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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
00:00:20defense 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
00:00:31famous 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.
00:00:57That 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
00:01:07of humanity.
00:01:09He entered the realm of power and bestrode it as a geopolitical colossus.
00:01:15He 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.
00:01:39The 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.
00:02:02I believe we have an obligation to prevent the totalitarians from taking over the world by force.
00:02:10Yes, he was brilliant.
00:02:11But in the end, his legacy is about the number of people, and we're talking hundreds of thousands,
00:02:17that died because of the arrogance of his policy.
00:02:22Nobody, 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.
00:03:02We've had to recognize it's Henry Kissinger's world.
00:03:22Tonight, Henry Kissinger talks about war and peace,
00:03:25and about his decisions at the height of his powers.
00:03:30I was brought up in a totalitarian society,
00:03:34and 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.
00:03:52One has to remember that Henry Kissinger was born at a time when Germany was in a state of near
00:04:00-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 Germany after the First World War generates the rise of a very vicious right-wing
00:04:23fascist movement,
00:04:26for whom Jews are the scapegoats.
00:04:30And the Kissingers, like a lot of German Jews,
00:04:34had no sense of what was going to come for them in the 1930s.
00:04:52Furt in Bavaria had a significant Jewish population in the 1920s.
00:05:01Heinz Kissinger is born into one of the orthodox families in Furt
00:05:06and grows up in a middle-class Jewish household.
00:05:13Heinz had two distinctive features, a brilliant mind and indefatigable energy.
00:05:21Well, if he got the brilliance from his father, Luis,
00:05:26he 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.
00:05:39Despite 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.
00:06:12But the childhood came to an abrupt end with the rise of the Nazis.
00:06:30The 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.
00:06:58Kissinger remembered that when he and his brother would take their bicycles to go visit their grandfather,
00:07:04he would see the sign saying Jews are not wanted here.
00:07:07And Kissinger commented later about how everything seemed changed.
00:07:13I was prohibited to go to German schools.
00:07:16All the German people with whom my parents associated more or less cut off all contact with us.
00:07:31A policy of segregation for Jewish people was created, and my father lost his job.
00:07:44Because Louis is an employee of the German state, he is sacked, and it devastates him.
00:07:51He got so much fulfillment out of his job as a teacher, and suddenly he was bereft, he was lost,
00:07:58and he withdraws in on himself, and Kissinger feels distant from his father.
00:08:03My 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.
00:08:18I can't imagine how destabilizing and terrifying it must have been for Kissinger to see that world around him that
00:08:26he so admired turning against him.
00:08:28That 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.
00:08:45His childhood featured that profound loss of innocence, of joy and prosperity and ease.
00:08:54That 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.
00:09:14My mother was extremely practical, and she decided that they should leave Germany.
00:09:21My father didn't object.
00:09:24I was mainly afraid for the children.
00:09:28You saw they were so isolated.
00:09:33In 1938, they leave.
00:09:37They take a couple of trunks with a few precious personal items, and then they have to leave everything behind.
00:09:44The Kissingers left in the nick of time.
00:09:47Just weeks before the huge pogrom that we know as Kistan after the night of broken glass.
00:09:58Mobs across Germany torch Jewish homes.
00:10:02They attack Jewish people in the streets.
00:10:04They destroy synagogues.
00:10:07And in Furt, they drag as many Jews as they can to the town center.
00:10:12And they have to stand there and watch as the synagogue burns to the ground.
00:10:23The Kissingers 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 are going to
00:10:41protect you.
00:10:43Really, 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, your name now is Henry.
00:11:09The Kissingers 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.
00:11:25We didn't have any money.
00:11:27My 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.
00:11:44That was why Henry Kissinger had to get a job.
00:11:54He 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.
00:12:07Because 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.
00:12:36My mother's name is Annalise Cohen.
00:12:39They very quickly started dating and it became a very sweet, dedicated relationship.
00:12:47They had been through the same kind of trauma.
00:12:50But they shared a desire to turn the disaster that they had experienced into a life of meaning.
00:13:00But 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 Pearl
00:13:22Harbor Attacks.
00:13:24And he doesn't have any idea where Pearl Harbor is.
00:13:26Immediate response from the youth of America.
00:13:29Army, Navy and Marine recruiting stations bulge to overflowing.
00:13:33Most teenagers pretty quickly figured out that they might not be interested in war,
00:13:38but war was likely going to be interested in them.
00:13:41The second number which has just been drawn is 192.
00:13:52The US Army was not a tremendously discerning institution in the early phase of World War II.
00:14:03It took its young men from wherever it could and from wherever they'd come from.
00:14:13He'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
00:14:35Spartan, to put it mildly.
00:14:39I thought it was a tremendous experience.
00:14:41Not every minute of which I enjoyed, but I now think it was one of the most important experiences of
00:14:47my life.
