Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Kissinger

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Robert is joined again by Gareth Reynolds & Dave Anthony (The Dollop) for part three of our epic six part series on Henry Kissinger. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Sophie, how do I introduce part three of the Kissinger series? You just did it. Gareth and Dave are right here. They're waiting for something good and I'm just fucking it up, Sophie. I mean, yeah, but you accidentally introduced the podcast, which is behind the bastards. Behind the dollops, dollop the bastards. Dollop the bastards. A hybrid podcast. And like all hybrids, it is incapable of procreating. That's right.

But better at getting up steep mountain passes. It's getting a little goaty now. We can multiply by cell division, but not through sexual opinions. Yeah. We've tried. Yeah, we have. We're in that process. Boy, how do you have we tried? So since we last recorded a podcast, war has broken out in Eastern Europe.

Oh, God, three days. We like ended it and then it was like, oh, wow, it's happening. And now it feels like it's been two months since then. Had a brief conversation. What do you think's going to happen? And then immediately checked our phones to be like, oh, okay. So they're shelling all over the place. Great.

Oh, so y'all, are we ready to learn about Henry Kissinger and a little country you might have heard of called Cambodia? Oh, God. And also a separate country you might have heard of called Laos and also Vietnam still. So that energy. I am. Let's go. Let's do it.

Yeah. So on February 14, Valentine's Day, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson approved Operation Rolling Thunder. This was a long-term campaign of aerial bombing against North Vietnam. Its primary aims were to help the morale of the South Vietnamese and the Saigon government to persuade North Vietnam to stop supporting the Viet Cong and to destroy the North Vietnamese transportation infrastructure and industrial base so as to stop them from sending men and equipment south.

It did not succeed as a spoiler. None of this. None of this works. Like it's just amazing that like you have all this firepower. You have all these planes. And really, you're talking about destroying like railroads and shipping stuff. And like underground tunnels too. This is the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you know?

Yeah. I mean, is that what we're talking about? The Ho Chi Minh Trail? Yes. Okay. But then they were never going to do that. No. This is like a lesson that no one ever learns in warfare because you can also point to like

the saturation bombing of Germany, which had a minimal effect on German industrial production. You could talk about like what's happening right now in Ukraine, which has not succeeded in its strategic aims. You could talk about a number of wars the U.S. has been involved in. You could talk about like World War I, where the British would have dropped a million shells in a couple of hours on a chunk of trench line and then all get killed by machine gun fire because the shells didn't do enough. Like military leaders always have this idea that we can just bomb our problems away and

it just never really works. Yeah. No, it doesn't. Yeah. You know, what it does, it terrifies the civilian population. It sure does. Yes. And it helps the Pentagon a lot, I think.

It does help the Pentagon. It makes money for people. So I guess to that extent, it succeeds in its goal and Operation Rolling Thunder did make some people a lot of money. It continued for three straight years until November of 1968 during this period, Air Force Navy and Marine Corps planes through more than 300,000 attack sorties, which dropped more than 864,000 tons of bombs. Oh, good.

For reference, the United States dropped half a million tons of bombs in the Pacific Theater during all of World War II. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which we bombed the shit out of North Vietnam to no notable effect. According to our trustworthy friends at the CIA, the raids did $500 million in damage, killed 21,000 people and injured more than 30,000 more. The CIA says that 75% of all casualties were people involved in military operations.

US government estimates not by the CIA, however, estimate at least 30,000 civilian fatalities. Their estimates place the civilian death toll much higher at close to 200,000 civilians. Probably fair to say north of 100,000, a lot of folks. By the time Kissinger and Nixon took office, it was clear that Rolling Thunder had failed miserably. This was due in part to the existence of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1959, this is before US soldiers had officially entered the country, the trail had been created under order by the Lao Dong, which is the Communist Party of Vietnam, to aid them in

what was at that point a building conflict with South Vietnam. At the start, it led across just the demilitarized zone into Que Son and South Vietnam. Porters would carry boxes of ammunition and rifles on their body, which they would then hand to insurgents in the south. Over time, the trail was expanded to a vast underground transit network, more than 12,000 miles in size, capable of moving more than 10,000 troops and thousands of trucks per year. As the fighting escalated, the trail veered into Lao, where the government was engaged

fighting its own insurgency and unable to stop the transit of weapons. The Ho Chi Minh Trail allowed North Vietnam to smuggle equipment south and to evade the US naval blockade that sought to choke it out. Today, even Defense Department sources recognize it as one of the greatest logistical successes of 20th century warfare. It works pretty good for this trail. It's amazing to think of the number of bombs you're talking about, and then they made a tunnel.

They dug a hole, yeah, like a really good hole, but it's like El Chapo. It's not just a tunnel, it's in a jungle, like we're talking about a very difficult sort of environment to make a tunnel. It's not that, like, it's incredible what they did. Yeah. So, LBJ's administration sent planes into Lao to bomb the trail, and to escort Laotian planes while they bombed the trail. When US airmen were killed or captured over Lao, their families were told they'd gone

down in Southeast Asia to allow LBJ to claim he'd abided by his 1964 election promise to avoid a wider war. Cambodia was bombed as well, but during LBJ's administration, Lao was considered a more important target. They thought more stuff was getting into Vietnam through Lao. This changed in 1968, when the Tet Offensive made it clear that North Vietnam had gotten very good at running troops in and out of Cambodia. Johnson hadn't been willing to escalate the bombing campaign against a neutral country,

though, especially since, again, there was this big election going on, and he was kind of having his vice president run on the promise that, like, we're really going to end this thing. So, LBJ, when he's trying to tease North Vietnam with a bombing halt, isn't going to just start laying into Cambodia. In the spring of 1969, after Kissinger and Nixon took office, they approved the expanded use of US special forces in Lao, along with a campaign of sustained airstrikes. This was called Operation Steel Tiger.

All of these. So dumb. Just the stupidest names. Yeah. They're always so dumb. Yeah. We, I mean, we, the marketing that we have gone for in this country for so long has been so absurd.

Steel Tiger. Well, I mean, they're just taking Y&T album names at this point. Yeah. If only they'd gone with, like, Prince, Operation Purple Rain, but it's like a defoliant that gives everyone cancer. So it's, I should note here that all secret operations carried out by any US forces anywhere in the world during the Nixon administration were approved personally by Henry Kissinger. Henry was the chairman of something called the 40 Committees.

Hell. Oh, sorry. Yes. This was a semi-secret body that had been set up to provide management and oversight to CIA covert operations. The committee was made up of members of the National Security Council. They concerned themselves regularly with the question of how to stop weapons from flowing into Vietnam.

By this point, trails ran through parts of Laos and Cambodia, but also from the Vietnam-Chinese border. So Kissinger is the head of this committee, considers a number of ways to stop weapons from getting into New, or from getting into North Vietnam, including the use of thermonuclear weapons to annihilate the railways between North Vietnam and China, out of its entire damn mind. And to be fair, is nuts enough that even Kissinger is like, no, that's a little too far. Let's sleep on this.

He also considered bombing the dykes that kept North Vietnam's irrigation system from flooding all of its fields. Both of these would have been war crimes on a Titanic scale. Thankfully, Kissinger declined to do either in favor of a completely different set of war crimes. So that's good. That's nice. At least he picked.

Yeah. Let's do a different thing. He decides which war crimes to commit like we decide like jeans or sweatpants in the morning. I mean, I think that would go really well with what we're doing now. That'll really tie the whole thing together. Yeah. That's quite a life.

So immediately after taking office, Henry helps his new boss put together a menu of bombardment targets in Cambodia. This is literally called Operation Menu. No. Yeah. What? Have you bombed on us before? Have you ever bombed on us before?

Can I do specials? We've got some great ideas on specials right now. Be sure to tip your bombardier. Tip your bombardier. Get the sample platter. That was, that's what, I don't really, I actually don't recall off the top of my head which bombing operation McCain was involved in, but there's a good, there's a good tip joke to be made there.

Somebody will figure it out. We'll do it in post. Yeah. We'll figure it out. Different parts of Operation Menu had code names, different targets had code names like breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner. What the fuck? What?

