Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Kissinger

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Robert is joined again by Gareth Reynolds & Dave Anthony (The Dollop) for part two 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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Welcome back to what is either behind the dollop or dollop the bastards, a podcast that no matter what name we choose for it is about tickling. Absolutely. This finally is. That's how you make us feel at home. Thank you. Do you think anyone has ever tickled Kissinger? I cannot picture it in my head. This is the way he would laugh.

Stop it. I'm going to wet my pants. It makes me want to kill. Just try to imagine him whispering into the ears of a sexual partner. I'm about to finish. I'm about to finish. I'm going to be more like, I'm going to end this. Say I'm a burned corpse. Only one of us makes it out alive.

I actually did while we were taking a break in between episodes. I had a moment where I actually did for the first time in my life, I felt profound sense of solidarity with Henry Kissinger. My cat is named Saddam Hussein and as I was feeding him during the break, I realized like Kissinger did at one point, he's gotten much bigger. Saddam has gotten much larger than I ever thought he would. I did not anticipate this. Yeah. Well, that's because you named him Saddam. There's a lot to love of what you just said.

Kissinger and I both make the same mistake. So let's get right back down. Because this is the story about why Vietnam lasted an extra half decade. Good times. We're going to have a fun one here. So one of the many downsides of an intellectual upbringing like the one Henry Kissinger experienced is that he spent a lot of time surrounded by people you might call political technologists. Now, this is a term I first heard in Ukraine from civilians describing Paul Manafort. That's what they called them, political technologists.

Oh, that's where I heard it. Yeah. Yeah. These like hired guns who come in and help anybody who just happens to like have government money, like do literally anything, right? They're guys like his mentor, Professor Elliott, and like Harvard economist, Thomas Schnelling, who advised powerful elected leaders in like all of the way in which they think about the mechanisms of government are very mathematic and inhuman, right? Those are the people that Kissinger patterns himself off of. Now, Schnelling, or Schelling, who we just, Thomas Schelling, who's a Harvard economist we just introduced, was one of Kissinger's other mentors. And Schelling at the same time as he's, he's working at Harvard and mentoring Kissinger is advising the Eisenhower administration on moral calculus in the early stages of the Cold War.

Schelling argues that. Moral calculus. Moral calculus. Yeah. Have you never, have you never talked about that with anybody? Me? Is that a common contradiction for you? No, no, sorry, no.

I mean, I was terrible at calculus, but I was always moral, so no. Well, you can't be moral in no calculus, which is why, you know, like Pol Pot, I'm going to eventually set all of my listeners after people who know math. That's the end goal to this podcast. I'll be right there. How many did we get? We're not sure, sir. No idea. No clue, sir.

It's impossible to say. No way, incalculable. People keep trying to tell us and we just kill them at them to the pile. Someone had two numbers, but we were unable to, we can't negotiate it. So, Schelling is advising the Eisenhower administration on moral calculus in the Cold War. And Schelling's argument is that whether you were, quote, deterring the Russians or your own children, the proper tactic was to figure out the right ratio of threat to incentive. What? Already.

Schelling might be the quickest I've ever described a person and had it be clear like, well, that's a bastard. That's a piece of shit. That's not okay, obviously. So, since I have no human feelings, I have to figure out this and children and murderers are the same. Yeah, children and the Soviet government only understand one thing, threats. Can I have more ice cream, dad? Put your hand in the drawer and find out. No.

There you go. I'm going to tell you something, Jimmy. You go for that ice cream. I have a loaded 38 on the table. Now, one of the chambers is empty, Jimmy, so if you get that ice cream, maybe the hammer goes down on the empty chamber. I'll just go to bed. I just want to go to bed. I don't like dessert.

There you go. Honey, you just feel like moral calculus is not the way to go with the ice cream. Maybe you could just say no if you don't want him to have dessert. Any dad can say no. I'm learning. So, while Henry was teaching at Harvard, and this is before he gets, we ended the last episode, and I'm getting that gig with the council on foreign relations, running about nuclear policy. In the period before that, when Schelling is his mentor,

Henry learns a lot from him, and he walks away from their relationship with the belief that, quote, bargaining power comes from the capacity to hurt, to cause, quote, sheer pain and damage. Jesus fucking Christ. You're just kind of waiting for this person to step into the vacuum, essentially, right? You're waiting for someone to be like, you know, there's actually a bottom that's under the bottom. Oh, my lord. What the shit, like, if that were true, we're all watching this situation unfold between Russia and Ukraine, where you've got, like, a lot of people with the ability to hurt a lot of people on both sides.

And you know what? It doesn't seem like negotiations are going great. Not really. Maybe that's not a good basis to proceed from anything with. I mean, I just, I can't believe that it's the craziest fucking idea. It's nuts. When you're negotiating, you go into negotiations, you're like, I'm probably not going to get what I want. We're going to try and get the best we can. And he's just like, how much can I fucking hurt you, and what will you give me?

If you spend enough time, like I do, around, like, gun culture people on the right in particular, there's these folks who, like, usually have never done anything like in the military themselves, but they read a bunch of, like, books by Navy Seals and shit, and they'll say shit like, you should have a plan to kill everyone in every room you walk into. And, like, their frame is that, like, the world's dangerous, you got to be ready. And I think any reasonable person is like, well, you are someone who should not have a gun. Absolutely. You should not have a gun. You are out of your entire damn mind.

Yeah, and this is a guy who should never be negotiated. Yeah, this is the exact same, absolutely not. Ready to kill someone is like, but you know what? Don't go into rooms. That's just going to be your thing. Don't go anywhere. Stay in your house. You go to one room. You know, I could tear your throat. I could reach across the table, tear your throat out and stab you in the eyes with ice picks.

So we're just talking about what price this thing is. He just wants ice cream, Dan. He just asked you for some ice cream, Dan. So Henry gets his gig at the CFR. And so the thing he's producing for the Council on Foreign Relations for his buddy, the Rockefeller, it's supposed to be like a report on how the U.S. should use nuclear weapons different ways in which they could approach it, right? And while he's writing this report, because it's with this thing, it's a very, very long process getting this out,

he also starts working privately on a book of his own titled, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. And this book is a version of the stuff he wants to write, and this thing he's like fighting to get out with the CFR. Oh my God, it's B-sides. Yeah, kind of, but also it's actually very smart what he does. Well, it'll take us a second to get there. This book that Kissinger writes, this is like own project,

criticizes U.S. threats of full scale nuclear attack in response to Soviet aggression. Niall Ferguson sums it up in this way, quote, with his skill for simplifying and expressing complex ideas, Kissinger put the issue starkly, the dilemma of the nuclear period can therefore be defined as follows. The enormity of modern weapons makes the thought of war repugnant, but the refusal to run any risks would amount to giving Soviet rulers a blank check. Kissinger's conclusions were not original.

The study group at the council was almost unanimous in its desire to find some alternative to Eisenhower's stated policy, and many defense intellectuals, most notably Bernard Brody and Basil Littleheart, had also written on the subject of limited nuclear war. Kissinger's book demonstrated his talent as a creative synthesizer of their ideas, drawing out the implications of their work, and arguing that for America's Cold War diplomacy to have any real substance,

the U.S. had to accept the possibility of the limited use of nuclear weapons. That Kissinger's own solution of limited nuclear war was also highly problematic, was less important to many contemporary observers than that it broke free from the straight jacket of the Eisenhower administration's policy. So, but where does he describe where you would use it? Is it like a tactical battlefield look? Yeah, it's like to win battlefield victories. In Vietnam, he will briefly flirt, well not even all that briefly,

but he will consider using nuclear weapons to cut off train access between Vietnam and China. Which is insane! As a layman, you can cut off trains in another way. Presumably, right? Well, I've seen the general with Buster Keaton, you can throw some logs on it. There are these other things called bombs, just bombs that would blow up the train.

You know what they are, Kissinger? Yeah, so it really, I mean, it is kind of just itchy trigger finger, and it is like, if you live in the realm of this sort of dark thinking, how are you not going to start thinking of ways that are just even more vicious, brutal? He's basically saying they need to think we're a chained mad dog. Yeah. And if we, you let the dog off the leash once and he attacks the postman, and then everyone's going to fucking know.

Then you don't get mail anymore. Then you stop receiving a mail. We've bombed Japan already. Like everyone gets it. We're already out of fucking minds. Right, of course. Oh my god. Yeah, it's not like it's this theoretical weapon that's never been used in me.

And it worked pretty well as far as making people be like, God damn, they are out of their minds. Yeah, these people are crazy. Holy shit. But it's also, there's a factor here. A part of me wonders if he even really believed about this, or cared about whether or not nukes should be used tactically. And if it was more a matter of, this is a big debate of the day.

And if I publicly take the most contrarian thing, intellectuals who don't really care about what works, but who care about who's thinking creatively, right? Like that's the thing. He's like, well, it's not about whether or not his plan would work. It's about we're getting out of this straight jacket Eisenhower's put us in. It's like, no, that's not all that matters. Finally.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's really funny, what just ironic about this is that It's funny. It's fun. It places like the Heritage Foundation for years have been, have been saying that Putin would use tactical battlefield nukes, and that's why he's unhinged.

That's one of the reasons. Yeah. Can you imagine someone doing this? I would say anyone who would do that is crazy. Yeah. Imagine. And now keep him on as an advisor. Yeah.

Yeah. That's my feeling on nukes. Don't shoot them at people ever. Yeah. Yeah. They seem bad. Maybe an Independence Day kind of situation. I'll be honest when I watch Independence Day, I think, yeah, I might shoot some new.