00:14:48I had never met any really native born Americans and these people from the Midwest were very tolerant and friendly.
00:14:55And I got to know America as a result of serving in the army.
00:15:06These are the men who served in the 84th Infantry Division.
00:15:09A division that distinguished itself in a series of critical engagements during World War II.
00:15:14Kissinger lands in France five months after D-Day in November 1944.
00:15:20And someone clearly recognizes his linguistic talents and he's put into the counterintelligence part of the 84th Infantry Division.
00:15:30It's not long after D-Day that Kissinger finds himself in one of the great battles of the war in
00:15:38Europe, the Battle of the Bulge.
00:15:43The fighting was hard.
00:15:45The Germans put up stiff resistance.
00:15:47The casualties were high.
00:15:54The 84th is trapped in a Belgian town, Marchant Famen.
00:16:01And Kissinger works in the courthouse with the general and other staff, monitoring everything and helping to organize the defense
00:16:09of the town.
00:16:10It was especially dangerous for Kissinger because as a German Jew by birth, he risked execution if he were captured.
00:16:27After the Battle of the Bulge, the 84th Infantry Division heads towards the city of Hanover, where they come across
00:16:34Arlem Concentration Camp.
00:16:36And it is a horrendous place.
00:16:45Out of 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.
00:16:59Horrifying.
00:17:00They radioed to the headquarters, which is where Kissinger is, and he drives up.
00:17:06And they come into this camp and Kissinger is just staggered by it.
00:17:17When questioned, most of these men could not remember when they'd last eaten a decent meal.
00:17:22Many had been beaten and tortured so long, their minds had failed.
00:17:27My father described his experience liberating the Arlem Concentration Camp as something that words could not entirely communicate.
00:17:38As our jeep traveled down the street, skeletons in striped suits lined the road.
00:17:45Cloth seemed to fall from the bodies.
00:17:49Their heads were held up by a stick that once might have been a throat.
00:17:54Paws 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.
00:18:06Don't go in there.
00:18:08We had to kick them to tell the dead from the living.
00:18:13To him, it always was the most horrendous thing that he'd ever seen.
00:18:18The victims relate the atrocity story and photographs are made for further documentation of the horrors committed at the Hanover
00:18:24Camp.
00:18:25The power of knowing that it could have been him in that camp.
00:18:32That stays with Henry Kissinger.
00:18:35The deaths continue even after liberation of the camp.
00:18:38Some were too far gone when the Americans took over.
00:18:42It 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.
00:19:02After the war, Kissinger writes to the mother, an old friend of his from Furt, who had survived a concentration
00:19:08camp.
00:19:09And he writes to warn her of what her son will now be like.
00:19:17I 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.
00:19:27Kissinger writes, he has not only suffered, but he has lived in an anarchic world in which is survival of
00:19:33the fittest, in which there is no order, there is no structure or sense of society.
00:19:40Concentration 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
00:19:54else.
00:19:55The 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.
00:20:14The 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.
00:20:28Don't let it fool you. You are in enemy country. Be alert. Suspicious of everyone. Take no chances.
00:20:39Germany in 1945 was in a state of collapse.
00:20:43Proven war criminals must answer for their crimes.
00:20:50As a member of the counterintelligence corps, Kissinger had to find out who were the Nazis.
00:20:59So 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.
00:21:19At a very young age my father was given enormous authority over an area around Hanover to apprehend high-ranking
00:21:29Nazis.
00:21:34My job was to arrest all Nazis above a certain level.
00:21:43At that time, of course, everyone 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
00:22:03over the very people who had been murdering his relatives.
00:22:09The very people who had driven his family across the Atlantic.
00:22:13There's no vengeance in Kissinger.
00:22:16He is not searching for some kind of feeling of righteous vindication.
00:22:23He is not a black and white person.
00:22:26He lives in the grey area in between.
00:22:37There, Harvard, thy sons to thy jubilee throng.
00:22:43And with blessings, surrender the oar.
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.
00:23:09He tried many different subjects.
00:23:12For 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.
00:23:26The old regime in France was tyrannical, oppressive.
00:23:29Insofar as one could learn anything in preparation for a high governmental position.
00:23:33I think a study of history is the best preparation.
00:23:37He 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.
00:23:48He was very rigorous about just using all of his time for his studies.
00:23:55He is the guy who's in the library 24-7, squirreled away in his dorm reading from dawn to dusk.
00:24:04And so most of his Harvard contemporaries barely remember him.
00:24:08He manages to sneak in a dog, and I think that's pretty much his only friend there by all accounts.
00:24:14And then Kissinger writes his undergraduate thesis, The Meaning of History.
00:24:19The Meaning of History.
00:24:21The 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
00:24:37history.
00:24:39It was the longest senior thesis in Harvard history.