What? It's, I mean, it is one thing to be like so sadistic and it's just another thing to tie it into. Do you want to try brunch? Yeah. Should we do a brunch? Yeah. We're going back to brunch finally under the watchful eye of the next administration.

They'll never take this away from us. It's nice that slaughter can be fun. They can find fun at least to slaughter. You gotta love what you do, Dave, otherwise it's just going to feel like work, you know? Yeah. So, before they began this series of bombings, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they warned the White House, quote, some Cambodian casualties would be sustained in the operation and that quote, the surprise effect of attack, could tend to increase casualties.

So they're like, the fact that we're not warning anyone and that we're keeping this a secret means more civilians will die, like heads up. So you know what you're doing, this is what's going to happen. Now as they approached the question of bombing Cambodia, Kissinger and Nixon had a choice. They could either tell Congress or they could hide what they were doing and use the presidential power over the armed services to appropriate funds from other places in order to carry out the bombing in secret. Nixon had been elected with Kissinger's help in part due to the LBJ administration's failure

to end the war. He didn't want to go into 1972's reelection campaign having to defend the fact that he expanded it. Henry Kissinger worked with colonels Alexander Hague and Ray Sitton to figure out a way for the president to direct bombing operations in a private manner and I'm going to quote from Kissinger's shadow by Greg Grandin. Sitton, based on recommendations he received from General Creighton Abrams, the commander of military operations in Vietnam, would work up a number of targets in Cambodia to be struck.

Then he would bring them to Kissinger and Hague in the White House for approval. Kissinger was very hands-on, revising some of Sitton's work. I don't know what he was using as his reason for varying them, Sitton later recalled. Like here in this area, Kissinger would tell them, or strike there in that area. Once Kissinger was satisfied with the proposed target, Sitton would back-channel the coordinates to Saigon and from there a courier would pass them on to the appropriate radar stations, where an officer would make a last-minute switch. The B-52 would be diverted from its cover target in South Vietnam into Cambodia, where

it would drop its bomb load on the real target. When the run was complete, the officer in charge of the deception would burn whatever documents, maps, computer printouts, radar reports, messages, and so on that might reveal the actual flight. Then he would write up false post-strike paperwork indicating that the South Vietnam sortie was flown as planned. It's so much work. Yeah.

It reminds me of when I used to skip school, that the lengths I would go to to get away with cutting class and the point would be made always to me, like if you put this focus towards studying, you'd spend less time and it would be more effective, but instead you just waste so much, instead of just stopping, you do all this gymnastics just to continue the thing that is the problem, that makes the problem compound. Yeah. They really are going through a lot of work to illegally bomb a neutral country. To look like they're not bombing.

Yeah. To look like they're not. It's gaslighting. That's what this is, Kiss & Cheek, you know? We're finally going to get them canceled. This is going to be what does it. Man, it would be, imagine, the uncancellable. We're going to do, Kiss & Cheek, what Hannibal Burris did to Cosby.

Oh, man. Oh, come on. Come on. So, you know, obviously, this is very illegal. There's a lot of parts of it that are illegal. For example, the military has a chain of command, and Sittin was bypassing his bosses in the Department of Defense, because he's just a colonel, right? Like colonels don't get to, that's not their, like you're not at that level, right?

So he is bypassing the normal chain of command in order to directly orchestrate an illegal bombing campaign with the White House, and kind of cutting out a chunk of the Pentagon. Sittin knew at the time that it was weird to cut his commanding officers out and report directly to Henry Kiss & Cheek. He later recalled, I kind of felt I was way out on a limb and skating on some pretty thin ice with all my trips to the west basement of the White House, where he's meeting with like, yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm going to a secret basement to talk about bombing. Like maybe this isn't how it's supposed to be done.

He doesn't seem like a democracy. I feel like we shouldn't be doing things like this in a basement. You've come to a secret democracy basement, yeah. The people voted for this basement. Do the fun knock, so I know it's you. I noted here that they kind of cut out a large chunk of like the military command apparatus to do this, which doesn't mean that those guys were against what they were doing. And in fact, all of Sittin's superiors knew what he was doing.

They just didn't want to be involved, because again, it was a crime, you know? So they're like, they're down with the cutout because they're just like, yeah, you do it. Yeah, I don't want my name on this shit. That's fucking crazy, but go with it for sure. I love it. I love it. We love it. Don't keep me out of the loop, but I love it.

But they didn't know about the bombing of Cambodia the same way I have never known a pot dealer. Right. Right. So Sittin would regularly like, I don't know, I'm not going to say this is to his credit, but he was like, this is weird. And he would go, he did on a couple of occasions go to his superiors and was like, are you okay with this?

And his exact phrase and what they responded was just do just what you're doing when you get a call to go to the White House, go because you don't really have a choice, which is great. Oh my God. It's so good. It's straight out of the show snowfall. Like it's just like this shit just happens all the time. Yeah. This is what happened with Iran Contra.

It was the same fucking shit that, you know, yeah. It's all crimes and it's worth noting that like the United States is going to war with a neutral country in secret under the personal direction of a guy who several months ago had been a Harvard professor. Like Kissinger is not even a year distant from being a fucking teacher and this and now he is orchestrating a secret war in Cambodia. And I love the beginning thing where you said there's like a guy whose job it is to pick targets and he's picking targets and Kissinger's just taking the maps and going, no, I like

this bomb here. Just totally random. He doesn't have any fucking idea what he's doing. He's just like, that hill looks like it should go away. He has not even begun to micromanage this war crime date. So the purpose of this illegal bombing campaign was not just to stop the movement of Vietnamese troops and materiel. It also played a role in advancing what Nixon called his madman theory.

Now the president had shared this with close confidence prior to the 1968 election. He told his future chief of staff that in order to negotiate an end to the war with favorable terms, he felt he had to make the North Vietnamese quote, believe I've reached a point where I might do anything to stop the war. So just slip the word to them that for God's sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed about communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry and he has his hand on the nuclear button and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace, which is like the idea is someone's like, so you want us to try to convey that you're crazy.

Okay. That seems, I think it's coming across, sir. Honestly, I think that's already sort of baked into this whole thing a little bit. It's also very funny that like they are trying to scare Ho Chi Minh, who at this point is fighting his second winning war against a major world power with like a very, very small number of people, you know, like North Vietnam, not a big country compared to say the French imperial forces or the United States. He's not a kind of, you're not going to scare Ho Chi Minh, right?

He's not a guy who gets spooked. No, it's over. That's just absolutely not happening at this point. Yeah. Kissinger either believed in his boss's plan or understood that he had to play along. Greg Grandin argues that Nixon's madman theory was actually just an extension of the foreign policy arguments that Kissinger himself had been making for years. Quote, toughness after all was a late motif that ran through much of his statecraft.

The idea that war and diplomacy are inseparable and that to be effective diplomats need to be able to punish and persuade an equal unrestricted measure. In fact, the madman theory was an extension of Kissinger's philosophy of the deed that power wasn't power unless one was willing to use it, that the purpose of action was to neutralize the inertia of inaction. I mean, it's not a double down. It's 18 double downs, but at some point you just, I at least in my lifetime had a moment where I did believe that there were people who would like point out the crazy shit.

But the more you learn, the more you go, no, there's just, there's not. They are just all like, it's like a bunch of junkies figuring out how to get more junk. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, it's just how do you get through the day? It's not long term anything. Yep. You know, there's a degree to which, and this is like one of the things that's most frustrating about this.

Part of how this always gets justified is there's legitimate logic in that, yeah, Hitler gobbled up a bunch of little chunks of Western Europe and nobody stopped him and they should have like something should have been done, like we decided to take Czechoslovakia, you know, we're doing the Angeles or certainly, you know, like they're, and they take this logic of like, yeah, if you have this like massive militarized nation gobbling up its neighbors, you can't just necessarily do nothing. And they apply that to like, well, okay, we've got a bomb Cambodia because some dudes are hiking through it with guns on their back.

