Mr. President, I have
Dr. Kissinger calling you now… Fine. - Thank you. President on the line, sir. Hi Henry? It’s the president. Are
you in New York or Washington? No, I’m here. Oh fine, fine... A man with direct access to
the president of the United States. He once possessed
huge amounts of power. But how did he wield it? What indelible mark did he
leave on the nation, and the world? And what mark
did it leave on him? More than a decade ago, we traveled to his guesthouse near
New York for a rare sit-down interview. For the first time, Henry Kissinger agreed to an in-depth
conversation about his life and legacy. During difficult times
throughout history, US leaders have always relied
on the advice of wise men… especially men with experience
leading the country into war. The nation was reeling
after the attacks on 9/11… but how would it respond? Then US President George W.
Bush consulted Henry Kissinger. For years, Kissinger had come and
gone through the doors of the White House. And there he had changed
the course of history. The president's got to be thinking
strategically in order to shape events and Henry Kissinger is a
very good strategic thinker. He's made a career
being a strategic thinker. He's got a mind that works
strategically. I see him regularly. US troops attacked Iraq. The invasion into this
far-away country was disastrous. Was a swift
withdrawal the answer? Once again, Bush turned to
Henry Kissinger for counsel. Kissinger advised: “Don’t give
up. The US must win this war.” I think you can learn
a lot from history. The key is for president
not to get stuck in the past. One can learn from
an experienced hand about how to deal with
today's current problems, and Henry Kissinger has
had a lot of experience. Henry Kissinger had the hard lessons
of the Vietnam War to reflect back on... how it all began. U-S leaders
believed they were in a global war. Back then, the war wasn’t waged in
the name of terror and “radical Islamists.” The enemy at that
time was communism. What led us into Vietnam
was to apply globally the principles that had
been successful in Europe. It was the theory that if you
could stop communist aggression, you then could build
democratic societies. And you could stop communism.
And there was also the theory that communism was determined to
overthrow the non-communist world. In the mid 1960s, the United States
divided the world into friends and foes. Americans treated the precarious
situation like a game of dominos: If just one piece were
to fall – just one nation – the next too would
fall… until they all did. That was the so-called
domino theory that if we who had become engaged in Vietnam
against a far-flung communist attack on South Vietnam – and
maybe in the whole region – that if we pulled out and just
let it happen that other countries would be absorbed into the Soviet or
the communist international system. They believed still in the late
‘60s erroneously as it turned out, that there was sort of a unitary
communist world out there, that the People's Republic
of China and the Soviet Union were conspiring together
with other communist countries. Therefore, they really looked upon
how the extraction from Vietnam was to take place as
being absolutely vital to the national interests
of the United States. Henry Kissinger was no stranger to
states that wanted to rule the world. He grew up in Germany, in
the Franconian town of Fürth. He was a Jewish child living
under an antisemitic tyrant. I sort of took it for
granted that Hitler youth – boys could beat us up on the street
and that there would be signs that Jews… ‘Juden unerwünscht.’ I didn’t… I can’t
say I liked it, but I didn't suffer from it
the way my parents did. His father was a teacher.
Kissinger, a shy teen and avid reader, fled with his family
to the United States. The year was 1938 –
not a moment too soon. In New York, Heinz became Henry.
He embraced this new open society. There wasn’t the constant
feeling of mistrust and danger… at least not at first sight. Young Kissinger soaked in his
surroundings and his new-felt freedom. The impression was that it was
a much more spontaneous life than what I was
used to in Fürth. People were much more
demonstrative in talking to each other. The concept of dating was
unknown in Fürth in the 1930s. So that relations between the sexes
and the relations were less constrained than they were in the middle-class
Germany that I had grown up in. Reunion with friends from Fürth. Including Ann Fleischer, who
would later be his wife of 15 years, who’d also escaped Germany. So had Kissinger’s
childhood friend, Frank Harris. Both men joined the US Army…
and it was time for another goodbye. At the Iceland Restaurant, it was shortly before we entered
the United States Armed Forces and we were happy to be together
and pledged that we, our friendship, will endure and we will get
together after we come back. Kissinger returned to Germany, the country where many of
his relatives had been murdered. Now he was an
American soldier in Krefeld. His division was tasked with
establishing a civilian administration and tracking down
Nazi perpetrators. I was full of hate, yes, because so many of my family
and friends got killed, yes. I did not have the sense that
this was an opportunity to get even. I had in fact the
opposite sense. I thought if it was wrong for the
Germans to treat the Jews as a category, it was wrong to treat the
Germans as a category. After serving in the military, Henry Kissinger returned to
the open society of the U-S. He’d previously worked
in a shaving brush factory. Now upon his return, he
enrolled at Harvard University. He’d shaken his shyness
and grown his self-confidence. His personal American dream
was to become a political scientist. I was a student at Harvard,
and he was, as you know, a fairly famous professor
there of international affairs at the Center for International
Affairs where he was a prominent, I think from the latter 1950s. He had written a book in 1957 called
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Kissinger analyzed the looming
threat posed by the Soviet Union. He developed a concept for the
limited use of American nuclear weapons. The book sparked a conversation. It was a seminal work. It enabled
people to make their own judgment about nuclear strategy
for the first time. That didn’t mean one would
necessarily endorse Kissinger’s opinion. But it was a
significant contribution to our understanding of
deterrence strategy, for example. In 1968, Richard Nixon won
the U-S presidential election. Nixon knew of Kissinger through
his work advising other politicians. Kissinger did not think
too highly of Nixon… but he was flattered when Nixon
appointed him as national security adviser. I enthusiastically
accept this assignment. And I shall serve the president-elect
with all my energy and dedication. The politician and the professor:
this duo would shape world history. Nixon had campaigned on the
promise to end the Vietnam War, but at the beginning of his term,
both men were in over their heads. When we were still finding out the
location of offices in the White House before we could do anything, the North Vietnamese started an
offensive in which 500 Americans were killed a week. And much
of that came from the sanctuaries. We took this for four weeks, and we had suffered
over 2,000 casualties in the first month of Nixon. We suffered from a deployment
that we had not put there. More casualties than America
suffered in three years in Iraq. Nixon and Kissinger’s first covert
operation was bombing Cambodia, where North Vietnamese
soldiers were hiding. Cambodia was officially a
neutral country in the war. Under no circumstances could the
truth behind the attacks come to light. Were they trying to be
truthful with the American public, or were they trying
to hide the truth, including the reality of what was
going on in the war in Vietnam? Just as now we have had a
president and a national security adviser and a secretary of state
who have hidden the truth – and a vice president – about the
reality of what's happening in Iraq. There is a line
from there to there. We expected that
somebody would protest. Cambodia, North Vietnam, Russia
somebody. We would then have said: Let us have a UN investigation
of what went on there, and we are willing to pay damages
for any destruction that we caused. To our absolute amazement,
nobody protested. Not the Cambodians, not the
North Vietnamese, not the Russians, not the Chinese. And that was
the origin of the secret bombing. It was not intended
to be secret. But it was a bombing that was
going on to which nobody objected. And therefore, for us to volunteer
this information might start a crisis that at least on any given