00:24:45It was so long that Harvard had to introduce a rule that dissertations had to be, you know, within a
00:24:51certain word limit.
00:24:52The meaning of history is extraordinary, but undisciplined, unedited, and confusing.
00:25:00I have read it.
00:25:02If 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.
00:25:15He spends many, many years at Harvard, and he's just this very frustrated young PhD graduate who is kind of
00:25:24trying to find a place for himself.
00:25:26So what he does is he kind of invents a place for himself.
00:25:29He studies the policies of European statesmen after the fall of Napoleon and their attempts to bring about order and
00:25:37stability.
00:25:38He does see it as an analogy for the world of the Cold War and of nuclear weapons in which
00:25:43states 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.
00:26:02All the rest of the world was a chess board.
00:26:05All the other pieces could be moved about that chess board.
00:26:09Diplomacy showed a way in which at least temporary peace could be achieved.
00:26:14It was not just accepting the world as it is, but understanding the realities of power and manipulating power in
00:26:24order 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.
00:26:36Victory is impossible because then only through that would you prevent another war.
00:26:48Machine guns chatter a song of death and rockets hiss down with terrifying accuracy onto the reds below.
00:26:54Shortly after Kissinger's graduation, the Korean War breaks out.
00:26:58And the 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 shadow that surrounds the world is dispelled.
00:27:26We have a rising Cold War that now has become a hot war.
00:27:31And I think what the Korean War does is it creates for the next 50 years in the United States
00:27:36an axiom that if you ever give the communists a little bit of space, they will seize it and seize
00:27:42more.
00:27:48And 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.
00:28:02It's difficult for us today to understand how scared people were in the 50s and early 60s about the prospects
00:28:08of nuclear war.
00:28:12Remember, these were the most powerful weapons ever designed in the world.
00:28:19And every military technology, every weapon that had ever been produced in human history had been used.
00:28:28And nuclear weapons had been used twice.
00:28:37Even the pigeons take part as New York holds its biggest civil defense drill.
00:28:42The U.S. strategy, which was called massive retaliation, was that if the Soviets use a single nuclear weapon against
00:28:50an American interest, the United States will hurl hundreds of nuclear missiles all the way to Moscow.
00:28:58Times Square waits.
00:29:00Millions wonder.
00:29:02Suppose 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
00:29:13Washington by retaliating against them?
00:29:16Kissinger's thought was no.
00:29:18And everybody knows it.
00:29:20Kissinger understood that there was something absurd about a strategy which gave you a choice between capitulation or Armageddon.
00:29:29And it was also true that there must be some limited use for nuclear weapons.
00:29:34What is the role of nuclear weapons?
00:29:37What is the significance of conventional forces?
00:29:40He talked to the experts, picked their brains, and then wrote his own book.
00:29:46And that book became Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
00:29:49It was the book that made him famous.
00:29:53Henry Kissinger.
00:29:55Henry Kissinger.
00:29:56Henry Kissinger.
00:29:56Henry 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
00:30:09wars.
00:30:10You think American strategy should be re-evaluated to restore war as a usable instrument of policy?
00:30:18American 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
00:30:28of our freedom.
00:30:28It suddenly makes him a hugely important public intellectual.
00:30:32He gets invited on television, he can write op-eds in the New York Times.
00:30:35He is now recognised as an important person in the conversations about the Cold War.
00:30:42Dr. Kissinger, do you believe it's true that we have no coherent strategy?
00:30:47I have no doubt that our military services have a plan for every conceivable contingency.
00:30:54But I have the uneasy feeling that these plans are not the same in each service.
00:31:03He's a very ambitious person.
00:31:06But he's also ambitious for his ideas.
00:31:08He wants to have an impact on history and he realises that in order to do that, he must cultivate
00:31:16relationships 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
00:31:40dominant divisive foreign policy issue of the later 1960s.
00:31:44And that is the war in Vietnam.
00:31:56We 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.
00:32:15The United States had been getting steadily more involved in Vietnam during the Kennedy administration.
00:32:23But it was under Lyndon Johnson, after Kennedy's assassination, that U.S. involvement escalated and large numbers of U.S.
00:32:31troops began to be committed.
00:32:33Retreat does not bring safety.
00:32:37And weakness does not bring peace.
00:32:42The 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.
00:33:00I first heard of him when we were all called into the political counselor's office in the embassy in Saigon,
00:33:07and he told us Dr. Kissinger was coming soon.
00:33:11And I was asked to take him up to the northern part of the country.
00:33:16And so we took him to some remote places in Vietnam.
00:33:21I wouldn't say it was exactly fearless.
00:33:23I can tell you one phobia he absolutely had, and that was flying.
00:33:28I remember one time, he walks up to the pilot and he says,
00:33:31Good morning, pilot.
00:33:33He says, Can this plane really get over those mountains?
