Original subtitles

ANNOUNCER: The following program contains content

which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Viewer discretion is advised.

President-elect Nixon today named Dr. Henry Kissinger,

the German-born Harvard professor,

as his White House policy adviser

on defense and foreign affairs.

ROGER MORRIS: In 1968,

when Henry Kissinger was named national security adviser,

he was not at all well-known,

and certainly not as famous or as celebrated

as he would become.

I enthusiastically accept this assignment

and I shall serve the president-elect

with all my energy and dedication.

SAM HOSKINSON: There was something about him that was different,

like the way he talked.

I have tried to avoid labels

like "hard" and "soft."

HOSKINSON: Here's this Harvard professor,

kind of a nerd, nerdish guy,

that became one of the most powerful men in the world.

KISSINGER: I believe that what America does

is of great consequence to the peace of the world

and to the progress of humanity.

NIALL FERGUSON: He entered the realm of power

and bestrode it as a geopolitical colossus.

BEN RHODES: He had enormous power,

more power than any unelected official

probably in the history of this country.

JEREMI SURI: And the moments he lashes out most

are the moments he feels powerless.

We are not talking about an attack on a neutral country.

BARBARA KEYS: The secrecy, the lying, the denial of reality,

those are all Kissingerian.

GREG GRANDIN: I don't think that he had much concern

for the human costs of his actions.

KISSINGER: The question about the relationship

of morality to foreign policy

is a very complex one.

RICHARD HAASS: I don't think he'd deny

that he overlooked certain human rights.

He would just say, "There were other factors at stake."

KISSINGER: Sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils.

ROHAM ALVANDI: He wasn't trying to win a popularity contest.

He was trying to implement his ideas.

(shouting) KISSINGER: I believe we have an obligation

to prevent the totalitarians

from taking over the world by force.

PETER KORNBLUH: Yes, he was brilliant.

But in the end, his legacy is about

the number of people--

and we're talking hundreds of thousands--

that died because of the arrogance of his policy.

FERGUSON: Nobody before or since

has played such an important role in American foreign policy.

We've had to recognize it's Henry Kissinger's world.

(phone ringing)

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

(explosions pounding)

♪ ♪

(explosions pounding)

(shouting)

PROGRAM NARRATOR: Tonight, Henry Kissinger

talks about war and peace

and about his decisions at the height of his powers.

KISSINGER: I was brought up in a totalitarian society,

and therefore I had perhaps a better sense

for the fragility of institutions,

and for the potential evil

that can break forth when restraints disappear.

(people shouting)

FERGUSON: One has to remember that Henry Kissinger

was born at a time

when Germany was in a state

of near-revolutionary upheaval.

ALVANDI: In the 1920s,

the economic crisis of hyperinflation

that engulfs Weimar Germany,

combined with the sense of grievance

about the terms imposed on Germany

after the First World War,

generates the rise

of a very vicious right-wing fascist movement...

ALL: Heil!

ALVANDI: ...for whom Jews are the scapegoats.

And the Kissingers, like a lot of German Jews,

had no sense of what was going to come for them in the 1930s.

MAN: Heil! CROWD (responding): Heil!

Heil! Heil!

Heil! Heil!

(church bells ringing)

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: Fürth in Bavaria had

a significant Jewish population in the 1920s.

Heinz Kissinger is born

into one of the Orthodox families in Fürth,

and grows up in a middle-class Jewish household.

Heinz had two distinctive features:

a brilliant mind and indefatigable energy.

Well, if he got the brilliance from his father, Louis,

he got that endless energy from his mother, Paula.

Their Jewishness is serious--

they're Orthodox, they're kosher--

but in terms of their work and education lives,

they see themselves integrated in German culture.

ANGUS REILLY: Despite his later reputation,

he's not a particularly studious child.

His mother complains that him and Walter

are always running away from kindergarten.

PAULA KISSINGER: Henry was born in '23

and Walter was born in '24.

And they were terrible naughty

and hard to handle.

DAVID KISSINGER: He always said that he was

a gregarious, fairly frivolous young man.

And he maintained that he had a rather happy childhood.

(shouting)

(band playing)

FERGUSON: But the childhood came to an abrupt end

with the rise of the Nazis.

