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Kissinger is the story of the enigmatic power-broker who served in the topmost echelons of U.S. diplomacy. Celebrated or reviled, his contradictions reflect those central to late 20th century U.S. foreign policy.
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00:00:00The following program contains content which may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.
00:00:13President-elect Nixon today named Dr. Henry Kissinger, the German-born Harvard professor, as his White House policy advisor on defense and foreign affairs.
00:00:22In 1968, when Henry Kissinger was named National Security Advisor, he was not at all well-known, certainly not as famous or as celebrated as he would become.
00:00:34I enthusiastically accept this assignment and I shall serve the president-elect with all my energy and dedication.
00:00:43There was something about him that was different, like the way he talked.
00:00:47I have tried to avoid labels like heart and sauce.
00:00:53Here's this Harvard professor, kind of a nerd, nerdish guy.
00:00:58That became one of the most powerful men in the world.
00:01:02I believe that what America does is of great consequence to the peace of the world and to the progress of humanity.
00:01:10He entered the realm of power and bestrode it as a geopolitical colossus.
00:01:16He had enormous power, more power than any unelected official probably in the history of this country.
00:01:22And the moments he lashes out most are the moments he feels powerless.
00:01:26We are not talking about an attack on a neutral country.
00:01:29The secrecy, the lying, the denial of reality, those are all Kissingerian.
00:01:35I don't think that he had much concern for the human costs of his actions.
00:01:40The question about the relationship of morality to foreign policy is a very complex one.
00:01:47I don't think he denied that he overlooked certain human rights.
00:01:51He would just say there were other factors at stake.
00:01:54Sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils.
00:01:57He wasn't trying to win a popularity contest.
00:02:00He was trying to implement his ideas.
00:02:03I believe we have an obligation to prevent the totalitarians from taking over the world by force.
00:02:10Yes, he was brilliant.
00:02:12But in the end, his legacy is about the number of people, and we're talking hundreds of thousands,
00:02:18that died because of the arrogance of his policy.
00:02:21Nobody, before all sins, has played such an important role in American foreign policy.
00:02:30We've had to recognize it's Henry Kissinger's world.
00:02:33We've had to recognize it's Henry Kissinger's world.
00:03:03Tonight, Henry Kissinger talks about war and peace, and about his decisions at the height of his powers.
00:03:28I was brought up in a totalitarian society, and therefore I had perhaps a better sense for the fragility of institutions
00:03:41and for the potential evil that can break forth when restraints disappear.
00:03:48One has to remember that Henry Kissinger was born at a time when Germany was in a state of near-revolutionary upheaval.
00:04:02In the 1920s, the economic crisis of hyperinflation that engulfs Weimar Germany combined with the sense of grievance
00:04:14about the terms imposed on the terms imposed on Germany after the First World War generates the rise of a very vicious right-wing fascist movement,
00:04:25for whom Jews are the scapegoats.
00:04:29And the Kissinger's, like a lot of German Jews, had no sense of what was going to come for them in the 1930s.
00:04:39Furt, in Bavaria, had a significant Jewish population in the 1920s.
00:05:00Heinz Kissinger is born into one of the Orthodox families in Furt, and grows up in a middle-class Jewish household.
00:05:13Heinz had two distinctive features, a brilliant mind and indefatigable energy.
00:05:20Well, if he got the brilliance from his father, Luis, he got that endless energy from his mother, Paula.
00:05:30Their Jewishness is serious, they're Orthodox, they're kosher.
00:05:33But in terms of their work and education lives, they see themselves integrated in German culture.
00:05:38Despite his later reputation, he's not a particularly studious child.
00:05:43His mother complains that him and Walter are always running away from kindergarten.
00:05:47Henry was born 23, and Walter was born 24, and they were terrible, naughty, and hard to handle.
00:05:56He always said that he was a gregarious, fairly frivolous young man,
00:06:03and he maintained that he had a rather happy childhood.
00:06:07But the childhood came to an abrupt end with the rise of the Nazis.
00:06:20The Jewish community, which had been very well integrated into a fairly liberal and cultured Germany,
00:06:37suddenly finds itself the target of the wrath of the German right.
00:06:44For people like the Kissingers, this is a shock.
00:06:48There is a deep reluctance to believe the depth that this depravity can reach.
00:06:56Kissinger remembered that when he and his brother would take their bicycles to go visit their grandfather,
00:07:03he would see the signs saying Jews are not wanted here.
00:07:07And Kissinger commented later about how everything seemed changed.
00:07:11I was prohibited to go to German schools.
00:07:15All the German people with whom my parents associated more or less cut off all contact with us.
00:07:24A policy of segregation for Jewish people was created, and my father lost his job.
00:07:39Because Louis is an employee of the German state, he is sacked, and it devastates him.
00:07:52He got so much fulfillment out of his job as a teacher, and then suddenly he was bereft, he was lost,
00:07:58and he withdraws in on himself, and Kissinger feels distance from his father.
00:08:02My father was a teacher and not a practical man.
00:08:09And he was sort of paralyzed in the face of the evil the Nazis represented.
00:08:15I can't imagine how destabilizing and terrifying it must have been for Kissinger
00:08:23to see that world around him that he so admired turning against him.
00:08:29That a society that was seemingly so civilized, so refined, could descend into this kind of madness.
00:08:39There is a sense of a lost world that he'll never be able to return to.
00:08:44His childhood featured that profound loss of innocence, of joy and prosperity and ease.
00:08:53That was a wrench in my life that had a deep impact on me.
00:09:00It was the possibility that what had given you security could disintegrate.
00:09:06My mother was extremely practical, and she decided that they should leave Germany.
00:09:22My father didn't object.
00:09:24I was mainly afraid for the children. You saw they were so isolated.
00:09:32My father was so isolated.
00:09:33In 1938, they leave.
00:09:38They take a couple of trunks with a few precious personal items,
00:09:41and then they have to leave everything behind.
00:09:44The Kissinger's left in the nick of time, just weeks before the huge pogrom
00:09:51that we know as Kistan after the night of broken glass.
00:09:54Mobs across Germany torch Jewish homes.
00:10:02They attack Jewish people in the streets. They destroy synagogues.
00:10:07And in Furt, they drag as many Jews as they can to the town center.
00:10:13And they have to stand there and watch as the synagogue burns to the ground.
00:10:16The Kissinger's are not spared the Holocaust in Germany.
00:10:28Kissinger loses 13 members of his family in the Holocaust.
00:10:32And I think for Kissinger, it generated a deep pessimism about the idea that norms and rules
00:10:41are going to protect you.
00:10:42Really, at the end of the day, the only thing that's going to protect you is power.
00:10:53There was a cousin of mine who brought us here.
00:10:58And when we arrived by boat, as we came down the gangplank, he said,
00:11:04your name now is Henry.
00:11:05The Kissinger's settle in Washington Heights, which has a large community of German Jews.
00:11:14It's known as Frankfurt on the Hudson or the Fourth Reich.
00:11:19And they try and build a life that, to an extent, mirrors the one they've left.
00:11:24We didn't have any money.
00:11:28My brother and I slept in the living room.
00:11:30We had no privacy.
00:11:32But I did not feel that I was suffering.