00:33:42Henry was holding onto the curtains of that airplane for dear life.
00:33:48The 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
00:34:15would 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.
00:34:23I concluded then that there was no way of winning the war in the manner in which it was being
00:34:28conducted.
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 A. 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
00:35:04war. Why don't you?
00:35:08I don't find the intervention in Vietnam immoral because our purpose is to give the people of South Vietnam a
00:35:18free choice.
00:35:18The Nazi intervention was to deprive the people of a free choice.
00:35:25And I would have thought that people in Britain should know the difference between American motivations and fascist motivations.
00:35:38I 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 honorably and so loyally and so
00:35:53well.
00:35:55By 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.
00:36:13Americans 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.
00:36:26Good evening, my fellow Americans.
00:36:29Tonight I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
00:36:35Then, in 1968, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term
00:36:47as your president.
00:36:48President Johnson declared he would not run for reelection.
00:36:52He was going to devote himself to finding a solution.
00:36:56And he was coming close.
00:36:57The diplomatic deadlock over a site for the peace talks was finally broken.
00:37:02The 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.
00:37:19The American public wanted to win, but they wanted to get out.
00:37:23And the clock is ticking.
00:37:28Kissinger saw that there was a chance to claim power and 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.
00:38:06Henry 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 and he passed on the status of the talks through his
00:38:27contact, Richard Allen.
00:38:29Henry Kissinger volunteered information to us through a spy he had, a former student that he had at the Paris
00:38:36peace talks.
00:38:37He called me from pay phones and we spoke in German.
00:38:42And he offloaded mostly every night what had happened that day in Paris.
00:38:47So he sends two different messages to Nixon on two different days in September saying,
00:38:53There's this bombing halt coming. I just want you to know, think about what your position is going to be.
00:38:59Kissinger 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
00:39:08House.
00:39:10This was the moment in which that distance between self-interest and national interest, at least in his mind, collapsed
00:39:18into each other.
00:39:20From that point forward, there was no daylight between the interests of Henry Kissinger and the interests of the United
00:39:27States, at least in Henry Kissinger's mind.
00:39:39Having 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.
00:39:48After 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
00:40:04player.
00:40:05Nixon had a general disdain for academics, but he wanted and needed a kind of authority that Henry gave him
00:40:13in 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
00:40:24dish.
00:40:25And that's why Nixon's decision to offer Kissinger the job of national security advisor came as such a surprise to
00:40:33Kissinger that 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
00:40:49campaign manager.
00:40:53And Mitchell says,
00:40:55So, how do you like the new job?
00:40:58And Kissinger says,
00:41:00Well, what job? No job was actually offered.
00:41:03And Mitchell goes,
00:41:05Oh, for Christ's sake, he messed it up again.
00:41:11President-elect Nixon made his first major foreign policy appointment today. He named Harvard professor Henry Kissinger to be a
00:41:18special 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
00:41:27of 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
00:41:44themselves in the other.
00:41:46President-elect and I have had many extensive conversations over the past week.
00:41:52It 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.
00:42:12Kissinger got inside his head super quickly and very quickly began to understand how to talk to this lonely, difficult,
00:42:19mistrustful man.
00:42:20Dr. Kissinger is keenly aware of the necessity not to set himself up as a wall between the president and
00:42:28the secretary of state or the secretary of defense.
00:42:33Nixon wants to bring foreign policy into the White House.
00:42:37Nixon 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.
00:43:10It was a very loosely run operation, very small. There 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.
00:43:43Argue your case. If you lose the battle, then faithfully carry out the policy.
00:43:49He enjoyed thinking and arguing issues through.
00:43:53Find 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
00:44:05not agree with him or the president politically.
00:44:09And I suspect he liked it because he won every argument.
00:44:13In part because he was very smart and in part because, let me see, oh yes, I worked for him.
00:44:19Kissinger admits to being a perfectionist, not an easy man to work for.
00:44:23He was a demanding perfectionist with his staff. Nothing could ever be right.
00:44:30There was also the joke that if Henry didn't yell at you, he didn't love you.
00:44:34He speaks at his staff with pride and a kind of affection.
00:44:37They call him Henry and regard him too with warmth.
00:44:41Salted with a degree of apprehension for he has a sharp temper.
00:44:44We were graded. We were told we had done a B plus or maybe an A minus if we were
00:44:50really lucky.
00:44:51But always, of course, you had to go back because the only real A was Henry's own rendition.
00:44:58Kissinger, he stretched my patience. He stretched my nerves.
00:45:02Will this meeting take very long?
00:45:06He is regularly late to meetings. His staff despairs good-naturedly of that.
00:45:11I 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.
00:45:32But Kissinger demanded to be the guiding light, the North Star of the Nixon foreign policy.
00:45:40And that meant the policy in Vietnam.