(people shouting)

(speaking German):

ALVANDI: The Jewish community,

which had been very well integrated

into a fairly liberal and cultured Germany,

suddenly finds itself

the target of the wrath of the German right.

For people like the Kissingers, this is a shock.

There is a deep reluctance

to believe the depth that this depravity can reach.

THOMAS SCHWARTZ: Kissinger remembered that when he and his brother

would take their bicycles to go visit their grandfather,

he would see the signs saying "Jews are not wanted here."

And Kissinger commented later

about how everything seemed changed.

KISSINGER: I was prohibited to go to German schools.

All the German people with whom my parents associated

more or less cut off all contact with us.

(speaking German):

KISSINGER: A policy of segregation for Jewish people was created,

and my father lost his job.

MAN: Sieg! CROWD: Heil!

MAN: Sieg! CROWD: Heil!

MAN: Sieg! CROWD: Heil!

REILLY: Because Louis is an employee of the German state,

he is sacked,

and it, it devastates him.

He got so much fulfillment

out of his job as a teacher,

and then suddenly he was bereft, he was lost,

and he withdraws in on himself,

and Kissinger feels distanced from his father.

KISSINGER: My father was a teacher and not a practical man.

And he was sort of paralyzed

in the face of the evil the Nazis represented.

ALVANDI: I can't imagine how destabilizing

and terrifying it must have been for Kissinger to see

that world around him that he so admired turning against him,

that a society that was

seemingly so civilized, so refined

could descend into this kind of madness.

REILLY: There is a sense of a lost world

that he'll never be able to return to.

His childhood featured that profound loss of innocence,

of joy and prosperity

and, and ease.

KISSINGER: That was a wrench in my life that had a deep impact on me.

It was the possibility

that what had given you security

could disintegrate.

(speaking German)

(crowd responds)

(band playing, people singing)

KISSINGER: My mother was extremely practical,

and she decided that they should leave Germany.

My father didn't object.

PAULA KISSINGER: I was mainly afraid for the children.

You saw that they were so isolated.

REILLY: In 1938, they leave.

They take a couple of trunks

with a few precious personal items,

and then they have to leave everything behind.

FERGUSON: The Kissingers left in the nick of time,

just weeks before the huge pogrom

that we know as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

(glass shattering, flames crackling)

REILLY: Mobs across Germany torch Jewish homes,

they attack Jewish people in the streets,

they destroy synagogues.

(people shouting, objects shifting)

And in Fürth, they drag as many Jews as they can

to the town center.

And they have to stand there and watch

as the synagogue burns to the ground.

(flames crackling)

♪ ♪

ALVANDI: The Kissingers are not spared the Holocaust in Germany.

Kissinger loses 13 members of his family in the Holocaust,

and I think for Kissinger, it generated a deep pessimism

about the idea that norms and rules are going to protect you.

Really, at the end of the day, the only thing

that's going to protect you is power.

(bell ringing, gulls squawking)

KISSINGER: There was this cousin of mine who brought us here,

and when we arrived by boat,

as we came down the gangplank,

he said, "Your name now is Henry."

REILLY: The Kissingers settle in Washington Heights,

which has a large community of German Jews.

It's known as Frankfurt on the Hudson, or the Fourth Reich.

And they try and build a life

that, to an extent, mirrors the one they've left.

KISSINGER: They didn't have any money.

My brother and I slept in the living room.

We had no privacy.

But I did not feel that I was suffering.

The challenge, of course, was to arrive

in the United States in the Depression.

That was why Henry Kissinger had to get a job.

(car horns honking)

♪ ♪

DAVID KISSINGER: He worked in a shaving brush factory.

He went to night school.

He didn't have the opportunity to have a lot of fun,

but he also

seems to have felt an enormous sense of relief

because he didn't have to cross the street

to get away from kids who would beat him up.

He starts to study

and he immerses himself

in the very vital life

of New York City in the late 1930s.

DAVID KISSINGER: I think he fell in love with New York

very quickly.

He fell in love with baseball.

(crowd cheering)

And he fell in love with my mother.

My mother's name is Anneliese Cohen.

