Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: Was Kissinger a Genius or a Monster?

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Ray McGovern: Was Kissinger a Genius or a Monster?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, December 4th, 2023. Ray McGovern joins us now. My dear friend, always a pleasure. Thank you for all the time you give us. I want to talk to you about Henry Kissinger. Was he a genius or was he a monster? Before we do that, I want to ask you, I know your opinions on it and I'm looking forward to hearing them, but I want to ask you some questions about genocide in Gaza and about what some mutual friends of yours and mine are planning to do about it. So first, the genocide. Has the Israeli military resumed its indiscriminate slaughter of civilians that it had engaged in in Gaza before the three or four or five day truce. Yes, they have. And they've advertised it as just as bad, just as powerful and intense

as the first go around, the first time it did this before the humanitarian pause. And does the Netanyahu government understand the damage being done to Israel by the perception around the world of its indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians. They dust it off, Judge. As long as they have the full-throated support of the President of the United States, nothing else matters. Netanyahu needs to pursue this thing for personal reasons, which most people know. If he doesn't come out of this well, he ends up in jail, okay? And he's able to exploit the vengeance, the feeling of vengeance on the part of the vast majority of Israeli people to do away with those Palestinians in Gaza. So the only break, the only break on his possible continuing this genocide, and I use the word advisedly,

is for the United States as major patron to say, look, enough, stop it, or we won't give you the wherewithal to continue the genocide. Very, very simple. And what I try to orient the folks that I've talked to today toward is making it very clear to the world, we intellectuals, if you could believe it, make it very clear to the world that it's the United States that's enabling this, and that to the degree pressure can be put on Biden, he's under the gun now. Most young Americans see it for what it is. They don't like genocide. Can you imagine? So he's got to change his tune, get those Zionists to turn around and say, look, Netanyahu, we know you've got problems, but you've got to stop. You've got to take more than just real careful measures not to kill so

many civilians. You know, we're going to want to stop you to kill all of them. And that would do it. And people need to realize that. There was one very poignant mention made by the former Turkish president, actually, and foreign minister, Ahmed Davutoglu. He said, you know, I used to deal with Hamas. And the last time I tried to get them to stop with the Israelis. They're going at it. They said to me, look, we are the sons. We are the grandsons of 1948, 1967. What are you going to do to guarantee that if we stop, a Palestinian homeland will be created? And the Turkish foreign minister, Davutoglu, said, I don't know if I can give you any guarantee.

So there you go. That's what happens when people yearn for freedom, yearn for freedom from oppression, don't get it, and have the wherewithal to make it very difficult. So who would take the American government seriously? I mean, reports out this morning reveal that we have delivered to Israel 15,000 pounds of bombs. So Tony Blinken is saying, here's a bunch of 2,000-pound bombs. Don't use them. It's effectively what this comes down to.

We're satisfying the neocons and the Lindsey Graham types by delivering this stuff to you, but we're also trying to satisfy the Arab American community in Michigan because it's a swing state by saying don't use them. How could anybody take the U.S. seriously? That's a very good point. They can, of course. And Congress is the fly in the ointment here because they're 80% behind supporting Israel. You know, the only time that I remember that Congress stepped up to the plate on Israel and others, in this case, it was Turkey, violating the Arms Export Act, was when David, what was his name, the representative from Wisconsin, Dave Obie, got up before George Schultz, or Schultz got up before Obie, who called a meeting, and he said, look, this is a hearing. We want to know why you violated the Export Act

in providing weapons to Iran, Contra to Iran. And Schultz said, Mr. Obi, you know, it's been three years. The Americans are just tired of this. And Schultz, to his credit, said, look, Mr. Obey, I didn't take an oath to defend and protect the United States Constitution from all enemies until I got tired. I'm going to pursue this. And he did. Nothing came of it, but at least there was some guts in Congress at that time. That goes way back to the 80s, Judge, as you know painfully yourself. There's no guts left in Congress. When we send 15,000 pounds of bombs to them, how does that happen? Does the U.S.

