- Henry Kissinger, one of the most controversial
and powerful figures in American politics is dead.
Kissinger was an American diplomat and political scientist.
He served as National Security Advisor
and Secretary of State under two presidents.
And his career is full of a lot,
some laudable achievements
such as normalizing relations with China,
but also full of some actions that many call war crimes.
Many of you watching are 100% positive
that Henry Kissinger is a war criminal.
Others might see Kissinger as a brilliant leader
who helped the U.S. navigate very uncertain times
during the Cold War.
I actually met Henry Kissinger once.
I was working at a think tank in D.C.
where he was a counselor and trustee and frankly,
I didn't glean much about this guy's character
in our little meeting.
But since then, we've gotten to know him,
at least his career.
We've studied him and his actions,
both the good and the bad.
So today I wanna look at this man, Henry Kissinger.
I wanna look at what he did and evaluate
what we can learn from this person who, for better or worse
has played an influential role
in how American power is wielded on the global stage.
- [Narrator] On this, perhaps the most gentle
and graceful land in all of Asia,
president Nixon and Mr. Kissinger
unleashed 100,000 tons of bombs.
- Henry Kissinger was born on May 27th, 1923 in Germany.
When he was a teenager, his family left Germany
for the United States, fleeing oppression from the Nazis.
He went to Harvard and later was drafted into the Army
during World War II, serving in a counterintelligence role.
After the war, he returned to Harvard
and pursued a PhD in political science.
Kissinger made a name for himself
as a political theorist and author,
he focused on the role of nuclear weapons
and this new geopolitics that had emerged
after World War II.
He studied a political philosophy called Realpolitik
which emphasizes how countries gain power
by reacting practically to conflicts and situations
as opposed to based on ideology or values.
But from my reading
what made Kissinger powerful was his ability
to connect with people, to network in Washington D.C.
That was perhaps his greatest asset
and the thing that kept him close to power.
This was later exemplified by the fact that Kissinger served
under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
You can start to seek Kissinger's realpolitik
and networking skills in full action
well before he ever stepped foot in the White House.
According to this archived document
from Nixon's chief of staff, early in his career
when he was working for the Democratic President LBJ
as an advisor on Vietnam,
he cozied up to the Democrats political opponent
Richard Nixon, who was running for president.
So he cozies up to Nixon
and conspires to pass Nixon information
about secret Vietnam War peace talks happening in Paris.
Nixon could potentially use this information
that he got from Kissinger to prevent the peace talks
from going well
which in turn would make the Democrats look bad
since they were the ones in power and help pave the way
for Nixon to win the presidency.
(dramatic music)
Now, there's a significant debate on whether or not
all of this sort of backroom deal thing had any impact
on the peace talks, but what I care about
in this little story is what it shows about Henry Kissinger.
That he was willing to go to these lengths
to betray the president he was working for
and to cozy up to a candidate who he hated
but thought could potentially win the presidency
to pass on information that could potentially compromise
the peace talks that might end the war in Vietnam.
Anyway, the peace talks did indeed break down
the day before the presidential election, no less.
Nixon ended up winning and Kissinger this political theorist
turned power-hungry networker had shown
that he was willing to sabotage peace talks
in the name of gaining favor in the eyes of a powerful man.
Nixon appointed Kissinger as his national security advisor
giving him an unprecedented level of control,
control over what he could use the American power machine
to do on the global stage,
all in the name of National Security.
(dramatic music)
Now, listen, most of us weren't alive at this time
so we don't really know what this was like
to live during the 60s and 70s when kind of everything
was about the Cold War and specifically Vietnam.
(dramatic music)
So now you have Henry Kissinger
and Richard Nixon overseeing this war.
It was a war that was no closer to ending.
A war that remember, these two conspired to lengthen,
so that together they could end it
and score Nixon political points.
And this leads us
to perhaps the most infamous of Kissinger's sins.
There's a reason why Anthony Bourdain said,
"Once you've been to Cambodia you'll never stop
wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death
with your bare hands."
That's because in March, 1969,
Kissinger directed the U.S. Air Force
to fly over Vietnam's neighbor, Cambodia,
a neutral third party and to drop bombs everywhere.
- [Narrator] President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger
unleashed 100,000 tons of bombs,
the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.
The bombing was their personal decision,
illegally and secretly, they bombed Cambodia
a neutral country, back to the Stone Age.
- The goal was to eliminate North Vietnamese supply lines
and strongholds that were in Cambodia
but the response was carpet bombing.
Carpet bombing is indiscriminate.
It has unknown targets, which means
that civilians usually get caught in the crossfire.
So now you have B52s raining down hell from the sky
at all hours of the day, homes were reduced to rubble.
Entire villages were turned immediately into refugees.
And what the record shows that came out later
is that all of this, this indiscriminate bombing,
this slaughter from above was approved by
and then concealed by Henry Kissinger.
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This map that you're looking at
is not some stylized representation of this.
This is actual data.
We have the data of every bomb,
hundreds of thousands of bombs
that were dropped on Cambodia during this time.
All in all, at least 100,000 Cambodians died in all of this.
2 million were made homeless,
and this is in a country of only 7 million people.
In total, the U.S. dropped 2,756,000 tons
of bombs on Cambodia.