day, seemed unnecessary. He's a very, very intelligent man
who believes from his point of view, I don't share this, but from his
point of view he really believes that if you're unscrupulous, that you
cannot allow scruples to come in the way of serious political purposes. That there may be, as a practical
purpose, as a practical point, you cannot be
needlessly unscrupulous. I think Kissinger would probably
feel to be needlessly unscrupulous would be monstrous. Because
it's ineffective. It's wasteful. It destroys what
you're trying to achieve. But in the sense of being a little
unscrupulous to make your point, I don't think that bothers him. The bombing of Cambodia was
not kept under wraps for long. There was a leak among
top Washington officials… and a reporter at the New
York Times broke the story. I went to two men who
were extremely well-placed. One at the State Department
and one at the White House. The official at the State
Department said: Jesus H. Christ, I have no comment. But his
expression said otherwise. You could tell from his
expression that he was amazed that someone had put these pieces
of top-secret information together and come out came
out with that scenario. I then went to the White House
person and did the same thing. And he said, you know,
I've never lied to you, Bill. And I won't start now, so
let's change the subject. At that point I realized that I
clearly had this story and wrote it. Kissinger was relaxing in
Florida with the president, as he’d do more
often in later years. The peace and quiet was punctured
when Security Adviser Kissinger found out about the
New York Times exposé. The secret bombing of
Cambodia was a secret no more. They were furious. They were
furious at the leak. Nixon, of course, wanted to, as usual, as you can see over the successive
years – Nixon wanted to find the leaker. Kissinger did too. This was
the first big breach of security, as it were, inside
the administration. They were only a few months
old and already one of their secret, most secret moves
in foreign policy had been revealed on the front
page of the New York Times. Who was behind the leak? To track down the source, the FBI
tapped numerous telephone lines – including those of
Kissinger’s closest aides. What part did
Kissinger himself play? I'm not here to say that I enjoyed
or approved Henry Kissinger going along with wiretapping of many
of his closest associates, including me. I think it was a mistake. Having said that, I did not hold
this against Kissinger fundamentally because I did share his view
that the leaks were serious. I do not agree with
people who do leak. Al Haig played a very
strong role in this as well, so I think Haig was the
key liaison with the FBI. If there was something
worrisome that appeared in them were delivered
to Henry's office, sometimes to me in Henry's
absence, sometimes directly to Henry. My only role was when
a leak had occurred. And after an investigation
had started to supply the names of the people who had
access to the information. The source of the
leak was never found. Kissinger, meanwhile, had become one of the most
influential men in the United States. Even then-Secretary of State William
P. Rogers stood in Kissinger’s shadow. Kissinger’s National
Security Council shaped the nation’s
foreign affairs strategy. He had vast amounts of
power but very few friends. In those early
days, early months, he was exceptionally careful
about what he did, how he did it, and he was very difficult with
all of us who worked for him. And I mean by that, you know, double
check everything we did and so forth. I don't think he was
loved or particularly liked by the people who
worked closest with him. I think there was a kind of loyalty
because they respected his competence, his substantive ability. But I don't think anyone particularly
liked him as a as a human being. He was hard driving. Hard taskmaster. And he demanded pretty much perfection. And people I know had to
do things sometimes over and over and over again
until they got them just right. In July 1969, six
months after taking office, Nixon traveled with Kissinger to
South Vietnam – into the war zone. Nixon wanted to deliver on his
campaign promise to end the war started by his predecessors, John
F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But as it came time to make
good on his pledge to bring the war to “an honorable end,”
the politicians stalled. Henry Kissinger was tasked with
executing the plan for afterwards, but none ever materialized. Nixon
and Kissinger refused to accept defeat. Instead of ending the war, they
became more deeply entrenched in it. They were taken aback by the resilience
of their North Vietnamese opponents. The problem was they
didn't mind losing people. And their threshold of pain
was far higher than it would be for a civilized Western nation. So the only way you can
succeed is to hurt them. The operation
began at 6 o’clock, Friday morning Saigon time three
hours before President Nixon’s speech… Nixon and Kissinger ordered
American troops to invade Cambodia. This time, the
operation was no secret. The move ramped up
tensions even further. He was continuing
the war with Nixon. Both of them were working full
time to continue that war until ‘72, when Nixon could get reelected. As a result, 25,000 American
soldiers were killed unnecessarily. And hundreds of
thousands of Vietnamese. In May 1970, antiwar
sentiment reached a fever pitch. Tens of thousands of
Americans took to the streets to protest the actions of
the US government, Nixon, and his security
adviser, Kissinger. For me, it was painful
for another reason. These were people
I’d been their professor, these were people
I've been in school with. The students were people I’d
been teaching a year earlier. So what I did is they were assembled
and they'd called “the Ellipse” right in front of
the White House. There were several hundred thousand
of them and I would send out assistance, that they were assembled by
colleges. And I would send out… during the Cambodian crisis, I kept
every afternoon free for the students, and I would send student assistance
out to bring students in for discussions. But it was… it didn't change the
intensity of the demonstrations. Nor did I expect it to. Ladies and gentlemen, the
president of the United States… Nixon responded
with more promises. The 150,000 Americans that I
announced for withdrawal the next year will come home on schedule. And it will, in my opinion, serve
the cause of a just peace in Vietnam. As the Vietnam War scaled up,
divisions in Kissinger’s team deepened. Three close aides resigned. Tony Lake and I and Bill Watts, who were three people who resigned
from the staff in protest of the invasion, did not make a public
declaration of our position and did not call a press conference
simply because we thought that would so irreparably damage
Kissinger inside the administration. And we thought the administration
was so awful, so bad, that to destroy or to damage Kissinger
would hurt the country. To weaken him we
thought that, ironically, Kissinger was
our last, best hope. An immigrant, a political scientist,
and in some ways an outsider. Held at arm’s length and
wanting Nixon’s recognition… could he have emerged
as the president’s foil? Would he have even wanted that? Kissinger’s boss was a complicated
man who distrusted intellectuals. Like his predecessors, Nixon wanted a taping system
installed in the White House. But he wanted to
take it one step further. He wanted to record all his
conversations with hidden recorders. An employee bugged
offices and telephone lines. There were six microphones
embedded in the president's desk, up from bottom to top. That turned out to be not a
very good idea because normally when the president's discussing
things with his aides at the desk, there are coffee cups on the desk
which rattled over by the fireplace where the president always sits
with the very important state visitors. There were microphones in the
base of the lamps in the cabinet room. They were in the base of the
lamps on either side of the wall. Then they're on all
the office telephones. And in the president's sitting
room over in the residence, he had a habit of sitting
in the Lincoln Room, which is just a sitting room. That
phone in that room were also bugged. And later on, he had his
telephone and his little private study up at Camp David – bugged. And his office across the street in
the Executive Office Building – bugged. I learned it… when did I learn
it? I learned it only in May ‘73, about six weeks before the
taping system was established when General Haig became
adviser, he told me. I was shocked. But the strange thing was that at
first I thought I have to be careful when I'm in here now.
