we closed our eyes when
Speaker 1: some others did sing something for Paul Pots. Of course,
Speaker 1: the United States attempted at least to provide direct military
Speaker 1: aid to the Khmer Rouge in order to help them
Speaker 1: oppose Vietnam, and there's a lot of debate and uncertainty.
Speaker 1: It seems that very little, if any actually made it
Speaker 1: to the Cammer but this is primarily because of difficulty
Speaker 1: getting shipped into Cambodia at this point in time. Um.
Speaker 1: But it is fair to say that Kissinger and Nixon's
Speaker 1: actions were crucial in creating the circumstances that brought Pole
Speaker 1: Pot to power, and once he was in charge in
Speaker 1: massacring people, they tacitly supported his government because they thought
Speaker 1: it would sty me the Vietnamese. In total, from the
Speaker 1: killing that started when the US bombing raids began, to
Speaker 1: the people killed by pol Pot's regime to those who
Speaker 1: died fighting in the fighting with Vietnam that finally brought
Speaker 1: the rouge to an end, one point seven million Cambodians died,
Speaker 1: more than a quarter of the population of the country
Speaker 1: pre war. It's it's so incredible how their ideology of
Speaker 1: just communism bad. They're like, well, communism will kill a
Speaker 1: bunch of people, and they're just fucking everything they can
Speaker 1: to save people. Well, and it's also like they don't
Speaker 1: even really believe communist because the Camaros your communist as hell,
Speaker 1: and they're fine with working with them because Vietnam is
Speaker 1: the ones who beat them, and so they're angry at Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and it's like in Vietnam fights Cambodia, like it's not
Speaker 1: there's no these people don't believe in anything. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: not good lessons to take from this, but um no,
Speaker 1: it's it's someone should have stabbed Henry Kissingers, that's for sure,
Speaker 1: because if that guy stabbed him. Yeah, there's so many
Speaker 1: people we should have stabbed. There's so many, but Kissinger's
Speaker 1: way up there, and and in this story right, like
Speaker 1: we're not Obviously you can't blame all of the deaths
Speaker 1: in Cambodia on Kissinger a lot, just like you can't
Speaker 1: blame all of the deaths in Vietnam on Kissinger and Nixon,
Speaker 1: but like just so many lead to which he's central
Speaker 1: to a lot of the worst actions in these wars well,
Speaker 1: And so the I I keep thinking about the point
Speaker 1: you made in the last episode where it you know,
Speaker 1: the idea that l b J, that that he broke
Speaker 1: up the l b J plan to sort of end
Speaker 1: all of this and just for political reasons made that
Speaker 1: not happen, and that just that the avenue that we
Speaker 1: are down now is just I mean, it's unconscionable. And
Speaker 1: there's there's so much. Also, we also besides just the
Speaker 1: straight bombings, we destabilize areas, we change the trajectory. Look
Speaker 1: putin is our fucking doing. Yeah, we fucking took out
Speaker 1: the government. We we Yelson all that ship that was
Speaker 1: a I'm not gonna let you sit here and touch
Speaker 1: it on Yelson. He was a very in control of
Speaker 1: what he was doing. He definitely knew what was happening.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like having a bottle of smear enough in charge.
