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