But after three or four days, there was really no choice. You could
not compose something for the tape while you were
talking to the president. So for the six weeks the
tapes were in operation, that I knew about it, I’d be interested
to compare whether what I said was significantly different from
before. I've never bothered to do this. I would guess not. But
it's a terrible system. Kissinger also had a
deep sense of mistrust. Years later, he too
recorded his conversations… and he too would lose
his grip on the system. I recommended it to him, I
said: Henry. It is the only way. Unless you're going to
write notes to yourself and then bring people into the office
and say, ‘here's what I said to him.’ This is the only way you can make
a record of what you talked about, what you committed to
and also to remind you if you want to write
a book later on, you've got these things
here that you can pull together and get some sense of what
you were doing. So he did it. One of the problems of that period
is that we all kept so many records that anybody who wants to prove
some point, can pick out a sentence, and then make that the
signpost for the whole period without explaining the context. The wiretapping also
impacted Willy Brandt. The German chancellor
implemented “Ostpolitik” – soothing tensions with
the Communist eastern bloc in favor of a peaceful coexistence.
The approach made Kissinger suspicious. Even if his recollections of that
period differed from his aides… I had developed enormous admiration
for Willy Brandt when he was mayor of Berlin. And he was a symbol of
the resistance to the Soviet Union. So I had very
high regard for him. I don't remember him having any
particularly warm feelings about him. I think he thought basically,
you know, that he was a socialist, therefore one had to deal
with him very carefully. He wasn't wild about
him, to put it mildly. He had serious questions. I don't
think he admired Mr. Brandt very much. I'm being gentle,
I will put it bluntly: I think he thought
that Willy Brandt was a terrible mistake
for the Federal Republic. Kissinger saw the German
chancellor as an adversary when it came to managing
relations with the eastern bloc. Willy Brandt teetered the
line between ally and rival. One of my tasks at the time as defense
minister, and later as finance minister, was to erase any doubts
in the United States regarding Germany’s
reliability as an ally. I told Henry Kissinger:
Willy Brandt is a decent man. You can take him at his word. And he said: I can take you at
your word, but I don’t know him. That was his mentality. He didn’t say that word-for-word,
but that was how he felt. I was in Washington with Willy
Brandt and we stayed at the Blair House. And Brandt spoke very openly
about how little he thought of Nixon. And I cautioned him that he
should be a bit more careful, that these rooms would
no doubt be bugged. And he said: I don’t believe
that, we’re not in Moscow. And I replied: Well I do believe it.
In any case, he grew more cautious. And in the end, it was true. It was bugged. Of course it ended up
on Nixon’s desk, and Nixon asked Henry. And of course Henry
told his president, who was a difficult man
psychologically, what he wanted to hear. The recording of this conversation
captured Nixon calling Brandt “a little bit dumb.” Kissinger
agreed, adding Brandt was lazy… and that he drank. But the real tension between Willy
Brandt and the Americans ran deeper. Kissinger harbored a
sort of political jealousy, fearing the Germans would
become too cozy with the Russians. We were initially suspicious
about Ostpolitik because we thought, it could be the beginning of
a separate German approach and lead to a new kind
of German nationalism. The Ostpolitik in Henry's view,
and I think with some justice, sliced underneath
Henry's attempts at what… what was the term we
were describing? Détente. Brandt pursued
his policy openly, something Kissinger
couldn’t afford to do. He had to circumvent the public eye
when reaching out to the Communists – or else the backlash in the
US would have been too great. Kissinger wanted to visit China, but
the trip needed to be kept under wraps. He’d have to go via Pakistan. The cover story was going to be that
Kissinger was going to get a stomach ache and had to spend time
in a hilltop retreat recovering. The problem is he got a real
stomachache while he was in India before he even got to
Pakistan, and he had to hide that because he couldn't have two
stomachaches. So he had to suffer the real stomachache
to preserve his cover story. We got to Pakistan. In Islamabad, Kissinger
greeted reporters as he would have
on any other trip. It was crucial that no one
could catch wind of the fact that Nixon’s security
adviser was headed to Beijing. It was all a big ruse, in which the
Pakistani president played along. In the middle of the night, we packed in our hotel and were
driven secretly to the Islamabad airport by the Pakistani
foreign minister and got on the president
of Pakistan's airplane. The most dramatic point
of my entire life, I think, was that first secret airplane
trip from Islamabad to Beijing because we flew by K2, the
second highest mountain in the world. Beautiful morning, the dawn
coming up and the snow glistening. None of the world knew where
we were except for very few people. We were about to meet the
Chinese and Joe and I in particular that we had not
seen for 22 years. So you had the huge historical
and geopolitical ramifications. You had the James
Bond secrecy dimension. The China that Kissinger landed
in seemed diametrically opposed to the United States.