I might at that point try a nuker too. Yeah. But you have Randy Quaid. I do. I do hang out with him a lot. That's my main plan. If things go wrong. Randy, get in the plane.

He lives in my basement. That actually tracks from the Instagram videos I've been seeing. So Kissinger's book was published in 1957, and it almost immediately sold 17,000 copies, which is a lot for a wonky book on nuclear warfare. Yeah. It is on the New York Times bestseller list for 14 weeks. Wow. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, it's not great. Now, his timing is perfect. He puts this book out right as the Soviets make too big advances in Hungary. There's like a revolution that they kind of crush. And then in the Suez, where like that brings the British and the French are like fucking around in the Suez Canal, and the Soviets are like, stop or we'll do something bad. And NATO like backs the fuck off, right? So the Soviets have like two big kind of foreign policy wins in this period.

And Americans can't look at this as like, well, you know, maybe fucking NATO shouldn't have been fucking around in the Suez. Yeah, that shit in Hungary is fucked up, but like maybe we can't do anything about it. They're like, we should listen to the guy who says, what if we nuked them? These colors don't run. Yeah, that's where people go, right? They're Americans. They don't take the rational route.

No, no, no. They hate us for our nuclear freedom. Yeah, they listen to the craziest person in the room about this. That's right. There's a lot of things that you could say about both what happened in Hungary and the Suez crisis that are not, why don't we use nukes more often? Sure. Kissinger knows his audience, you know?

Kissinger writes this book in the New York Times in their review of it, right? For the first time since President Eisenhower took office, officials at the highest government levels are displaying interest in the theory of the little or limited war. The theory of massive retaliation is reexamined. I love that those go together. Those are the options? Yeah, and then it's like the little war is the nuclear war. Like it's the baby war for us.

Yeah. Hear me out. Hear me out. Baby nukes, little tiny nukes. Well, yeah. It's like if someone's like, look, we got to decide which of these is going to be legal. Serenerve gas bombs for civilians or chlorine gas bombs for civilians. One type of poison gas bomb has to be legal.

We all have to have access. Everyone has to be able to have one kind of poison gas. Two is crazy. Tastes great. What if nobody has those? That's not where things go here. President Eisenhower is given a summary of Kissinger's book because he's the president. They don't read books.

Yeah, it's the Cliff Notes. Yeah, he gets a Cliff Notes and he recommends it to his Secretary of State, John Foster Dolis, who we have talked about quite a lot on this show. Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, if he's the rational mind. If Dolis is being like, this dude seems a little out of his mind. That's a big problem.

Yeah, that's not great. Because John Foster Dolis, fucking lunatic. Yeah, complete lunatic. So the vice president at this point is a little dude you might have heard of called Richard Millhouse Nixon. He gets photographed with a copy of Henry Kissinger's book, which is not great. I mean, it's actually great foreshadowing writing a screenplay. This is great.

Yeah. Really, this is like season one of the Nixon show. And you just like see him with Kissinger's book. Right. Yeah. Right. Good television, you know. Yeah.

So the book is successful enough that it provokes Rockefeller, who'd gotten him the job at the CFR to rush out the report that Nixon had been or that Kissinger had been making. And yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah. The report from the CFR concludes, the willingness to engage in nuclear war when necessary is part of the price of our freedom. No.

I mean, the price of our freedom is pretty goddamn pricey, isn't it? That seems expensive. Yeah. Man. How can we live if we're not dead? Yeah. How can we live without nuclear fallout? And it's amazing that it all, if it was part of his plan or not, like you said, the timing

is just pretty remarkable to release this book, and then it actually shifts the way that they view this. Yeah. And actually, he's got a really good point in his best-selling book about how nukes are cool. How nukes are sweet, you know. I am excited for Ben Shapiro's book on the same subject to lead to the annihilation of whole life on Earth.

I'm coming soon. Can't wait. I'm going to live underground soon. That's a good idea. So this report is a weird, like weirdly popular. Like, again, this is a report from the CFR, from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is like, not, you don't expect that to go viral, you know, like, have you read this pamphlet?

Have you read this link study by the CFR? I mean, America never lets you down when you're like, oh, that won't happen. That won't happen. That won't go. Yeah, right. It does. Yeah. So Rockefeller actually goes on the Today Show to talk about this report the CFR wrote

with Kissinger. What the fuck? I know. It's amazing. What an amazing macaroni casserole. So next. So he gives people on the Today Show an address where they can write for a copy of this report. Oh, no.

They get 45,000 requests the first day and 200,000 requests the next. God. Hell's Post Office is overwhelmed. Yeah. The media, the US media called this report, quote, the answer to Sputnik, which is like, hey, the Russian sent an unarmed ball into space to further exploration. This book about how everyone should be nuking everyone is the answer to that. We're thinking that this report on nuclear weapons will actually show the Russians that

it not go to space. Yeah, that space exploration. If you get rid of Russia, they can't go to space. Do you understand? Yeah. And it's worth noting, because I think in our popular history, the answer to Sputnik is the Apollo missions and it's framed as beauty, which, you know, did eventually happen. But no, the first answer to Sputnik was a report about how we should be nuking each

other more often. Yep. That's a very. They put a ball in the orbit, so we should, we should blow up safe to people. We should be ready to drop 13 nuclear warheads on Berlin at a second's notice. That's what it showed them. Jesus. What the fuck?

So this makes Henry Kissinger famous. He is all over the place now. How? This is how it becomes famous. Like some guy, some guys watch the today's show when he buys the book so he can tell everybody at the Elks Club that we need to use nukes. Someone. This is what's happening?

Give this accountant a soccer ball. Some people get famous because their dad is one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers. Some people get famous because they write a book about how nuclear warfare is not that bad, you know? It's just in fame. It's a crapshoot. Absolutely. Fuck, I mean imagine being an anti-nuke person at this point, you're just like, wait, what

is going on? No. What is happening? Have you read the report? It's so good. We're going to show them if they should not be going to space. Yeah, next time they put a satellite up, we're going to kill everyone in Paraguay. What we need to do is irradiate a country.

So on July 14th, 1958, Mike Wallace gives Henry Kissinger his first big break into the public sphere. Man, in the fucking Christ is happening. It really is just fucking disgusting because I go through this all the time on our show where I'm like, it is the same shit. But again, it's just media using its platform irresponsibly to normalize things that are fucking batshit. Yeah, it's great.

Like 60 minutes having a fucking whole segment on the Havana fucking sound. By the way, it's not real. Come on, Dave. You know that's real. I suffered from that for two years, those crickets. Oh, man, I will say, like the stupidest joke that I laugh at every time is, yeah, I got Havana syndrome. Having another beer never doesn't get a chuckle out of me.

But we've done, we've had 60 minutes come on, 60 minutes did the Satanic scare shit with a lot of Satanic stuff. They just run with ideas that are crazy. Yeah, I mean, because for people who are at the level Mike Wallace is, the definition of journalist is not afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, it's be a giant shithead. Yeah, right. Be a huge shithead.

Man. Oh, man. So Mike Wallace introduces Henry Kissinger, the guy whose one achievement is a book about how nukes are cool by saying this, in the field of foreign policy and military affairs, Dr. Kissinger. You're acknowledged to be one of the most penetrating minds in the country. Oh, he's penetrating. Yes, penetrating like an Atlas missile penetrates the cloud cover above a city full of women

and children. Yeah. Wow. Now, during the interview, Kissinger expressed that, quote, a capitalist society or what is more interesting to me, a free society is a more revolutionary phenomenon than 19th century socialism. I think we should go on the spiritual offensive. Yeah.

With a nuclear extension. With nukes. Yes. So he's connecting, he's connecting capitalism and 19th century socialism or capitalism or current day capitalism. And nukes. Those are the options. Yeah.

And Mike Wallace just empty-headedly sits there and goes like, I really love your property. Yeah. Just smiles in behind his eyes as a dial tone. Oh, my God. So this earns him finally the job at Harvard that he'd coveted. This is why they give him shut the fuck up whenever simple. I can't. I cannot get over how fucking evil Harvard is.

It's so good. It is monstrous from it's the beginning. It is a horrific. Some of us went their asshole anti-Harvard action. So he gets his Harvard job and he keeps writing in 1961. Thank God. What's he doing at Harvard? What's he doing at Harvard?

He's like teaching some shit, you know, kissing your stuff type classes. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about Spangler a lot. Yeah. Nukes are awesome too. Nukes are awesome. It requires an absence of morality, teaching kids good stuff, teaching kids good things.

So in 1961, he publishes a book titled The Necessity of Choice, which is his manifesto on how the United States should approach foreign policy in the 1960s. It is not an optimistic piece of writing, quote, the United States cannot afford another decline like the one which has characterized the past decade and a half, 15 years of more of a deterioration of our position in the world such as we have experienced since World War II would find us reduced to fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant. Our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.

What in the fuck is he talking about? I mean, America invented. Well, it's not losing influence. No, this is like the height of American power, obviously, to anyone who's not. But Kissinger is, he knows this is bullshit. He is part of a group of people who are pushing, have you guys heard the term missile gap? No. No.

In the early stages of the Kennedy administration, there is suddenly this huge, and this is both in conversations that people are having in D.C. and in the media, there's this constant talk of a missile gap, this idea that these Soviets have outpaced us in missile development and in the number of missiles they have. There's talk about, there's bomber gaps, there's tank gaps, there's talk about these gaps between, it's this idea that is totally bullshit. Not that the Soviets have not made a lot of weapons, Soviet Union makes plenty of weapons, but there is no point in the Cold War in which the United States is out fucking gunned

to any degree that could be, anyone reasonable could call like a missile gap, it just does not happen. It feels like we're still responding to that today to be like, doot doot doot, first buy a log shot. And it's not, I would say unhinged, but it's very reasonable because the argument comes primarily out of the defense department and the growing defense industry, who it's great for them if everyone thinks there's a missile gap, like of course, yeah, you gotta build a lot more weapons.