Many of these bombs went undetonated
turning the country into a minefield
of undetonated explosives that still exist today
and perhaps more significantly contributing
to the destabilizing of this country
making way for a violent communist party to rise to power
with a vengeance leading to a mass genocide.
All of this happened in secret
without the approval of Congress, it was Henry Kissinger.
This one man wielding, his deathly gotten power
to ruthlessly get what he wanted at any cost.
As the endless war was near its end,
peace negotiations kept breaking down.
In response, Kissinger sent another round of brutal bombings
around Christmas, 1972 in an effort
to force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table.
(dramatic music) (bombs exploding)
And I'm not exaggerating here.
Like Kissinger literally said,
"We bombed the North Vietnamese
into accepting our concessions."
Some historians argued that the bombings had little effect
on the peace talks, and instead only resulted in more pain,
more death, and more destruction.
And yet, this is where the story takes an insane turn.
The next year, Henry Kissinger was given a Nobel Peace Prize
for brokering the ceasefire in Vietnam.
An award given to him for ending a war
that didn't actually end.
An award that his North Vietnamese counterpart
would decline.
Two members of the Nobel Peace Committee resigned
in protests because of this.
- It is as if everyone at the Olympic Stadium
joined in carrying an athlete on their shoulders
in an endless triumphal procession
without pausing to realize that in fact
he had won no gold medals at all.
- And Kissinger himself even felt weird about this
and offered to give the medal back to the committee.
Okay, this is one of the great parodies of the modern era
that this ever happened, but it doesn't end here.
In Chile, in 1970, Kissinger directed the CIA to destabilize
the country and seek to overthrow
its recently elected socialist president.
The coup attempt failed here, but it eventually did lead
to the assassination of a Chilean general.
The President was eventually overthrown
and replaced by this Chilean general
who would go on to kidnap, murder, and torture
his political opponents.
But because he wasn't a communist,
Kissinger turned a blind eye.
In fact, one of the features of Henry Kissinger
during his time was cozying up to dictators
all around the world,
all in the name of securing America's place
as the global superpower.
He pledged his support for this Indonesian military dictator
as he was invading East Timor using American weapons.
We have this declassified document of the conversation
between Kissinger and this military dictator.
Kissinger telling this military dictator to move fast
on his invasion and to not be too obvious about the fact
that he's using U.S. military weaponry and support.
The dictator did move fast and soon was exterminating
hundreds of thousands of people,
Kissinger and his big powerful apparatus standing by
to watch what they had sponsored.
While illegally bombing Cambodia,
Kissinger also oversaw illegal bombings in Laos.
He supported Pakistan in their genocide against Bangladesh.
He supported Turkey as they invaded Cyprus.
He helped kick off U.S. dependence on Saudi Arabia
for oil in exchange for selling them weapons,
a relationship that we're still bound to today.
He supported coups and death squads
across Latin America, and the list goes on and on and on.
- I won't have it from him
that he's doing this against communism.
It's just another of the constituents of the gigantic lie
that constitutes his reputation.
He's a thug and a crook and a liar
and a pseudo intellectual and a murderer, okay?
All of those things are factually verifiable,
factually verified.
- I mean, listen, it was the Cold War like,
again, none of us can really capture what that was like.
You had two superpowers racing to see
who could get more nuclear weapons.
There was real fear here and leaders had to make
very difficult decisions.
Defenders of Kissinger see all of this behavior
that I've listed as just a leader living in the Cold War,
having to do what it takes to avoid nuclear conflict
or a communist takeover.
A vital elder statesman serving America
and making impossible decisions along the way.
But the most vociferous critics tend to see the opposite.
An evil genius who was given the full arsenal
of American power, which he then wielded to achieve
his grand vision of how the world should look.
But when you look at the arc of Henry Kissinger's career
neither of these characterizations hold.
He was not a master strategist or an unparalleled genius.
In fact, he's a guy full of contradictions.
He conspired to extend the Vietnam War
despite thinking that the war was foolish.
He joined the Nixon White House, despite long maintaining
that Richard Nixon was not presidential material.
He orchestrated these increased bombings of Vietnam
and Cambodia despite all evidence indicating
that the U.S. could not win this war.
A reminder that Henry Kissinger grew up being bullied
and beaten up for being a Jew in Nazi Germany
and then he fled that brutality to come to the United States
where he studied how power works between countries,
but also between people.
He used those skills to navigate himself
into standing in the most powerful places in the world
next to the the most powerful people in the world,
the most powerful military in the world at his disposal
and the permission to use it as he saw fit.
Henry Kissinger knew what it took to stay on top
and what it took was shifting alliances,
secret bombing campaigns, sabotaging peace talks,
supporting dictators abroad, and the list goes on.
I guess the point here
is that Henry Kissinger's master guiding principle
was to have no guiding principle.
He infused that into his leadership, into his decisions,
leading to the destruction of many lives around the globe,
ripples that are still felt today.
Even if Henry Kissinger were still alive,
I believe he would never have faced true accountability
for his actions.
He played the game too well.
He's too liked by powerful people
on both sides of the aisle.
But ultimately, if we can learn anything from this,
the death of Henry Kissinger gives us an opportunity
to appreciate what can happen when too much power
is concentrated in the hands of one man.
(dramatic music)
Thank you all for watching.
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(lively music)