A closed society, driven by the ideological directives
of a despot at the pinnacle of power. China under Mao Zedong
was a pretty nasty place. And the opening to China
was a product of the belief that we needed to work with China
in order to balance the Soviet Union. That was Realpolitik and a
very important example of it in terms of Henry
Kissinger's history. Months later, Nixon made
an official visit to Beijing. Nixon going to China
represented a complete turnaround in one of the central tenets
of American foreign policy throughout the late 1940s, all of the
1950s, and essentially all of the 1960s. And that was that
we could, in effect, make China go away by
pretending that it didn't exist. Kissinger's back-channel
diplomacy paid off. US officials stepped foot into the
world of their ideological adversary for the first time….
as the world watched. Henry Kissinger had
moved the needle, nudging the nation into a
new chapter of foreign policy. The meeting with Mao Zedong had the potential to steer the
course of history in a different direction. He lived in a residence in the
Forbidden City, which was very simple. The first few times I saw him,
there was a bed actually in his study. I don't know whether he
had a more palatial residence, which he didn't show. He himself… but there
was this atmosphere of mystery. He had a very
sharp strategic mind. Of course it's also
responsible for more crimes and for more deaths than any
other contemporary leader. So the fact that he had
his superior intellect, it's no justification or it doesn't
excuse what he did in domestic politics. But as a strategist in foreign
policy, he was extremely impressive. But Kissinger had
other ideas in store. China was part of a greater plan, for him. Remove China from
the complex of foreign policy issues that we had to view as closely
related to the Soviet Union. It broke that relationship clearly,
publicly. It gave us an opportunity to play the Chinese against
the Soviets and vice versa. Ahead of Nixon’s May
1972 visit to Moscow, Kissinger arranged the
details in the background: Americans’ misgivings about the
Soviets were too great and besides, Nixon wanted the
spotlight fixed on him. But the superpowers were still tangled
up in a bitter proxy war in Vietnam… one the US was in danger of
losing. The optics were critical: The summit in Moscow could not
look like a meeting between a winner and a loser.
Behind closed doors, Kissinger fought with the
Soviets over protocol. They had agreed to continue
the summit, despite the fact we were then
bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong – their supposed allies. So we had a special session in
the dacha country home of Brezhnev, in which I was involved, just a few
of us, with the four Russian leaders. And Brezhnev and the others
lectured Nixon for three-and-a-half hours mercilessly on our terrible
policies in Vietnam and how we ought to get out
and the mood was very testy. When this was finished, we
went upstairs and Brezhnev and all the others completely
changed their mood, offered us vodka, started
singing and cracking jokes. They had obviously done this session
so they could send the transcript to Hanoi to show how tough they were. He did not have the brainpower
of the Chinese leaders or of say, Kosygin, but he had a
sort of fundamental instinct, and I thought that he really wanted
to achieve peaceful negotiations with the United States, and he was willing
to cut some corners in order to do it. And in some ways,
I thought of him later as sort of a forerunner of
Brezhnev, of Gorbachev in the sense that he had understood there was
something wrong with that system. The summit where foes met face-to-face
was rife with symbolism. But in reality, it came down to the withdrawal
from Vietnam and nuclear warheads. Who was calling the shots? Kissinger had precious little time
to figure out Brezhnev's strategy. He had understood that a
prolonged confrontation with America would drain the Soviet Union and so
on practical negotiations on weapons, he was very – by my
sense – quite cooperative. I know there was a
big debate in America that they were threatening to
achieve a first strike capability. I never believed that, and history
has shown that it was total nonsense. “Cocktail diplomacy” went too far
for many people’s tastes in the US. Was Henry Kissinger
gambling with the nation’s pride? He believed that he had to maneuver
an agile and sometimes quite cynical way in order to compensate for the absence
of strength from the American position. And if you ask about
Realpolitik in that context, I think it was the view that you
have to be prepared to do things that you would rather not
do and that you wouldn't do if you were not in the circumstances
that you found yourself in. And it doesn't go as far as
saying the end justifies the means, but it certainly tends
in that direction. I don't think he was overly
swayed by sentiment or emotion or the kinds of ethical principles that
two men are obliged to operate under. Nations operate
in different ways. The summit in Moscow did not
bring an end to the Vietnam War. Increasingly desperate, Nixon
and Kissinger steeled themselves against the
possibility of defeat. They threatened their enemy with
bombs – as they’d done in previous years. President Nixon was becoming
increasingly unpredictable… not only to his enemies,
but to his closest aides. There was speculation whether the
US president was truly of sound mind. But Kissinger shrewdly capitalized
on his president's weakness, turning it into a
strategic strength. The madman approach to
international relations was quite unique. You know, Nixon had this theory that if he could project a kind
of irrationality in his behavior that it would intimidate, frighten
these foreign governments – the Soviet Union, China,
the Vietnamese, and so on. So he cultivated the image
of the unpredictable president who might do something
really crazy something really awful. People wondered: How far would Nixon
go really? Would he use nuclear weapons? Anybody who knew
Nixon would tell you that he often made
exorbitant statements. That this was his way
of letting off steam. It never meant that it
was an actual policy, so it's not hard to go through
all these telephone conversations which you left behind and find that he
made some grand delinquent statement. A furious Nixon spouted threats: He wanted to wipe out dikes, power
plants, cities – even entire countries. Kissinger dutifully reassured him
the American public would understand. Kissinger frequently use the
unpredictability of President Nixon as a tool, sometimes
as a rather delicate tool, sometimes almost
like a sledgehammer. But the line would always be, look, I
understand what you're trying to say. I understand what
your point of view is, but you have to understand I am
representing this very unpredictable – sometimes I think he might
even go so far as to say, this maniac back
at the White House – and while I might be inclined to
go along with your point of view, he would not. So he used
Nixon. Nixon used him. Nixon deliberated deploying nuclear
weapons… the “worst-case scenario” that Kissinger had
long-since considered. What he said was
actually not wrong. What he was saying was
that in the nuclear age, the risks of war are so great, that unless you can convince your
antagonist that you might go further than you would normally expect,
he will not take you seriously. That was the correct analysis. But
if you look at what he actually did, he did in foreign policy. I cannot
think of any irrational act he took. The nuclear war-mongering did not
seem to intimidate the North Vietnamese. Kissinger traveled to Paris – at first covertly and then
repeatedly for peace talks. The negotiations carried on for years
– much like the war in the Far East. I was directly involved in
the first secret negotiations. By the end of 1969,
the beginning of 1970, we had a basic agreement
on a withdrawal schedule for both the North Vietnamese
and the United States, a kind of coalition arrangement
with South Vietnam sharing power with the Vietcong, in a kind of what we called a leopard
spot arrangement in South Vietnam, where they controlled
part of the territory and the South Vietnamese
government the other part. We could have ended that war
by them by the middle of 1970 if it hadn't been for the
Cambodian coup and the invasion. When you have 550,000 troops
involved and you have already lost 35,000, you can't just turn this
off like a television set and say we don't care about the
people who, in reliance on our word, have cast their faith with us. And just technically, how to get
500,000 people out of a country? If you think of the problems, people
have now evacuating a few 100 people. So we thought this systematic
retreat while strengthening the people who we had supported
was the necessary cause and in fact I think there
was no other cause. The Americans pictured
the war ending in triumph. Instead, they were dependent
on the good will of their enemies and Kissinger’s negotiating
counterpart, Le Duc Tho. The superpower was humiliated.