pay Raytheon and Raytheon ships them there? Does the U.S. authorize Raytheon and the Israelis pay Raytheon and we reimburse the Israelis? Do you know the mechanics of how that works? Judges, worse than that. They're already there, okay? They're in storehouses, they're in bunkers, precisely for the purpose of being able to be used by the U.S. in the first instance against whatever threat they perceive in that part of the world. The others, yeah, they're made by, they come from our stocks, they're sold, they're given really to Israel, and then they're replenished. But the most recent news is that Biden, in this most recent act, carves out for himself an exemption, exemption from making sure the Israelis have to ask us before they use these really terrible ones. They don't have to ask us anymore if this law goes through.

That's even worse. So if we need to know this, this is an urgent situation. We need to do more than make statements and, you know, even demonstrate, put our bodies into it. So Alistair Crook reported this morning that Tony Blinken, this past weekend, or the last time he was in Israel, sometime in the last 72 hours, said to the Israeli Defense Minister Galon, you only have a few weeks. Now, I'm not sure what he meant by that. Are we going to stop supplying you in a few weeks? Are we going to stop supporting you in a few weeks, or we're going to stop supporting you in a few weeks, or hell hath no fury like the regional powers scorned, and they'll only tolerate you for a few more weeks. What do you think? It's hard to know what Blinken means by these things. Does he mean,

well, you only have a few more weeks to clean them all out, drive them out into the Sinai? You only have a few more weeks before we make bad noises about what you're doing. So go ahead, hurry up and do it. We got the weapons to you. We got your carte blanche. Go ahead and do it. And a few weeks from now, we'll say, oh, we tried to get them to be restrained, to moderate, not to use such powerful bombs, but they didn't listen to us.

Yeah, that's the worst interpretation. Blinken, he's way in over his head here. He doesn't know any more than you or I do, Judge, how soon it will be the Hamas, you know, not Hamas, but Hezbollah from the top will come down from the north. How long will it be before the so-called insurgents in Syria go after our troops big time, who have no business being in Syria nor in Iraq. That's going to be, I think, the first real problem. When a lot of our troops get killed there, it doesn't matter why they're there or whether they have permission to be there, that will be able to drum up more support in Congress for the Lindsey Grahams of this world to say, oh, now we have to make a bigger war.

Now we have to show the Israelis we're really 150% behind them. Tell me what your group of intellectuals, including my former Princeton professor, Richard Falk, and dear friend of the show, mutual friend of yours and mine, a great visionary, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, are up to with respect to acknowledging, recognizing, exposing, and condemning, my words, not yours yet, the Israeli government's genocide against the Palestinian people. Well, first off, Professor Sachaks started us off today on the Zoom call, and he said very clearly we have to appeal for immediate ceasefire, okay? That's big, okay? And we can't be shy about naming genocide, genocide, for God's sake, okay? He also said that he thought it would be a good idea if Palestine was recognized by the UN as a full member.

I think that makes sense, too. There are others that thought, well, you can't really speak for the Palestinians, but certainly they would welcome that. Others were very, very good. You know, these are intellectuals. I don't know how they let me in, but, you know. I sent your name in. Go ahead, Ray. They asked me, and when I summed up things, I said, look, you know, it depends on who you want to, who you want to move here. Netanyahu is not movable. They have no, they have no shame.

It's a shameless operation. So if you're going to try to have a modicum of shame somewhere, you have to try in Washington, because Washington is the enabler without Washington, Netanyahu can't do this. That's why it's really up to us. We're all complicit. If we don't do everything, we don't. What is the us going to do?