They very quickly started dating,

and it became a very sweet, dedicated relationship.

They had been through the same kind of trauma,

but they shared a desire

to turn the disaster that they had experienced

into a life of meaning.

But I think it was the Army that truly gave him

the confidence that he could be a true American.

(explosions roaring)

REPORTER: The attack was carried out

by Jap torpedo planes together with dive bombers.

REILLY: Kissinger is at a football game,

and he comes out and sees

the newspaper boy

with the headline saying "Pearl Harbor Attacked."

And he, he doesn't have any idea where Pearl Harbor is.

NEWSCASTER: Immediate response from the youth of America.

Army, Navy, and Marine recruiting stations

close to overflowing.

FERGUSON: Most teenagers pretty quickly

figured out that they might not be interested in war,

but war was likely going to be interested in them.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: The second number

which has just been drawn is 192.

SINGERS: ♪ This is the Army, Mr. Green ♪

FERGUSON: The U.S. Army was not

a tremendously discerning institution

in the early phase of World War II.

It took its young men from wherever it could

and from wherever they'd come from.

♪ ♪

REILLY: He's drafted in 1943

and he's sent to a rifle company

in the 84th Infantry Division, the Railsplitters.

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: Initially, the young Henry Kissinger found himself

in this extraordinary melting pot

of young men in training camps that were spartan,

to put it mildly.

KISSINGER: I thought it was a tremendous experience,

not every minute of which I enjoyed,

but I now think

it was one of the most important experiences of my life.

I had never met any really native-born Americans,

and these people from the Midwest

were very tolerant and friendly,

and I got to know America as a result of serving in the Army.

♪ ♪

FILM NARRATOR: These are the men who served in the 84th Infantry Division,

a division that distinguished itself

in a series of critical engagements during World War II.

REILLY: Kissinger lands in France

five months after D-Day,

in November 1944,

and someone clearly recognizes

his linguistic talents,

and he's put into the counterintelligence part

of the 84th Infantry Division.

FERGUSON: It's not long after D-Day

that Kissinger finds himself

in one of the great battles of the war in Europe,

the Battle of the Bulge.

(firing)

The fighting was hard.

The Germans put up stiff resistance.

The casualties were high.

(firing)

REILLY: The 84th is trapped in a Belgian town,

Marche-en-Famenne.

(explosion pounds)

And Kissinger works in the courthouse

with the general and other staff

monitoring everything

and helping to organize the defense of the town.

It was especially dangerous for Kissinger,

because as a German Jew by birth,

he risked execution if he were captured.

(explosion roars)

After the Battle of the Bulge,

the 84th Infantry Division heads towards the city of Hanover,

where they come across Ahlem concentration camp,

and it is a horrendous place.

♪ ♪

FILM NARRATOR: Out of a thousand Polish men brought here

ten months prior to April 1945,

only 200 remained.

Prisoners who could walk were removed

before American troops entered Hanover.

The others were left to starve and die.

REILLY: Horrified, they radio to the headquarters,

which is where Kissinger is, and he drives up.

And they come into this camp,

and Kissinger is just staggered by it.

FILM NARRATOR: When questioned,

most of these men could not remember

when they'd last eaten a decent meal.

Many had been beaten and tortured so long,

their minds had failed.

DAVID KISSINGER: My father described his experience

liberating the Ahlem concentration camp

as something that words could not entirely communicate.

KISSINGER (dramatized): As our Jeep traveled down the street,

skeletons in striped suits lined the road.

Cloth seemed to fall from the bodies.

The heads were held up by a stick

that once might have been a throat.

Poles hang from the sides where arms should be.

I see my friend enter one of the huts

and come out with tears in his eyes.

"Don't go in there.

We had to kick them to tell the dead from the living."

REILLY: To him, it always was

the most horrendous thing that he'd ever seen.

FILM NARRATOR: The victims relate the atrocity story

and photographs are made for further documentation

of the horrors committed at the Hanover camp.

REILLY: The power of knowing

that it could have been him in that camp.

That stays with Henry Kissinger.

FILM NARRATOR: The deaths continue

even after liberation of the camp.

Some were too far gone when the Americans took over.