Kissinger had to give it his all to package the defeat as the honorable
withdrawal that had been promised. It was not a pleasant experience because their strategy
was to break our spirit. Their strategy was to
maneuver us into positions in which the demoralization of
the American body politic continued. And they were
extremely skillful at this. The following statement is being issued
at this moment in Washington and Hanoi. At 12:30 Paris time
today, January 23, 1973, the agreement on ending the
war and restoring peace in Vietnam was initialed by Dr. Henry Kissinger
on behalf of the United States and Special Adviser Le Duc Tho on behalf of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam. The US lost the Vietnam War. But Kissinger, the diplomat,
somehow eked out a victory. He and Le Duc Tho were
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Nothing that has happened to me
in public life has moved me more than this award. When I shall
receive the award together with my old colleague in the search
for peace in Vietnam Le Duc Tho. Le Duoc Tho declined the award,
saying the U-S had violated the agreement and peace had not
yet been established. Henry Kissinger caught word
that protesters awaited him in Oslo and sent the US ambassador
to the prize ceremony instead. As Kissinger and Nixon were ascending
in power, the downfall was drawing near. The slip-up happened amid
Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1972. The Republican incumbent
was running for his second term – and odds of him
winning were fairly high. But his distrust of his Democratic
opponents clouded his judgment and regard for the law. Five men broke into the campaign office
of the Democrats at the Watergate Hotel. They searched the rooms, installed
bugs… and were caught red-handed. The trail led back to officials in
the White House administration. Henry Kissinger had nothing to
do with the break in at Watergate. what Watergate was about is an extra
constitutional and criminal presidency. When I became aware of the extent
of it – which was very late in the game – I called an old associate of Nixon’s, who had been adviser twice now, and said how could this happen? And he said some fool went into the
Oval Office. And did what he was told. The wiretapping system
was Nixon’s undoing, proving he knew of the blackmail
by the Watergate burglars. One million dollars? Nixon said
that’d be feasible – even in cash. One reads these dramatic statements
– those who knew Nixon well – knew that these dramatic
statements meant nothing. That you had to go back after a few
hours of that, preferably the next day. And you owed it to him. To give him
that chance. But some people didn't. Kissinger and Nixon had
been victorious in the past… but their methods of backroom wheeling
and dealing had caught up to them. Kissinger watched how Nixon talked his
way into trouble, digging his own grave. Good evening. I had no prior
knowledge of the Watergate break in. I neither took part in nor knew about any of the
subsequent cover-up activities. I neither authorized nor encouraged
subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics.
That was, and that is the simple truth. The facade crumbled. John Dean, the official who told
Nixon about the blackmail, testified. At that point, the truth about the
White House wiretapping system hadn’t yet come to light. Everything that John Dean
was saying I knew was true. I knew the system so well. Then I was called shortly
after John Dean was called. The equipment allowed for a lag so that no portion of a
conversation would be omitted. I knew how much these
tapes meant to Richard Nixon. I knew how much the secret
of the tapes meant to him. And now I was telling the whole
world I was a fan of Richard Nixon. I'd been on his staff
for those four years. I felt honored to
have been there. And now I was the person who was
going to cause great discomfort for him and harm to his presidency. As the walls caved
in on Nixon in the US, a foreign policy crisis
was mounting abroad. In October 1973, Syrian and
Egyptian troops attacked Israel. Nixon knew that the Yom Kippur war
was a direct outgrowth of Watergate where the Russians felt he was so
preoccupied they could do what they did. On the one hand, that was
an extremely tense situation. On the other, we saw it as an
opportunity to begin a peace process. Kissinger organized an airlift to send military supplies and
weapons to Israel, a US ally. When Israeli forces successfully
encircled Egyptian troops, Egypt called on the
Soviet Union for aid. If Moscow were to
send its own troops, the Middle East conflict
would become a showdown – bringing the Americans and
Soviets into indirect conflict. A crisis team met in
Washington to discuss next steps. A full-on clash between the two
superpowers seemed inevitable. When we met on the night, the
president was in the residence. General Haig, who
was his chief of staff, would go from our meeting
back to the residence.” I discussed this
with the president. He said he wanted to know where Henry
stood. I said you know where he stands. He's in lock step with you.
There's no question about Henry. He knew his president
and he knew what was right. Nixon was not
there that evening. Rumors swirled about
his drinking habits… that the Watergate investigations
were rendering him incapacitated. Why the President decided to
absent himself on that evening is a question that
I cannot answer. Al Haig said: You know,
go ahead with the meeting, I'll keep you informed
and that's what we did. All eyes were now on Henry
Kissinger and his inner circle. How would they counter the
measures threatened by the Soviets? What I do remember
was that Al Haig and Henry came to the conclusion
that we should raise the alert level. We sent out an order to all U.S. forces
around the world to put them on alert because we knew the Soviets would
see all of the additional message traffic going out and know
that we were serious. The United States’
defense readiness condition, or DEFCON, was
set to level three. The world was inching
closer to a nuclear showdown. Were the Americans bluffing? The Soviets got the message and did not
send their units to the Sinai Peninsula. The deterrence strategy of Kissinger,
the former Harvard professor, won out. What we attempted to
do in Nixon administration was to make more precise
calculations of the penalties and rewards that needed to
be assembled in each situation. We never had the idea that we would
overwhelm other countries without power. But we did, and we always
offered the possibility of negotiation. But we did believe that power
was an important element in international
relations, among others. Was he ready to
use nuclear power? No, I think he had the
conviction that if he was ready to, then he would never have to.