Speaker 1: Nothing that happened. Every everything we get involved with turns
Speaker 1: into a funk pie. I mean, it's just we just
Speaker 1: create chaos, but we're murder midas. It's this, it's this
Speaker 1: thing where we're talking about like how how insane it
Speaker 1: is that Kissinger is micromanaging these bombings. Which is not
Speaker 1: to say that like the military men who were doing
Speaker 1: it before, we're particularly better. And this is the problem
Speaker 1: that like we're going to have, you know, with Ukraine
Speaker 1: and whatnot to it's just that, well, now we have
Speaker 1: all of these people who are supposed to be the
Speaker 1: people we call experts, who are now going to be
Speaker 1: doing things, and like if you actually look at their resumes,
Speaker 1: it is not a wide ranging history of successes, you know,
Speaker 1: and it is the same thing with Russia. You could
Speaker 1: look at like Russian intervention a bunch of places. It's
Speaker 1: a nightmare. The kind of people who are in a
Speaker 1: position to make calls when the conflicts get to this
Speaker 1: level are always gooules, and they're always bad at anything
Speaker 1: but causing devastation. And that's why all of this keeps happening. Um,
Speaker 1: because none of these people are any good at it,
Speaker 1: and no one gets punished and nobody ever. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: fact that Bill Crystal is still saying what anybody should
Speaker 1: do anywhere the world. You're like, what the fun is
Speaker 1: going on? Who gets to go? Who goes away? Who
Speaker 1: goes away? Favorite? I imagine I know somebody who lost
Speaker 1: their job at a grocery store because they got arrested
Speaker 1: protesting for like protesting against police violence. Um, meanwhile, Bill
Speaker 1: Crystals like a guest media show. Yeah, it's it's Bill.
Speaker 1: What do you think I mean? Um, Yeah, it's it's frustrating.
Speaker 1: Every now and then, far too seldom you get a
Speaker 1: story like that billionaire Russian arms dealer who's yacht got
Speaker 1: partially sunk. But there's like three of those stories for
Speaker 1: every thousand Kissingers um, and they don't ever mean anything
Speaker 1: because that guy can afford to fix his fucking yacht.
Speaker 1: So when they were they were egging Bezos his boat.
Speaker 1: When when he was getting that bridge torn down, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like, I mean people, yeah, it's like he's gonna
Speaker 1: have someone hose it down and that he's fine. Everybody.
Speaker 1: You look. Yachts burn. We know burn, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: Yachts burn, and so do Bill Crystals crystal, So I
Speaker 1: think it's like, yeah, actually when you burn and he
Speaker 1: just turns into a few crystals. So Greg Grand and
Speaker 1: author of Kissinger's Shadow, sees the bombing campaign in Cambodia
Speaker 1: and Lao is the terminal phase in what he calls
Speaker 1: the crack up of America's domestic consensus, which had begun
Speaker 1: under Johnson. Kissinger considered conditions in the country at the
Speaker 1: time of Kent State to be quote near civil war conditions.
Speaker 1: The paranoia Nixon had felt led him to push for
Speaker 1: illegal expansions of domestic surveillance, which eventually led to his
Speaker 1: ouster from office. The Senate investigation into the Watergate scandal
Speaker 1: concluded quote Kent State marked a turning point for Nixon.
Speaker 1: The beginning of his downhill slide towards Watergate, Nixon grew
Speaker 1: increasingly unhinged, which is a story for another time. Nixon
Speaker 1: starting to lose a gang. It is worth noting that
Speaker 1: for all of the things happening at this point, Nixon
Speaker 1: as as a rule, anytime I quote him and Kissing
Speaker 1: Kissinger talking, Nixon is as a rule, drunker than you
Speaker 1: have ever been. Like then, you have ever been. I
Speaker 1: don't care how how drunk you've gotten, you have never gotten.
Speaker 1: Nixon in the White House hammered. So with Kissinger's help,
Speaker 1: Nixon cooks up a plan to pursue an arms control
Speaker 1: treaty in order to discredit his political rivals. Kissinger agreed
Speaker 1: that attacking the left was the right way to distract
Speaker 1: from the disaster they'd created in Southeast Asia. He told
Speaker 1: his boss, we've got to break the back of this
Speaker 1: generation of democratic leaders. Nixon responded in agreement, we've got
Speaker 1: to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.