Like that's a nonsense escalation. Chamberlain also is always in play there too, because it's like, everyone's like, oh, yeah, you don't want to be Chamberlain. Yeah. We're appeasing North Vietnam if we don't drop more bombs and we're dropped in all of World War Two on Cambodia. Yeah, on Cambodia. It's this nonsense escalation of logical, of historical logic that's like, like someday

Nixon's just going to look in the mirror and be like, sometimes I think I'm, I'm just fighting a war inside of myself. They're actually, there are some quotes from Kissinger that aren't all that far off gear. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

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So the first bombing mission in this operation was launched on March 18, 1969. Kissinger was in conversation at the time when he was interrupted with a note telling him that the bombing run had been a success. He smiled and then sent the information on to the president. Nixon's chief of staff later recalled, historic day, Kissinger really excited. He came in beaming with the report. Now it was noted by people who were around the White House that Kissinger seemed to enjoy quote, playing the Bombadier, taking great pains to direct the destruction.

Seymour Hirsch wrote that quote, when the military men presented a proposed bombing list, Kissinger would redesign the missions, shifting a dozen planes perhaps from one area to another and altering the timing of the bombing runs. That's yeah, guys, no fucking expertise in this area. Absolutely none. He's a fucking nerd who reads books. You don't know anything about what to bomb, Henry. It's like me showing up at a hospital and being like, I give me this surgical schedule.

I need to start working these surgeries and getting them in order. It's fucking crazy. It is. I mean, there's a human impulse here. We're seeing it in Ukraine where all these random people are being like, here's how you disable a tank. And it's like, you've never disabled a tank. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

You're not going to, like, throwing paint on it isn't going to stop it. You're going to get people killed if anyone's stupid enough to listen to you. Shut up. It just like, Kissinger is actually in a power to really do that. And there's this, I don't know what it is. I don't know what it is that makes some people certain that like they know how to prosecute an entire war based on their experience reading a lot of books at a school. And there's, and there's, it doesn't sound like there's anybody who's going like, no,

it doesn't make any sense. Is this out of its mind? Yeah. Yeah. It is. It's just people being like, okay, sure. Because there's a lot, obviously the unrestricted drone warfare that escalated during the Obama administration and continued at an even higher pace under Trump is indefensible morally.

But also the way that it tended to work was like, you would get, you know, these guys with the administration, whichever one it was would say like, these are the things we are, we are going to target with drones. And then the military would bring them like, well, here are the different options for strikes that we have. And they would like pick which one to do. Kissinger is literally taking the maps from them, erasing their plans and like writing in his own, which is like, it's a coach and someone in the huddle with an action like

with coach K, he's drawing a plan a whiteboard and then a fan just scribbles it out and like rubs it all down with his arm and then it's like, instead, why don't we all run up the court at the same time and then we pass the ball bunch and try to do it that way. Make someone head the ball into the net. It's, it's, I think, yeah. I'm just upset because I bought 40 gallons of paint because you were gonna try to knock out a couple of tanks coming tank war and now I, the whole fucking thing is shot like yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. There are some things paint is good at when it comes to conflict. There were some very funny moments in one of the big shud fights we had up in Portland where kids filled a fire extinguisher with paint and like ruined thousands of dollars in tactical gear. That was nice. That was good.

Wow. Yes. Look, it's not to say that amateurs never have good ideas, but they were not amateurs at that point though. Those kids have been fighting those crap boys for a minute. So Kissinger's extraordinary degree of control over the situation was possible because he had literally reformed the entire national security apparatus around himself. Nixon wanted a buffer from his own secretary of state, which provided Henry with the opportunity

to take as much power and centralize it around the national security advisor. And he could do this as long as he kept Nixon happy under Kissinger, the National Security Council, which he headed became the center of US foreign policy, a massive bureaucracy fed piles of information, embassy cables, intelligence reports, et cetera, straight to Henry Kissinger. He decided he's again, Henry is where all of the information from this vast apparatus that the US has to gather information, right, the eyes and ears of the president, you know, all of the things that are supposed to provide the president with information, all of that comes directly to Henry and he decides what to give the president.

And he was a teacher. And he was like a year before. He was a guy whose primary claim to fame before this was, we need more nukes, we don't have enough fucking nukes, and also we should use them whenever. I was just watching, there's a great documentary called Command and Control that's about a nuclear disaster in the US in 1980 that nearly killed half of the people on the East Coast that enough folks don't know about, a guy accidentally dropped a bolt and it ignited part of a nuclear missile and it nearly killed everyone on the East Coast Seaboard.

What? Yeah. Yeah, it was a big old, it was a big kerfuffle. Oopsies. The guys, the screw fell in the thing. That's nuts about it. But one of the things that pointed out, I think we have, Sophie can Google this for me, I think we have about 6,000 nuclear weapons right now, which is way too many.

But as a result, Russia has around 6,000, we have around 4,800 I think. 4,800. So that's too much, both countries have too many nukes, I think we can all say that's fair. It's a lot. I'm not signing off on that. As a result, in part of Kissinger's, we have a missile gap and we need to build more. By this point in the mid-60s, there are 32,000 nuclear weapons in the United States.

Oh my God. I think it is, that's even an aside because it did, yeah. It's like a Kardashian with shoes. Well, I feel my thing has always been every person who owns properties should be allowed to have a nuke. Your own nuke. Yeah. Look, I think we can all agree.

You know what, you know what there wouldn't be if everyone had a nuke, Dave? No knock raids by the cops. That's true. You're not going to have any of that shit. That is so true. They ain't going to be busted down doors. Yeah. No, come on in guys, it's fine.

Doors open asshole. Real different situation, Ari, the cops, if everybody's got a nuke. Other problems though. There would be some other problems. I don't see any other problems. So anyway, Kissinger is effectively turned himself into the eyes and ears of the United States military apparatus. He decides what the fucking crazy.

You can argue he's one of the two or three most powerful people who's ever lived at this point. There's an argument could be made. So Marvin and Bernard Kahlb, who are both diplomats at this point, describe what Henry builds here as Henry's wonderful machine. Quote, since Kissinger, I know, Mr. Magorium's nuclear emporium, since Kissinger controlled the system, he controlled the decision making process. One reports to Kissinger and only Kissinger reports to the president.

This set up allowed Henry to micromanage bombing campaigns over order covert arms deals and engage in secret diplomacy at will. He was not merely executing the president's orders. He himself was free to make national policy as long as Nixon was happy with him. Oh, my God. From Kissinger's shadow, quote, Kissinger, according to Marvin and Bernard Kahlb, knew almost instinctively that he would be able to control the bureaucracy and thus help reorder American diplomacy only to the degree that he became indistinguishable from the president

and his policies. Roger's at state was opposed to the idea of escalating the war into Cambodia, layered at the Pentagon was for it, but thought it needed to be done aboveboard legally and publicly through the normal chain of command. This gave Kissinger an opening, letting him stake out a Naples ultra position. He wanted to bomb. He wanted to bomb in a way that inflicted the most pain. And he wanted to bomb an absolute secrecy completely off the books.

As a result, every war crime committed by the United States during the Nixon administration, every bad thing US forces do, particularly under the age of special operations at least, has to be considered one of Henry Kissinger's crimes, because it is his job to personally sign off on all of them. And he is not just a rubber stamper, he is actively pushing for things. So we are going into very specific detail about one specific crime. If you find a bad thing that the US, the CIA, or special forces did from 1969 to 1973, Henry Kissinger gave that the old thumbs up.

So again, we're going to have to leave out a lot. It doesn't even sound like it's, I mean, it's like ego based. It's not even, I mean, there's so little actual, it just shows you like what happens when you're in a bubble. Yeah. I just don't think most people would be capable of this, but it is. It's just like, it's not really from anything other than he just feels great being at the helm of this.

And it's an extremely powerful position. It's such a bad idea. If you proceed, like a moment, get ourselves in the headspace, if someone who thinks all of this is morally justified, it's a bad idea because a person can't competently manage all of this. Right. This is too much. Yeah.