What's that? What is the us going to do? What's that? What is the us? What is your group of intellectuals led by Jeff Sachs and you going to do? Well, there's going to be an action plan come out of this meeting, not next week or the following week, but next day or two. There's going to be a very clear delineation as to what's at stake. And Jeffrey Sachs' appeal for an immediate cease fire, of course. And I mentioned, which nobody else did, Security Council Resolution 242, I've said this before on this program, unanimously adopted November 22nd, 1967, calling for the Israelis to leave all the occupied

territories they occupied in their war of aggression, self-admitted now, in June of 1967. That got some resonance, and I think we'll see that in the final statement that, look, that's on the books. It should be enforced. Otherwise, the UN is not worth its weight. Henry Kissinger, was he a genius or a monster? He was both, Judge. I had the good fortune of not having to deal with this monstrous stuff. I was overseas from, what, 68 to 70, and that's when Cambodia and all those things went really bad. saw that he could exploit the animosity between Russia on the one hand and China on the other to the benefit of the United States. Long story short, out of that came a very adroit dance where we were able to persuade the Russians that, look, it would be really in their interest to conclude a quadripartite

agreement on Berlin, never happened before, and even go to strategic arms limitation talks and conclude a strategic arms limitation treaty, namely the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the cornerstone of stability between U.S. and Russia for the next 30 years, count them, three decades, until Junior Bush decided he didn't want to be in the ABM Treaty anymore. So I was able to watch this up close and personal because I was in Moscow for the signing of that treaty. There's Brezhnev and Nixon shaking hands. Taranovsky is off to the left. This is a major event. May 1972, there's Brezhnev and Nixon walking down there with their retinue. There's Patricia Nixon and some of the others. And that's, you know, actually, Mrs. Nixon made quite an impact there too. They allowed Richie,

they were a tricky dick to give a speech at the end of it to the Russian people. There were some curious things there too. Here's a little gem. When Nixon left Moscow to go to Kiev, he of course had a flight in a Soviet plane. And the pilot wouldn't fly the plane because there was something wrong with it. Everybody's in the plane. He comes down and has it out with Kosygin. Kosygin's going like this. He said, yes, yes.

The pilot would not fly the plane. So what happened? They had to drop another plane, right? Then they had to take all the fruit and the vegetables and the dinners and everything, the flowers out of the one VIP plane that they had. They put it in the other VIP plane. And Mrs. Beam, the ambassador's wife, yucked it up, really took advantage of it. So we're all looking at this stuff.

And the agricultural attache from the embassy in Moscow says to me, Ray, I got a real story here. I said, what's that? He says, only half of the Russian VIP planes have fruit, vegetables, and flowers. How did Kissinger utilize the CIA? Well, that is a very welcome question because I was right in the thick of that. When I came back from overseas, it was April 1970. The SALT negotiations had just started, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, okay? Helsinki and Vienna. In my branch, the Soviet foreign policy branch, I appointed three people to help the SALT delegations, one in Helsinki and Vienna,

the other in the bowels of the agency working with the military types, and the third one reporting to the muckety-mucks in Washington. As a result of our work, I was able to go to Moscow for the signing. And, you know, that was a really supreme achievement for us to be able to sign that, because when push came to shove, Kissinger says to us, he says, will the Soviets cheat? And we said, no, no. Well, if they cheat, how soon will you be able to tell us? So I went back to the people that run the satellites, and I asked them. They said, about 10 days.

I said, Mr. Kissinger, 10 days. That's all right. We can go on that basis. And the SALT agreement was signed. Now, did they cheat? Yeah. But we caught them? Yeah, we caught them.

And what did Reagan do at the time? He said, show the Soviets those images. Tell them to tear it down. And we showed the Soviets those images. Did they tear it down? No. Did Reagan make war on Russia? No.

He kept talking until Gerovichov came in, and he said, all right, you guys are right. That's an ADM. And the rest is history. You have given Kissinger credit for the negotiation of these treaties, but tell us about the monstrous side. How many people are dead because of Henry Kissinger? I'm afraid I have to say millions. Millions. He was not totally responsible for Vietnam.