00:11:38The challenge, of course, was to arrive in the United States in the Depression.
00:11:43That was why Henry Kissinger had to get a job.
00:11:55He worked in a shaving brush factory.
00:11:57He went to night school.
00:11:58He didn't have the opportunity to have a lot of fun.
00:12:02But he also seems to have felt an enormous sense of relief.
00:12:08Because he didn't have to cross the street to get away from kids who would beat him up.
00:12:14He starts to study.
00:12:16And he immerses himself in the very vital life of New York City in the late 1930s.
00:12:24I think he fell in love with New York very quickly.
00:12:28He fell in love with baseball.
00:12:32And he fell in love with my mother.
00:12:37My mother's name is Annalise Cohen.
00:12:40They very quickly started dating and it became a very sweet, dedicated relationship.
00:12:47They had been through the same kind of trauma.
00:12:51But they shared a desire to turn the disaster that they had experienced into a life of meaning.
00:12:59But I think it was the army that truly gave him the confidence that he could be a true American.
00:13:12The attack was carried out by Jap torpedo planes together with dive bombers.
00:13:16Kissinger is at a football game and he comes out and sees the newspaper boy with the headline saying
00:13:22Pearl Harbor attacks.
00:13:24And he doesn't have any idea where Pearl Harbor is.
00:13:27Immediate response from the youth of America.
00:13:29Army, Navy and Marine recruiting stations bulged to overflowing.
00:13:33Most teenagers pretty quickly figured out that they might not be interested in war, but war was likely going to be interested in them.
00:13:41The second number which has just been drawn is 192.
00:13:47The U.S. Army was not a tremendously discerning institution in the early phase of World War II.
00:14:04It took its young men from wherever it could and from wherever they'd come from.
00:14:11He's drafted in 1943 and he's sent to a rifle company in the 84th Infantry Division of the Rail Splitters.
00:14:22Initially, the young Henry Kissinger found himself in this extraordinary melting pot of young men in training camps that were Spartan, to put it mildly.
00:14:39I thought it was a tremendous experience, not every minute of which I enjoyed, but I now think it was one of the most important experiences of my life.
00:14:48I had never met any really native-born Americans, and these people from the Midwest were very tolerant and friendly, and I got to know America as a result of serving in the army.
00:15:00These are the men who served in the 84th Infantry Division, a division that distinguished itself in a series of critical engagements during World War II.
00:15:15Kissinger lands in France five months after D-Day in November 1944, and someone clearly recognizes his linguistic talents, and he's put into the counterintelligence part of the 84th Infantry Division.
00:15:28It's not long after D-Day that Kissinger finds himself in one of the great battles of the war in Europe, the Battle of the Bulge.
00:15:40The fighting was hard.
00:15:45The Germans put up stiff resistance.
00:15:48The casualties were high.
00:15:50The 84th Infantry Division is trapped in a Belgian town, Marchand Famen.
00:15:58And Kissinger works in the courthouse with the general and other staff, monitoring everything and helping to organize the defense of the town.
00:16:10It was especially dangerous for Kissinger because as a German Jew by birth, he risked execution if he were captured.
00:16:21After the Battle of the Bulge, the 84th Infantry Division heads towards the city of Hanover, where they come across Arlem Concentration Camp.
00:16:36And it is a horrendous place.
00:16:46Out of the 1,000 Polish men brought here 10 months prior to April 1945, only 200 remained.
00:16:52Prisoners who could walk were removed before American troops entered Hanover.
00:16:56The others were left to starve and die.
00:16:59They're horrified.
00:17:00They radio to the headquarters, which is where Kissinger is, and he drives up.
00:17:05And they come into this camp and Kissinger is just staggered by it.
00:17:13When questioned, most of these men could not remember when they'd last eaten a decent meal.
00:17:21Many had been beaten and tortured so long their minds had failed.
00:17:26My father described his experience liberating the Arlem Concentration Camp as something that words could not entirely communicate.
00:17:37As our jeep traveled down the street, skeletons in strapped suits lined the road.
00:17:44Cloth seemed to fall from the bodies.
00:17:48Their heads were held up by a stick that once might have been a throat.
00:17:53Paws hang from the sides where arms should be.
00:17:59I see my friend enter one of the huts and come out with tears in his eyes.
00:18:05Don't go in there.
00:18:07We had to kick them to tell the dead from the living.
00:18:11To him, it always was the most horrendous thing that he'd ever seen.
00:18:17The victims relate the atrocity story and photographs are made for further documentation of the horrors committed at the Hanover camp.
00:18:23The power of knowing that it could have been him in that camp.
00:18:30That stays with Henry Kissinger.
00:18:34The deaths continue even after liberation of the camp.
00:18:38Some were too far gone when the Americans took over.
00:18:41It was an illustration for him that strength was an unavoidable facet of resisting evil.
00:18:50That the attempt to deal with evil through compromise sometimes was not enough.
00:18:59After the war, Kissinger writes to the mother, an old friend of his from Firth, who had survived a concentration camp.
00:19:09And he writes to warn her of what her son will now be like.
00:19:16I feel it necessary to write to you.
00:19:19I think a completely erroneous picture exists in the United States of the former inmates of the concentration camps.
00:19:26Kissinger writes he has not only suffered, but he has lived in an anarchic world in which is survival of the fittest.
00:19:33In which there is no order, there is no structure or sense of society.
00:19:39Concentration camps were not only mills of death, they were also testing grounds.
00:19:45It's a warning that morality has its limits and that this was about power and strength and survival above all else.
00:19:54The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance.
00:20:00It was a necessity to follow through with a singleness of purpose inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States.
00:20:08The problem now is future peace. That is your job in Germany.
00:20:20You'll see ruins. You'll see flowers. You'll see some mighty pretty scenery.
00:20:27Don't let it fool you. You are an enemy country. Be alert. Suspicious of everyone. Take no chances.
00:20:36Germany in 1945 was in a state of collapse.
00:20:42Proven war criminals must answer for their crimes.
00:20:46As a member of the counterintelligence corps, Kissinger had to find out who were the Nazis.
00:20:58So Kissinger went from fighting Germans to trying to understand them.
00:21:05Somewhere in this Germany are stormtroopers by the thousands.
00:21:09Out of sight, part of the mob, but still watching you and hating you.
00:21:16Trust none of them.
00:21:18At a very young age, my father was given enormous authority over an area around Hanover to apprehend high-ranking Nazis.
00:21:30My job was to arrest all Nazis above a certain level.
00:21:43At that time, of course, every German claimed that he hadn't been a Nazi.
00:21:47For someone so young, it's a lot of responsibility and he carries out the job effectively.
00:21:53It's a rather extraordinary thought that the young 22, 23-year-old Henry Kissinger is in this position of power over the very people who had been murdering his relatives.
00:22:08The very people who had driven his family across the Atlantic.
00:22:12There's no vengeance in Kissinger.
00:22:15He is not searching for some kind of feeling of righteous vindication.
00:22:22He is not a black and white person.
00:22:25He lives in the grey area in between.
00:22:28Bear Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng.
00:22:43And with blessings, surrender thee o'er.