It's like, I need help. I mean, we're doing what we came to do. Like a reasonable warlord would be like delegating more. Yeah. Level headed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

So when he was signing off on bombing runs, Kissinger poured over raw intelligence documents, which included information on exactly, in many cases, down to the number, how many civilians lived in a certain target area. Now sometimes it was a little bit less specific in this, for example, area 704, which had quote sizable concentrations of civilians, didn't have an exact number, but was bombed 247 times on Henry Kissinger's orders. And since we're going to be talking a lot about bombing, we should discuss exactly what that meant in this case, because all bombings are not created equal.

The bombings Kissinger directed were carried out by B-52 bombers. These are massive planes. These are like the size of the big international commercial aircraft, roughly, right? These are not like fighter jets and stuff. These fly too high to be seen from the ground, and they are incapable of meaningful discrimination between civilian and military targets. This is not an era in which there's much at all in the way of precision-guided bombing, and with a B-52, you cannot even attempt precision.

You are dropping explosives blindly from like a mile up. I want to quote now from a write-up by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan for Yale, quote, a single B-52D big-belly payload consists of up to 108, 225 kilogram, or 42, 340 kilogram bombs, which are dropped in a target area of approximately 500 by 1,500 meters. In many cases, Cambodian villages were hit with dozens of payloads over the course of several hours. The result was near total destruction. One U.S. official stated at the time, we had been told, as had everybody, that those

carpet bombing attacks by B-52s were totally devastating, that nothing could survive. It's like a sturgeon with eggs. Yeah. Yeah. It is completely indiscriminate. One Cambodian survivor, because people did live, as we've stated, these are never as good at killing people as the military likes to claim, which is not to minimize the horror. It's just like, it's also not, it doesn't work.

One Cambodian survivor of U.S. bombing described it this way, three F-111s bombed right center of my village, killing 11 of my family members. My father was wounded but survived. At that time, there was not a single soldier in the village, or in the area around the village. 27 other villages were also killed. They had to run into a ditch to hide, and then two bombs fell right into it. Oh, for fuck's sake.

Yeah. It is, yeah. You cannot exaggerate the extent to which this is indiscriminate. Yeah. It's just total madness on top of madness. Yeah. People are rightly furious about bombing in Ukrainian cities right now. What the United States is doing in Cambodia is eliminating grid squares on a map of all

life. Right. Yeah. Which is a country that has nothing to fucking do. Yeah, some dudes are walking through it. It's cop logic. We're like, a guy who stole a car was seen in this neighborhood, so we had to shoot anyone, someone we saw in the window of their house.

Right. Yeah. It's that kind of shit, which I guess it makes sense that cops act the way they do, because this has always been the way people with guns and power act everywhere if they're all time. Yeah. Yeah. So that's good.

Yeah. Yeah. So the ostensible purpose of all this carnage, which to put an end to North Vietnam's ability to wage war, but a huge factor for both Kissinger and Nixon, even larger than any actual impact on the war itself, was to preserve their personal power. Right after the bombing of Cambodia began, Nixon sent Kissinger to talk with the Soviet ambassador, a fellow named Dobrynian. In Henry Kissinger and American Power, Thomas Schwartz writes, quote, Kissinger put forth

a straightforward domestic political account for Nixon's motivation and thinking, noting that Nixon is not seeking a military victory, but he cannot go down in American history as the first U.S. president to have lost a war in which the U.S. participated. Oh, I mean, the honest, like you'd think you'd at least lie about it. No, no. I mean, there's the, oh, my God, look, it's murdering, a democide is one thing, Gareth, but dishonesty. I guess it's just, it's disgusting.

That's I feel like a parent, look, the Soviet ambassador, someone kissing your drinks with, you know, yeah, exactly. It's not going to lie to him. Exactly. I mean, I just, I would love to see a version where you just keep up an appearance. Look, you can't, we just, Nixon hates losing. That's what this is about. We can't take the L.

We can't take the L. Yeah, it's, so between March of 1969 and May of 1970, more than 3,630 raids were flown across the Cambodian border. Each was approved personally by Henry Kissinger. The New York Times broke this story to the American public for the first time in May of 1969. So that's pretty good, right? Like the New York Times actually is pretty quick on this and reveals what has happened.

This prompts protests and international outcry. That's one of the frustrating things about the New York Times, because there's a million things to be angry at them all the time. And then it's like, oh, and they also were the first people to reveal this horrific crime against humanity. Because there are these bright spots where you're like, oh, you fuckers, it's like a broken clock though, you know, every now and then. It's like a broken clock, but when it's right, it's about like the massacre of civilians

on an industrial scale, but also when it's wrong, it's about the massacre of civilians on an industrial scale. So mixed bag. So there's immediately protest and international outcry. Armed students sees a building at Cornell University, which is very based. Students at Kissinger's own Harvard engage in a two week strike. Ever PR savvy, Kissinger agreed to meet with student protesters in order to prop up his image among liberals.

He told them, if you come back in a year and things haven't changed, we won't have a morally defensible position. So like, hey, you know, I know it's all fucked up. I've got to fix this whole mess up. It's been going on for years. You know, I'm working on it. If you come back in a year and I fix it. I find out who's behind this.

I will figure it out. What? I figure out who's behind this. What? I find out who's the problem. There's a cog in here. Give me, give me one year to kill all the babies. And it also shows how fucking crazy you are.

Like if you're doing this, you know, you'd be like, look, hide me. I do not want to talk to, the fact that he's like, I'll meet with them. It's like. He knows he can make it work. Yeah. I'll just tell him what's up, like, look, we got to kill people, we got to kill people for like a year. Let's, let's see how it goes.

Give me a year. I'm going to bomb the shit out of just villages and shit and kill a bunch of babies and ladies. You have no idea. After a year. After a year. It's just nice. Nice to be back at Harvard. Look at the campus.

You guys are going to change the couple of things, huh? You guys are just like, you guys are like, oh, I heard something bad. We're just getting started. By the way, give me a year is an amazing thing to say when it's on this look. Yeah. This is happening in the year. We'll revisit. It's like, yeah.

No, not a year. You don't get to revisit this. You know, we should revisit where we are in the story after this break. Yeah. Let's revisit the sponsors of this show. You know who else, you know, who else need a year to keep killing? Yeah. Look, if, if has not stopped the carpet bombing of Cambodia in a year, then you can cancel

your subscription. You know, by the way, talking, that's menus. Those are menu options. It's very much like, yeah, it's a very much like a White House visit with a hell of what do you want to make a case of the or do you want to do this chickpea salad? What do you have to, there's options. You want to do a flatbread margaritas, though? During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. He's in a good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So there's congressional inquiries about the illegal carpet bombing of Cambodia. On what grounds? What are they after? They, what, they smell some smoke? I should also note, seizing Cornell offices with arms dope, actually sitting down with

Henry Kissinger to let him talk about how things aren't really that bad, not dope, maybe throw a stapler in his face, you know, something, you fucking hit him really hard, you know, at least give him a shoe, you know, you've got options, somebody from a fucking baseball team at Harvard had to have been able to hit him with a fastball. There are people that if you're around, you should, Cheney, Bush, you get around certain people, you get close to them, you should fucking hit them. You should just, look, Dick Cheney is basically like a charging phone, just unplug him at this point and see what happens, just whatever his little plug is, just be like, yeah.

Turn on a microwave next to him. Yeah, yeah, just, just have a microwave and an extension cord and put it on popcorn and throw it in his lap. Yeah, but look, we, we, we all know, everybody here knows that eventually Cheney and Kissinger shed their human skins and become one ball of energy. I think Kissinger currently is shedding his human skin. If you've seen him lately, it looks like he's halfway through the molten. Fingers crossed.

Yeah. But the two of them merge and then, you know. Wings, oh yeah, I get it. So they kind of become like a, like a cerebus or something like that. Yeah, then they're one. It's like. Come on, Henry, let's get out of here. Finally, they got through form.