But we have McNamara before him saying there were three million Vietnamese dead because of our war in Vietnam. Now, you know, we talk about 8 million Jews. That was a genocide during the Third Reich. Is 3 million not enough for a genocide? I think it qualifies. And with 2 million plus in Gaza, that qualifies too. So, you know, he was a beast. How was he responsible for the millions of deaths? Are you talking about

expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia? That's right. Yeah. And they actually had plans to move all the way up there into North Vietnam and China. And this is a hopeful note. There were such mass demonstrations, a million people in Central Park, that they prevented, this prevented Kissinger and Nixon from doing this madman act as though they were going to do a nuclear bomb, okay? And that's recounted in a wonderful documentary now, The Madman and the Movement. Look it up. I think it's available online. You really ought to see that. It would give everyone hope that these demonstrations, these marches are not in vain. They often have an effect that you don't realize has the effect for years later. What was the madman act that Nixon and Kissinger had contemplated, which the demonstrators in Central Park prevented?

Well, Nixon wanted to the Vietnamese and the Chinese to think that he was a madman enough to use a nuclear weapon, okay? Now, he wasn't, thank God. I hope nobody is. But he wanted that to make the communists give up. I don't know who told them that that would make the communists give up. It wasn't us, okay? And he was just about to do that, move those troops up toward Hanoi and right onto the border of China. And these demonstrations prevented that, and that's provable. We have documents that came out just within the last year that show that these mass demonstrations had a real salutary effect and effect toward peace in the world. What is Kissinger's legacy in a word or a sentence or a phrase? Well, I think it's twofold.

One, you need a basic concept of morality so you don't do things like genocide. The other is that you need to be smart. And when you see opportunities like the Sino-Soviet conflict, you can leverage that into good policies for the United States. That's precisely what he did. And right now we have a relationship with Russia and China, where they have the long ends of this triangle now, and we are on the short end of the stick. And Kissinger didn't like that either. He complained about it, but just mildly when he was in his late 90s, just before he died. I'm going to play an old-fashioned propaganda clip produced by the government. This is Nixon and Mao, of course, orchestrated by Kissinger. Because this is so

old, the first 10 seconds of it are silent, but just be patient. You'll recognize the faces, you'll recognize the voice. You and I are of an age where we remember these things, and you'll certainly recognize government propaganda. Henry Kissinger joins President Nixon to meet with Chairman Mao in China. ...last bestowed during the first day of a state visit on former Premier Nikita Khrushchev. meet with Chairman Mao in China. Frank. At the summit, face-to-face, two leaders who direct the destiny of one out of three persons on the earth. The gate to friendly contact, says Joe and Lye, has finally been opened. Produced to you by your friends in Langley, Virginia. Well, actually, Judge, you know, that wasn't far from the truth. There was euphoria there. I mean, through very artful diplomacy and people like Chas Freeman, who were really good with language, there was a joint agreement, the Shanghai Communique, which said there's just one China, okay, That Taiwan is part of that one China. That was US policy back to

1972, for God's sake. Now, I don't know why Biden doesn't get it or why these guys decide that they want to challenge China over Taiwan, but I guess it makes a lot of money for the arms manufacturers and the people who build the warships. So, you know, that was all solved. Yeah, it was an imperfect solution. But there was one China. We recognize that. Why we're tempting the Taiwanese to declare independence or to give them the wherewithal to resist an invasion from the mainland is beyond me, other than we think we can sell more arms that way

and that we are, after all, the indispensable nation. We can work our will in any way we see fit. You are the indispensable man, Ray. Thank you very much for your wealth of knowledge and insight in all of these matters. Our friend Larry, of course, is in Moscow. He's going to be on in just a little while. I don't know if we can twist his arm

to get him to do the intelligence roundtable from Moscow at the end of the week, but we'll certainly give it a try. That'd be fun. Thank you, Ray. All the best. Coming up, Larry Johnson, 3 o'clock Eastern, live from Moscow. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.