00:46:03Kissinger and Nixon entered the White House at a time when the United States is in a very, very difficult
00:46:09place in Vietnam.
00:46:12In 1969, tens of thousands of Americans had already been lost. We were losing about 200 a day.
00:46:23We were heading toward 535,000 troops in Vietnam. It was a hellish situation.
00:46:32We inherited a nightmare. It was shaking our domestic stability. It was the consuming concern of the intellectual community.
00:46:45We made up our minds from the beginning that we were going to try to disengage from Vietnam.
00:46:54That the war should end was unquestioned. The question was how. The question was when. The question was under what
00:47:02circumstances. 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
00:47:12to 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
00:47:22to be turned on Richard Nixon. They knew that.
00:47:29What the Vietnam War did to many Americans was shake their faith that their country was decent and honorable.
00:47:38Because it seemed like the United States was fighting a war in a distant country in an extremely brutal way
00:47:45using chemical weapons like napalm, destroying villages, massacring civilians.
00:47:52And Nixon understood you had to change course.
00:47:56How are you doing, President, in your efforts to end the Vietnam War?
00:48:01Once the enemy recognizes that it is not going to win its objecting by waiting aside, then the enemy will
00:48:08negotiate and we will end this war before the end of 1970. That is the objective we have.
00:48:13Nixon had to show that there is hope, there's light at the end of the tunnel, and we're going to
00:48:17get out. But with honor.
00:48:20Ending 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.
00:48:38And I wanted to create conditions which would unify the country again by having an unwritten end to the war
00:48:44in 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
00:48:56in the world, without a betrayal of millions of people who had relied on us, whose lives hung in the
00:49:07balance.
00:49:10Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense, arrived in Saigon today for a first-hand look at the progress of Vietnamization, which
00:49:17he said was irreversible.
00:49:19The secret plan that Nixon had to end the war that wasn't so secret or really a plan was Vietnamization.
00:49:28Vietnamization 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
00:49:39the job.
00:49:40The basic idea is that we should begin a policy as quickly as we can of pouring money and training
00:49:50into the military in South Vietnam, and that they'll be able to replace American troops.
00:49:57Twenty percent of these young men are farmers' sons, out of the rice paddies and flying solo in a matter
00:50:03of weeks, and 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
00:50:17at home and buy time for the other prong, which was secret negotiations.
00:50:24The fact is that there were some public exchanges in Paris, but there were essentially propaganda battles, but the real
00:50:31negotiations were secret.
00:50:33Have you talked about Vietnam?
00:50:37I won't discuss any of the subjects.
00:50:41Here's the way it would work. We had to make a cover, pretending we were still in Washington.
00:50:46So I would leave the office and say to my compatriots, I'm going to take the weekend off.
00:50:52And then I would join Kissinger. We fly into the middle of France, and we were met by a military
00:50:58attaché who would sneak us into a safe house.
00:51:02In the safe house, we used code names so that the housekeeper wouldn't know who we were.
00:51:08I 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.
00:51:28So, first point was that they were secret, not only from other governments, but from the State Department and the
00:51:33rest of the American government.
00:51:35We cut the State Department out of an awful lot of stuff, and it was Henry versus them, and he
00:51:41just didn't want them to be involved or get any credit.
00:51:46Kissinger always feared, to a certain extent, that the State Department could undermine his control of foreign policy.
00:51:52And he made it a point of his role as national security adviser to try to gather in the authority
00:52:01of foreign policy to himself.
00:52:04And this gave Kissinger just tremendous power, because really he was the only person that was fully in the loop.
00:52:10The North Vietnamese want the complete withdrawal of American forces. In 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
00:52:27than Nixon and Kissinger truly appreciated.
00:52:32Henry Kissinger always had considerable and usually quite well-placed faith in his ability to negotiate.
00:52:41So his assumption was that if he could get in the room with a well-empowered North Vietnamese representative,
00:52:48he could find some room for manoeuvre.
00:52:51But they were also the hardest negotiations Kissinger ever experienced.
00:52:56It was our misfortune that Lee Docto's assignment was to break the spirit of the American people for the war,
00:53:04and that he was engaged in a campaign of psychological warfare.
00:53:07So what he attempted to do to us was extremely painful.
00:53:12The North Vietnamese negotiators drive Kissinger insane,
00:53:16because he tries to come up with every conceivable formula and variation of language that would be enough to achieve
00:53:25some kind of deal,
00:53:27but they just simply refused.
00:53:30We would sit across the table, and it would be Henry and an interpreter and me,
00:53:34and I would look at them very carefully, and they were not in the slightest cowed, as far as I
00:53:41could tell.
00:53:42But after all, they had defeated the French, they'd been holding off the Chinese for 2,000 years, and it
00:53:47was hard to convince them.