DAVID KISSINGER: It was an illustration for him that strength was

an unavoidable facet of resisting evil.

That the attempt to deal with evil through compromise...

...sometimes was not enough.

(typewriter keys clacking)

REILLY: After the war, Kissinger writes to the mother

of an old friend of his from Fürth

who had survived a concentration camp,

and he writes to warn her of

what her son will now be like.

KISSINGER (dramatized): I feel it necessary to write to you.

I think a completely erroneous picture

exists in the United States

of the former inmates of the concentration camps.

REILLY: Kissinger writes, "He has not only suffered,

"but he has lived an anarchic world

"in which it's survival of the fittest,

"in which there is no order,

"there is no structure

or sense of society."

KISSINGER (dramatized): Concentration camps were not only mills of death,

they were also testing grounds.

REILLY: It's a warning that morality has its limits,

and that this was about power and strength and survival,

above all else.

KISSINGER (dramatized): The intellectuals, the idealists,

the men of high morals had no chance.

It was a necessity to follow through

with a singleness of purpose,

inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States.

(typewriter carriage slides)

(film reel clicking)

FILM NARRATOR: The problem now is future peace.

That is your job in Germany.

You'll see ruins,

you'll see flowers,

you'll see some mighty pretty scenery.

Don't let it fool you.

You are in enemy country.

Be alert, suspicious of everyone.

Take no chances.

FERGUSON: Germany in 1945

was in a state of collapse.

FILM NARRATOR: Proven war criminals must answer for their crimes.

(gun fires)

FERGUSON: As a member of the Counter Intelligence Corps,

Kissinger had to find out, who were the Nazis?

So Kissinger went from fighting Germans

to trying to understand them.

FILM NARRATOR: Somewhere in this Germany

are storm troopers by the thousands.

Out of sight, part of the mob,

but still watching you and hating you.

Trust none of them.

DAVID KISSINGER: At a very young age,

my father was given enormous authority

over an area around Hanover

to apprehend high-ranking Nazis.

KISSINGER: My job was to arrest all Nazis

above a certain level.

(speaking German)

KISSINGER: At that time, of course,

every German claimed that he hadn't been a Nazi.

REILLY: For someone so young, it's a lot of responsibility,

and he carries out the job effectively.

FERGUSON: It's a rather extraordinary thought

that the young 22-, 23-year-old Henry Kissinger

is in this position of power

over the very people

who had been murdering his relatives,

the very people who had driven his family across the Atlantic.

There's no vengeance in Kissinger.

He is not searching

for some kind of feeling of righteous vindication.

He is not a black and white person.

He lives in the gray area in between.

("Fair Harvard" playing)

FILM NARRATOR: Fair Harvard,

thy sons to thy jubilee throng.

And with blessings surrender thee o'er.

REILLY: Kissinger enters Harvard on the G.I. Bill,

alongside millions of other new college students

who had served in the military.

And Kissinger is determined to take his own experiences

and hit the ground running.

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: He was the proverbial

young man in a hurry.

DAVID KISSINGER: He tried many different subjects.

For a while, he was on track to be a chemistry professor.

He also flirted with going to law school.

But ultimately,

his fascination with history and government prevailed.

The old regime in France was tyrannical, oppressive...

KISSINGER: Insofar as one could learn anything in preparation

for a high governmental position,

I think a study of history is the best preparation.

SCHWARTZ: He was definitely someone who was determined

to conquer academia

through sheer hard work and labor,

not someone who joined college activities,

joined college clubs.

DAVID KISSINGER: He was very rigorous about just

using all of his time for his studies.

ALVANDI: He is the guy who's in the library 24/7,

squirreled away in his dorm,

reading from dawn to dusk,

and so most of his Harvard contemporaries

barely remember him.

He manages to sneak in a dog.

(dog barks) And I think that's pretty much

his only friend there, by all accounts.

REILLY: And then Kissinger writes

his undergraduate thesis, "The Meaning of History."

"The Meaning of History."

"The Meaning of History."

Yes, the famous "Meaning of History."

(typewriter keys clacking)

(carriage slides, bell dings)

An extraordinarily detailed and philosophical thesis,

which grapples with the big questions of human life,

human meaning, the meaning of history.