00:22:48Kissinger enters Harvard on the GI Bill alongside millions of other new college students who had served in the military.
00:22:55And Kissinger is determined to take his own experiences and hit the ground running.
00:23:05He was the proverbial young man in a hurry.
00:23:08He tried many different subjects.
00:23:11For a while, he was on track to be a chemistry professor.
00:23:16He also flirted with going to law school.
00:23:21But ultimately, his fascination with history and government prevailed.
00:23:25The old regime in France was tyrannical, oppressive.
00:23:28Insofar as one could learn anything in preparation for a high governmental position,
00:23:33I think a study of history is the best preparation.
00:23:36He was definitely someone who was determined to conquer academia through sheer hard work and labor.
00:23:43Not someone who joined college activities, joined college clubs.
00:23:47He was very rigorous about just using all of his time for his studies.
00:23:54He is the guy who's in the library 24-7, squirreled away in his dorm, reading from dawn to dusk.
00:24:03And so most of his Harvard contemporaries barely remember him.
00:24:07He manages to sneak in a dog, and I think that's pretty much his only friend there by all accounts.
00:24:13And then Kissinger writes his undergraduate thesis, the meaning of history.
00:24:19The meaning of history.
00:24:20The meaning of history.
00:24:21The meaning of history.
00:24:22Yes, the famous meaning of history.
00:24:27An extraordinarily detailed and philosophical thesis which grapples with the big questions of human life, human meaning, the meaning of history.
00:24:37It was the longest senior thesis in Harvard history.
00:24:46It was so long that Harvard had to introduce a rule that dissertations had to be within a certain word limit.
00:24:52The meaning of history is extraordinary, but undisciplined, unedited, and confusing.
00:25:00I have read it.
00:25:01If you ask me if I understand it, I would bet I'm on a punt that question.
00:25:07But it produces a summa cum laude degree and admission to the graduate program in government and history.
00:25:13He spends many, many years at Harvard.
00:25:17And he's just this very frustrated young PhD graduate who is kind of trying to find a place for himself.
00:25:26So what he does is he kind of invents a place for himself.
00:25:30He studies the policies of European statesmen after the fall of Napoleon and their attempts to bring about order and stability.
00:25:38He does see it as an analogy for the world of the Cold War and of nuclear weapons in which states have to balance against each other undergirded by a fear of what war is like.
00:25:52The central problem of the Cold War was like a kind of chess game.
00:25:57There were two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
00:26:01All the rest of the world was a chessboard.
00:26:04All the other pieces could be moved about that chessboard.
00:26:07Diplomacy showed a way in which at least temporary peace could be achieved.
00:26:13It was not just accepting the world as it is, but understanding the realities of power and manipulating power in order to achieve the ultimate goal, which was peace and stability.
00:26:28It's about building the right balance of power so that war is impossible.
00:26:35It's victory is impossible because then only through that would you prevent another war.
00:26:47Machine guns chatter a song of death and rockets hiss down with terrifying accuracy onto the reds below.
00:26:53Shortly after Kissinger's graduation, the Korean War breaks out.
00:26:57The Korean War is really the pearl harbor of the Cold War.
00:27:04It was the moment when Americans could no longer ignore Stalin's ambitions to expand communism beyond the Soviet Union.
00:27:17The democratic peoples must fight and continue to fight until the grim red cheddar that shrouds the world is dispelled.
00:27:24So, we have a rising Cold War that now has become a hot war.
00:27:30And I think what the Korean War does is it creates for the next 50 years in the United States an axiom that if you ever give the communists a little bit of space, they will seize it and seize more.
00:27:42And so the United States has to be ever ready, has to be prepared for apocalypse at any moment.
00:27:54Today, every state, every city and town is within striking range of a determined enemy.
00:28:01It's difficult for us today to understand how scared people were in the 50s and early 60s about the prospects of nuclear war.
00:28:10And every military technology, every weapon that had ever been produced in human history had been used, and nuclear weapons had been used twice.
00:28:29The U.S. strategy, which was called massive retaliation, was that if the Soviets use a single nuclear weapon against an American interest, the United States will hurl hundreds of nuclear missiles all the way to Moscow.
00:28:54Time Square waits. Millions wonder. Suppose it were real.
00:29:03But if the Soviet Union did something in a second-tier European country, would we really sacrifice New York and Washington by retaliating against them?
00:29:15Kissinger's thought was no, and everybody knows it.
00:29:19Kissinger understood that there was something absurd about a strategy which gave you a choice between capitulation or Armageddon.
00:29:28And it was also true that there must be some limited use for nuclear weapons.
00:29:34What is the role of nuclear weapons? What is the significance of conventional forces?
00:29:40He talked to the experts, picked their brains, and then wrote his own book. And that book became Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. It was the book that made him famous.
00:29:52Henry Kissinger is the author of the bestseller Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
00:30:01Kissinger is offering the possibly radical argument that the United States should be willing to use nuclear weapons in smaller wars.
00:30:09You think American strategy should be re-evaluated to restore war as a usable instrument of policy?
00:30:17American strategy has to face the fact that it may be confronted with war.
00:30:22And that if Soviet aggression confronts us with war and we are unwilling to resist, it will mean the end of our freedom.
00:30:28Suddenly makes him a hugely important public intellectual. He gets invited on television. He can write op-eds in the New York Times.
00:30:35He is now recognized as an important person in the conversations about the Cold War.
00:30:41Dr Kissinger, do you believe it's true that we have no coherent strategy?
00:30:46I have no doubt that our military services have a plan for every conceivable contingency, but I have the uneasy feeling that these plans are not the same in each service.
00:31:03He's a very ambitious person, but he's also ambitious for his ideas.
00:31:08He wants to have an impact on history, and he realizes that in order to do that, he must cultivate relationships with power.
00:31:22So, he begins to use the sort of cachet and prestige of Harvard to build relationships for himself beyond university.
00:31:31Now, if you're a policy intellectual, you're pretty stupid if you don't get expert about what's going to become the dominant divisive foreign policy issue of the later 1960s.
00:31:44And that is the war in Vietnam.
00:31:47We do not want an expanding struggle with consequences that no one can perceive.
00:32:02Nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our power.
00:32:08But we will not surrender.
00:32:12And we will not retreat.
00:32:14The United States had been getting steadily more involved in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration, but it was under Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination that U.S. involvement escalated and large numbers of U.S. troops began to be committed.
00:32:34Retreat does not bring safety, and weakness does not bring peace.
00:32:41The escalation really dates from 1965, and that's the year that Kissinger first visits Vietnam.
00:32:49Why did he go?
00:32:51Well, I think Kissinger was genuinely interested in the problem that was evolving in Vietnam.
00:32:58I first heard of him when we were all called into the political counsellor's office in the embassy in Saigon, and he told us Dr. Kissinger was coming soon, and I was asked to take him up to the northern part of the country.
00:33:15And so we took him to some remote places in Vietnam.
00:33:20I wouldn't say it was exactly fearless.
00:33:22I can tell you one phobia he absolutely had, and that was flying.
00:33:27I remember one time, he walks up to the pilot, and he says, good morning, pilot.
00:33:32He says, can this plane really get over those mountains?
00:33:36Henry was holding onto the curtains of that airplane for dear life.