That's what deterrence is all about. So you have to
be ready to use it. If you don't want to use
it. If you want to use it, let the other side think that
you won't. Then they'll use it. With the strength of the
US military behind him, Kissinger flew to the
Middle East. For weeks, he bounced between the capitals of
the region, practicing “shuttle diplomacy.” While everyone around him
might be collapsing from fatigue, he was still going on and one of
the things that I will remember most was the constant sitting there
thinking when is he going to go to bed so that I can get
some sleep myself. There were times when we traveled
back and forth for 16,18 hours a day where you might hit two or three
or four different capitals in one day. In the end, Kissinger managed to
ease the tensions in the Middle East – at least temporarily. He enjoyed some time off – under the watchful eyes of
the press… and armed guards. Kissinger had brokered
a ceasefire in Vietnam and established some semblance
of peace in the Middle East. His reputation as a great statesman
of foreign policy was solidified. And his pragmatic style of politics
known as Realpolitik was praised too. What Realpolitik consists of
is you make every agreement that's to your advantage, and
you discard every agreement, every such agreement, the moment
it ceases to be to your advantage, to the degree you're able to do
it. That's what makes it Realpolitik. You can't always do what
you want to do in Realpolitik. But you have to know how to get
the maximum out of each situation, and morals have absolutely
nothing to do with it. Henry Kissinger was the architect
of a new American world order – and not everyone fit into it. One example was Salvador
Allende, a socialist politician in Chile. It all came to a head
in the fall of 1973, during the Watergate affair
and the crisis in the Middle East. But the story began
three years earlier with Allende's candidacy
for the Chilean presidency. Nixon feared Allende
would be a new Fidel Castro. For Nixon, the phenomenon of
Castro was a particularly emotional issue because he believed
he was defeated in 1960 because of the fact that Kennedy
was freer to talk about Castro than he was being vice president and
knowledgeable of what was being done. So he believed he was defeated
because of Castro's existence. Then, in 1962, he felt he was
defeated for governor in California because the Cuban Missile crisis
occurred at it at the precise moment of the election so that to prevent
the emergence of another Castro was an article of faith with Nixon and
an issue in which he was more active than on any other single
issue that I dealt with. It was Nixon’s
nightmare scenario. In 1970, Allende was elected
president with a razor thin majority. White House officials got to work
to prevent Allende’s inauguration. Well, we didn't mind the thought
of Allende not being elected. He was leftist and some of the recent
writings that have come out of the KGB right out of their files have
confirmed that he worked for them. It was paid by the KGB. What was your plan
regarding Salvador Allende? Now this is an issue that one… that your viewers
will have to read up on because there are a few issues
which have been so misrepresented. That's why I'm asking. But to get into it to
briefly put the first of all: I did not have a personal plan
on what to do about Allende. This was one issue in which
Nixon gave direct orders to the intelligence community,
although I certainly didn't oppose it. Throughout his tenure, Nixon
had worked closely with Kissinger to coordinate covert plans in foreign
policy, including CIA operations. The same was true for Chile. Nixon
was determined to prevent the emergence of a second Castro in
Latin America at all costs. The intention was to find a way the
reason that Allende technically won he only had something like 36
percent of the vote and his next – his principal opponent
– had 1 percent less. But if you added the
non-Communist votes together, they were about 60 plus percent. So the
general strategy was to find a device by which the election could be
held between two candidates. In Santiago, the CIA urged the
commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army, General René Schneider,
to call a new election. While the constitution afforded him
the right to do so, the general refused. He did not want to
interfere in politics. The CIA backed one group
which was designed to build an alternative to Allende and
provide funds for that alternative, but they kidnapped
one of Allende’s military. General Schneider? Yeah, and he was killed in this. Very stupid thing that they
did but that was not done with American approval
or American plan. That was not an American
plan, but it was CIA funded. Therefore, they were responsible.
In terms of many of our legislators. The assassination of General Schneider
did not prevent Allende's inauguration. And so a battle began on
uneven playing grounds, with Allende in South America
and Nixon in North America. Nixon was determined to
make life as difficult as possible for Chile's new president. Allende wanted to
nationalize US corporations. It was a struggle from afar. I think we gave some sort of assistance
to workers who are going on strike for this or that or
the other and so on just to increase the problems that
Allende had in governing the country. There was a lot of,
what I call covert activity, done by the Central
Intelligence Agency. And there had been some previous
historic events in Latin America where that activity
was quite successful. It wasn't in the
Nixon administration, it was actually in the Eisenhower
administration or earlier administrations where covert action brought
about a successful outcome, prevented a Communist
takeover. That happened in Brazil. On occasions, it
happened to Guatemala. And so that was the kind of
activity that the CIA was looking at and we had special
organizations to deal with that. Covert actions are
pursuant to American policy. And while the president is
responsible for covert actions, the CIA is under the general control
of the National Security Council. So it was his responsibility. Well, he certainly, certainly
played a role. Yes, of course. The CIA financed Chilean opposition
groups which wielded every mistake made by Allende's socialist
government to their advantage. The result was massive unrest. From the start, Allende's adversaries
knew they could rely on US support. The pressure on Allende mounted,
until it had become practically unbearable. They had committees that worked and considered these
plans that were be proposed, perhaps by the
CIA or the Pentagon, to take some action
which was covert in nature. What was Henry Kissinger's role? He was a member of the committee.