00:53:49The problem was that his negotiating position was weakened by the fact that the US began withdrawing troops even before
00:53:57he began negotiating.
00:54:01We were going to San Clemente, the White House in California, and I wrote a memo to Kissinger saying the
00:54:08problem here is that if we are Vietnamizing,
00:54:13then the first tranche of troops that come home are like salted peanuts,
00:54:18and 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
00:54:28be 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,
00:54:42and then said that we have to threaten them all the more with measures of great force in order to
00:54:47make up for the weakness of our position on mutual withdrawal.
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 equivalent of the air base for the American war.
00:55:19To the north is Laos, and to the east, of course, is Vietnam.
00:55:24It's right in the middle, and it's neutral, run by a very charismatic leader named Prince Nordam Sihanak.
00:55:31I assure you that we have not given any military aid or logistics aid in any form.
00:55:45Kissinger believes that Cambodia is a real problem for the United States and Vietnam, because even though the Cambodian leader
00:55:51and others are trying to play neutral, the North Vietnamese are sending supplies through Cambodia. That's just a fact.
00:55:59U.S. bombing raids in North Vietnam forced the creation of a primitive method for keeping supply lines open.
00:56:06Nixon and Kissinger came up with the idea, well, we'll start bombing Cambodia.
00:56:12Kissinger thought if the North Vietnamese supply lines could be broken, if the flow of man and material could be
00:56:23disrupted, then the North Vietnamese would be greatly weakened.
00:56:30The North Vietnamese were the ones who spread the war. They were sitting in Cambodia along the border for two
00:56:37years, coming across the border, killing Americans and South Vietnamese and returning to safe havens.
00:56:47And so the bombing was to not let them have safe havens.
00:56:52So we are not talking about an attack on a neutral country. We are talking about the attack on territory
00:56:59occupied 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
00:57:12the madman theory.
00:57:14This was the idea that Nixon was so crazy, so unhinged that he might do anything.
00:57:21And it was supposed to project to North Vietnam a sense of fear and force them back to the bargaining
00:57:27table.
00:57:35So Operation Menu is launched in which sorties secretly bombed the problematic area where the Ho Chi Minh Trail is
00:57:43located.
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
00:57:58war, not to extend it, not to expand it in any way.
00:58:03It was very clear to everybody, including Kissinger himself, that if the American public learned that they were bombing Cambodia,
00:58:14that there was going to be an explosion in the United States.
00:58:17And so that's why they went secret.
00:58:22Because they knew damn well they couldn't get it any other way.
00:58:27Kissinger 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
00:58:39border within South Vietnam were actually dropped in Cambodia.
00:58:45There's descriptions of him in an office in the basement of the White House with his maps picking out the
00:58:51bombing sites and working in this very clandestine manner.
00:59:00This had the effect of really kind of pushing the White House deep into paranoia, into a sense that there
00:59:08were 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
00:59:18being exposed to it.
00:59:20At one point, Dr. Kissinger even suggested that why don't we do it using SkySpot radar?
00:59:26Even the crews won't know where they're dropping.
00:59:29Mel 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,
00:59:53that 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, which is what
01:00:09happened.
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.
01:00:25Like, how did he get that news? Who told him?
01:00:28And so that's the point at which they make a very fateful decision to start wiretapping people in the government,
01:00:34as 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.
01:00:49They wanted to decide when the public could find out, when the Congress could find out, when other members of
01:00:55the administration could find out.
01:00:57Kissinger had brought to Washington a large number of officials in his National Security Council staff who were known to
01:01:04politically lean more toward the Democrats.
01:01:07And this immediately raised the suspicion that they leak this in order to undermine the policy of the administration.
01:01:14Kissinger was convinced there were people in his own staff, Mort Halpern, Tony Lake, Roger Morris, you name it, that
01:01:20were deliberately undermining their policy, that if they had an argument behind closed doors, that these guys were going public
01:01:28with it.
01:01:29Actually, it was a major subject for discussion, but...
01:01:32Nixon and Kissinger were both conspiratorial themselves.
01:01:36And if you're conspiratorial yourself, you tend to suspect everybody else of being conspiratorial, too.
01:01:45I do think that Nixon and Kissinger, and I think it's important to think about them together, they fed on
01:01:51one another's paranoia, they fed on one another's need for secrecy, and 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.
01:02:14And he said, I'm running a story tomorrow that your phone was tapped, and they've been listening to your telephone.
01:02:23And I was really pissed, and I threw rocks at Seagulls for a while.
01:02:28I don't find out about the wiretap for four years, but my home was wiretap, my family was wiretap, the
01:02:35kids' conversations, my wife's conversations with her mother.
01:02:39I've got the wiretap logs now.
01:02:45Neighbor talks to Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith said they would be leaving in ten minutes for the weekend, destination not
01:02:50given, and wanted the neighbor to hold the papers for her.