00:33:49The reports that he wrote from that and later trips to Vietnam in the mid-60s are extraordinary,
00:33:57because he understood very quickly why the United States' effort to prop up South Vietnam was failing.
00:34:07He recognizes that the United States is likely not able to prevail in the amount of time that public opinion would be supportive of the war effort.
00:34:17And he, from a very early point, believes that the United States has to find some type of negotiated solution.
00:34:22I concluded then that there was no way of winning the war in the manner in which it was being conducted.
00:34:29So I felt from that moment on that we had to find a negotiated way out.
00:34:35But I also felt that having committed that many forces, we couldn't simply walk away.
00:34:43Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard.
00:34:46He's been an advisor to the United States government under four presidents, and has recently returned from Vietnam.
00:34:53Professor Kissinger, I find American intervention in Vietnam as immoral as Nazi and Italian intervention in Spain before the last war.
00:35:04Why don't you?
00:35:05I don't find the intervention in Vietnam immoral, because our purpose is to give the people of South Vietnam a free choice.
00:35:18The Nazi intervention was to deprive the people of a free choice.
00:35:24And I would have thought that people in Britain should know the difference between American motivations and fascist motivations.
00:35:32I bring with me the love of your families and the affection of your friends.
00:35:44I bring with me also the gratitude of the nation that you serve so honourably, and so loyally, and so well.
00:35:53By 1968, what Kissinger had spotted in 1965 was becoming obvious even to President Lyndon Johnson.
00:36:07The war in Vietnam was proving extremely hard to win.
00:36:12Americans risk and sometimes give all that they have half a world away from home.
00:36:18In order to try to figure out a graceful exit from Southeast Asia, a negotiation had to happen.
00:36:25Good evening, my fellow Americans.
00:36:28Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
00:36:35Then, in 1968.
00:36:37I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
00:36:48President Johnson declared he would not run for re-election.
00:36:52He was going to devote himself to finding a solution.
00:36:55And he was coming close.
00:36:57The diplomatic deadlock over a site for the peace talks was finally broken.
00:37:01The North Vietnamese had revealed a willingness to talk, but only on their terms.
00:37:07In Paris, politics and diplomacy eventually assembled all parties to try to find peace in Vietnam.
00:37:14The Johnson administration opened secret negotiations in Paris.
00:37:18The American public wanted to win, but they wanted to get out.
00:37:23And the clock is ticking.
00:37:24Kissinger saw that there was a chance to claim power.
00:37:31And he went to Paris in September.
00:37:34And he heard over there that there may be this bombing halt coming.
00:37:40This was the golden moment to say,
00:37:43if I don't walk through that door now and Nixon gets elected,
00:37:48it's going to be four years or eight years and I'm going to be a Harvard professor again.
00:37:52No matter how smart I am, this is my shot.
00:37:55And this was despite the fact that Kissinger and Nixon did not know each other.
00:38:00And Kissinger had said throughout that summer that Nixon would be a disaster if he got elected president.
00:38:05Henry Kissinger had steered clear of Richard Nixon throughout his career as a policy intellectual,
00:38:12declining invitations to meet with Nixon because he really had a pretty low opinion of Nixon.
00:38:19But Kissinger quickly made contact with the Nixon campaign.
00:38:24And he passed on the status of the talks through his contact with Richard Allen.
00:38:29Henry Kissinger volunteered information to us through a spy he had,
00:38:34a former student that he had at the Paris peace talks.
00:38:37He called me from pay phones and we spoke in German.
00:38:41And he offloaded, mostly every night, what happened that day in Paris.
00:38:46So he sends two different messages to Nixon on two different days in September,
00:38:51saying, there's this bombing halt coming.
00:38:54I just want you to know, think about what your position is going to be.
00:38:57Kissinger told the Nixon campaign, you know, they're getting closer to a deal.
00:39:02And Nixon's people told the South Vietnamese government that it would get better terms if Nixon was in the White House.
00:39:09This was the moment in which that distance between self-interest and national interest, at least in his mind, collapsed into each other.
00:39:19From that point forward, there was no daylight between the interests of Henry Kissinger and the interests of the United States, at least in Henry Kissinger's mind.
00:39:30Having lost a close one eight years ago, and having won a close one this year, I can say this.
00:39:45Winning's a lot more fun.
00:39:47After the election, Nixon invites Kissinger to come to the Pierre Hotel in New York City.
00:39:56The Henry Kissinger who goes to the Pierre Hotel after Richard Nixon's election victory is a player but a bit player.
00:40:05Nixon had a general disdain for academics, but he wanted and needed a kind of authority that Henry gave him in academic terms.
00:40:15Kissinger had met Nixon just once before, and they have one of those awkward conversations which were Richard Nixon's signature dish.
00:40:25And that's why Nixon's decision to offer Kissinger the job of national security adviser came as such a surprise to Kissinger
00:40:33that he didn't realize Nixon had offered him the job.
00:40:37Nixon is just so awkward with people that he had neglected to actually make the offer.
00:40:44So Kissinger comes away from the meeting with Nixon and he gets a phone call from John Mitchell, who's the campaign manager.
00:40:53And Mitchell says,
00:40:54So, how do you like the new job?
00:40:57And Kissinger says,
00:40:59Well, what job? No job was actually offered.
00:41:02And Mitchell goes,
00:41:04Oh, for Christ's sake, he messed it up again.
00:41:11President-elect Nixon made his first major foreign policy appointment today.
00:41:15He named Harvard professor Henry Kissinger to be a special assistant for national security affairs.
00:41:20Dr. Kissinger is a man who is known to all people who are interested in foreign policy as perhaps one of the major scholars in America and the world today in this area.
00:41:30The relationship between Nixon and Kissinger is fascinating and it becomes a bizarre marriage.
00:41:37There's a wariness they have of each other early on, but I think they each see quite a bit of themselves in the other.
00:41:46President-elect and I have had many extensive conversations over the past week.
00:41:53It quickly became clear to Nixon that Kissinger was an asset.
00:41:58First of all, he understood Nixon.
00:42:01I enthusiastically accept this assignment and I shall serve the president-elect with all my energy and dedication.
00:42:11Kissinger got inside his head super quickly and very quickly began to understand how to talk to this lonely, difficult, mistrustful man.
00:42:20Dr. Kissinger is keenly aware of the necessity not to set himself up as a wall between the president and the secretary of state or the secretary of defense.
00:42:33Nixon wants to bring foreign policy into the White House.
00:42:37In this, he finds a perfect partner in Henry Kissinger.
00:42:40I don't think one could have expected this, but Kissinger turned out to be a very savvy, bureaucratic player.
00:42:47He was very good at maneuvering and counter maneuvering and he liked the secrecy as well.
00:42:54Kissinger meets alone with the president every day, sometimes for as long as an hour and a half.
00:42:59Nixon and Kissinger turned the National Security Council into basically the main hub of foreign policy.
00:43:07I had joined the NSC under the Johnson administration.
00:43:11It was a very loosely run operation, very small.
00:43:14There were only 11 or 12 of us.
00:43:17That was not true at all under Kissinger.
00:43:20These are the senior people from his National Security Council staff of about 40 persons.