FERGUSON: It was the longest senior thesis in Harvard history.

(typewriter keys clacking)

ALVANDI: It was so long that Harvard had to introduce a rule

that dissertations had to be,

you know, within a certain word limit.

(laughs)

"The Meaning of History"

is extraordinary, but undisciplined, unedited,

and

confusing.

I have read it.

If you ask me if I understand it,

I would bet, want to punt that question,

but it produces a summa cum laude degree

and admission to the graduate program

in government and history.

He spends many, many years at Harvard,

and he's just this very frustrated young PhD graduate

who is kind of trying to find a place for himself,

so what he does is,

he kind of invents a place for himself.

REILLY: He studies the policies of European statesmen

after the fall of Napoleon

and their attempts

to bring about order and stability.

He does see it as an analogy for the world of the Cold War

and of nuclear weapons, in which states have to balance

against each other,

undergirded by a fear of what war is like.

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: The central problem of the Cold War

was like a kind of chess game.

There were two superpowers: the United States

and the Soviet Union.

All the rest of the world was a chessboard.

All the other pieces could be moved about that chessboard.

Diplomacy showed a way in which at least

temporary peace could be achieved.

ALVANDI: It was not just accepting the world as it is,

but understanding the realities of power

and manipulating power

in order to achieve the ultimate goal,

which was peace and stability.

REILLY: It's about building the right balance of power

so that war is impossible.

It's, victory is impossible,

because then only through that

would you prevent another war.

(plane engine roaring)

(guns firing)

FILM NARRATOR: Machine guns chatter a song of death

and rockets hiss down

with terrifying accuracy onto the Reds below.

SCHWARTZ: Shortly after Kissinger's graduation,

the Korean War breaks out.

And the Korean War is really

the Pearl Harbor of the Cold War.

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: It was the moment

when Americans could no longer ignore Stalin's ambitions

to expand communism beyond the Soviet Union.

(cannons firing)

FILM NARRATOR: The democratic peoples must fight

and continue to fight

until the grim red shadow that surrounds the world

is dispelled.

SURI: We have a rising Cold War

that now has become a hot war.

And I think what the Korean War does is,

it creates, for the next 50 years in the United States,

an axiom that if you ever give the Communists

a little bit of space,

they will seize it and seize more.

(firing)

(explosions pound)

And so the United States has to be ever ready,

has to be prepared for apocalypse

at any moment.

FILM NARRATOR: Today, every state,

every city and town,

is within striking range of a determined enemy.

FAREED ZAKARIA: It's difficult for us today to understand

how scared people were in the '50s and early '60s

about the prospects of nuclear war.

(explosion rumbling)

(explosion bangs)

Remember, these were the most powerful weapons

ever designed in the world.

(explosions roaring)

And every military technology, every weapon

that had ever been produced in human history

had been used.

And nuclear weapons had been used, twice.

(air raid siren blares)

FILM NARRATOR: Even the pigeons take part,

as New York holds its biggest civil defense drill.

ZAKARIA: The U.S. strategy, which was called massive retaliation,

was that, if the Soviets use a single nuclear weapon

against an American interest,

the United States will hurl

hundreds of nuclear missiles all the way to Moscow.

FILM NARRATOR: Times Square waits.

Millions wonder: suppose it were real.

ZAKARIA: But if the Soviet Union did something

in a second-tier European country,

would we really sacrifice New York and Washington

by retaliating against them?

Kissinger's thought was no, and everybody knows it.

FERGUSON: Kissinger understood

that there was something absurd about a strategy

which gave you a choice between capitulation or Armageddon.

And it was also true that there must be

some limited use for nuclear weapons.

KISSINGER: What is the role of nuclear weapons?

What is the significance of conventional forces?

FERGUSON: He talked to the experts,

picked their brains, and then wrote his own book,

and that book became "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy."

It was the book that made him famous.

(applauding)

MAN: Henry Kissinger... MAN: Henry Kissinger...

MAN: Henry Kissinger is the author of the bestseller

"Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy."

REILLY: Kissinger is offering the possibly radical argument

that the United States

should be willing to use nuclear weapons

in smaller wars.