We'll sell them to you. I thought it was the place you could get khakis on your rockets, but yeah, the missile gap. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. And we'll be right back. Am I allowed to throw the question?

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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. We are back. So it's bullshit, the idea of the missile gap. And Kissinger is smart enough to know this, but he is one of the major proponents. He's not one of the... There's other guys who are more influential pushing it, like actually within the halls of power, right?

Because he's not super within the halls of power yet. But he is, he's all over TV and shit. Like he's a guy that you call now, like once you get in the role of dex of media people, you stay there, you know? He's the new guy. He's the new guy. He's the new guy. A positive new guy.

There's people that you've got like the negative new guy and the positive new guy. He's the positive new guy. And he's the guy who says we don't have enough. You know, the thing we've ever not had enough of, nuclear weapons. He is a big part of why we have so many fucking nukes. And why the Russians have so many fucking nukes, because once the U.S., like once you start this, like we have to build a lot more nukes, they're going to build even more nukes. And like, then you're going to get to build any more nukes, because you can say they've

built so many more nukes, we don't have enough nukes now. And then you wind up with like 12,000 of them in the world. I have a name for that. I'm coming over right now, Nuclear Arms Race. That's cool. That's a neat one. I'm glad there's finally a term for it. We should nuke him.

I mean, that would just be like the one thing I would like. It is the one you kiss. He just doesn't go find me to just nuke him. One of those Davey Crockett handheld missile launchers with the nuke guy. Whatever we could do. What about just a little tiny nuke that we shoot into him and it explodes, but it's just a little guy. A little baby nuke.

Just enough to take out Kissinger. Yeah. Kissinger sized nuclear weapon. Yeah. But he would just ingest it and go, I am now more powerful. Oh, now I am bigger and I'm more upset. It is. It is amazing to think about how seriously this guy gets treated by everyone immediately

and how much influence he's allowed to have on an incredibly dangerous thing. And this is the same guy who got tricked by Theranos. This is the same dude who gets owned winked by the fake blood lady in the turtleneck. It's really amazing. Oh my God. Yeah. It's so funny. It's so funny.

So Kissinger is not, again, he doesn't come up with the idea of the missile gap, but he's like a very influential voice in pushing this idea, right? He's a part of this. So he doesn't get, if we could honestly do a whole episode on why there's so many fucking nukes that this would be a part of. But he's a factor in this massive arms buildup. And he also starts, but he's also like, he's just doing this for careerism reasons because it gets him in good with people who are in power.

And part of how you know that is that Kennedy, not a guy I'll give a lot of credit to, but one of the things Kennedy says is that limited nuclear war is insane. Right. Fuck you, Henry Kissinger. He doesn't say that, but it gets made clear, the connections that Kissinger has in the Kennedy administration make it clear that JFK does not buy your attitudes on limited nuclear war. And so he stops talking about that because he wants to become part, he doesn't believe

in shit, but he wants to be in the JFK administration, right? So he stops pushing this thing that makes him famous and saying other shit because it'll get him closer to power. And that's all Henry Kissinger really cares about. So I wonder if like the Today Show is calling up and he's like, you know, I'm not really doing nukes anymore. No, he just comes on. Yeah.

I'm going to quote actually from Nile Ferguson here. He explains like what he starts doing on the Today Show. Kissinger now advocated a conventional arms buildup since the dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is more familiar and therefore easier to maintain. He continued to insist that the United States develop smaller nuclear weapons, but he moved his own position to where he thought Kennedys was. In effect, the necessity of choice was something of a job application. And Kissinger hoped Kennedy would make an offer.

So like, again, doesn't believe shit, really, I mean, it's, it's just Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean, it is the same shit, essentially, and it's like, you know, the sensationalism that gets you the headlines. And then once you're fit and it's any, it's really any form of our, our pop culture entertainment now, just make, get your name in the fucking headlines and then define who you are. And then you can like figure out what you actually think and actually believe or how you're going to ride that to power. Just make a bang.

It's the, it is, it's, it is like the political equivalent of a comedian, like saying a racial slur and then listening to the audience to determine whether or not they're joking. Yeah. Like, right. Like that's what he's doing. He's, it's, yeah. Yeah. I mean, show up to a club, take your dick out and then write your hour.

Yeah. It's called the, it's a Louis CK backwards. Yeah. It's the, it's the Casey, I'm not going to figure out what the backwards are doing. No, you're close. It's Casey Sewell. Casey Sewell. Yeah.

So this, he does not get exactly what he wants, but he gets part of what he wants. His buddy Nelson Rockefeller is able to give him a part-time consulting gig for the National Security Advisor. So it's not, but it's not everything he wants, but he is now, he's, he has like, he's cracked his way in, you know, like you, you start your way in. It's, unless you really fuck up, and by fuck up, I mean, don't get a lot of people killed. You'll just get closer and closer to power because that's how our system works. So you know, Kissinger is, is obviously very conservative.

Rockefeller is not, again, he's part of the Kennedy administration. Right. This is what I don't understand. Yeah. Well, we'll talk, we're actually, we're going to talk shitload about that over the next couple of episodes because this is like a consistent weird thing about him. But like one of the things Kissinger does is he oils Rockefeller with effusive claims that Kennedy's inaugural speech, which Rockefeller had helped with, was so good, he quote, might

become a registered Democrat. Right? That's the kind of shit he says that like, I'm almost a Democrat now because of how good JFK speech was. That was so good. It was like, kick him. He didn't believe in shit. Like, he just, like, I can't overemphasize that other than that, Henry Kissinger should

be very close to power. He believes strongly in that. Yeah. He believes in that as much as anyone's ever believed in the Bible. Right. He does not believe in ideas. I'm sorry. I'd like to sing happy birthday to the president if possible.

I saw what Maryland did and let me tell you, it was such a testament to the love of Kennedy and sometimes they call me, happy birthday, Mr. President. Would you like to see where they call me Kissinger standing over this event and look at what they're doing to my sport? See, that's the fan art I want of Henry Kissinger, of him just like trying to fuck JFK with every bit of charm in his German body. Oh, dear. Nobody told me subway go over event.

Oh, look at this. You're going to see everything. Oh, there goes my nuke. So JFK is eventually assassinated by Bernard Montgomery Sanders and LBJ takes over. Oh, yeah. I mean, history is a banquet. I've got a pamphlet for you, my self. That's my length.

So LBJ is the president now and LBJ is like between LBJ and JFK. It's like a decade, you know, that the Democrats are in power and LBJ is very good at exercising power, right? Yes. And he's also not super into Henry Kissinger. He's not against Henry Kissinger either, but Henry kind of is kept in this weird like he's on the margins of power during this period of time, right? Finally.

Which is frustrating. Yeah. Well, not really. Because while he's, there's no breathers, there's no breathers, Karen, good to hear. While he's kind of on the margins, he's able to build connections with as many Republican lawmakers and their aides as he does with Democrats, right? That's what he's doing while he's doing these like part-time gigs with the NSC and stuff is he's making friends with everybody he can.

There is nobody. He's just a fucking networker, like he is just a supreme networker. There is so much, when I was a kid in speech and debate, one of the other kids in the debate team with me was obsessed with Kissinger, like read his books and stuff, thought he would. And this was this thing that I heard too from like family members and stuff that like, well, he wasn't always right, but it was, he was doing the hardest job anyone's ever had and he was just this really genius man and you can't really argue with him if you read about

what he was saying. And it's like, no, he didn't believe in shit. He was a genius at making people like him. And that allowed him to do more horrible things. Yeah. Which I guess like anyone who's really dangerous in politics is that's as a version of that guy, right? Yes.

Yes, 100%. Like that's all of them. But he's an interesting kind of that guy. And as a result, probably the most toxic kind of that guy we've ever had in the United States. Wow. Which is saying something. I mean, really bad people.

Quite an honor. Quite an honor. But yeah, so yeah, he makes all these connections. He cultivates them and he keeps his name in the news, right? That's a big part of why he's able to do what he does later. He keeps going on TV, he keeps being on the radio, he keeps being quoted and like cited and interviewed by journalists for articles. Henry makes it known that like, if you're a journalist, I'm easy to reach.

I will always give you a quote. You can always reach Henry Kissinger for like a line or two on this thing, you know? Which is very smart of him. It's very dumb and shameful and horrible for the journalists who fuck him. But like it's great for Henry. At least they've learned. Thank God that they've learned. Thank God that doesn't happen anymore.

Now I turned to the New York Times story published today that described Nazis assaulting a book club as men with a swastika flag. I mean, someone pointed out, well, the article calls them Nazis, it's just all of the social media they described them that way. And I was like, I can't explain to you why I feel worse about that, but I do. It was not just a dumb error. It was calculated. Yeah.

Yeah. Moral calculus. Yeah. Moral calculus, right? Good shit. So the professor cultivates connections. Yeah. He goes to Vietnam at one point and he makes connections with a bunch of people in Vietnam

who are able to talk to not just the South, but the North Vietnamese government. Like that's the thing he consciously does is like, I want to be able to like be able to take the temperature of like guys, which is not like, I would say actually like the most reasonable thing he does, if you think you're going to be in power, like, yeah, it's good. You probably want to be able to talk to those guys, even though we're fighting with them. That's not an unreasonable thing. He will use it badly.

Right. Who's he's doing that on the part of? Just himself? Yeah. Well, he is working. He has a gig with the guy. He's like an advisor to the National Security Council and he's a known academic. You know, he's probably being like, you know, I'm an academic.