Speaker 1: Good news on that one, buddy. Yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: a rare swish. That is a hole in one for you,
Speaker 1: my friend, No nuts, Yeah, yeah. Re election in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two was always going to be dicey for Nixon
Speaker 1: and Kissinger. Nixon's plan was the infamous Southern strategy, cultivating
Speaker 1: racial resentment in order to turn whites into a reliable
Speaker 1: Republican voting block. There's a lot to be said about this. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we were just kind of breezing past it. But part
Speaker 1: of the strategy, part of his strategy for doing this
Speaker 1: to get these Southern whites on his side, was to
Speaker 1: continue carpet bombing huge chunks of the East Asia, even
Speaker 1: though this had no impact on the war's course, and
Speaker 1: he knew it. Grant And described the continued bombing as
Speaker 1: quote blood tribute paid to the growing power of the
Speaker 1: American right, and as yeah, just and I mean it
Speaker 1: is like I mean, it's it's what our politics is now,
Speaker 1: which is just constantly the optics on how to get reelected.
Speaker 1: It's just the number crunch on how do you get
Speaker 1: reelected by doing things illegally or you know, shifting prior
Speaker 1: whatever it is. But yeah, change, yeah, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, like we all know that war
Speaker 1: helps poll numbers, so well, some of them do, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: But I mean, in the in the short term, it
Speaker 1: seems like it's it's a short there's a short term
Speaker 1: gain to be made, certainly if you're on the right,
Speaker 1: for sure, and it it's um. It is worth noting
Speaker 1: because I always had this idea, even at past the
Speaker 1: point where I stopped believing Henry Kissinger was a hero,
Speaker 1: um that he was doing what he was doing in
Speaker 1: Southeast Asia because they were like very specific, wonky things
Speaker 1: he believed about the conduct of the war and how
Speaker 1: to win it. He was just like willing to do
Speaker 1: these horrible things. But like, no, they know what's not
Speaker 1: winning the war. This is for votes. And Kissinger, so
Speaker 1: I mean, you're you're basically just saying it is just
Speaker 1: a a white supremacist thing. They're killing people of color
Speaker 1: to make whites in the South happy. That's all we're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: supremis is the country. But that doesn't fit on a
Speaker 1: lawn placard. Yeah, one of those like in this in
Speaker 1: this house, we believe in the next administration. We believe
Speaker 1: in covering up in order to And so it's worth
Speaker 1: noting to Kissinger isn't just micromanaging the the actual racist
Speaker 1: bombing campaign that they're doing to get votes. He is
Speaker 1: also the frontman Nixon sends out who talked to right
Speaker 1: wing leaders to to to try and like pump them
Speaker 1: up about this. Nixon sent him to talk to Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 1: then the governor of California. Kissinger sat down on Nixon's
Speaker 1: behalf with Billy Graham, with William F. Buckley, with God.
Speaker 1: His pattern went like this. The President wanted me to
Speaker 1: give you a brief call to tell you that with
Speaker 1: all the hysteria on TV and then the news on LAO,
Speaker 1: we feel we have set up everything we set out
Speaker 1: to do. Destroyed more supplies than in Cambodia last year,
Speaker 1: set them back many months. We achieved what we were after. Well,
Speaker 1: I tell you, I really I can't wait to go
Speaker 1: out there. And rarely that was true. Sarah Hank having
Speaker 1: having just been doing some research. He is friends with
Speaker 1: Frank Sinatra. Frank, we call him on the phone. Yeah
Speaker 1: that sounds right, sounds right. Well, I get a nuclear weapon?
Speaker 1: Is that possible? Frank Sinatra with a nuke? That's yeah.
Speaker 1: There's no people left if that had happened. And Dan
Speaker 1: Martin's drink and they did a notice kissing you spent
Speaker 1: a particularly long time bragging to Ronald Reagan about the
Speaker 1: administration's achievements. Quote, we wouldn't have had Cambodia, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have had Lao, and we wouldn't have had an eighty
Speaker 1: billion dollar defense budget, you know, without Nixon getting elected.