You think American strategy should be reevaluated

to restore war as a usable instrument of policy?

American strategy has to face the fact

that it may be confronted with war,

and that if Soviet aggression confronts us with war

and we are unwilling to resist,

it will mean the end of our freedom.

REILLY: It suddenly makes him a hugely important public intellectual.

He gets invited on television.

He can write op-eds in "The New York Times."

He is now recognized as an important person

in the conversations about the Cold War.

MAN: Dr. Kissinger,

do you believe it's true

that we have no coherent strategy?

I have no doubt that our military services

have a plan for every conceivable contingency.

But I have the uneasy feeling that these plans

are not the same in each service.

(others laughing)

(applauding)

ALVANDI: He's a very ambitious person,

but he's also ambitious for his ideas.

He wants to have an impact on history.

And he realizes that in order to do that,

he must cultivate relationships with power.

So he begins to use

the sort of cachet and prestige of Harvard

to build relationships for himself beyond university.

FERGUSON: Now, if you are a policy intellectual,

you're pretty stupid

if you don't get expert

about what's gonna become

the dominant, divisive foreign policy issue

of the later 1960s.

And that is

the war in Vietnam.

♪ ♪

LYNDON JOHNSON: We do not want an expanding struggle

with consequences that no one can perceive.

Nor will we bluster, or bully,

or flaunt our power.

But we will not surrender.

And we will not retreat.

(fires)

FERGUSON: The United States had been

getting steadily more involved in Vietnam

during the Kennedy administration,

but it was under Lyndon Johnson,

after Kennedy's assassination,

that U.S. involvement escalated,

and large numbers of U.S. troops began to be committed.

JOHNSON: Retreat does not bring safety

and weakness does not bring peace.

FERGUSON: The escalation really dates from '65,

and that's the year that Kissinger first visits Vietnam.

Why did he go?

Well, I think Kissinger was genuinely interested

in the problem that was evolving in Vietnam.

JOHN NEGROPONTE: I first heard of him

when we were all called

into the political counselor's office in the embassy in Saigon,

and he told us Dr. Kissinger was coming soon,

and I was asked to take him

up to the northern part of the country.

And so we took him to some remote places in Vietnam.

I wouldn't say he was exactly fearless.

I can tell you one phobia he absolutely had,

and that was flying.

(chuckling): I remember, one time, walks up to the pilot,

and he says, "Good morning, pilots," he says...

(imitating): "Can this plane really get over those mountains?"

(laughs)

(plane rattling, wind blowing)

Henry was holding on to the curtains of that airplane

for dear life.

(chuckles)

The reports that he wrote

from that and later trips to Vietnam in the mid-'60s

are extraordinary,

because he understood very quickly

why the United States' effort to prop up South Vietnam

was failing.

SCHWARTZ: He recognizes that the United States

is likely not able to prevail in the amount of time

that public opinion would be supportive of the war effort.

And he, from a very early point,

believes that the United States

has to find some type of negotiated solution.

KISSINGER: I concluded then that there was no way

of winning the war in the manner in which it was being conducted.

So I felt from that moment on

that we had to find a negotiated way out.

But I also felt that, having committed that many forces,

we couldn't simply walk away.

MAN: Professor Henry A. Kissinger of Harvard.

He's been an adviser to the United States government

under four presidents

and has recently returned from Vietnam.

Professor Kissinger,

I find American intervention in Vietnam as immoral

as Nazi and Italian intervention in Spain before last war.

Why don't you?

(audience laughing and clapping)

KISSINGER: I don't find

the intervention in Vietnam immoral,

because our purpose is

to give the people of South Vietnam a free choice.

The Nazi intervention was to deprive the people

of a free choice.

And I would have thought that people in Britain

should know the difference

between American motivations and fascist motivations.

(audience cheers and applauds)

JOHNSON: I bring with me the love of your families

and the affection of your friends.

I bring with me also the gratitude of the nation

that you serve so honorably

and so loyally and so well.

FERGUSON: By 1968,

what Kissinger had spotted in 1965

was becoming obvious even to President Lyndon Johnson.

The war in Vietnam

was proving extremely hard to win.