00:43:26Kissinger's NSC staff was a much more concentrated power structure than anything that we had seen before.
00:43:36Kissinger made very clear that he did not want yes men.
00:43:39He wanted candid advice, disagreement if necessary, argue your case, if you lose the battle then faithfully carry out the policy.
00:43:49He enjoyed thinking and arguing issues through.
00:43:54Find out whether it's possible on Thursday and then we'll make it depend on the other day.
00:43:58I think he enjoyed having a few of us, maybe not too many, but a few of us who did not agree with him or the president politically.
00:44:09And I suspect he liked it because he won every argument.
00:44:12In part because he was very smart and in part because, let me see, oh yes I worked for him.
00:44:18Kissinger admits to being a perfectionist, not an easy man to work for.
00:44:22He was a demanding perfectionist with his staff. Nothing could ever be right.
00:44:29There was also a joke that if Henry didn't yell at you, he didn't love you.
00:44:33He speaks at his staff with pride and a kind of affection.
00:44:37They call him Henry and regard him too with warmth.
00:44:40Assaulted with a degree of apprehension for he has a sharp temper.
00:44:43We were graded. We were told we had done a B-plus or maybe an A-minus if we were really lucky.
00:44:51But always of course you had to go back because the only real A was Henry's own rendition.
00:44:57Kissinger, he stretched my patience. He stretched my nerves.
00:45:02Will this meeting take very long?
00:45:05He is regularly late to meetings. His staff despairs good-naturedly of that.
00:45:09I would quit about once a week. He was a mentor and a tormentor.
00:45:18We worked murderous hours. We were often seven in the morning till eight or nine at night.
00:45:25And it took a toll on families. It took a toll on our physical stamina.
00:45:30But Kissinger demanded to be the guiding light, the North Star of the Nixon foreign policy.
00:45:40And that meant the policy in Vietnam.
00:45:43Kissinger and Nixon entered the White House at a time when the United States is in a very, very difficult place in Vietnam.
00:46:10In 1969, tens of thousands of Americans had already been lost. We were losing about 200 a day.
00:46:19We were heading toward 535,000 troops in Vietnam. It was a hellish situation.
00:46:30We inherited a nightmare. It was shaking our domestic stability. It was the consuming concern of the intellectual community.
00:46:41We made up our mind from the beginning that we were going to try to disengage from Vietnam.
00:46:50That the war should end was unquestioned. The question was how. The question was when. The question was under what circumstances. With what honor or sense of honor.
00:47:05I want to end this war. The American people want to end this war. The people of South Vietnam want to end this war.
00:47:13Very soon, the enormous sentiment against the war that had haunted and driven Lyndon Johnson out of power was going to be turned on Richard Nixon. They knew that.
00:47:24What the Vietnam War did to many Americans was shake their faith that their country was decent and honorable.
00:47:37Because it seemed like the United States was fighting a war in a distant country in an extremely brutal way using chemical weapons like napalm, destroying villages, massacring civilians.
00:47:51And Nixon understood. You had to change course.
00:47:55How are you doing, President, in your efforts to end the Vietnam War?
00:48:00Once the enemy recognizes that it is not going to win its objecting by waiting aside, then the enemy will negotiate and we will end this war before the end of 1970. That is the objective we have.
00:48:12Nixon had to show that there is hope, there's light at the end of the tunnel, and we're going to get out. But with honor.
00:48:18But with honor.
00:48:21Ending the Vietnam War had been the principal goal of Nixon's first term.
00:48:30Not only in order to bring peace, but in order to end our domestic divisions.
00:48:36And I wanted to create conditions which would unify the country again by having an unwritten end to the war in Vietnam.
00:48:48Foremost in my father's mind was finding a way to end the Vietnam War without a collapse of America's influence in the world.
00:48:56Without a betrayal of millions of people who had relied on us, whose lives hung in the balance.
00:49:09Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense, arrived in Saigon today for a firsthand look at the progress of Vietnamization, which he said was irreversible.
00:49:14The secret plan that Nixon had to end the war that wasn't so secret or really a plan was Vietnamization.
00:49:27Vietnamization is the brainchild of Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense.
00:49:32You cannot guarantee the will and the desire of any country, but you can give them the tools to do the job.
00:49:39The basic idea is that we should begin a policy as quickly as we can of pouring money and training into the military in South Vietnam and that they'll be able to replace American troops.
00:49:5620% of these young men are farmer sons, out of the rice paddies and flying solo in a matter of weeks.
00:50:02And that's what the 300 South Vietnamese are doing here, learning to fly choppers for combat.
00:50:09So over a period of time, we felt that we could gradually withdraw American troops, which would maintain domestic support at home and buy time for the other prong, which was secret negotiations.
00:50:21The fact is that there was some public exchanges in Paris, but there were essentially propaganda battles, but the real negotiations were secret.
00:50:33Have you talked about Vietnam?
00:50:35I won't discuss any of this episode.
00:50:38Here's the way it would work. We had to make a cover tending we're still in Washington.
00:50:45So I would leave the office and say to my compatriots, I'm going to take the weekend off.
00:50:51And then I would join Kissinger.
00:50:53We fly into the middle of France and we were met by a military attache who would sneak us into a safe house.
00:51:01In the safe house, we used code names so that the housekeeper wouldn't know who we were.
00:51:06I was Major Larkin, I remember. I couldn't even be a lieutenant colonel. It was one humiliation after another.
00:51:20If the negotiations were secret, then Henry would have much more flexibility in how to negotiate with them.
00:51:27So, first point was that they were secret, not only from other governments, but from the State Department and the rest of the American government.
00:51:34We cut the State Department out of an awful lot of stuff, and it was Henry versus them, and he just didn't want them to be involved or get any credit.
00:51:44Kissinger always feared to a certain extent that the State Department could undermine his control of foreign policy.
00:51:51And he made it a point of his role as national security adviser to try to gather in the authority of foreign policy to himself.
00:52:03And this gave Kissinger just tremendous power, because really he was the only person that was fully in the loop.
00:52:09The North Vietnamese want the complete withdrawal of American forces.
00:52:15In effect, they want a type of American surrender.
00:52:18And the North Vietnamese leaders were far more unified and determined to forcibly reunify their country at almost any cost that Nixon and Kissinger truly appreciated.
00:52:29Henry Kissinger always had considerable and usually quite well-placed faith in his ability to negotiate.
00:52:40So his assumption was that if he could get in the room with a well-empowered North Vietnamese representative, he could find some room for manoeuvre.
00:52:50But they were also the hardest negotiations Kissinger ever experienced.
00:52:54It was our misfortune that Lee Docto's assignment was to break the spirit of the American people for the war, and that he was engaged in a campaign of psychological warfare.
00:53:07So what he attempted to do to us was extremely painful.
00:53:11The North Vietnamese negotiators drive Kissinger insane because he tries to come up with every conceivable formula and variation of language that would be enough to achieve some kind of deal, but they just simply refuse.
00:53:28We would sit across the table and it would be Henry and an interpreter and me and I would look at them very carefully and they were not in the slightest cowed as far as I could tell.
00:53:41But after all they had defeated the French, they'd been holding off the Chinese for 2000 years and it was hard to convince them.