Speaker 1: He also told Reagan, we wouldn't have had m Chetica. Now,
Speaker 1: am Chetica is an island off the coast of Alaska
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen seventies, the White House wanted to
Speaker 1: nuke it for a lot of complicated reasons. This is
Speaker 1: one thing. I'm actually I was not other islands, but
Speaker 1: specifically am Chitka. Yeah, we're like Amshitka. So the White
Speaker 1: House wants to nuke this island off the coast of Alaska.
Speaker 1: And as you have environmentalists and indigenous people who just
Speaker 1: folks whose brain freedom and hate freedom. Here's Greg Granton again.
Speaker 1: The test had no military or scientific benefit, but was
Speaker 1: seen as something of a ritual by the right, fireworks
Speaker 1: to celebrate the end of Johnson's presidency when many Hawks,
Speaker 1: like Curtis LeMay, felt the United States had fallen behind
Speaker 1: on nuclear development. Then, when public opposition to the detonation
Speaker 1: began to grow, Nixon had a chance to show conservatives
Speaker 1: that he would stand up to liberals. He let me
Speaker 1: known that we're the Supreme Court to issue an injunction
Speaker 1: against the test. He would go forward anyway. The Court
Speaker 1: didn't block the test, but haled him and told Kissinger
Speaker 1: to play it for politics anyway. Tell Reagan, we're taking
Speaker 1: an unmitigated heat in order to keep that thing going.
Speaker 1: We need all the support of the right. Later after
Speaker 1: the test was conducted, Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater
Speaker 1: and mocked the fears of environmentalists. The seals are still swimming.
Speaker 1: The President said, I'm damn proud of you. Goldwater told him, honestly,
Speaker 1: I need to get a bucket to Barfen when people
Speaker 1: when people think like, oh, we've we've become dumb recently,
Speaker 1: We've always been so fucking stupid. It cannot be emphasized enough.
Speaker 1: We're just really dumb. I honestly, I I definitely thought
Speaker 1: that we've I mean, it is a show cocking level
Speaker 1: of dumb. It's the fact that it's just this dumb.
Speaker 1: It's just been going on an island because because they
Speaker 1: wanted fireworks. Yeah, because wanted fireworks, and it's just that
Speaker 1: they could tell Reagan it's like his gender reveal fucking
Speaker 1: party like right, right, Jesus Christ, it is worth noting
Speaker 1: for the sake of talking about how dumb we still
Speaker 1: are today. Um. Curtis LeMay, who was one of the
Speaker 1: people cheering on the bombing of this random island, is
Speaker 1: essentially the hero of Malcolm Gladwell's book The Bomber Mafia,
Speaker 1: which talks about how cool the bombing apparatus we set
Speaker 1: up was and how it helped keep things peaceful and
Speaker 1: built the wonderful packs Americana. That's I'm sure these Cambodian
Speaker 1: civilians we've talked about appreciate it. Well, that's the one
Speaker 1: where you need to Once you have ten thousand bombs,
Speaker 1: you're an expert. Yeah, Yeah, that's right. That's right. If
Speaker 1: you dropped ten thousand bombs, you're an accident bombing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's exacts exactly So in order to be a
Speaker 1: well to do it right, you have to do it
Speaker 1: wrong for you gotta log the bombs. That's exactly right.