REPORTER: Americans risk, and sometimes give,

all that they have half a world away from home.

FERGUSON: In order to try to figure out

a graceful exit from Southeast Asia,

a negotiation had to happen.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

Tonight, I want to speak to you

of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.

Then, in 1968...

I shall not seek,

and I will not accept,

the nomination of my party for another term

as your president.

ELIZABETH BECKER: ...President Johnson

declared he would not run for reelection.

He was gonna devote himself to finding a solution,

and he was coming close.

REPORTER: The diplomatic deadlock

over a site for the peace talks

was finally broken.

The North Vietnamese had revealed

a willingness to talk,

but only on their terms.

REPORTER: In Paris, politics and diplomacy

eventually assembled all parties

to try to find peace in Vietnam.

ROBERT BRIGHAM: The Johnson administration

opened secret negotiations in Paris.

The American public wanted to win,

but they wanted to get out.

And the clock is ticking.

♪ ♪

JOHN FARRELL: Kissinger saw that there was a chance to claim power,

and he went to Paris in September,

and he heard over there

that there may be this bombing halt coming.

This was the golden moment to say,

"If I don't walk through that door now

"and Nixon gets elected,

"it's going to be four years, or eight years,

"and I'm gonna be a Harvard professor again.

"No matter how smart I am,

this is my shot."

And this was despite the fact

that Kissinger and Nixon did not know each other,

and Kissinger had said throughout that summer

that Nixon would be a disaster if he got elected president.

FERGUSON: Henry Kissinger had steered clear of Richard Nixon

throughout his career as a policy intellectual,

declining invitations to meet with Nixon

because he really had

a pretty low opinion of Nixon.

(phone calling out)

GRANDIN: But Kissinger quickly made contact

with, with the Nixon campaign.

(call answered) And he passed on

the status of the talks

through his contact Richard Allen.

ALLEN: Henry Kissinger

volunteered information to us

through a, a spy he had,

former student,

that he had in the Paris peace talks.

He called me from pay phones and we spoke in German.

And he offloaded mostly every night

what had happened that day in Paris.

FARRELL: So he sends two different messages to Nixon

on two different days in September,

saying, "There's this bombing halt coming.

"I just want you to know.

Think about what your position is going to be."

GRANDIN: Kissinger told the Nixon campaign, you know,

"They're getting closer to a deal."

And Nixon's people told the South Vietnamese government

that it would get better terms

if Nixon was in the White House.

This was the moment

in which that distance between self-interest

and national interest, at least in his mind,

collapsed into each other.

From that point forward,

there was no daylight between the interests of Henry Kissinger

and the interests of the United States,

at least in Henry Kissinger's mind.

(crowd cheering and applauding)

NIXON: Having lost a close one eight years ago,

and having won a close one this year,

I can say this:

winning's a lot more fun.

(laughing, audience cheers and applauds)

FARRELL: After the election,

Nixon invites Kissinger

to come to the Pierre hotel in New York City.

FERGUSON: The Henry Kissinger who goes to the Pierre hotel

after Richard Nixon's election victory

is a player, but a bit player.

MORRIS: Nixon had a general disdain for academics,

but he wanted and needed a kind of authority

that Henry gave him in academic terms.

FERGUSON: Kissinger had met Nixon just once before,

and they have one of those awkward conversations

which were Richard Nixon's signature dish.

And that's why Nixon's decision

to offer Kissinger the job of national security adviser

came as such a surprise to Kissinger

that he didn't realize Nixon had offered him the job.

FARRELL: Nixon is just so awkward with people

that he had neglected to actually make the offer.

(phone ringing)

So Kissinger comes away from the meeting with Nixon

and he gets a phone call from John Mitchell,

who is the campaign manager.

(phone ringing)

And Mitchell says...

(over phone): "So, um, how do you like the new job?"

(in interview): And Kissinger says...

(over phone): "Well, what job? No job was actually offered."

(in interview): And Mitchell goes...

(over phone): "Oh, for Christ's sake, he messed it up again!"

NEWS ANCHOR: President-elect Nixon made

his first major foreign policy appointment today.

He named Harvard professor Henry Kissinger

to be his special assistant for national security affairs.