00:53:47The problem was that his negotiating position was weakened by the fact that the US began withdrawing troops even before he began negotiating.
00:54:00We were going to San Clemente, the White House in California, and I wrote a memo to Kissinger saying the problem here is that if we are Vietnamizing, then the first tranche of troops that come home are like salted peanuts.
00:54:17And the taste for further withdrawal of American forces is going to become overwhelming.
00:54:22The North Vietnamese are not idiots and they know that if they simply wait us out, then we're going to be withdrawing while they're not.
00:54:30So we've got a problem and therefore we need to cut the best deal we can now.
00:54:35Well, Henry took the conclusion off my memo, made it his own memo to Nixon, and then said that we have to threaten them all the more with measures of great force.
00:54:46in order to make up for the weakness of our position on mutual withdrawal.
00:54:55How would you characterize Nixon administration's policy towards Cambodia?
00:55:01Well, you know, there's been the charges and they did.
00:55:08What's important to know about Cambodia was that it was in the middle of the war.
00:55:13To the west was Thailand, which was the equivalent of the air base for the American war.
00:55:19To the north is Laos, and to the east, of course, is Vietnam.
00:55:23It's right in the middle, and it's neutral, run by a very charismatic leader named Prince Nordam Sihanak.
00:55:31Kissinger believes that Cambodia is a real problem for the United States and Vietnam.
00:55:49Because even though the Cambodian leader and others are trying to play neutral, the north Vietnamese are sending supplies through Cambodia.
00:55:56That's just a fact.
00:55:59U.S. bombing rigs in North Vietnam forced the creation of a primitive method for keeping supply lines open.
00:56:05Nixon and Kissinger came up with the idea, well, we'll start bombing Cambodia.
00:56:10Kissinger thought if the north Vietnamese supply lines could be broken, if the flow of man and material could be disrupted, then the north Vietnamese would be greatly weakened.
00:56:27The north Vietnamese were the ones who spread the war.
00:56:30The north Vietnamese were the ones who spread the war.
00:56:33They were sitting in Cambodia along the border for two years, coming across the border, killing Americans and south Vietnamese and returning to safe havens.
00:56:43And so the bombing was to not let them have safe havens.
00:56:50So we are not talking about an attack on a neutral country.
00:56:55We are talking about the attack on territory occupied by an enemy force that is killing Americans from that territory.
00:57:06But the real reason for the bombing was to put into place what Nixon and Kissinger had come to call the madman theory.
00:57:13This was the idea that Nixon was so crazy, so unhinged that he might do anything.
00:57:20And it was supposed to project to North Vietnam a sense of fear and force them back to the bargaining table.
00:57:27So Operation Menu is launched in which sorties secretly bombed the problematic area where the Ho Chi Minh Trail is located.
00:57:44Technically, there was no sanction for this in the U.S. Congress of any kind.
00:57:49And you're coming at a time when there's enormous pressure to wind down the war, enormous pressure to limit the war, not to extend it, not to expand it in any way.
00:58:02It was very clear to everybody, including Kissinger himself, that if the American public learned that they were bombing Cambodia, that there was going to be an explosion in the United States.
00:58:17And so that's why they went secret.
00:58:21Because they knew damn well they couldn't get it any other way.
00:58:26Kissinger was intimately involved in choosing the bombing sites.
00:58:31He came up with basically a dual bookkeeping system in which bombs that were supposed to be dropped along the border within South Vietnam were actually dropped in Cambodia.
00:58:44There's descriptions of him in an office in the basement of the White House with his maps picking out the bombing sites and working in this very clandestine manner.
00:58:59This had the effect of really kind of pushing the White House deep into paranoia, into a sense that there were enemies all around.
00:59:10We were told that this is so sensitive that it must be done with the absolute minimum number of people being exposed to it.
00:59:19At one point, Dr. Kissinger even suggested that why don't we do it using SkySpot radar?
00:59:25Even the crews won't know where they're dropping.
00:59:28Mel Laird, Nixon's Secretary of Defense, was opposed to the secret bombing of Cambodia.
00:59:35The manner in which they wanted to carry out that bombing, I thought, would lead to trouble.
00:59:41He thought there was no way that Congress wouldn't eventually find out.
00:59:45And I told the National Security Council, the President, the Presidential Advisor for National Security, and the Secretary of State, that their proposal to keep it secret just would not work.
00:59:58It was monumentally stupid to think that they could actually get away with doing this in secret.
01:00:02At some point, someone, some low-level Air Force official, would hand the books to a reporter.
01:00:08Which is what happened.
01:00:10There's an article that appears in the New York Times by William Beecher.
01:00:15If you blinked, you might have missed it.
01:00:17But Kissinger and Nixon don't miss it.
01:00:20And that really sets Nixon and Kissinger off enraged.
01:00:24Like, how did he get that news? Who told him?
01:00:27And so that's the point at which they make a very fateful decision.
01:00:31To start wiretapping people in the government, as well as wiretapping certain reporters.
01:00:40Nixon and Kissinger were paranoid about leaks.
01:00:43They wanted not only to control policy, but they wanted to control the narrative about policy.
01:00:48They wanted to decide when the public could find out.
01:00:52When the Congress could find out.
01:00:54When other members of the administration could find out.
01:00:57Kissinger had brought to Washington a large number of officials in his National Security Council staff.
01:01:03Who were known to politically lean more toward the Democrats.
01:01:07And this immediately raised the suspicion that they leaked this in order to undermine the policy of the administration.
01:01:13Kissinger was convinced there were people in his own staff.
01:01:17Mort Halpern, Tony Lake, Roger Morris, you name it.
01:01:20That were deliberately undermining their policy.
01:01:23That if they had an argument behind closed doors, that these guys were going public with it.
01:01:28Actually, it was a major subject for discussion, but...
01:01:31Nixon and Kissinger were both conspiratorial themselves.
01:01:36And if you're conspiratorial yourself, you tend to suspect everybody else of being conspiratorial too.
01:01:43I do think that Nixon and Kissinger, and I think it's important to think about them together.
01:01:49They fed on one another's paranoia.
01:01:52They fed on one another's need for secrecy.
01:01:55And they saw enemies in a very stark light.
01:02:01And so there was always a sort of us versus them.
01:02:08I was on vacation on Martha's Vineyard when Seymour Hersh called me.
01:02:13And he said,
01:02:14I'm running a story tomorrow that your phone was tapped.
01:02:18And they've been listening to your telephone.
01:02:21And I was really pissed.
01:02:24And I threw rocks at seagulls for a while.
01:02:27I don't find out about the wiretap for four years, but my home was wiretap.
01:02:32My family was wiretap.
01:02:34The kids' conversations, my wife's conversations with her mother.
01:02:38I've got the wiretap logs now.
01:02:41The neighbor talks to Mrs. Smith.
01:02:46Mrs. Smith said they would be leaving in 10 minutes for the weekend.
01:02:49Destination not given.
01:02:50And wanted the neighbor to hold the papers for her.
01:02:52Mrs. Smith calls Hazel, the maid, and asks if she is coming over tomorrow.
01:02:56Hazel said she would be there.
01:02:58This is outrageous.