Speaker 1: Gre So. Part of what made Kissinger remarkable, though, was
Speaker 1: his ability to rope conservatives in line for mass murder
Speaker 1: while also charming the entire liberal establishment of the East
Speaker 1: Coast Nixon's chief of staff later recalled we knew Henry
Speaker 1: as the hawk of hawks in the Oval office. But
Speaker 1: in the evenings, a magical transformation took place, touching glasses
Speaker 1: at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger
Speaker 1: would suddenly become a dove, and the press, beguiled by
Speaker 1: Henry's charman humor, bought it. They just couldn't believe that
Speaker 1: the intellectual, smiling, humorous Henry the k was a hawk
Speaker 1: like that bastard Nixon. It really is all about like
Speaker 1: if if, if, if Donald Trump had had talked like
Speaker 1: an Aron Sorkin character and like quoted books that people
Speaker 1: don't read but no are smart books, he would have
Speaker 1: been the most popular president in a generation. Like well,
Speaker 1: and I mean that'll happen. Yeah, one of them will
Speaker 1: figure it out. Yeah, it will. And you got to
Speaker 1: dial the racism down a little, and you've got to
Speaker 1: dial the polite up and then kind of equalize them,
Speaker 1: and then you can yeah, and then and then with
Speaker 1: the right access to the right people in media. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean we already saw that. I mean
Speaker 1: even under Trump, where you've got all these fucking reporters
Speaker 1: who had these like bombshells about horrible crimes being committed
Speaker 1: that they like didn't release for a year and change
Speaker 1: because they got a book deal. Yeah right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean John Bolton was basically just there to write
Speaker 1: a book. Yeah, everyone was. The whole administration was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like fucking navy seals with the books. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Kissinger's reputation was as a brilliant, computer brained policy want
Speaker 1: but his success came from his charm. He was able
Speaker 1: to win reporters over with a mix of leaks and
Speaker 1: effusive praise for their work, something that made them feel
Speaker 1: like insiders and thus sympathetic. He had a regular series
Speaker 1: of lunches with Arthur Slessinger, a liberal historian, whom he
Speaker 1: made sure to can confidentially inform quote, I have been
Speaker 1: thinking a lot about resignation after the invasion of Cambodia
Speaker 1: Slashinger was not privy to the information that prooved Kissinger
Speaker 1: had planned the whole thing, so he believed Kissinger when
Speaker 1: Henry said that he'd only kept working for Nixon to
Speaker 1: prevent more damage to quote institutions of authority. Kissinger would
Speaker 1: warn his liberal friends that if he resigned, Spireau agnew
Speaker 1: would run foreign policy. He was basically threatening, if I'm
Speaker 1: not here, the far right's going to be totally in
Speaker 1: power and foreign policy. I'm the only one keeping things
Speaker 1: from going crazy. It's like Sessions and with trying. I
Speaker 1: mean there are multiple people like that, Like the amount
Speaker 1: of times when people will be like, oh, mc masters,
Speaker 1: you know, these are the good guys inside of that.
Speaker 1: You know, I hate this too. As he's drawing on
Speaker 1: a map where to annihilate. Yeah, yeah, and it works.
Speaker 1: It always works. It works, and it works over and
Speaker 1: over and over again. As a rule, if their job
Speaker 1: is to be a journalist who spends their time face
Speaker 1: to face with powerful people, they're bad at their job.
Speaker 1: As a rule. Every now and then you get an
Speaker 1: ext sception. But as a rule, no, it's like when
Speaker 1: Chomsky points out to that reporter that he has the
Speaker 1: rye he's sitting in that scene. Yeah, you get the
Speaker 1: odd people who are willing to like report on the
Speaker 1: Pentagon papers or whatever, and like, do you know you
Speaker 1: get or the Afghanistan papers Washington Post. Not to not
Speaker 1: to downplay the fact that there are people in those
Speaker 1: institutions who do do damning reports on on power, but
Speaker 1: also the level of complicity within the broader media apparatus
Speaker 1: means that even when you get a damning report on
Speaker 1: for example, the war in Afghanistan, which the Washington Post,
Speaker 1: if you've read that, it's utterly damning, didn't do anything,
Speaker 1: doesn't matter, doesn't doesn't stop anything. They're very I mean,
Speaker 1: you know. And then and the reason why people do
Speaker 1: it less and less is because you're attacked. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: it works. The public attacks discredit you, and then you
Speaker 1: are you are what you are, You're no longer you
Speaker 1: no longer get access to that information. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: So a good example of how Kiss changed his charm.