I'm trying to understand the dimensions of this and like, I want to talk to everybody. I'm a very fair-minded man. I don't let ideology get in the way, yadda, yadda, yadda. Like one of the things about Henry Kissinger too, like he's as good. He can, he's he's fucking his buddies with Mao like he's great at talking with people who are communists and stuff. As long as you like Henry Kissinger and what he's selling, he'll sell it to anybody, you know?

It's so crazy. It's wild. Like he must have eyes that just start spinning and like you just have to get close to notice that he's got hypnotic eyes. You're like, he isn't so bad now that I'm talking to him. You know, let's think about Vietnam for a second, right? If you're going to war in Vietnam, Gareth, right? If you decide I, Gareth Reynolds, I'm going to go to war in Vietnam.

How long do you think it would take you to realize that was a bad idea? It would be, I mean, I, Gareth Reynolds, it would be instantaneous. Pretty quickly. Very quickly. I mean, it's David. Okay. Can I just, can I ask a question? Which side am I fighting on?

The not Vietnamese side. Okay. Then really quick. Yeah. Really quick. I feel like you could, I feel like you could, you could take Vietnam, David. Dave could. You're not going to see it coming.

They're not going to see it coming. I would certainly be the guy who they'd be like, we broke him or we broke him before we even shouted at him. I'd be like, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to show up with pants that were already pissed in. I know, I know one thing about me and that's that if things got really, really chaotic and bad that I, I kind of thrive in that environment. Yeah.

Dave, you'd be like, Dave, we don't have time to eat their brains. You'd be like, shut up. I'm figuring out what they know. It's like Dr. Manhattan ending the Vietnam War. Both sides surrendered to Dave. In the mid sixties, which is fairly early on, considering how late the Vietnam War goes, it is clear to people, especially a lot of people protesting in the United States that like, oh, shit, this ain't going great.

It's not hard for people. There are people who buy into the US propaganda, but like people who are actually privy to information on the war are aware that it is not going well. Kissinger still decides we should escalate things. And I'm going to quote again from Kissinger's shadow by Greg Randon. Upon returning from his first visit to South Vietnam in late 1965, Kissinger threw himself into a campaign to build public support for ongoing intervention. In early December, he joined 189 other scholars from Harvard, Yale, and 15 other New England

universities in an open letter expressing confidence that Johnson's policies would help, quote, people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny. A Vietcong victory will spell disasters, said the letter. Then, later that month, he led a Harvard team against a group of Oxford opponents of the war and a debate held in Great Britain and broadcast nationally in the United States on CBS. Kissinger passionately defended the bombing of Northern Vietnam, insisting that it was not a violation of international law.

He invoked the analogy of World War II, saying Washington's actions in Indochina were as righteous and justified as they were in Nazi Germany. Bob Schrum, who went on to become a Democratic political consultant, was on Kissinger's team and says that when he today watches a recording of the debate, he is, quote, amazed by two things, how young we look, even Kissinger, and how wrong we were. So first off, Bob... Especially Kissinger. You don't feel bad enough.

You don't know how bad you feel about this? It's not enough. Not enough at all. Not nearly enough. Your first reaction would be like, God, we were kids. We were young. We were young. We were young.

Look at that. There's some Vietnamese dude next to him thinking about bombs raining down on the jungle and bombs being like... Look at that. I didn't even have crow's feet back then. You believe that? Look at Kissinger. Oh, my God.

It's Jals. Look at Hank. Yeah, he's only got one Jal at that time. That's before he got the eight. Our hair looked so stupid. Am I right? Am I right? By the way...

It's before Henry Kissinger looked like Chit and Weird Science after things go wrong. It's amazing. There's a lot in that paragraph, both that like, of course, when the debate starts to be like, should we escalate this nightmarish war, the first thing, one of the first things that happens is that a bunch of fucking New England universities decide to have a debate about it. Right. Let's let everyone hear it.

Let's have the best arguments of both sides about whether or not we should bomb these people. The most experienced minds. Yeah. Yeah. Like, first off, fuck everyone involved in this. Even the people arguing against the war a little bit. Like, just don't do...

That's bad. Well, the premise. Yeah, the premise alone, yeah. The premise is bad. Yeah. Less so, certainly. I don't know. I don't know.

Maybe like, it made sense at the time. Here's a bunch of virgins debating which position is the best to fuck in. Yeah. Like, what the hell? Why is this a different... Instead of the debate like, hey, why are we there? Like really? Why?

Sorry. That's... We're not debating that. We're not asking that. That's not a question for the debate. And it is... Again, it's like... And you can see just about how comprehensively wrong these people are that like, number one,

this idea that this will help the people of South Vietnam determine their own destiny. Which is just... Like, the South Vietnamese government was a dictatorship the entire time the war was going on. Right. It wasn't democratic in any meaningful sense than the Northern Vietnam. And also like, a Viet Cong victory will spell disasters. Like, there's plenty of things to criticize the Vietnamese government for, but like, broadly,

on an international level, it's fine. Like, the country seems to be doing all right. Yeah, right. Like, better than a lot of places. Oh, it did. It kicked ass during COVID. Yeah. Did a pretty good job at COVID.

Like, you know, it didn't seem like a disaster. Maybe if we hadn't killed 5 million people, things would be even better. Yeah. It seems like it couldn't hurt. Yeah. Yeah. Again, they're wrong about everything. Like, Kissinger in this period, everything that he said, like, that's, I mean, he has

this reputation as such an intellectual titan, and he's like, so constantly fucking wrong. But there's always like, yeah. It's the same as today. All of these people that are constantly fucking wrong, just keep on getting positions of power and being media, and they're always fucking wrong. And there's this shit like people will bring up like, well, but there's this nuclear arms treaty he helped make. And there's this like peace deal he negotiated in the Middle East and like all of these things.

Yeah. But that was like 2% of the shit that he did. And it was largely because other people that he wanted to stay in good with were pushing for that kind of shit too. Like, Henry Kissinger, whenever he has expressed an idea that is his legitimate idea is like really, really disastrously wrong. Yeah. Amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. Nobody cares. He's got to get to invest in Therano still, as opposed to being, you know, the one victory weekend. The one victory. That's why we should pardon her. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Look, you stole a lot of money, but you made Henry Kissinger look kind of stupid. Listen, we're going to release you to come up with another scheme to take more money from this bag of shit. But you don't get to make a company anymore, but we're going to have cameras follow you. Think of yourself as a... Have you seen the prank show?

Yeah. I've seen punked. Are you okay? We're talking about Therano's punk, but it's just every week for Henry Kissinger. You're going to put on mustaches and like fake wigs, and you're just going to try to fuck with them. You're telling me this is a way for me to get a longer spine? I mean, I'd love to get a little money.

This popcorn has zero calories? I can't believe what I'm hearing. But you know what's awesome about that story is that she's a younger female Kissinger. Yeah. Yeah. 100 percent. She's like... She's super into her, and she was just saying whatever people wanted to hear and like...

Yeah. Right. Because there's the good grifters and the evil ones. We just finished our four-parter on the czar and talked about the fact that before Rasputin, there was another spiritualist grifter who pretended to talk to ghosts and stuff named Philippe, who got a bunch of money for them, tricked the czarina into thinking she was pregnant and then bounced with a bunch of their money. The last thing he did before he left was like, I'm going to come back in another form as

another spiritual healer and you can trust whatever I said. Very funny. Took all the money and ran. And when he died, it was found out that he had been paying for the mortgages and rentals of like 52 impoverished families. Like the perfect guy, like the opposite of Kissinger. Yeah. Yeah.

Just taking money from the czar to help poor people out. What a dude. Fantastic. It'd be great if he showed up again. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's put that guy in front of Kissinger.

Let's see what he can do. So in private, Kissinger admitted already while he is doing all this, while he's a part of this big debate, you know, while he's taking the side that we should escalate, in private, in his conversations, he admits to his friends that Vietnam is an unwinnable disaster of a war. Man. Oh my fucking god. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He defended it in public, though, because there was at least a 50% chance the Democrats were going to stay in power after the next election. That is unreal. They didn't want to give up on the chance of having a job. You know, I think it a lot of times you just, you do, I guess he's a little different because he's such a shape shifter.

Yeah. But you know, they're, I think, and it's just the way we are, you are like, they can't just be that base evil. Yeah. He sure can. But he is. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. It's something I, it's something I was thinking about climate change is that people can't wrap their heads around the fact that there might be a significant portion of rich people in control who actually want everybody to die. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least don't care because what really matters is like maintaining their level of relative power to everyone else.

Yeah. They know and it's just like, but what are they going to do? Call themselves out? Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. So obviously, and it's one of those things, I don't actually know that he really believed that Vietnam was a disaster because he may have been lying to his friends when he said

that because he wants to keep like, he wants to keep a bridge to the other side open, you know, like it's impossible to say because he's fucking Henry Kissinger, you know. Is it possible? There's two Kissingers? Yes. Okay. What if there's six? Oh, that'd be amazing.

And if they ever touch, Cambodia will be, oh, yep, you know what, all right. So the fact that Kissinger in private be like, yeah, Vietnam, what a fuck up. And in public would be like, let me bin Shapiro about Vietnam to you. Let's win this. That really pissed off a lot of his friends, including the political scientist Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau had admitted to Morgenthau that the war was unwinnable, unwinnable, even while he continued to go on in the media and advocate expanded saturation bombing. Morgenthau found this deeply disappointing, but Henry was increasingly tailoring his public

statements to the ear of a man who was already a fan of his work, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Can we get like, yeah, some sound effects, a lightning whips across the screen in a wool palace, which we'll do a whole Nixon episode one of these days. A lot of our Kissinger series will also be about Nixon because you can't unwrap the two men, you know, so there are two Kissinger's. Yeah. One of them is Richard Nixon. So by the end of 1968, as the presidential race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey

and former Vice President Richard Nixon heats up, Kissinger's profile had raised enough that he was seen as the frontrunner for a serious foreign policy job in either potential administration. As time went on. Either. Yeah. He's got a gig no matter what, baby. It's just unbelievable.