01:03:00I mean, what is the government doing listening to our phone calls?
01:03:04And even if they were looking for national security,
01:03:08not having the decency and the smarts to say we don't need this.
01:03:12Unless they thought maybe we were passing secret signals to the neighbor or Hazel.
01:03:17It's a faithful decision to wiretap because it begins a policy of distrust of your own people.
01:03:29You know, even if they're your friends.
01:03:32Even if the people on your staff came on your staff, as many did for Kissinger,
01:03:37because they think that Henry Kissinger is going to bring peace.
01:03:42And they're there to help.
01:03:43They're there to pitch in and make that happen.
01:03:45And now he's going to start treating them like they're enemies.
01:03:49And when that happens, sort of the level of paranoia begins to grow exponentially.
01:03:58There was secrecy, subterfuse, and confusion.
01:04:02And you learn that Kissinger's word could not be trusted.
01:04:06Whatever he told you, you knew something else was going on.
01:04:09He played off everybody against each other.
01:04:12The truth, as my Victorian grandmother used to say, was not always in him.
01:04:18Nice to see you.
01:04:19You'd tell when the eyebrows would come together and he'd be like this
01:04:22that he was being perhaps a little devious.
01:04:25But he was very effective, mostly because of how smart he was,
01:04:29and because he had absolute certainty in his views.
01:04:35He sought celebrity status, and he got celebrity status.
01:04:40There was something about him that was different.
01:04:50The first time I met Henry Kissinger was at a party for Gloria Steinem.
01:04:54And about halfway through the dinner,
01:04:57I looked up and saw this little guy standing alone in a corner.
01:05:01So I knew who he was, because I'd seen his picture.
01:05:04So I walked over to him and I said,
01:05:06Dr. Kissinger, how are you? I'm Sally Quinn from the Washington Post.
01:05:09And I said, why are you hiding over here in the corner?
01:05:12And he looked at me and he said, well, I'm really a secret swinger.
01:05:16I said, I'm too busy to do any public swinging.
01:05:24And I don't want you to think that I don't do any swinging.
01:05:28So why don't you just assume I'm a secret swinger?
01:05:31The next day, he was inundated with calls from movie stars.
01:05:35Kissinger is cutting quite a swath on Washington's social scene.
01:05:38He likes to spend well-publicized evenings in the company of such ladies as Jill St. John or Shirley MacLaine,
01:05:44who add luster to his image as the playboy of the Western Wing.
01:05:48He was at Sausse restaurant every night, every lunch, with some babe.
01:05:55It was incredible. He became the sex symbol in Washington.
01:05:58Others watched in bewilderment, trying to work out why this somewhat portly, overweight, bespectacled Harvard professor with a strong German accent could possibly be appealing to actresses.
01:06:13Why did he encourage the secret swinger reputation?
01:06:22I think he truly was just having fun.
01:06:24I mean, you know, when Marlo Thomas and Candace Bergen are interested in going on a date with you and you're a 46-year-old single man, who wouldn't?
01:06:36Well, listen, I was not in the bedroom with him, but I don't think that it was real romance.
01:06:43But then he met Nancy, and they were inseparable from then on.
01:06:47She's a very brilliant, warm, and charismatic person, very confident in her own right.
01:06:58And her energy, her ability to live a big life matched his.
01:07:05And she also doesn't lack for self-confidence, so they just made for a very fulfilling pair.
01:07:15Nancy was the love of his life.
01:07:19You know, my parents divorced in 1962, shortly after my birth.
01:07:26And he had met Nancy in 1968.
01:07:30I think he was ready to marry her from the moment they met.
01:07:34So all these other detours were really just that.
01:07:40The reality was, Henry Kissinger was more a workaholic and a control freak than he was a secret swinger.
01:07:53But Kissinger understood that this gave him not only stardom, but more importantly, some real influence.
01:08:02Be popular with the journalists can matter a lot, particularly when, as invariably happens, Washington politics turns nasty.
01:08:13Kissinger was a master manipulator of the press.
01:08:17This is at a time when diplomatic correspondents needed official sources of information.
01:08:22And Kissinger knew how to feed information to them, pretend to share secrets, flatter them.
01:08:30He lied to them, he deceived them, he rewarded them.
01:08:34He paid attention to them ceaselessly.
01:08:37He curried the press as no foreign policy figure before him.
01:08:43When he signed on Henry Kissinger, the president had no idea how effective he would turn out to be with the press corps.
01:08:49His backgrounders, the background briefings, became the most popular events for the Washington press corps that there had been in years.
01:08:59How do you like your reporting on the backgrounders?
01:09:03I like the way my anonymity is, my interest.
01:09:06Kissinger was a charmer, and he knew how to turn on the charm.
01:09:12But Henry was always using everybody.
01:09:15That was his thing, that's what he did.
01:09:17So of course he was using the press.
01:09:19I mean, he was very cynical about the press.
01:09:22I mean, there were plenty of people in Washington who used people all the time.
01:09:27But Henry took it to such another level of expertise.
01:09:32You can't come back there with that.
01:09:35So when you're with Henry Kissinger, you always had to weigh two things.
01:09:40Your own morals, values, and ethics.
01:09:44And the fact that there was a really brilliant guy who was fun to be around had a good sense of humor.
01:09:49On October 15, the first moratorium against the war turned out huge crowds in cities all across the nation.
01:10:01In 1969, there are massive demonstrations throughout the United States calling for an end to the war in Vietnam.
01:10:11You know, we were seeing those protests from the outside and the inside.
01:10:17Tony Lake and I had at one point stood outside on the south lawn of the White House
01:10:22and watched our wives and children demonstrating down Pennsylvania Avenue against the war.
01:10:33And I can remember in the old executive office building, when I went up to the fifth or sixth floor,
01:10:39there were American troops sitting there with their backs to the walls and weapons
01:10:44in case the White House was attacked by the demonstrations outside.
01:10:48And I agreed with the demonstrators, but there I was.
01:10:57This has an enormous effect on Nixon, who does not want to admit it has an effect.
01:11:01What he does do in response is give the silent majority speech.
01:11:06Good evening, my fellow Americans.
01:11:09Tonight, I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all Americans
01:11:14and to many people in all parts of the world, the war in Vietnam.
01:11:18He has the kind of epiphany that everybody else has missed.
01:11:22If there is an educated minority implacably opposed to the war,
01:11:26doesn't that mean that there's a majority that doesn't feel that way?
01:11:33To you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support.
01:11:41I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace.
01:11:49Nixon had his own innate disabilities as a politician.
01:11:54What he also had, though, was this ability to read the public
01:11:58and to sense what the moment called for.
01:12:02North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.
01:12:07Only Americans can do that.
01:12:12Public reaction to the address was crossed.
01:12:16And some of those regarded as a silent majority broke their silence.
01:12:20He's deluged with positive feedback to that speech.
01:12:23And it helped him in the polls, which he, of course, obsessively tracks.
01:12:28And it helped him in the kind of feedback that he got from telegrams and calls to the White House.
01:12:33The White House says it received thousands of letters and postcards,
01:12:37the vast majority supporting the president on Vietnam.
01:12:42It gave him time.