Speaker 1: As a speech he gave it M I T in
Speaker 1: January of nineteen seventy one. He started off by meaning
Speaker 1: a confidential air and telling the students that Nixon had
Speaker 1: not been his quote first choice, but that in time
Speaker 1: he'd come to see the bombing of Cambodia as the
Speaker 1: only quote sensible path towards the Vietnamization. Vietnomization is like
Speaker 1: the process of the U. S getting out in South
Speaker 1: Vietnam taking over, Right, That's the big buzz word Nixon
Speaker 1: and his jury using when one student asked him what
Speaker 1: it would take to make him resign from the Nixon administration.
Speaker 1: Kissinger said he wouldn't quote unless gas chambers were set
Speaker 1: up or some horrendous moral outrage. Wait, wait, what is it?
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Exactly? He wouldn't get out unless
Speaker 1: unless Nixon was setting up gas chambers. I mean, what
Speaker 1: the fuck? Like his child his childhood didn't affect him
Speaker 1: in any way. Yeah, outrageous, And it's confidence the student.
Speaker 1: And it's it's interesting because then the student who asked
Speaker 1: this question of Kissinger later realized, like, is there really
Speaker 1: a difference between forcing people into a gas chamber and
Speaker 1: incinerating from them from the sky with a bombing campaign?
Speaker 1: I guess not. But at the moment, this doesn't really
Speaker 1: occur to him. And at the moment he writes quote,
Speaker 1: he had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one
Speaker 1: of us, And right, I'll blame the journalists, like I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna blame a student for falling for Henry because
Speaker 1: like he's essentially still a child, and Henry Kissinger is
Speaker 1: the most powerful man in the world. Of course he's
Speaker 1: good at walk talking circles around these fucking kids. Um.
Speaker 1: The week after that speech, Kissinger and Nixon sent ground
Speaker 1: troops into Law after another massive round of aerial bombardment.
Speaker 1: This involved seventeen thousand South Vietnamese troops supported by US
Speaker 1: air power. It was a catastrophe. Eight thousand South Vietnamese
Speaker 1: soldiers were killed or wounded. The United States lost two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifteen men. Nixon considered it a victory because
Speaker 1: it played well with conservatives in the media. And he's drunk,
Speaker 1: he is, and he's he is, he just he just
Speaker 1: pounded back an entire bottle of vodka, before saying that
Speaker 1: when the media savage Law as a pointless blood bag,
Speaker 1: Kissinger ran to his boss and complained about vicious coverage,
Speaker 1: saying if Brittain had pressed like this in World War Two,
Speaker 1: they would have quitten forty two. Both Kissinger and Nixon
Speaker 1: saw Law as a win because it benefited their domestic
Speaker 1: chances of re election. As Nixon told his right hand man,
Speaker 1: the main thing, Henry on Lao, I don't care what
Speaker 1: happens there. It's a win. See wind See as there's
Speaker 1: a little gangs three that's Ryan Henry Coppers. Oh. And
Speaker 1: as the re election campaign turned forward, Kissinger was about
Speaker 1: to help his boss engineer another win and this one. Boy,
Speaker 1: how do you think we've seen a body count so far?
Speaker 1: Oh my god? What the fuck? But that's still morning.
Speaker 1: That island sweeps. Yeah yeah, now they're hitting sweeps. And
Speaker 1: if you think hundreds of thousands of Cambodian dead plus
Speaker 1: eight ing in the deaths of another millionaire, so was bad.
Speaker 1: It was just it's really bad. It's a historic crime.
Speaker 1: But also Henry Kissinger's just getting started. So you guys
Speaker 1: want to plug anything my ears death. I remember because
Speaker 1: when I did an episode on our podcast about Tim
Speaker 1: Leary and there's a lot of the you know, uh Nixon,
Speaker 1: law and Order president stuff in there, and how drunk
Speaker 1: he was. But also his lunch every day was pineapple
Speaker 1: circles with cottage cheese in the middle and um, and
Speaker 1: so that was his that was his daily drunk lunch.