He's the Raytheon of people. Can't lose. So as time goes on, though, he increasingly leans towards Nixon, which surprises his friends, whom he had told, quote, Richard Nixon is the most dangerous of all the men running to have his president. But I want him to give me a gig. I can't do it for him. I need job.

Satan looks like he's good. So he was heartbroken when his friend Rockefeller lost to Nixon and he commented, now the Republican Party is a disaster and Nixon is not fit to be president. Oh my God. I am. It's the same fucking shit over and over. And oh, this one, they said about Reagan, this was about Bush, this one, they said about Trump.

Yeah, it's always the same calculus. This is true, but Kissinger didn't let his complete contempt for Nixon stop him from trying to get a job with the man. To explain why, here's the New Yorker. It took Kissinger's close contemporary, the political theorist Sheldon Wollin, another son of Jewish emigres who fought in the war and studied at Harvard with William Yandel Elliott, to fully dissect Kissinger's careerist instincts. On the surface, Wollin observed, Kissinger would have appeared a mismatch for the anti-elitist

Nixon. But the pairing was perfect. Nixon needed someone who could elevate his opportunism to a higher plane of purpose and make him feel like a great figure in the drama of history. As Wollin wrote, what could have been more comforting to that barren and inarticulate soul than to hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kissinger, who spoke so often and knowingly about the meaning of history? I mean, it's just an empty sack and an evil sack and the evil sack's like, I can feel

you. It's like somebody's going to load me with something, and who's not going to do it? Put all that black pile down inside of me. Thank you, Hank. Oh boy, Gareth, he doesn't call him Hank, but we'll get to that later. Come on, Spanky. It's a lot worse than that, Gareth. So, in 1968, the Johnson administration was carrying out an extensive series of negotiations

between South and North Vietnam in an attempt to secure an end to the war. LBJ wants credit for his legacy, right? I'm not going to give LBJ credit for caring about human death and suffering because he's also a monster, not trying to make him seem good by comparison. But he sees ending the war both as a way to like, I want to go out on a good note and also this is going to, if he could, if he could even secure a significant like ceasefire, that would help Humphrey get reelected, right? Because nobody's in the U.S. is very pro the Vietnam War, within the majority of most voters

are very anti it. So, that's kind of the play that LBJ is making. He wants to end the war in order to help Humphrey win. Over the course of the election year, his secretary of state, national security advisor, and his secretary of defense, Clark Gifford, became aware that something was amiss. Some of the moves that the South Vietnamese government made which threatened the negotiations seemed bizarre. They would like take these wild changes where it's like suddenly South Vietnam's not willing

to negotiate. Like, what the fuck? We had like worked all this out. Why are you guys pulling out at the last minute? North Vietnam's willing to come to the table. In the trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens writes, quote, from his seat in the Pentagon, Clifford, who's again the secretary of defense, had actually been able to read the intelligence transcripts that picked up and recorded what he terms a secret personal

channel between President Thieu and Saigon in the Nixon campaign. The chief interlocutor at the American end was John Mitchell, then Nixon's campaign manager and subsequently attorney general. He was actively assisted by Madame Anna Chanel, known to all as the Dragon Lady, a fierce veteran of the Taiwan lobby, and all-purpose right-wing intriguer. She was a social and political force in the Washington of her day. So LBJ's administration, this is suspicious as fuck, let's bug the Nixon campaign, right? Which is not illegal, obviously, like you have.

It is an act of fucking treason to try and extend a war by sabotage negotiations. This is one of the very few cases where like, yeah, you should wiretap those people. You should tap the fuck out of those phones. But it's also, they don't want this to get LBJ, doesn't want this shit to get out at all. This would be, number one, a hanging crime. You get executed for doing this kind of shit, like on paper at least, right? And so LBJ's administration, while they're wiretapping Nixon and getting evidence about

like this would increasingly becomes clear as a conspiracy, keeps fucking quiet about it. Because they're worried that revealing this would create a crisis of confidence in the American government. Oh my god. Fucking liberals. I know, I know, right? Fucking liberals.

And this is LBJ. How many times, how many fucking times Bush stole two elections, this is what they did. This is what they fucking did. It's awesome. It really is. I mean, yeah, it's just, I mean, that is so fucking crazy to put the clubhouse, I mean, above everything. It is like the one time where if a president had had his political opponents hanged, it

would be like, yeah, that's what you should have done. And the man, all you have to, one session of hangings really would have gone a long way with this country. It would be in so much a better position if they'd hung Nixon and several other people were about to talk about. It would also give a Nixon good posture, finally. Yeah, finally. I knew about that Nixon had done.

I did not know that they knew. I didn't know they knew at the time. Oh yes, David. Fucking insane. The little mind. I always think about this story about when the Honto took over in Chile before Pinochet got into power and they asked all the, they said, we want to have interviews with people and the liberals so believed in government that they went and lined up for the secret

police interviews because they're like, well, this is what we do. And they're like, no, they're taking your names down to possibly kill you. But they lined up because they're like, well, this is, we don't want to mess up the system. Like we're supposed to go get interviewed by the government. Yeah. And you're like, it's a Honto. It's just the mindset of just, this is how our constitution works and this is what we're supposed to do.

And you're like, no, it's literally not working. The thing isn't working. This is a great, this is one of the best examples ever of that. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the germ of truth in Kissinger's whole ideology about conflict is that if you are in a conflict with someone who is willing to throw down and you aren't, they're going to win.

Right? Like that is a truth of history. Right? It's not enough to say like punching them isn't the entirety of it. But if you're not willing to throw down, they will win. Right? Right. And that is a thing that is often taken exactly the wrong way at the geopolitical level.

But like you see in this that like LBJ was not willing to throw down and Nixon was and everything we're going to talk about in the rest of this series happens as a result. And it's like, LBJ loved throwing down, but it's amazing that he doesn't in this. I think that's the craziest thing is that like that was the fucking big dick. I'm going to take a shit and you're going to listen to me guy like he gave no fucks and threw down with everybody. You know what I think it is, Dave? I think for all of his many, many, many flaws and evil acts committed, I think LBJ believed

in things. Yeah. And Nixon and Kissinger down. He wouldn't throw down, but he would throw two ads. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, because you know, LBJ was famous for whipping his dick, which he called jumbo out at all times.

He once pissed on a secret service agent at a party because he couldn't get to the bathroom easily enough. And like that's the secret. Yeah. All of our sponsors are the same and that their dicks are called jumbo and they do piss on the secret service. Every one of our sponsors pisses on the secret service. That's a promise.

So 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. As 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 and on the gun badass 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Oh, boy, good times. So South Vietnam pulls out of the negotiations, right? I think they're happening in Paris. I haven't really gone into detail about what happened up to this point, because those details

are very obscure to the American people. What is publicly available? Known is that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are supposed to come to the table, have this big negotiation to try to come to some way in which the war can come to an end. And South Vietnam, after throwing a bunch of wrenches in the process, finally just backs out entirely, right? And so the negotiations don't happen, and the war continues. That's what everybody sees.

If you're just a dude paying attention on the news, that's what you're aware of happening here. LBJ's administration knows something sketchy is going on between Nixon and the South Vietnamese government, but even for them, they don't know precisely what happened. Here's what happened. As part of the negotiations, LBJ offered the North Vietnamese a bombing halt. Now, you can see why this is very enticing for Hanoi, right? Because being bombed is not pleasant, and the US was doing a lot of it.

So this is what LBJ is like, hey, I will fucking stop bombing Vietnam if you guys will come to the table and talk about stuff, and the North Vietnamese government not being made entirely of soulless cockroaches is like, well, okay, that's a pretty good offer, actually. Yeah. We were bombing, sorry. We actually dropped John McCain. Yeah, we did drop John McCain. You guys might have caught him.

You can keep him for a while. He'll come back into the picture. It'll be a big problem. He'll also, weirdly enough, be the least objectionable Republican elected leader for a long time. So it's a mess. Just so you guys know, that's our future hero. Yeah. He and Jesse, the body of Ventura, will be the only conservative voices against torture.

So, heads up. It is amazing watching that old clip of Jesse Ventura on the view being the most reasonable American in fucking early 2000s. Next to Gilbert Gottfried, at least. It's actually not Gilbert Gottfried in the alternative universe. So yeah, this is a very enticing offer for Hanoi, the bombing cessation, and it's good enough if like, if you won't bomb us anymore, yeah, maybe we can concede on some stuff if you're not murdering people in mass, like, yeah, of course we'll negotiate with you.

Sounds pretty good. Yeah. Nixon cannot let this happen. This would be a disaster. Vietnam not getting bombed. He seizes like the worst case scenario, even though he is campaigning on ending the war, by the way. Nixon's been promised.

Nixon's been promised. I'm going to get us out of there. But yeah, on my watch. That happens before when I'm campaigning on. So Nixon uses his back channel to the South Vietnamese government to get them to torpedo their end of the negotiations because the government of South Vietnam is frightened, obviously, that the U.S. is going to stop bombing North Vietnam. So if you're following along, something should be obvious at this point.