And then they locate and nuke microbiological life on Europa. So there's congressional inquiries Kissinger gets brought before the Senate where he assures everyone that Cambodian territories bombed by the U.S. were all quote unpopulated. He knew this was a lie at the time. We know from briefing documents Kissinger received that he was warned in detail about such things. The breakfast bombing target, he was told, was inhabited by 1640 civilians. Dessert had 350.

It's just, it's just like ice cream. Yeah. You wouldn't get angry at me for bombing a Baskin Robbins. Would you? There are no people there. Who? Senator, who hates cake? It's called the magic shell.

So Nixon eventually initially blamed Kissinger for the leaks that had revealed the story of the bombing of Cambodia to the New York Times. And this is because Kissinger brings in a lot of like liberals, like a lot of Kissinger's staff are not Republicans are not like right wing guys, they're like northeastern liberals. Yes. Because. Yeah. They're not that much different.

They are not. Wrong. But Nixon is like, it must have been one of these East Coast liberals you brought in that leaked through times. Oh, he, right. So he thinks it's an extension of Kissinger, not Kissinger himself. No, no, no. He doesn't think Kissinger.

You know, someone's really up to something. Somebody's fucking around. There's a big ass hole. I won't tell you who though, but this is like bringing Woody Allen in and he's funny. He tells you he's good. This is some good context on how comprehensively shitty a person Kissinger is how incapable of real loyalty. He is.

Thomas Schwartz writes that in order to preserve his own position, Kissinger had to throw large numbers of his team members under the bus quote Kissinger called FBI director. Jay Edgar Hoover and gave him a list of those staffers in his office with access to the information telling Hoover that he would destroy whoever did this if we can find him no matter where he is. Among the first to be wire tapped was Morton Halperin, who had helped devise the NSC system. Helmut Sonnenfeld, Kissinger's fellow German Jewish refugee, and even Winston Lord, the man Kissinger later called his conscience on foreign policy issues.

And all there would be 17 FBI wire taps up by the White House, 13 on government employees including Kissinger staff and Foran Newsman, among them Kissinger's British friend who was a reporter for the London Times. It's a meteoric raw. It's like American Idol level sudden impact as far as because I mean, as you pointed to, he wasn't like this crazy. I mean, he was crazy, but now it's like he's just it's on Royce. The level that he the level he's gotten to and the level of insanity that he's gotten

to is really, even for this country, historic. Yeah. It's it's pretty cool and just like it's great. He's not capable of even like treating his very loyal friends well. So yeah, this would come back to bite Kissinger and Nixon in the ass in the not too distant future. But we're going to take a while to get to that because there's a lot in between there and now.

So let's return to Cambodia. It is worth noting that operation menu achieved nothing. It was useless in a military sense. The enemy command and control facilities they were ostensibly trying to destroy were never taken out. And it was useless from a negotiating standpoint because North Vietnam did not bulge a budge bulge. It may have 19.

Are they bulge? They fucking bulge. In May of 1970, Nixon decided to escalate again by ordering a ground invasion of Cambodia. He announced this with a typically unhinged speech. And again, this is public because at this point, you know, the New York Times has revealed things. You know, we live in an age of anarchy. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations

in the past 500 years. What? It's happening. It's because kids are like protesting in colleges. Yeah. Like, yeah. He framed it as a test of the nation's quote, will in character. Oh, seriously?

No, he's right. When one of his staff members, when Kissinger staff members, balked at plans to illegally invade Cambodia with ground troops, troops Henry told him, quote, your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern establishment. This staff member, William Watts, tried to physically attack Henry Kissinger, who hid behind his desk. Oh, it's just like, if he was only able to just kill him, imagine the ripple. If only there'd been a sharper letter opener on the desk.

Yeah, if he could just pen and put it like a pen through his neck. Yeah. It's very funny that Kissinger did, at some point, have to hide behind a desk to stop his own staff from assaulting him, bombing everywhere, and then he's hiding under his desk. All right, so relax. So this staff member, Watts resigns right after this. And when staff member Anthony Lake echoes Watts' concerns, Kissinger, presumably still

hiding behind his desk, calls Lake not manly enough to do what was necessary. You go through. And so Lake resigns too. Yeah. Bold words from hiding behind a desk. Yeah. Big tough guy. After Nixon's speech announcing the invasion of Cambodia, four students were shot dead at

Kent State during a protest over the invasion. Nine more were wounded. Two weeks later, at Jackson State, police shot into a crowd of black students protesting the war. Two were killed and 12 wounded. The invasion prompted some of the first consequences and only consequences Kissinger ever faced. Stern rebukes from fancy academics, he respected. A group of them, men who had often acted as his brain trust and advised him and other

presidential advisors on issues, marched into his office after the invasion. One of the men, Thomas Schelling, opened by saying that he's supposed he should explain who they were. Kissinger responded with confusion that, I know who you are, you're all good friends from Harvard. Next, from Niall Ferguson's Kissinger, no, said Schelling. We're a group of people who have completely lost confidence in the ability of the White House to conduct our foreign policy.

And we have come to tell you so. We are no longer at your disposal as personal advisors. Each of them then proceeded to berate him, taking five minutes apiece. Now, is he under the desk at this point? It's like that scene from Rudy when they all hand in their uniform to get Rudy to play. It's like that. This whole story is like Rudy. If you have him, oh God, what's his fucking name?

I'm spacing. The West Wing motherfucker. Oh, Aaron Sorkin. Aaron Sorkin. If Aaron Sorkin's writing this. The West Wing motherfucker. That is the best description of him. If Aaron Sorkin is writing this, this is like the heroic moment where like the conscience

of like the American ruling class that comes in is like, this is not right, Henry. And really, that's bullshit. That's not what's happening. And Ferguson goes on to note that these guys were kind of full of shit. They're all Washington insiders. They have, Schelling advised LBJ to massively escalate violence throughout the war in Vietnam. Ferguson continues, and this is his explanation of what they were really doing, quote, for these men publicly breaking with Kissinger, with journalists briefed in advance about

the breach, was a form of self-exculpation. Not to say an insurance policy as student radicals back on the Harvard campus ran riot. When Newstat told the Crimson, I think it's safe to say we're afraid, he did not specify of what. Others were more candid. As Schelling put it, if Cambodia succeeds, it will be a disaster, not just because my Harvard office may be burned down when I get home, but it will even be a disaster in the administration's own terms.

Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, for fuck's sake. Yeah. I mean, honestly, this happens on the dollop a lot, where I'm like, all right, we got a hero. And then immediately I'm like, more villains, goddammit. I mean, to the extent that there's some heroes, the kids on these campuses who are actually lighting buildings on fire and destroying things, they do make Henry Kissinger and his

academic friends afraid and uncomfortable briefly, which is more than anyone else does. Yeah. And this would kind of be the last time that that even happens, really, right? But that people in that level of power do feel any sort of threat from the regular folk. Yeah, credit where it's due, they are the only people that I'm aware of who made Henry Kissinger briefly feel something that vaguely resembles shame. Emotion. Yeah.

Like seriously, good work. But of course, that doesn't stop anything, obviously. No, he's got many desks. Yeah. So Cambodia falls into chaos as a result of the, as most places would when bombed on this level, right? Yeah. Hard to maintain a state with this level of things exploding.

It is unclear precisely how many people die in operation menu, the subsequent invasion of Cambodia and the bombing campaigns that followed. The low estimate is 50,000. The high estimates are 150,000 to 200,000. 30,000 to 50,000 lotions die in the bombing campaign, which makes the sparsely populated nation the most densely bombed place on earth. 30% of these bombs fail to detonate and in the years since the bombing, another 20,000 people have died from the estimated 80 million bombs left in the soil, 40% of the victims

are children. One aid worker said of the situation, there are parts of Lao where there is literally no free space. There are no areas that have not been bombed. And when you are in the villages now, you still see the evidence of that. You see the bomb craters. You still see an unbelievable amount of metal and wreckage and an exploded ordinance just lying around in villages and it's still injuring and killing people today.