He chaired the committee, I believe, at that time under the
system that was set up. But it didn't mean he
had a carte blanche. This had to be agreed to by all of
the departments and the framework. So he had to
coordinate these actions. Not only coordinate them but be
sure everybody agreed to them. We don't know what personal
conversations took place because a lot of those
conversations are still classified. A lot of those transcripts
were never released. But we know that he was very
aggressive in interagency meetings, in transmitting Nixon's orders to the
CIA to do something about Allende, yes. And that he was very vigorous in
carrying out the president's orders. As control slipped away
from the Chilean government, a group of military leaders
decided to stage a coup. Fighter jets from the Chilean Air
Force bomb the presidential palace. I can only urge your viewers to read
some responsible book on the subject. And not to get into the fine points
and misrepresentations that have been… that have characterized
this debate. But let me ask a more general
question. Chile was a sovereign state. Why was it important for the
United States at this time to…? Because we had just seen missiles put
into Cuba in ‘62 and in that very month, a soviet submarine base was
being built Because Latin
America, Argentina, in Cienfuegos in Cuba. was in near civil war conditions
and the belief was as it had been in previous administrations, this was
not an invention of President Nixon. President Kennedy and Johnson
had pursued exactly the same policy – only they had done it more
effectively in the electoral period. And that was the issue, as
far as we were concerned. But that's as much as I
will say on this subject, so it's no sense pursuing it. Salvador Allende was found
dead on September 11th, 1973. It was unclear if his death
was a murder or suicide. Five days later, Nixon – clearly
in good spirits – called Kissinger. A transcript of the conversation
captured their mood. The president
opened with small talk. I don't think they admired him greatly
and I think the evidence, as I said, has now come out that he was
indeed being paid by the KGB. So this was reason
for joy, I believe. Well, after all, this was a
Cold War. But it was a war. Kissinger and Nixon both bear
some kind of indirect responsibility for the death, not only
the death of Allende but all of the
casualties of that coup. That that coup was
essentially made in America. And the encouragement
to the Chilean military, the green light that we gave
them in so many different ways, as well as the very material
aid that we gave them, was responsible for the
awful repression of that country for years to come. Yes, of
course they bear responsibility. After the coup and
Allende’s death, General Augusto Pinochet
headed a military dictatorship. Thousands of citizens were arrested,
tortured, and made to disappear. Years later in 1976, Henry Kissinger
flew to Santiago – a cordial encounter. Our general strategy in
human rights was to conduct it with a policy of engagement,
that is to say that we talked to… we used our influence with Pinochet
to bring about the release of prisoners and to humanize his conduct. Kissinger's Realpolitik was
I would say, amoral, yes. There was a deliberate ignoring of
what a country did inside its boundaries. Our only criterion for
judging it as our friend or foe was what its foreign policy was. There was a deliberate blind eye turned
toward how it treated its own citizens. And I think that often amounted
to violations of international law. Human rights was an alien
concept to Kissinger. One can look at it 30 years later
from the posture of a different approach and start second
guessing the conversations, but if you read my
conversations with Pinochet, you can say on the one
hand I was too polite to him. On the other hand, you can
also say that the only conversation that I've had with him that four-fifths
of it concerned human rights issues – put in a very polite way and
not in a confrontational way. So that would have to be judged, but it's not a subject I
will now I will pursue. Headlines depicted Henry
Kissinger as more than a politician. He rose to a pop star level of fame
and enjoyed his life in the limelight – especially when
women were around. He understood star power
and the power of celebrity and used it very effectively, especially
because he was around people who were otherwise grey and he
really knew how to use it, how to milk it. He always used to say power
is the ultimate aphrodisiac, that by being powerful people
are attractive. I think that's true. They were immensely
jealous of them, you know, here are these hard-working
bureaucrats, married families. They had marriages that were ten,
fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years old. They were considerably a
little bored with their marriage. And here's Henry gallivanting around
their age, but gallivanting around, going out with a beauty like Jill St.
John, going out with other women, a figure of gossip. I've always believed
that Henry, in a way, had an inferiority complex and
that one of the things that drove him to be so good at everything he did
was in fact that underlying insecurity. No, that's not a subject
to… assuming we enjoyed… as our relationships, it
was mutually agreeable. And I don't know in
what way it was unusual. And it was certainly done discreetly,
and I was not married at the time. But you enjoyed this society. Well, if I did it
over some months, I obviously must have
enjoyed it within limits. But let's go to another subject. In the fall of 1973, Nixon
gave Kissinger a second job: secretary of state. Months later,
he got married for the second time to a smart, wealthy woman also
working in the political sphere. Afterward, the reaction in the
Jewish community was very, very unpleasant in many ways. It was bad enough that he must
marrying a gentile but worst of all was, that it was on a Saturday. Kissinger departed for his honeymoon
with Nancy… the press tagged along. So you took everybody by
surprise by getting married. How, how sudden was it really? We’ve planning it
for several weeks. You were very famous for your… female acquaintances. And do you believe that
this was more of a campaign and publicity campaign
rather than to… I couldn't possibly admit
the number of other bachelors are very grateful
to me that way. I thank God for when he got married
was that he went home at night and I didn't have to stay there
until 10:00 o'clock at night every night cleaning up after
him or whatever. So I was terribly grateful
when they got married. It was a lull that
didn’t last long. In Washington, the Watergate
scandal spread and reached Kissinger. As both security adviser
and secretary of state, he had more power
than ever before. But an old story concerning
Kissinger's early days in the administration
resurfaced. It was about the secret bombing
of Cambodia – and how the phones of close associates and journalists
were subsequently tapped. For all their many differences, were
Kissinger and Nixon kindred spirits who had become
similar in their mistrust? Would Kissinger survive
his own Watergate? Well we found
out that Kissinger, that the so-called plumbers
who conducted these wiretaps had worked under a
deputy to Kissinger. That the wiretap conversations had
gone to Haig, had gone to Kissinger. And that this was an operation that was very much
centered around his office. The bad stuff about him, all
the ugly stories, the wiretapping, the particularly ugly stuff in Chile
with Allende, the this, the that. All the terrible stuff came
out bit by bit over the years and inspired an enormous
wrath in members of the left who were looking for a villain. And he then became
Dr. Strangelove for a lot of people. On one of his frequent
trips across the Atlantic, Kissinger decided to push back. During a press conference in
Salzburg, he faced down his critics. The press got to know a
different side of Kissinger – one that was more direct
and far less charming. The implication that my
office was spending its time reading salacious reports
about subordinates is a symptom of the poisonous atmosphere that is now
characteristic of our public discussion. I do not believe that it is possible
to conduct the foreign policy of the United States under these
circumstances when the character and credibility of the
secretary of state is at issue and if it is not cleared
up, I will resign. But Secretary of State
Kissinger did remain in office… even as President Nixon stood
on increasingly shaky ground. One day he's going to resign.