01:02:53Mrs. Smith calls Hazel, the maid, and asks if she is coming over tomorrow.
01:02:57Hazel said she would be there.
01:02:59This is outrageous!
01:03:00I mean, what's the government doing listening to our phone calls?
01:03:05And even if they were looking for national security, not having the decency and the smarts to say, we don't
01:03:11need this.
01:03:12Unless they thought maybe we were passing secret signals to the neighbor or Hazel.
01:03:20It's a faithful decision to wiretap, because it begins a policy of distrust of your own people.
01:03:30You know, even if they're your friends, even if the people on your staff came on your staff, as many
01:03:36did for Kissinger, because they think that Henry Kissinger is going to bring peace.
01:03:42And they're there to help. They're there to pitch in and make that happen.
01:03:46And now he's going to start treating them like they're enemies.
01:03:50And when that happens, sort of the level of paranoia begins to grow exponentially.
01:03:58There was secrecy, subterfuse, and confusion. And you learn that Kissinger's word could not be trusted.
01:04:07Whatever he told you, you knew something else was going on. He played off everybody against each other.
01:04:14The truth, as my Victorian grandmother used to say, was not always in him.
01:04:18Nice to see you.
01:04:20You tell when the eyebrows would come together and he'd be like this, that he was being perhaps a little
01:04:24devious.
01:04:25But he was very effective, mostly because of how smart he was, and because he had absolute certainty in his
01:04:32views.
01:04:35He sought celebrity status, and he got celebrity status. There was something about him that was different.
01:04:50The first time I met Henry Kissinger was at a party for Gloria Steinem.
01:04:55And about halfway through the dinner, I 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.
01:05:10And I said, why are you hiding over here in the corner?
01:05:12And he looked at me and said, well, I'm really a secret swinger.
01:05:18I said, I'm too busy to do any public swinging.
01:05:25And I don't want you to think that I don't do any swinging.
01:05:29So why don't you just assume I'm a secret swinger?
01:05:32The next day, he was inundated with calls from movie stars.
01:05:36Kissinger is cutting quite a swath on Washington's social scene.
01:05:39He likes to spend well-publicized evenings in the company of such ladies as Jill St. John or Shirley MacLaine,
01:05:45who add luster to his image as the playboy of the Western Wing.
01:05:49He was at Sausse restaurant every night, every lunch, with some babe.
01:05:55It was incredible. He became the sex symbol in Washington.
01:05:59Others watched in bewilderment, trying to work out why this somewhat portly,
01:06:05overweight, bespectacled, Harvard professor with a strong German accent could possibly be appealing to actresses.
01:06:13Why the hell do you think Kissinger was so weak when I was trying to call you?
01:06:17Don't breathe out, dumb babe.
01:06:18Why did he encourage the secret swinger reputation?
01:06:22I think he truly was just having fun.
01:06:25I mean, you know, when Marlo Thomas and Candace Bergen are interested in going on a date with you and
01:06:32you're a 46-year-old single man, who wouldn't?
01:06:37Well, listen, I was not in the bedroom with him, but I don't think that it was real romance.
01:06:44But then he met Nancy, and they were inseparable from then on.
01:06:50She's a very brilliant, warm, and charismatic person.
01:06:56Very 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.
01:07:16Nancy 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.
01:07:44The 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.
01:08:02Being popular with the journalists can matter a lot, particularly when, as invariably happens, Washington politics turns nasty.
01:08:14Kissinger was a master manipulator of the press.
01:08:17This is at a time when diplomatic correspondents needed official sources of information.
01:08:23And 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, he 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
01:08:48the press corps.
01:08:49His backgrounders, the background briefings, became the most popular events for the Washington press corps that there had been in
01:08:59years.
01:09:00How do you like your reporting on the backgrounders?
01:09:04I like the way my anonymity is, my mantra.
01:09:09Kissinger was a charmer, and he knew how to turn on the charm.
01:09:13But Henry was always using everybody.
01:09:16That was his thing, that's what he did, so of course he was using the press.
01:09:20I mean, he was very cynical about the press.
01:09:24I mean, there were plenty of people in Washington who used people all the time, but Henry took it to
01:09:30such another level of expertise.
01:09:34You can't come back there with us.
01:09:37So when you're with Henry Kissinger, you always had to weigh two things.
01:09:42Your 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
01:09:49of humor.
01:09:55On October 15, the first moratorium against the war turned out huge crowds in cities all across the nation.
01:10:04In 1969, there are massive demonstrations throughout the United States calling for an end to the war in Vietnam.
01:10:13We 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 and watched
01:10:23our wives and children demonstrating down Pennsylvania Avenue against the war.
01:10:30It's now reality!