Since the Johnson administration was negotiating secretly with North Vietnam, there should have been no way for the government in Saigon to know that LBJ had proposed a bombing halt. But obviously, Saigon knew, which means there was a secret informant within the Johnson administration passing information to the Nixon administration and sharing a lot of top secret data with Saigon. So the big question is, who could possibly be so deep into both camps that he could feed information from one to the other? No, Forest.

Oh, my God. That's right, baby. Wow. Who would be executed for treason? Absolutely should be executed for treason. My God. Slowly. Yeah.

Slowly executed. Yeah. It should be that incompetent dude who hung the Nazis at Nuremberg and kept fucking up and making it worse. Bring that deep back. Sorry. Let me try one more time before you guys get mad. We should have frozen that motherfucker in carbonite to break out when the nation needed

him. Yeah. That's amazing. Oh, my God, are you guys waking me up to kill me? No, we actually, we're huge fans. Get drunk and do another hanging. We are huge fans. We've got you a handle of gin here and this is Henry Kissinger.

Oh, he's great. Why would you do that, Kissinger? He's awesome. Shut up. Just do whatever you, just kill him as fast as you can. That's the only note. But I took a lot of notes from him back in the day, like he's great. He's great.

Just kill him. Okay. I don't think he could die, though. I will say I don't think that guy could read. So obviously Kissinger is the back channel who is spreading this information. Now, in his own memoirs, Nixon later admitted to hearing about the proposed bombing halt through what he termed as a highly unusual channel. Christopher Hitchens continues, it was more unusual even that he than he acknowledged

Kissinger had until then been a devoted partisan of Nelson Rockefeller, the matchlessly wealthy prince of liberal republicanism. His contempt for the person and policies of Richard Nixon was undisguised. Indeed, President Johnson's Paris negotiators, led by Avril Harriman, considered Kissinger to be almost one of themselves. He had made himself helpful as Rockefeller's cheap foreign policy advisor by supplying French intermediaries with their own contacts in Hanoi. Henry was the only person outside of the government that we were authorized to discuss

the negotiations with, says Richard Holbrook. We trusted him. He is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the US negotiating team. So the likelihood of a bombing halt, wrote Nixon, came as no real surprise to me. He added, I told Haldeman that Mitchell should stay a continuous liaison with Kissinger and that we should honour his desire to keep his role completely confidential. So this is all in the open now.

Yeah, I also, I mean, Nixon really just never shut the fuck up. I mean, he really just, he was like, if the drunk guy had a party, he would just sort of tell you whatever. Like, honestly, he's the guy Donald Trump might put a hand on be like, Hey man, you're saying, you're saying some stuff that you probably shouldn't right now. I think you might not, I think you might regret this later. To explain, I just say a lot of stuff you probably shouldn't. And I'm on Twitter, yeah.

That is just so crazy and just says it all, you know, and it's gotten worse. I mean, it's just fucking bonkers. Now the bombing halt was planned for October 23rd, but thanks to Kissinger, the Nixon campaign was able to lobby South Vietnam to increase their demands suddenly at the bargaining table, which wrecked attempted agreements being made with North Vietnam. This, you know, there's a process. This happens back and forth until the bombing halt is completely scuttled and peace negotiations fall apart.

Since all this was happening behind closed doors, Humphrey never got to present the possibility of a bombing halt to the American people. Nixon avoided having to take into stance of any kind on the issue, because obviously as the peace candidate, he couldn't say you shouldn't do it, right? Right. He didn't even want it to come up at all. The Johnson administration made one final attempt to push through a bombing halt at the end of October, but the South Vietnamese government, warned by Kissinger via Nixon,

preempted this with a surprise boycott of the peace talks. Now, while all this is happening, Kissinger is also advising the Humphrey campaign and is so respected there that he was considered a shoo-in for a senior job if they'd managed to win. There's three of them. Jesus fucking... Yeah. Democrats are so fucking stupid.

I know, right? There's three of them. There's three Kissinger. There's... No, you're fucking amazing. Just fucking Humphrey walking around. I got my buddy, Henry, so I'm going to give him a good old job. I'll tell you what.

All right. That's our party you're talking about, mister. Yeah. And then I can never get over the fact that Hillary walked around with him during the fucking campaign. Yeah. It's amazing. Well, he wasn't really walking, to be fair, Dave.

He fucking is... He's like one of those episodes of Frasier, where he's dating two women at the same time and trying to keep it secret that there's the same restaurant like that. He's for a politician. He's for a stripper. Yeah. It's very funny, except for all of the millions and millions. Yeah.

Well, let me ask you that. So do you have the numbers on where the deaths were at in Vietnam and where they ended up? Oh, you don't even want to know this. I'll get you that. Oh, god. Yeah, I'll get you that in a minute. Why did I ask? Yeah.

Nixon, by also, grows in convinced of Kissinger's value during this period of time, too. And he becomes a shoe-in for a senior job there. He was particularly impressed by the skill with which Kissinger protected his identity as the leaker from the Humphrey campaign. Nixon later wrote, one factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger's credibility was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy. What a terrible... I mean, that's just not a good personality trait.

It's really not. It's actually not. But down is up it is, but not normal. This guy is the best double agent. He's so fucking great. He'll fucking... Boy, this guy's an unbelievable shitbag liar. Yeah.

I mean, honestly, it makes sense that, like, Nixon would be super into that. Yes. Oh, yeah. Wow, this guy's a real piece of shit. And I'm Dick Nixon. This guy could lie to you. Let me tell you. As a liar.

Oh, fuck. It's fucking amazing. It's bad. Yeah. Clark Clifford, who would later, was again the secretary of defense of the time, would later blame the fact that the war did not end in 1968 and the loss of the Humphrey campaign in that election on the school duggery of the Nixon campaign, which was orchestrated in part by Henry Kissinger, quote, the activities of the Nixon team went far beyond the bounds

of justifiable political combat. It constituted direct interference in the activities of the executive branch and the responsibilities of the chief executive, the only people with authority to negotiate on behalf of the nation. The activities of the Nixon campaign constituted a gross, even potentially illegal interference in the security affairs of the nation by private individuals, which is the polite political wonkway of saying it in the book Kissinger's shadow, Greg Grandin is even more pointed. The fact that Kissinger participated in an intrigue that extended the war for five pointless

years, seven, if you count the fighting between the 1973 Paris peace accords and the 1975 fall of Saigon is undeniable. Adding to the evidence as Kissinger himself, he's been caught on tape twice on recordings recently released, admitting he passed on useful information to Nixon. Jesus Christ. My God, it's like killing him isn't enough. No, he should be gibbeted. I said, we need to bring back gibbeting and just hang that motherfucker somewhere in a nice

cage box, like, leave him out there. Leave him out there. Let people pelt him with stuff. Yeah, fuck you. Let's kill him by throwing potatoes at him. You've got to make sure there's soft, right, because he's not that strong anymore and you want it to last a while. Yeah.

So, we'll talk a bit later about how he got caught on tape and why we know about all of this, because that's a fun story, guys, and it involves a different series of crimes. But Grandin makes another point that's worth acknowledging here. While Kissinger definitely had inside information from the Johnson campaign, which he passed on, he also didn't have as much information as he pretended to know when he talked to the Nixon campaign. Oh, Jesus. Quote, even with access to Johnson's negotiating instructions, he couldn't have had exact information

about the decisions being made at the White House. He had to have been winging it, at least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining what others would do with that guest, playing the angle, sussing out the chance, or well, giving the appearance of composure and certainty. He was right winging it. What? I mean, just what else? Yeah, what an absolute fucking psychopath, like that's the kind of shit.

Like he said, if you're dating two women, you're trying to figure it out and get through some stinky situation, but he's doing this with fucking Vietnam and two presidential campaigns. I don't, yeah. The craziness, the absolute lack of a soul is astounding. He is pure blackness inside. Yeah. Dave, let me push back for a second.

Oh, no. Oh, God. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. You can't. I mean, it's hard to even speak to it because it's like, to look, I'll kill five people for a job, but at some point you have to be like-

I think up to five is normal, sure. Yeah. That's regular. Yeah. But to let, I mean, to just, I don't know, it is- He killed, he killed, I mean, how many Vietnamese died after that? Like- So many, yeah.

Yeah. But we're talking, you know, was it like a million died in the whole war or is it more than a million? No. I mean, it is because you also have to include the people who died in Cambodia and Laos and in Vietnam. We're going to get into more of this in episode three, but conservatively an additional couple of million deaths as a result of this.

In addition to an additional 20,000 U.S. dead, it's kind of hard, the death toll, to get precise. Yeah. But like a couple million, like in the millions of additional dead. Because- Another one to this day, by the way, because- Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah, right. Because he wanted a job.

Yeah. Because he wanted a gig. He's essentially lying in a job interview like you would if you were, had no fast food experience and were in Del Taco, except millions of people are dying. Yeah. It's awesome. Holy- He's such a bad person.

The crazy thing you've done here is you've humanized the situation for me. Because I can understand that there's evil people out there and they do stuff like they want to bomb Cambodia, they want to do this other stuff. But when you take it to a level where it's a guy winging it in a meeting, it takes on a whole different flavor of evil that is something- because now that's something we can all understand. We've all been in a situation where we're like, yeah, this guy did a thing and then I did a thing and you're just trying to get through a situation.