What a legacy. Now, if any of this concern, Nixon and Kissinger, they did not show it. I would like to just throw out there that I do feel that gardening should be more dangerous. Yes, nobody's in disagreement about that. And we have enough bombs in this country to make gardening a lot more dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. Yeah. That is my 24.

F***ing earn it. F***ing earn it. F***ing beans. If there's not a one in three chance digging up a potato loses you a goddamn arm, you're not really a gardener. How are the tomatoes? Ken's dead. Ken died.

If any of this concern, Nixon and Kissinger, we have no evidence of it. We know that in 1972, Nixon asked, how many did we kill in Lao? And the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, responded with a guess, maybe 10,000, 15? Kissinger agreed. In the lotion thing, we killed about 10, 15. This is how they talk about, it's the showcase showdown, three to five, nine, 11's worth of people. I mean, it's the way you talk about it.

Did you get like one bag of grapes or two? Yeah. I think I had two bags of grapes. Oh, what's the cover fee to get into that to get into that concert? It's like 10 or 15 bucks. Yeah. I mean, they're just complete and total fucking psychopaths. And they're off by a half, at least, you know.

It's hard to get accurate, you know, death tolls here. And the bombs were not the only thing left behind by the campaign that Kissinger orchestrated, Greg Grandin writes, defoliation chemicals did their work. Just over a two-week period, April 18th to May 2nd, 1969, US dropped Agent Orange caused significant damage. Andrew Wells-Dang, who has long been involved in relief aid to Southeast Asia, writes, both the US government and independent inspection teams confirmed that 173,000 acres were sprayed, 7% of Kompongcham Province, 24,700 of them seriously affected.

The rubber plantations totaled approximately one-third of Cambodia's total and represented a loss of 12% of the country's export earnings. Washington agreed to pay over $12 million in reparations, but Kissinger tried to defer the payment to fiscal year 1972, when the money could be paid without a specific, without a special request that would have revealed US cross-border activity. Every effort Kissinger wrote, should be made to avoid the necessity for a special budgetary request to provide funds to pay this claim. Oh my God.

Look, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to get the money. You're going to get the money. You're going to get the money. She's going to take a while. I just need to. It's like a tax thing. Move. Yeah.

I need to move some stuff around. Just, but you're going to get it. It's fine. You know, let's just keep it on the, on the deal. You know what I mean? Yeah. The secret service wasn't calling Trump Agent Orange, by the way, if that wasn't his codename, that's a disappointment.

That is. I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be disappointed in the secret service, but that is one of them. That's my number one. So, the loss of life and economic damage caused Cambodia to spiral into chaos, or at least it was a factor, other stuff's going on. We have a couple episodes about King Notre Dame Sahannuk, who was a real piece of shit in the King of Cambodia in this period, a lot's happening.

But unrest caused by the bombings and the economic devastation helped to spark a right-wing coup, which was likely orchestrated with CIA help, and thus with the direct input of Henry Kissinger. You guys are looking to change things up here. We've got a plan. We've got an idea. So, it's a matter of what happens. Someone bomb you?

Well, why don't we provide some help? Yeah, exactly. And the coup, you know, overthrows the king, who then starts backing the Khmer Rouge, then win. Oh, they're great. Yeah. They're the right-wing coup, and this leads to the establishment of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government.

Yay! Once the Rouge took over in 1975, Nixon had left office. Kissinger, though, was still in power. In November of 1975, he told Thailand's foreign minister, you should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. I mean, we get it.

Kissinger. They're my people, we're murderous thugs. I get it, murderous thugs. I'm all about murderous thugs. I think we could find common ground. This man wants to kill a million people. I think that is a cute start. Yeah, I feel adorable.

In 1988, when questioned on this, Kissinger explained that, quote, the Thai and the Chinese did not want a Vietnamese-dominated Indochina. We didn't want the Vietnamese to dominate. I don't believe we did anything for Pol Pot, but I suspect we closed our eyes when some others did something for Pol Pot. Of course, the United States attempted, at least, to provide direct military aid to the Khmer Rouge in order to help them oppose Vietnam. And there's a lot of debate and uncertainty.

It seems that very little, if any, actually made it to the Khmer, but this is primarily because of difficulty getting shit into Cambodia at this point in time. But it is fair to say that Kissinger and Nixon's actions were crucial in creating the circumstances that brought Pol Pot to power. And once he was in charge and massacring people, they tacitly supported his government because they thought it would stymie the Vietnamese. In total, from the killing that started when the U.S. bombing raids began, to the people killed by Pol Pot's regime, to those who died in the fighting with Vietnam that finally

brought the Rouge to an end, 1.7 million Cambodians died more than a quarter of the population of the country pre-war. Oh, my God. It's so incredible how their ideology of just communism bad, they're like, well, communism will kill a bunch of people and they're just fucking massacring. Everything they can to save those people. Well, and it's also like, they don't even really believe communists because the Khmer Rouge are communists as hell and they're fine with working with them because Vietnam

is the ones who beat them. And so they're angry at Vietnam and it's like, and Vietnam fights Cambodia. Like it's not, there's no, these people don't believe in anything. Yeah. There's not good lessons to take from this, but um, someone should have stabbed Henry Kissinger. That's for sure. Oh God, there's so many.

If that guy stabbed him. Yeah. There's so many people we should have stabbed. I mean, there's so many, but Kissinger's way up there. And in this story, right, like we're not, obviously you can't blame all of the deaths in Cambodia on Kissinger a lot. Just like you can't blame all of the deaths in Vietnam on Kissinger and Nixon, but like just so many.

The degree to which he's central to a lot of the worst actions in these wars. Well, and so the, I keep thinking about the point you made in the last episode where it, you know, the idea that LBJ, that he broke up the LBJ plan to sort of end all of this. And just for political reasons made that not happen. And that just, that the avenue that we are down now is just, I mean, it's unconscionable. And there's so much. We also, besides just the straight bombings, we destabilize areas, we change the trajectory. Look, Putin is our fucking doing.

Yeah. Yeah. We fucking took out the government. We, Yeltsin, all that shit. That was a fucking American video. Well, I'm not going to let you sit here and talk shit on Yeltsin. He was at very in control of what he was doing towards the end there. He definitely knew what was happening.

It wasn't like having a bottle of Smirnoff in charge. Nothing that happened yet. Everything we get involved with turns into a fuck pie. I mean, it's just, we just create chaos. Yeah. We're murder mitis. It's this, it's this thing where we're talking about like how insane it is that Kissinger is micromanaging these bombings, which is not to say that like the military men who

were doing it before were particularly better. And this is the problem that like we're going to have, you know, with Ukraine and whatnot too, is just that like, well, now we have all of these people who are supposed to be or the people we call experts who are now going to be doing things. And like, if you actually look at their resumes, it is not a wide ranging history of successes, you know. Right. And it is the same thing with Russia.

You could look at like Russian intervention in a bunch of places. It's a nightmare. The kind of people who are in a position to make calls when the conflicts get to this level are always ghouls. And they're always bad at anything but causing devastation. And that's why all of this keeps happening. Because none of these people are any good at it. And no one gets punished for failing.

And nobody ever gets punished for failing. They just keep rising up. I mean, the fact that Bill Crystal is still saying what anybody should do anywhere in the world, you're like, what in the fuck is going on? Who gets to go? Who goes away? Who goes away? Not only getting fined.

Favoriting his tweets. Imagine. I know somebody who lost their job at a grocery store because they got arrested protesting for protesting against police violence, meanwhile, Bill Crystal's like a guest on media shows. Bill, what do you think? Wow. I mean, yeah, it's frustrating. Every now and then, far too seldom, you get a story like that billionaire Russian arms

dealer whose yacht got partially sunk. But there's like three of those stories for every thousand Kissinger's. And they don't ever mean anything because that guy can afford to fix his fucking yacht. They were egging Bezos' boat when he was getting that bridge torn down. Yeah. You're like, this isn't a satisfying as some people are paying, yeah, it's like, he's going to have someone hose it down and that's really. He's fine.

Everybody, look, yachts burn. We know this. We've seen it. They burn. That's the thing. Yachts burn and so do Bill Crystal's. Bill's Crystal. So I think it's like an attorney.