01:10:33And I can remember in the old executive office building, when I went up to the fifth or sixth floor,
01:10:40there were American troops sitting there with their backs to the walls and weapons in case the White House was
01:10:46attacked by the demonstrations outside.
01:10:49And 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.
01:11:02What he does do in response is give the silent majority speech.
01:11:08Good evening, my fellow Americans. Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all
01:11:14Americans and to many people in all parts of the world, the war in Vietnam.
01:11:19He has the kind of epiphany that everybody else has missed.
01:11:23If there is an educated minority implacably opposed to the war,
01:11:30doesn't that mean that there's a majority that doesn't feel that way?
01:11:34To 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
01:11:49peace.
01:11:50Nixon had his own innate disabilities as a politician.
01:11:55What he also had, though, was this ability to read the public and to sense what the moment called for.
01:12:03North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.
01:12:09Only Americans can do that.
01:12:13Public reaction to the address was prompt.
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.
01:12:24And it helped him in the polls, which he, of course, obsessively tracked.
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, the 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.
01:12:57The bombing campaign in Cambodia was a secret, maybe to the American, but certainly not to the Cambodians.
01:13:06Cambodia was never in the foreground of the Vietnam War.
01:13:11Cambodia's suffering was not in the public eye and therefore allowed to continue because nobody knew about it.
01:13:21The American V-52s ultimately dropped 539,000 tons of bombs.
01:13:29That is more than Japan during World War II.
01:13:35The bombing eviscerates the country and 2 million people end up in Phnom Penh as basically internally displaced persons.
01:13:46Some families manage to cling together. Somehow they survive and find a sort of peace.
01:13:55The super bombing of Cambodia sets in motion a set of events which result in the overthrow of Prince Siena.
01:14:04And almost within a year, a relatively stable place has been turned into hellhole.
01:14:13We could not permit the Communists to act in Cambodia with total impunity which they had occupied before we did
01:14:21anything.
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
01:14:49South Vietnam, but that the whole country is going to go Communist.
01:14:52And then any possibility of an acceptable deal in South Vietnam would really begin to evaporate.
01:15:02Kissinger 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.
01:15:24He managed, I think, to make his view, Nixon's view, in a very skillful way while leaving Nixon with the
01:15:33impression 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.
01:15:49Good 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 and we are going to go after the North Vietnamese who they don't want in
01:16:07their country and sending the North Vietnamese back to their country.
01:16:11If North Vietnam also occupied this whole band in Cambodia or the entire country, it would mean that South Vietnam
01:16:21was completely outflanked.
01:16:23And he explains, you know, there are North Vietnamese troops clearly inside of Cambodia, violating Cambodia's neutrality and that those
01:16:32troops 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, but we will not be humiliated.
01:16:47The President wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything. It's an order. It's to
01:16:55be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.
01:17:02In 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, there's going to be a firestorm of some sort.
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.
01:17:37Because I felt it was just, it was the last straw of escalation.
01:17:41We were working very hard, night and day, literally, on a, on a peace settlement.
01:17:49The 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.
01:18:03I bore the brunt of the argument. And at the end of it, Kissinger said, and I can still hear
01:18:07his voice.
01:18:08Well, Tony, I knew what you were going to say.
01:18:12And I thought to myself, I can leave now.
01:18:15I can send him a subscription to the New Republic or something.
01:18:20And I can go.
01:18:21And afterwards, I said to Roger, okay, this is it. I've had it.
01:18:24And he agreed.
01:18:26And 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.
01:18:35Which he did.
01:18:35And Kissinger was not pleased.
01:18:41There 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.
01:19:00As usual, when the United States escalates in any way in the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement goes into
01:19:09action.
01:19:10College campuses erupted.
01:19:19What 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
01:19:45Kent State.
01:19:50National Guardsmen opened fire with semi-automatic weapons.
01:19:53Suddenly, to have the National Guard, like, shooting at students.
01:19:56I mean, this is absolutely stunning.
01:19:59After 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.
01:20:09Mr. Nixon bore heavily his decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia and the awesome, explosive impact of that
01:20:16decision here at home.
01:20:17It's hard to exaggerate the anger.
01:20:21A 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.
01:20:44And Kissinger felt himself surrounded by protesters in his office.
01:20:49In 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.
01:21:04In which those who wanted peace would have peace.
01:21:09And those who wanted honor could live with themselves.
01:21:14I think Kissinger harbored the notion that he could somehow pull off what Nixon wanted,
01:21:20which 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 it's his ultimate indictment.
01:21:51Next 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
01:22:12humanity.
01:22:12The conclusion of Kissinger, next time on American Experience.
01:22:17Made possible in part by Liberty Neutral Insurance.
01:22:22American Experience, Kissinger is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
01:22:29Right.
01:22:48Is there somebody else anything like property?
01:22:49Not at all.
01:22:49That's only a good idea.
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