We've all experienced that. None of us have experienced giving the green light to dropping bombs and killing people. But that I get and I feel in my bones of like, holy shit, but you're doing that with millions of people's lives on the line. It is this thing where the idea I had always had before I really got into it was that he was involved in all of these horrible things that I knew who was involved in. But I assumed it was from a wonky perspective of like he believed strongly in the need to fight these wars and that anything was justified and so he did these horrible things because

he believed we were in this like civilizational struggle and certain things were necessary in that. And like he had all of these different kind of very complex moral beliefs that he wrote dozens of books about explaining why he did the things- at the end of the day, no, motherfucker wanted a gig. Yeah. And by the way, it's not like he would have been out of politics. Like even at his down time, he was like, you know, he was gigging.

Like it's just like he would have been patiently waiting for another administration or he would have been working in LB, whatever, like, you know- No, he didn't want to work at Uncle Chuckle Fox, he didn't want to work at Uncle Chuckle Fox, he wanted to gig at Charlie Goodnights, like he said, I want to work at the premier club. It's unreal. He literally like did the- like that's the thing, he didn't just do this for a job, he did this for like one of the two jobs and the one he kind of didn't want as much.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Un-fucking-conscionable. Yeah. It's really hard to like, it is hard in like it's, I think it's easier to understand now what he did. It's hard to like judge him adequately in moral terms that are even like comprehensible

because it's so much out there. Yeah. It's hard to process. It really is one of those like, say what you will about the tenets of nihilism dude, at least it's in ethos moments where it's like, I'm thinking about like people like fucking Saddam or whatever, where it's like, yeah, that was a piece of shit. There were definitely some things he believed though. Yeah.

Yeah. Like there's pieces of shit out like fucking out there who like, there are things they believed and Kissinger just believes he should be close to power. Kissinger. Yeah. Yeah. His political doctrine was Kissinger. He's like, I'm really smart.

I should be in the top game and I just want to be there. It's awesome. Yeah. I like how he thinks his childhood didn't fuck with him. Yeah. Yeah. Like, dude. Bro.

Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.

Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.

Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.

Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.

Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. He was married twice. Yeah, he definitely was married at points, but he's also, like, kind of a playboy. Oh, God, I'm going to be sick.

We'll go back in time a little bit and talk about some of that later. He was married, his first marriage was 1949 to 1964, so I don't think he's, and then he's not remarried again until 74, so I don't think he's married in this little hub. I wonder why she left him. Yeah, I wonder. I guess. No idea. He's the only guy who comes black.

I haven't written the episode yet, but I have several pages of people talking about Henry Kissinger's sex appeal on the news that are real, real blackpilling, as the kids say. Oh, my God. Not good. So Nixon wins the 68 election, obviously. He gets inaugurated in 1969. The Vietnam War continues on for half a decade-ish. This was an almost incalculable humanitarian tragedy, as well as disastrous for the future

stability and cohesion of the United States, but it was dope as hell for Henry Kissinger, who was swiftly appointed Nixon. Yeah. I like to put out there that my uncle went to Vietnam, and it totally, you know, he had to kill a lot of people, and it totally fucking ruined his life, and he watched times die and stuff. So thank you, Richard Nixon. You fucked this shit.

Thank you, Richard Nixon. Everybody who went to Vietnam after 68, say a thank you to Richard for Nixon and Kissinger for, you know, all of the trauma and the trauma that in some cases some of you passed on to your family members, and the trauma that has been passed on societally based on our attitudes towards war because of how Vietnam went and the ways in which some people were always looking for a rematch, and it got us into other, you know? Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. Very good stuff. Good stuff. Imagine if like that had been the end of Vietnam, that like there was actually a president realized, you know, the foolishness of a conflict, and we went to the table and like negotiations were made. And I don't think, I don't think the first Iraq war happens.

The Asia Panama doesn't happen. You would think that for how long Vietnam dragged on, that that would have actually been a lesson to not go into conflicts, you know, aimless conflict. Yeah. I guess so. No. I guess the problem is we're thinking people should learn lessons. Yeah.

They're not leading countries. Well, that war is in any way like a moral decision or like actually comes from a place of actual, you know, save your mentality, anything like that. Yeah. It's good stuff. It's great. So, getting this appointment as national security advisor required a lot more politicking from Kissinger, including spreading rumors to Nixon before his inauguration that Johnson

planned to either depose or kill the president of South Vietnam before he left office. Kissinger pushed this rumor to the president-elect via regular bastard's podside character and Rhodesia enthusiast, William F. Buckley. Buckley's his middleman to lie to Nixon. Rhodesia enthusiast. The translator. Yeah. Get old William F. Buckley, whose son went on to write, honestly, a pretty fun book.

But we don't need to think too much about that. Wow. It's like a foreign Eckhart performance in the movie. So, Nixon appreciated Kissinger's chutzpah and connections enough that when he put him at the head of the National Security Council, he ordered the professor to reorganize it in order to take foreign policy control away from the state and defense departments. This means that Nixon gave Kissinger it was very close to a blank check to take total control of U.S. foreign policy.

Obviously, Nixon wanted this because he was a paranoid control freak. He did not want any kind of separation of powers. He certainly did not want to have a secretary of state who could do things that Nixon might not be explicitly ordering. But the result of this was that Kissinger found himself in a position where he could exercise near absolute power in foreign policy as long as the president kept liking him. Oh, God. Just as Kissinger had little love for Nixon, our buddy Dick Milhouse was not particularly

warm to his new right-hand man. Now, you had given a couple of… Spanky, Hank. Yeah. You want to know what his real nickname for Kissinger was? Jewboy. Oh, my God. Jesus Christ.

Oh, my God. It is Nixon. It is Nixon. But it's like… I mean, I thought we would be jumping off of the name a little bit. He's just like, what am I going to call you? Spanky, Hank? No.

Little Jewboy. Jesus Christ. And again, it says a lot about Henry Kissinger that he's like, yeah, right? That's pretty good. Where did you come up with that? He's a guy. Very funny, sir. Did I mention on childhood, there's no effect on me today?

Not… What? So, there must have been an element of Nixon, then, who knew what an ass-kissing little bitch he was. Oh, yeah. Because he's belittling him to his face and knowing he'll stick around. It's why you get hired for these jobs, because it's just like it's not, you know, an empty vacuum who is going to be your right-hand man is still, you know, there's security

in that. There's secrecy in that. Yeah. He's like a vacuum, Gareth, in that he'll suck Nixon's dick, but he's also like a toilet in that he'll take Nixon's shit, you know, that's Henry Kissinger. He's a blubkin. He's a dick-sucking toilet. He's a human blubkin.

Yeah. Yeah. He's like, the Toto toilet is pretty effective, but have you ever had a dick-sucking toilet? They just shit or cum either way, I'm ready for it, baby. Henry Kissinger. So, can the title be Henry Kissinger, Dick-Sucking Toilet? It's also pretty hot. We got it, Dick.

All right. I do draw the line. Speaking of Dick-Sucking Toilets, it is time for a commercial break. That is who sponsors our podcast. Raytheon's new Dick-Sucking Toilet, well, it is going to fire a missile at a busload of children, but that's just the Raytheon, you know, we can't avoid it. We're contractually obligated. Yeah.

It's how it works. So Nixon announced Kissinger's appointment as the National Security Advisor before he had even picked a Secretary of State, which is an unprecedented move. He announced Henry as quote, and this is again in his like public announcement to the country, as quote, a man who is known to all people who are interested in foreign policy is perhaps one of the major scholars in America and the world in this area. And he acknowledged that while Kissinger had never held a full-time government job before, he had Nixon's confidence to bring in a whole new foreign policy team, quote, new men to

develop new ideas. Now, the conservative media of the day immediately roared into gear, hailing Henry Kissinger as an unprecedented policy genius, the man necessary to get America back on track after nearly a decade of disastrous war under Democratic presidents. William F. Buckley wrote, Not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure received such universal acclimation. Why are you going to ruin her? Fucking William F. Buckley piece of shit.

Compared with Florence Nightingale. That's fantastic. Yeah, it's amazing. But even ostensibly liberal figures were wooed by Kissinger's supposed Titanic intellect and Henry Kissinger and American power, Thomas Schwartz writes. The liberal historian Arthur Sleshinger Jr. simply referred to it as the best appointment so far. The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker noted, The collective sigh of relief that went up

from the liberal eastern establishment and the Ivy League, fearing Nixon's Cold War Year image, most shared in the sentiment of Kissinger's Harvard colleague Adam Yarmolinsky. We'll all sleep a little better each night knowing Kissinger is down there. And you mean in the toilet getting ready to suck dick. It's exactly what happened with Trump. Yes. And it's like, it's the way that, I mean, again, it's people's natural reaction is normally kind of there.

It's just the fears are assuaged by people who they consider to be, you know, the compass. And they're just not. And so when when you're told that there are the good guys inside the bad camp, it's like, it's just never fucking true. It is wrought from the core. Yeah. And it is these liberals are also are also impressed by him and so comforted by him because they think he's smart because he's good at quoting smart dead people, right?

Yeah. It is the same thing that happened with Mattis. Mattis, thankfully, is not nearly as toxic a person as Henry Kissinger. But like, if you actually look at Mattis's background, one of the things he did in the Iraq war was cover up a war crime like he's not not a man to be like, I mean, and he was like he was very popular among like people who served under him, which is part of like why there was this kind of collective relief. But it's this idea that he's like the warrior monk, right?

Yeah. They love the idea that like, well, this guy who's president is a maniac, but this dude reads books that he hired. So that'll it'll be OK. And it's like, no, it's never OK as you continue to lower the bar more and more. Obviously, like the people that you're bringing back are part of a lower bar. But because the bar is even lower, it seems and feels a little higher. But it is all just it's just this is exactly what happened with Colin Powell, who was a

fucking evil. We did the dollop on him. Exactly. Yeah, horrible person. Yeah. Covered up fucking the massacres in fucking Vietnam. That's like when he started out like terrible human being. But the press did the same shit.