Speaker 1: And then there's the one night where where he's starting
Speaker 1: to feel the heat. Well maybe I don't know if
Speaker 1: he'll get it into that, but he basically he goes
Speaker 1: out hammered with his valet and he goes and talks
Speaker 1: to some of the people protesting him, and like one
Speaker 1: of the wakes, one of these guys up and he's like,
Speaker 1: you really think I'm a bad guy, and the guy's
Speaker 1: just like the funk is going on? Right? Nixon now cruising. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well we'll um we as you know. Look, it sounds
Speaker 1: like the world loves America after hearing some of this stuff.
Speaker 1: So we will be going to Australia on a tour. Um.
Speaker 1: You can go to dollar podcast dot com for those
Speaker 1: tour dates. Will be touring America and um, even if
Speaker 1: we do badly, we won't bomb as hard as Kissinger Nixon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it would be hard to it would be
Speaker 1: level I don't honestly, we still have a lot of bombs.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we have enough bombs to bomb
Speaker 1: that hard anymore. I don't think so. I honestly think
Speaker 1: we could pull our pants down and fight with our
Speaker 1: penises and still people be like that. That's not that's
Speaker 1: I've seen. I've heard of where's bombings. I have seen
Speaker 1: a couple of cities leveled by American bombs at this point,
Speaker 1: and it's still not as much as fucking Lao got bombed.
Speaker 1: It's just yeah, he cannot process it. And well I'm
Speaker 1: on the road to go to Gareth Reynolds dot com
Speaker 1: for tour dates. But it feels it feels wrong to
Speaker 1: do that hard promotion. Well, it's great. Will put in
Speaker 1: a plug for the concept of death, because as long
Speaker 1: as as long as men die, you know, there's all
Speaker 1: of these ghouls eventually had to face the end of
Speaker 1: of of everything in the same way that that those
Speaker 1: people in Cambodia did. And one day will come for
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger and he will be frightened and alone and
Speaker 1: and left. I feel like he bombed the reaper. I
Speaker 1: mean he like he is the level of melting. I
Speaker 1: mean he is. He dies. I hope he just I
Speaker 1: hope he ships himself and then slowly dies over eight hours. Yes,
Speaker 1: it needs to be like that. He needs to be.
Speaker 1: It needs to be a letting. There's a you know,
Speaker 1: the one war criminal in all of history who got
Speaker 1: close to what he deserved is Yanhard Hydrich, the architect
Speaker 1: of the Holocaust, who stupidly charged a bunch of assassins
Speaker 1: and got wounded by a bomb and shot into his
Speaker 1: own guts for several days until he died of steps
Speaker 1: us over the course of a weekend. Change. That's that's
Speaker 1: the kind of death and and and not just kissing you.
Speaker 1: There's like thirty people we've named in this story. You
Speaker 1: deserve that kind of death. There's a lot of folks
Speaker 1: pot died old and relatively you know, unpunished. You know
Speaker 1: they all, most of them do. That would be great
Speaker 1: to hear a judge sentence Kissinger to that, like it
Speaker 1: would be due to shifting in your own guts for
Speaker 1: about a week after a bomb just embows you. That's
Speaker 1: that's the right, that's the right punishment for for this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Um, all right, yeah, yeah, Hi, everybody.
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here and my novel After the Revolution is
Speaker 1: available for pre order now from a k press dot org. Now,
Speaker 1: if you go to a k press dot org you
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 real cool. You can also preorder
Speaker 1: it in physical or in kindle form from Amazon or
Speaker 1: pretty much wherever books are sold. So please google a
Speaker 1: k press after the Revolution um, or find an indie
Speaker 1: bookstore in your area and preorder it. You'll get assigned
Speaker 1: a copy, and you'll make me very happy.