No, yeah. Actually, when you burn him, he just turns into a few crystals. So Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger's Shadow, sees the bombing campaign in Cambodia and Laos as the terminal phase in what he calls the crackup of America's domestic consensus, which had begun under Johnson. Kissinger considered conditions in the country at the time of Kent State to be, quote, near civil war conditions. The paranoia Nixon had felt led him to push for illegal expansions of domestic surveillance,

which eventually led to his ouster from office. The Senate investigation into the Watergate scandal concluded, quote, Kent State marked a turning point for Nixon, the beginning of his downhill slide towards Watergate. Nixon grew increasingly unhinged, which is a story for another time. And Nixon's starting to lose it, gang. It is worth noting that for all of the things happening at this point, Nixon is as a rule. Any time I quote him in Kissinger talking, Nixon is as a rule, drunker than you have ever been.

Right. Like, than you have ever been. You don't care how drunk you've gotten, you have never gotten Nixon in the White House hammered. Wow. That's amazing. With Kissinger's help, Nixon cooks up a plan to pursue an arms control treaty in order to discredit his political rivals.

Kissinger agreed that attacking the left was the right way to distract from the disaster they'd created in Southeast Asia. He told his boss, we've got to break the back of this generation of democratic leaders. Nixon responded in agreement, we've got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment. Good news on that one, buddy. Yeah. I mean, honestly, yeah.

You know what? A rare swish. And he's drunk and he's right. That is a hole in one for you, my friend. No notes. So prescient, yeah. Yeah. Re-election in 1972 was always going to be dicey for Nixon in Kissinger.

Nixon's plan was the infamous Southern strategy, cultivating racial resentment in order to turn whites into a reliable Republican voting bloc. There's a lot to be said about this, obviously, we were just kind of breezing past it. But part of his strategy for doing this, to get these Southern whites on his side, was to continue carpet bombing huge chunks of Southeast Asia, even though this had no impact on the war's course and he knew it. Brandon described the continued bombing as, quote, blood tribute paid to the growing power of the American right.

And as, yeah. Just, I mean, it is like, I mean, it's what our politics is now. Which is just constantly the optics on how to get re-elected. It's just the number crunch on how do you get re-elected by doing things illegally or, you know, shifting prior, whatever it is. Or unmasking, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Whatever it is. I mean, you know, like we all know that war helps poll numbers. So. Well, some of them do. Yeah. Right. But I mean, in the short term, it seems like it's a short, there's a short term gain to be made.

Certainly, if you're on the right for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it is worth noting, because I always had this idea even at, past the point where I stopped believing Henry Kissinger was a hero, that he was doing what he was doing in Southeast Asia, because there were like very specific, wonky things he believed about the conduct of the war and how to win it. Right.

And he was just like willing to do these horrible things, but like, no, they know it's not winning the war. This is for votes. Yeah. And Kissinger. Yeah. So, I mean, you're basically just saying it is just a white supremacist thing. They're killing people of color to make whites in the South happy.

Yeah. That's all we're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. White supremacists, the country. But that doesn't fit on a lawn placard. Yeah.

Get one of those like in this, in this house, we believe in the Nixon administration. We believe in covering up for our war crimes with doubling down on racism. And so it's worth noting too, Kissinger isn't just micromanaging the actual racist bombing campaign that they're doing to get votes. He is also the frontman Nixon sends out to talk to right wing leaders to try and like pump them up about this. Nixon sent him to talk to Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. Kissinger sat down on Nixon's behalf with Billy Graham, with William F. Buckley, with

Bob Hope. His fucking name. God. His patter went like this. The president wanted me to give you a brief call to tell you that with all the hysteria on TV and in the news on Lau, we feel we have set up everything we set out to do, destroyed more supplies than in Cambodia last year, set them back many months. We achieved what we were after.

Well, I tell you, I really can't wait to go out there and rally those troops there, Hank. Having just been doing some research, he is friends with Frank Sinatra. Frank would call him on the phone. Yeah. Right. That fucking sounds right. Can I get a nuclear weapon?

Is that possible? Frank Sinatra with a nuke. That's, yeah, there's no people left if that had happened. I put some Agent Orr and Dean Martin's drink and he didn't notice, baby. Kissinger spent a particularly long time bragging to Ronald Reagan about the administration's achievements. Quote, we wouldn't have had Cambodia. We wouldn't have had Lau and we wouldn't have had an $80 billion defense budget without

Nixon getting elected. He also told Reagan, we wouldn't have had Amchitka. Now, Amchitka is an island off the coast of Alaska. In the early 1970s, the White House wanted to nuke it for a lot of complicated reasons. No, you get that. This is one thing I'm actually, I was totally with them on. Not other islands, but specifically Amchitka. Yeah.

We're like, Amchitka. So the White House wants to nuke this island off the coast of Alaska and a lot of environmentalists and indigenous people, just folks who's brain and heart. Oh, here we go. Why do they hate freedom? They hate freedom. Here's Greg Grandin again. The test had no military or scientific benefit, but was seen as something of a ritual by the

right. Fireworks to celebrate the end of Johnson's presidency when many hawks, like Curtis LeMay, felt the United States had fallen behind on nuclear development. Then when public opposition to the detonation began to grow, Nixon had a chance to show conservatives that he would stand up to liberals. He let it be known that we're the Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the test. He would go forward anyway. The court didn't block the test, but Haldeman told Kissinger to play it for politics anyway.

Tell Reagan we're taking an unmitigated heat in order to keep that thing going. We need all the support of the right. Later, after the test was conducted, Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater and mocked the fears of environmentalists. The seals are still swimming. The president said, I'm damn proud of you, Goldwater told him. I need to get a bucket to barfin. When people think like, oh, we've become dumb recently, we've always been so fucking stupid.

Cannot be emphasized enough, we're just really dumb. I honestly, I definitely thought that we've, I mean, it is a shocking level of dumb. It's the fact that it's just this dumb. Yeah, and it's just been going on for so long because they wanted a fireworks show. Yeah, because he wanted fireworks. And it's also, just so they could tell Reagan, it's like his gender reveal fucking party. Right, right. Jesus Christ.

It's a bomb. It is worth noting for the sake of talking about how dumb we still are today. Curtis LeMay, who was one of the people cheering on the bombing of this random island, is essentially the hero of Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Bomber Mafia, which talks about how cool the bombing apparatus we set up was and how it helped keep things peaceful and built the wonderful Pax Americana, that I'm sure these Cambodian civilians we've talked about appreciate it. Well, that's the one where you need to, once you have 10,000 bombs, you're an expert.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. If you drop 10,000 bombs, you're an expert. You're an expert at bombing. Yeah, that's exactly. So in order to be able to do it right, you have to do it wrong for a long time. You've got to log the bombs. That's exactly right, Gary.

So part of what made Kissinger remarkable, though, was his ability to rope conservatives in line for mass murder while also charming the entire liberal establishment of the East Coast. Nixon's chief of staff later recalled, we knew Henry as the hawk of hawks in the Oval Office, but in the evenings, a magical transformation took place, touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove. And the press, beguiled by Henry's charm and humor, bought it. They just couldn't believe that the intellectual smiling, humorous Henry the K, was a hawk

like that bastard, Nixon. It really is all about like if Donald Trump had talked like an Aaron Sorkin character and like quoted books that people don't read, but know our smart books, he would have been the most popular president in a generation. Well, and I mean, that'll happen. Yeah. No, one of them will figure it out. Yeah.

Yeah. That could get cracked and you know, you got to dial the racism down a little and you got to dial the polite up and then kind of equalize them. And then you can yeah, and then if you and then with the right access to the right people in media, you know, I mean, we already saw that. I mean, even under Trump where you've got all these fucking reporters who had these like bombshells about horrible crimes being committed that they like didn't release for a year and change because they got a book deal.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, John Bolton was basically just there to write a book. Yeah. Everyone was. The whole administration was.