If you can quote old books and smile and you're willing to give journalists time, they will talk about you as being the secret reasonable person within the war crimes party. Right. Like that's all it takes. Yeah. It's great. It's really cool. It's just the same thing as if you're a Nazi who reads books, you can get an archetypes

profile. Yes. Or dress nicely. Yeah. Or you'll get on 60 minutes or whatever, you know. It's don't trust people who want you to think they're smart. Yep. That's never a good sign.

Smart people. It's the same thing with like people who want you to believe they're dangerous. If they want you to believe something specific about them, they're lying about it. That's how people work. And how about if a doctor wants to get on the news to talk about COVID and be famous on the news, that's actually not a doctor you should listen to. Not a great guy. No.

Also, I mean, it's, you know, it's from the same publications and the same networks. The idea that you continue to listen to these sources about what is right and what is wrong, just because they have fancy terms like senior policy advice, it's like, it's all fucking, it's days of our lives. It's their actors. These are teleprompters. Yeah. And they don't know any more than you about anything that matters as a general rule.

Every now and then you get, but like even like within agencies that are heavily like medical oriented, like the CDC, where you would expect them to have a lot of specialized knowledge, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do a good job. But like the New York Times comfortably lied about Iraq. Yeah. It's, it's not great. So during the transition from the Johnson to Nixon administration, US military command began to act under what General Creighton Abrams described as a total war mindset against

the infrastructure of the Viet Cong insurgency. This began with a six month operation to clear the Mekong Delta code named Operation Speedy Express. This would prove to be the first major military operation that both Nixon and Kissinger oversaw and it was a Titanic bloodlet bath. There is a good article on this operation in The Nation and the title of the article is a My Lie a Month. Oh my God.

Yeah. So it's, it's bad. Oh my God. Now the My Lie massacre had occurred in 1968 before Nixon or Kissinger were in power. You know, that ain't on them. And Seymour Hirsch didn't like break the story until 69, which is the year that they come to power. This slaughter of 500 civilians by US troops was horrific enough, but within a few months

of taking power, Speedy Express had exceeded it many times. Quote from The Nation, an inkling that something terrible had taken place in the Mekong Delta appeared in a most unlikely source, a formerly confidential September 1969 senior officer debriefing report by none other than the commander of the 9th division, then Major General Julian Ewell, who came to be known inside the military as the butcher of the Delta because of a single minded fixation on body count. And the reports, copies of which were sent to Westmoreland's office and to other high ranking officials, Ewell candidly noted that while the 9th division stressed the discriminant

and selective use of firepower in some areas of the Delta, where this emphasis wasn't applied or wasn't feasible, the countryside looked like the Verdun battlefields, the site of a notoriously bloody World War One battle. That December, a document produced by the National Liberation Front sharpened the picture. It reported that between December 1st, 1968 and April 1st, 1969, primarily in the Delta provinces of Kien Hoa and Dinh Thuong, the 9th division launched an express raid and mopped up many areas, slaughtering 3,000 people, mostly old folks, women and children, and destroying thousands of houses, hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards.

But like most NLF reports of civilian atrocities, this one was almost certainly dismissed as propaganda by U.S. officials. A United Press International report that same month, in which U.S. advisors charged the division with having driven up the body count by killing civilians with helicopter gun ships and artillery, was also largely ignored. Because they're saying they're soldiers, that they're shooting from a distance on a helicopter machine. Well, and then they just, like Colin Powell justified it by saying, well, they're providing

food for the enemy, so there's no difference. Yeah. By the time speedy express comes to an end, U.S. forces had killed more than 10,000 people. The vast majority of these were claimed to have been insurgent fighters. But extensive mop-up after operations after the fact found less than 800 weapons on all these bodies. They shared. I mean, that is fucking crazy.

Yeah. I mean, like, we can't even frame them competently. No. No. And also, remember, you're taking guys that you drafted. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, right.

You know, to do this. Yeah. I mean, like you said with your uncle. I mean, it is. Yeah. You know, it's a ripple through that and the lifetime, you know, what it does, it, it root. I mean, yeah.

It's pretty. It's beyond who dies, who doesn't live again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what, yeah, what do people take back with them? Now, it is fair and necessary to note that this began in the December before Nixon and Kissinger took office.

This is not entirely on them. Some of the blame for this goes on the LBJ administration as well, obviously. But it continued under them. This paragraph written by Christopher Hitchens gives you some idea of the savagery of what occurred in the early days of the Nixon administration's control of the Vietnam War. The people who still live in pacified Kien Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in early 1969, virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way.

There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in 1970. One village elder told me the Americans destroyed every house with artillery, air strikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters. About 100 people were killed by bombing, others were wounded, and others became refugees. Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs, which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground. So Nixon's plan at the beginning, you know, when his people had derailed the peace negotiations in 1968, was that he would win election and then make peace with Vietnam, right?

Then he's going to do the thing that he promised to do. But it swiftly became clear that peace was a messy prospect. One of the things he's worried about is that, like, well, if we withdraw from Vietnam, the Saigon government's probably going to fall, right? Because we're just barely propping up this shitty dictatorship. And that'll make me look weak, right? And so I can't do it because it'll make me look weak if I abandon Saigon. Give me one beer and then I'll quit drinking.

Yeah. And then I won't win re-election in 1972. And that's unacceptable. And that, I mean, obviously keeps going over and over again, like, you get into office and then you're like, well, what about re-election instead of going like the best direction for... It is one of the few things I'll give Biden some credit for because he had the same calculus with Afghanistan, a lot of criticisms to make about the pull-up from Afghanistan, but he did not make the same decision Nixon and Kissinger did.

He did fucking get out. And it would have been easy. I would like to have a much more darker outlook on that and see that he knew that he was going to win re-election. He knew that Ukraine was kicking off because that's been kicking off since he actually won the election. But Zelensky was largely for peace until all of a sudden Biden got elected and then he flipped and I was like, I want data and all this shit.

So, you know, if you can pull out of Afghanistan, if you know there's another area cooking up, not that negative on that chip. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Um, because that's a whole, another several... It's a fucking shit. It's worth of stories.

It's a shit hole of just unbelievable garbage all over the place. Yeah. So, withdrawing from Vietnam, I mean, Saigon is going to fall, the government's going to fall and that will be bad in the 72 elections and it might push Kissinger and Nixon out of power. Neither of them can accept this. And this description of a meeting from December 1970 by H. R. Haldeman shows Kissinger's role in pulling back from peace.

Kissinger came in and the discussion covered some of the general thinking about Vietnam and the president's big peace plan for the next year with Kissinger later, which Kissinger later told me he does not favor. He thinks that any pullout from next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the 72 elections. He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of 72 so that if any bad results follow, they will be too late to affect the election. Ah.

Yeah. And it's... You know. But that's what our wars always are. They're all about elections. They fucking always are. It's... I mean, yeah.

This led to Republicans thinking that they had to get war back on track at some point. But it's... It's always... It's never... It never works. It's just such a crazy idea. And you also... People are watching body bags go home.

No one's happy about anything that's going on. No. And it... This... They just kind of... I mean, this part of why it keeps going is... Yeah. This kind of craven knowledge that like, well, the worst thing that could happen is we don't

get reelected. Yeah. At no point is he thinking about any of the human beings involved, even any of the American human beings involved. It's just like, well, we can't be losing re-election, you know? Imagine if Kissinger was damaged from his childhood, how bad things would get. It could be really bad. And it's like, you know, actually, when we talk about the story of like American presidents

making craven political decisions, one of the reasons FDR did not approve more effort being taken to evacuate Jewish refugees from Germany is he did not want to be seen as pro-Jew. Oh, geez. Because of the socialist policies and stuff that we're going through, he knew that that could hurt him. There were a number of other reasons, but like, yeah, they did not... It is like, there were things that were done that led to the U.S. government saving fewer Jewish people from the Holocaust that were done for craven political reasons by the FDR

administration. Let me hear this Kaiser pitch again. It actually... Yeah, it's so... Big hat. I love the hat. The biggest hat you've ever seen, very spiky. Now, loves this mom's hands, but...

Oh, God. So the fun thing about this episode is that everything we're going to talk about in part three is even worse because in part three, we're going to talk about fucking Cambodia. So... Whoo! Yay! Well, you guys want to plug anything after... My ears!

...three hours? Yeah. I'm going to be in a toilet trying to get clean after this episode. You can go to dolloppodcast.com for tour information and my website's garenbrunnels.com, I'm on tour. But not like tours of duty, just like stand-up and podcast tours with the aim of bringing joy to people. You kill, you kill, though. I don't want to talk like that anymore, Dave.

You just slaughter when you're out there. Dave, shut your fucking mouth and you can just listen to the dog. Last time I saw you do a set, you just fucking murdered the whole fucking crowd. Shut your fucking face. Not only did you kill that crowd, you left unexploded ordnance in the crowd that they even tripped over later. No, no. That session had been over 15 minutes earlier.

And like with unexploded ordnance in Laos, 40% of the people who loved your jokes after the set ended were children. No more, they'll be no more relating, they'll be no more correlating. Yeah. Anyway, that's part two. You got two more weeks of Henry Kissinger ahead of you, folks, so strap in. Gets a lot uglier. But also, we'll be talking about his sex life.

So, you know. A lot more. I was going to say something to look forward to, but not really. Not really. Yeah. Yeah. Come back next week for more of the dick-sucking-toilet Henry Kissinger. That's a pretty good title.

Sophie's not happy with it. No, Sophie's not on board. I don't love it, but you know. Alright. 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 AK Press, 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. 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. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet 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, 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. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.