01:12:44It gave him the time he desperately needed to find some way out.
01:12:49And Kissinger had a plan.
01:12:58The bombing campaign in Cambodia was a secret, maybe, to the American,
01:13:02but certainly not to the Cambodians.
01:13:06Cambodia was never in the foreground of the Vietnam War.
01:13:09Cambodia's suffering was not in the public eye,
01:13:14and therefore allowed to continue because nobody knew about it.
01:13:19American B-52s ultimately dropped 539,000 tons of bombs.
01:13:28That is more than Japan during World War II.
01:13:35The bombing eviscerates the country,
01:13:38and 2 million people end up in Phnom Penh as basically internally displaced persons.
01:13:45Some families manage to cling together.
01:13:48Somehow they survive and find a sort of peace.
01:13:51The superbombing of Cambodia sets in motion a set of events which result in the overthrow of Prince Siena.
01:14:03And almost within a year, a relatively stable place has been turned into a hellhole.
01:14:10We could not permit the Communists to act in Cambodia with total impunity, which they had occupied before we did anything.
01:14:22The situation that is confronting both Nixon and Kissinger in April of 1970 was that Cambodia was disintegrating politically.
01:14:34Many children still go to school, but many others carry guns.
01:14:38The war in Cambodia touches everyone and knows no age limits.
01:14:43What they were now confronting was not only are you going to have Communist troops right on the border of South Vietnam,
01:14:50but that the whole country is going to go Communist.
01:14:52And then any possibility of an acceptable deal in South Vietnam, you know, would really begin to evaporate.
01:15:00Kissinger argued that there was an opportunity here to impact the course of the war.
01:15:09The case he made to Nixon and to others was, air power has its limits.
01:15:14There's only so much you can do with a B-52.
01:15:18You need to go in on the ground.
01:15:21He managed, I think, to make his view Nixon's view in a very skillful way while leaving Nixon with the impression that Nixon had made the policy,
01:15:36that it was Nixon's brilliance and not Henry's.
01:15:40From CBS News in Washington, this special report.
01:15:45Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
01:15:48Good evening, my fellow Americans.
01:15:52President Nixon went on air.
01:15:54He stands in front of a map, and he says,
01:15:58we are going into Cambodia,
01:16:01and we are going to go after the North Vietnamese, who they don't want in their country,
01:16:07and sending the North Vietnamese back to their country.
01:16:10If North Vietnam also occupied, this whole band in Cambodia,
01:16:16or the entire country, it would mean that South Vietnam was completely outflanked.
01:16:22And he explains, you know, there are North Vietnamese troops clearly inside of Cambodia,
01:16:28violating Cambodia's neutrality, and that those troops and supplies pose a direct threat to the United States.
01:16:36We will be patient in working for peace.
01:16:40We will be conciliatory at the conference table.
01:16:44But we will not be humiliated.
01:16:47The President wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.
01:16:51He doesn't want to hear anything.
01:16:53It's an order.
01:16:54It's to be done.
01:16:55Anything that flies on anything that moves.
01:16:58In April of 1970, Kissinger called in me and Roger Morris and then three others, I believe.
01:17:10At the meeting, Kissinger said that we are going to go into Cambodia.
01:17:15And what do you think?
01:17:17And then we argued that this was bad strategically because Cambodia is now in play, etc.
01:17:23And domestically, it was going to be a firestorm or so.
01:17:26I remember banging my fist on the desk to the point that some of the papers actually rose.
01:17:31So I said, if there's one trooper across that line, I'm out of here.
01:17:36Because I felt it was just, it was the last straw of escalation.
01:17:40We were working very hard, night and day, literally, on a peace settlement.
01:17:48The notion that we would, at that point, escalate very decidedly with an armed invasion of American forces.
01:17:59No, I mean, I just, I thought it was intolerable.
01:18:02I bore the brunt of the argument.
01:18:04And at the end of it, Kissinger said, and I can still hear his voice,
01:18:08Well, Tony, I knew what you were going to say.
01:18:11And I thought to myself, I can leave now.
01:18:15I can send him a subscription to the New Republic or something.
01:18:19And I can go.
01:18:21And afterwards, I said to Roger, OK, this is it.
01:18:23I've had it.
01:18:24And he agreed.
01:18:25And so we wrote a joint letter to him and handed it to Al Haig.
01:18:30And said, please give it to him on the day the invasion takes place.
01:18:34Which he did.
01:18:35And Kissinger was not pleased.
01:18:38There are several thousand American troops moving into Cambodia tonight.
01:18:46The dimensions of the war have certainly widened.
01:18:51It's a gamble, both in terms of the reaction of the enemy and the reaction of American public opinion.
01:18:57As usual, when the United States escalates in any way in the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement goes into action.
01:19:10College campuses erupted.
01:19:13What in the hell were we doing invading Cambodia?
01:19:25Everybody was angry.
01:19:26They were waiting for peace.
01:19:28And Congress was furious because this was done without their consent.
01:19:34The student population went insane.
01:19:38It led to an explosion of unrest at universities across the country, leading to the tragic killing of students at Kent State.
01:19:50National Guardsmen opened fire with semi-automatic weapons.
01:19:53Suddenly, to have the National Guard, like, shooting at students, I mean, this is absolutely stunning.
01:19:58After the shooting, one young man dipped a black flag of revolution in the blood and waved it about.
01:20:03You know, and then you have thousands and thousands of students coming to Washington.
01:20:07Mr. Nixon bore heavily his decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia and the awesome explosive impact of that decision here at home.
01:20:17It's hard to exaggerate the anger.
01:20:20A few of the demonstrators confronted a cordon of buses at Lafayette Square protecting the White House.
01:20:26And from the other side, police eventually responded with tear gas.
01:20:30It was a peaceful rally. Peaceful until it was attacked in a vicious and brutal manner.
01:20:35Nixon came close to a nervous breakdown in the wake of Kent State.
01:20:39This was the price we paid for opposing Nixon and his genocidal policies.
01:20:43And Kissinger felt himself surrounded by protesters in his office.
01:20:48In the blood of our young people.
01:20:51They certainly felt very much under siege.
01:20:56The biggest problem domestically was whether we could finally unite the country in which those who wanted peace would have peace.
01:21:09And those who wanted honor could live with themselves.
01:21:15I think Kissinger harbored the notion that he could somehow pull off what Nixon wanted, which was peace with honor.
01:21:22But I think the quest for an end with honor was really a prolongation of the senseless waste and casualties.
01:21:31That he did not pursue ending the war in Vietnam as he might have with all of his gifts.
01:21:37That he did not use his genius in that way.
01:21:41I think is his ultimate indictment.
01:21:52Next time.
01:21:53From the very beginning Kissinger was running all the major elements of foreign policy.
01:21:57And it was Henry versus them.
01:21:59This gave Kissinger just tremendous power.
01:22:02Because really he was the only person that was fully in the loop.
01:22:05In his mind he was advancing the strength of the United States because America was the last best hope of humanity.
01:22:12The conclusion of Kissinger.
01:22:14Next time on American Experience.
01:22:16Made possible in part by Liberty Neutral Insurance.
01:22:19American Experience.
01:22:24Kissinger is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
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