Yeah. They're like fucking Navy SEALs with the books. Yeah. So Kissinger's reputation was as a brilliant computer-brained policy wonk, but his success came from his charm. He was able to win reporters over with a mix of leaks and effusive praise for their work, something that made them feel like insiders and thus sympathetic. He had a regular series of lunches with Arthur Slesinger, a liberal historian, whom he made

sure to confidentially inform, quote, I have been thinking a lot about resignation after the invasion of Cambodia. Slesinger was not privy to the information that proved Kissinger had planned the whole thing. So he believed Kissinger when Henry said that he'd only kept working for Nixon to prevent more damage to, quote, institutions of authority. Kissinger would warn his liberal friends that if he resigned, Spiro Agnew would run foreign policy.

He was basically threatening, if I'm not here, the far right's going to be totally in power in foreign policy. I'm the only one keeping things from going crazy. It's like sessions with Trump. I mean, there are multiple people like that, but the amount of times when people would be like, oh, McMasters, these are the good guys inside of the barge. Look, I hate this too as he's drawing on a map where to annihilate. Right.

Yeah. And it works. It always works, because it works, and it works over and over and over again. As a rule, if their job is to be a journalist who spends their time face-to-face with powerful people, they're bad at their job. As a rule. Every now and then, you get an exception. But as a rule.

No, it's like when Chomsky points out to that reporter that he has to write he's sitting in that seat. Yeah. And you get the odd people who are willing to report on the Pentagon Papers or whatever. And you get, or the Afghanistan Papers, the Washington Post, not to downplay the fact that there are people in those institutions who do damning reports on power, but also the level of complicity within the broader media apparatus means that even when you get a damning report on, for example, the war in Afghanistan, which the Washington Post,

if you've read that, it's utterly damning. Yeah. It didn't do anything. Doesn't matter. Yeah. It doesn't stop anything. I mean, you know, and the reason why people do it less and less is because you're attacked so, I mean, it works, the public attacks discredit you and then you are, you are what you are.

You're no longer, you no longer get access to that information. Yeah. It's great. So a good example of how Kissinger used his charm is a speech he gave at MIT in January of 1971. He started off by feigning a confidential heir and telling the students that Nixon had not been his, quote, first choice. But that in time, he'd come to see the bombing of Cambodia as the only, quote, sensible path

towards Vietnamization. Vietnamization is like the process of the U.S. getting out in South Vietnam, taking over, right? That's the big buzzword Nixon and his jury are using. When one student asked him what it would take to make him resign from the Nixon administration, Kissinger said he wouldn't quote, unless gas chambers were set up or some horrendous moral outrage. What?

Wait, wait, what does that mean exactly? He wouldn't get out unless, unless Nixon was setting up gas chambers. I mean, what the fuck? He said that to an audience. His childhood didn't affect him in any way. Yeah. Outrageous. And it's confidence.

Fuck. And it's interesting, because then the student who asked this question of Kissinger later realized, like, is there really a difference between forcing people into a gas chamber and incinerating them from the sky with a bombing campaign? I guess not. But at the moment, this doesn't really occur to him. And at the moment, he writes, quote, he had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one of us.

And right, I'll blame the journalists. Like, I'm not going to blame a student for falling for Henry, because, like, he's essentially still a child, and Henry Kissinger is the most powerful man in the world. Of course, he's good at talking circles around these fucking kids. The week after that speech, Kissinger and Nixon sent ground troops into Laos after another massive round of aerial bombardment. This involved 17,000 South Vietnamese troops supported by US air power. It was a catastrophe.

8,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed or wounded. The United States lost 215 men. Nixon considered it a victory because it played well with conservatives. Oh, my fucking god. Andy's drunk. Andy's drunk. Andy's drunk. Yeah, he is.

Andy's. He is shit. That's pretty good, isn't it? That's not too bad, right? He just pounded back an entire bottle of vodka before saying that. When the media savaged Laos as a pointless bloodbath, Kissinger ran to his boss and complained about vicious coverage, saying, if Britain had pressed like this in World War II, they would have quit in 42.

Both Kissinger and Nixon saw Laos as a win because it benefited their domestic chances of reelection. As Nixon told his right-hand man, the main thing, Henry on Laos, I don't care what happens there. It's a win, see? Oh, a win, see? There's that little gangstery. That's right, Henry.

It's a win, see? It's incredible. Dirty coppers. Oh, and as the reelection campaign churned forward, Kissinger was about to help his boss engineer another win. This one, boy, how do you think we've seen a body count so far? Oh, my God, what the fuck? I'm still mourning that island off of Laos.

Another in sweeps. Yeah, yeah. Now they're hitting sweeps. If you think hundreds of thousands of Cambodian dead plus aiding in the deaths of another million or so was bad, it was. It's really bad. It's a historic crime, but also, Henry Kissinger's just getting started. No.

We're just getting warmed up, baby. You guys want to plug anything? My ears. It's just death. I remember, because when I did an episode on our podcast about Tim Leary, and there's a lot of the Nixon law and order president stuff in there, and how drunk he was. But also his lunch every day was pineapple circles with cottage cheese in the middle. And so that was his daily drunk lunch.

And then there's the one night where he's starting to feel the heat. Well, maybe I don't know if you'll get into that. He basically, he goes out hammered with his valet, and he goes and talks to some of the people protesting him. And he wakes one of these guys up, and he's like, you really think I'm a bad guy? And the guy's just like, the fuck is going on, right? Nixon? Drunk Nixon out cruising.

Yeah. Well, we as, you know, look, it sounds like the world loves America after hearing some of this stuff. So we will be going to Australia on a tour. You can go to dolloppodcast.com for those tour dates. We'll be touring America. And even if we do badly, we won't bomb as hard as Kissinger and Nixon. Yeah.

Yeah. It would be hard to. It would be pretty tough to bomb on that level. I don't, honestly, we still have a lot of bombs. I don't know if we have enough bombs to bomb that hard anymore. I don't think so. I honestly think we could pull our pants down and fight with our penises. And still people be like, that's not, I've seen, I've heard of worse bombings.

I have seen a couple of cities leveled by American bombs at this point, and it's still not as much as fucking Lao got bombed. Jesus Christ. Yeah. He cannot process it. It's so many bombs. And I may as well, I'm on the road too, go to garethrenalds.com for tour dates. Yeah.

But feels, feels wrong to do that. Yeah. It's a hard promotion. Well, it's gross. I will put in a plug for the concept of death because as long as men die, you know, there's all of these ghouls eventually had to face the end of everything in the same way that those people in Cambodia did. And one day it will come for Henry Kissinger and he will be frightened and alone and left

with nothing. I feel like he bombed the reaper. I mean, he, like he is at the level of melting. I mean, he is. I hope he dies. I hope he just, I hope he shits himself and then slowly dies over eight hours. Yes. It needs to be like that.

He needs to be, it needs to be a letting. There's a, you know, the one war criminal in all of history who got close to what he deserved is Reinhard Heidrich, the architect of the Holocaust, who stupidly charged a bunch of assassins and got wounded by a bomb and shat into his own guts for several days until he died of sepsis over the course of a week in change. That's the kind of death. That's war porn. And not just Kissinger.

There's like 30 people we've named in this story who deserve that kind of death right? There's a lot of folks. I mean, Pol Pot died old and relatively, you know, unpunished, you know, they all, most of them do. That would be great to hear a judge sentence Kissinger to that. It would be dope. Kissinger to shitting in your own guts for about a week after a bomb just embellishes you.

That's, that's the right, that's the right punishment for, for this kind of stuff. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Hi everybody, Robert Evans here and my novel After the Revolution is available for pre-order now from akpress.org. Now if you go to akpress.org, you can find After the Revolution, just Google akpress.org after the revolution, you'll find a list of participating indie bookstores selling my

book. And if you pre-order now from either of these independent bookstores or from akpress, you'll get a custom signed copy of the book, which I think is pretty cool. You can also pre-order it in physical or in Kindle form from Amazon or pretty much wherever books are sold. So please Google akpress after the revolution or find an indie bookstore in your area and pre-order it. You'll get a signed copy and you'll make me very happy.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Find Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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