The next day he was not. Then he was, then he wasn't. And.
You know he knew that he couldn't govern. On August 7, 1974,
Richard Nixon resigned. All the lies of the last
months had caught up to him, weighing too heavily on him. But before Nixon announced
the news to the public, he called his loyal
aide for a final talk. He called me, you know, after dinner
and asked me whether I’d come over. And he was all alone. He had told me
a few hours before that he would resign and that he would
resign the next night, so we… so he asked to
review every foreign policy, what had been achieved and he
was, of course, extremely despondent. And I said to him that history
would treat him more kindly then his contemporaries
and he in a typical Nixon way said that it depends
who writes the history. And when I left, he suggested
we say a prayer together. It was perfectly natural. It was
the end of a man's public career. When Kissinger returned
to his office, the phone rang. The president was shell-shocked.
Kissinger reassured the president that if he were to ever
talk about their meeting, it would be with
the utmost respect. But because the wiretapping system
was still installed at the White House, there was reportedly a highly
personal tape of Nixon's call. I made sure that the tape
didn't go anywhere, yes. Could you describe this? No, I never. I just… I don't. I don't know where it is
now, and I never listened to it. You never listened to it?
- No, I did not. So what did you
do with the tape? I never listened to it. Did you destroy it?
It was… you know, it was
obviously so intensely personal that, yes, I did destroy it. It was the end of a presidency…
and a historic working relationship. Nixon’s departure
was critical for Kissinger because it meant he’d lost his most
important shield from public criticism. His new boss, President Gerald
Ford, would not fulfill that role. I had been used as I
said earlier by the media, in part as an alibi for their
hatred of Nixon but that safety net disappeared and in fact, I became as a survivor
of the Nixon period a natural target. And it was easier to attack forward
through me and so that was the reversal. I became a normal
political figure. Just a “normal” secretary of state
accompanying his new president on a “normal” state
visit to Indonesia? But at the end of 1975, the stakes
in Jakarta were unusually high. Portugal had just ended its colonial
rule in neighboring East Timor, sparking unrest. President Suharto
planned to invade the peninsula. How would the US react? While we were there, the Indonesians told us they
would probably move into Timor, and it's always presented as
if we could have stopped them. We were in opposition to stop them.
They didn't ask us for our approval. We viewed it as similar
to the Indians taking Goa. But it was not a
very well-considered… this came up unexpectedly
in a conversation. Most of which was
handled by President Ford. And again, if you read the
actual text of that conversation – it was about five
minutes were devoted. The secret minutes
of the meeting revealed Indonesian President Suharto
asking Ford and Kissinger for support. We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to
take rapid or drastic action. We will understand and will
not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you
have and the intentions you have. You appreciate that the use of
US-made arms could create problems. It is important that whatever
you do succeeds quickly. We would be able to
influence the reaction in America if whatever happens after we return.
This way there would be less chance of people talking about
it in an unauthorized way. The president will be back on
Monday at 2:00 pm Jakarta time. No sooner said than done. The first reports of the
bloody invasion into East Timor were broadcast on US television just
15 hours after the politicians’ return. Kissinger and Ford would have
had to have said at that point: You must not do this. We
will… we will embargo you. You know, we will cut you off. But of course, he didn't get
anything like that. He got a nod. Throughout his career, Henry Kissinger
experienced both triumph and defeat… but one defeat in particular still haunted him and the
US even decades later. Saigon, South Vietnam, April 1975.
Kissinger's peace agreement was moot. The North Vietnamese
took Saigon. Americans and South Vietnamese
allies frantically left the city. Kissinger was very conscious of the
and remains to this day very conscious of the fact that every time the
United States pulls out of a country leaving an unfinished foreign
policy commitment behind, it makes it more difficult
the next time around. To get some country to commit itself
to a joint venture with the United States. The crisis team – which included
Ford's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld – was on high alert. News out of
Vietnam suggested impending chaos. The officials debated if the
US should respond with bombs. Was it better to withdraw
or counterattack? I talked to him, and I said
this thing is going to pot, and we have to do something. He said, well, you'll have
to talk to the president. There were some tensions
between Henry and Ford’s… not President Ford
himself, but his people. He felt that after
all this effort, that the least we could do
to the South Vietnamese, with all their imperfections,
was not to cut off aid. He understood why we could
never send troops back in. He obviously wished
we could have bombed and response to Hanoi's
violations of the ceasefire. I think Henry Kissinger
– had it been possible – would have taken action, I have no
doubt about it. Had it been possible. The US leadership was
divided… it had snowballed into an untenable situation
on the other side of the world. Kissinger and Ford
needed to make a decision. At one point when it
was beginning to collapse, I can remember talking with Henry
and he said: Larry, this has gone too far. We can't salvage it. It is best now
that we get out as quickly as we can. On April 30th, 1975, the last
American troops left Vietnam. I think Vietnam has cast a shadow
over American policy ever since. Now unfortunately the same issues that arose in the context of Vietnam have been renewed
in the context of Iraq. There are some parallels, but they're
not really substantive similarities. They're substantively
very different. This is an ideological struggle that's steeped with global potential and which is far more
serious than Vietnam. I'm very much afraid that the
sense of failure in Iraq will do for the next 25 years what the sense
of failure in Vietnam did for the last. The limits to a world
power… time and time again, Kissinger had succeeded in
pushing them as far as they could go. The controversial diplomat led the
US down paths it had never gone before. But the failure in Vietnam held
a mirror to America’s limitations… at least temporarily. If you only deal with the
elements of the current situation, you're doomed to stagnation,
and you learn only complexities and not opportunities and
so the art of statesmanship is to have objectives that are at
the limit of a society's capacity. If they go beyond the
limits, then they will fail. If they don't
reach their limits, then one has not reached or one's
opportunities. And how to balance this? This needs to be understood. I think that's something I've
learned in my experience. Henry Kissinger’s tenure as
Secretary of State ended in 1977. But his decisions and doctrines
continue to shape the United States and the world to this day.