Dr. Kissinger is a man who is known

to all people who are interested in foreign policy

as perhaps one of the major scholars in America

and the world today in this area.

ALVANDI: The relationship between Nixon and Kissinger is fascinating,

and it becomes a bizarre marriage.

SURI: There's a wariness they have of each other early on,

but I think they each see

quite a bit of themselves in the other.

The president-elect and I

have had many extensive conversations

over the past week.

FERGUSON: It quickly became clear to Nixon

that Kissinger was an asset.

First of all, he understood Nixon.

KISSINGER: I enthusiastically accept this assignment,

and I shall serve the president-elect

with all my energy and dedication.

FERGUSON: Kissinger got inside his head super-quickly

and very quickly began to understand how to talk

to this lonely, difficult, mistrustful man.

Dr. Kissinger is keenly aware of the necessity

not to set himself up as a wall

between the president and the secretary of state

or the secretary of defense.

♪ ♪

ZAKARIA: Nixon wants to bring foreign policy

into the White House.

In this, he finds a perfect partner in Henry Kissinger.

I don't think one could have expected this,

but Kissinger turned out to be

a very savvy bureaucratic player.

He was very good at maneuvering and counter-maneuvering,

and he liked the secrecy, as well.

REPORTER: Kissinger meets alone with the president every day,

sometimes for as long as an hour and a half.

GRANDIN: Nixon and Kissinger

turned the National Security Council

into basically the main hub of foreign policy.

MORRIS: I had joined the NSC under the Johnson administration.

It was a very loosely run operation,

very small.

There were only 11 or 12 of us.

That was not true at all under Kissinger.

REPORTER: These are the senior people

from his National Security Council staff

of about 40 persons.

MORRIS: Kissinger's NSC staff

was a much more concentrated power structure

than anything that we had seen before.

Kissinger made very clear

that he did not want yes-men.

He wanted candid advice.

Disagreement, if necessary.

Argue your case.

If you lose the battle,

then faithfully carry out the policy.

He enjoyed

thinking and arguing issues through.

Find out whether it's possible on Thursday,

and then we'll make it depend on the other thing.

LAKE: I think he enjoyed having a few of us,

maybe not too many, but a few of us

who did not agree

with him or the president politically.

And I suspect he liked it because he won every argument.

(chuckles): In part because he was very smart,

and in part because,

let me see, oh, yes, I worked for him.

REPORTER: Kissinger admits to being a perfectionist,

not an easy man to work for.

HOSKINSON: He was a demanding perfectionist with his staff.

Nothing could ever be right.

There was also the joke

that if Henry didn't yell at you,

he didn't love you.

REPORTER: He speaks of his staff

with pride and a kind of affection.

They call him Henry and regard him, too, with warmth,

salted with a degree of apprehension,

for he has a sharp temper.

MORRIS: We were graded.

We were told we had done a B-plus

or maybe an A-minus if we were really lucky,

but always, of course, you had to go back,

because the only real A

was Henry's own rendition. (chuckles)

LORD: Kissinger, he stretched my patience.

He stretched my nerves.

Will this meeting take very long?

(man talking in background)

REPORTER: He is regularly late to meetings.

His staff despairs good-naturedly of that.

I would quit about once a week.

He was a mentor

and a tormentor.

♪ ♪

MORRIS: We worked murderous hours.

We were often 7:00 in the morning

till 8:00 or 9:00 at night.

And, uh, it took a toll on families.

It took a toll on our physical stamina.

But Kissinger demanded to be the guiding light,

the North Star,

of the Nixon foreign policy.

And that meant the policy in Vietnam.

♪ ♪

(bombs falling)

(explosions pounding)

(firing)

ZAKARIA: Kissinger and Nixon enter the White House

at a time when the United States

is in a very, very difficult place in Vietnam.

(helicopter blades whirring)

LORD: In 1969,

tens of thousands of Americans had already been lost.

We were losing about 200 a day.

(firing)

We were heading toward 535,000 troops in Vietnam.

It was a hellish situation.

(guns firing)

KISSINGER: We inherited a nightmare.

It was shaking our domestic stability.

It was the consuming concern of the intellectual community.

(explosion pounds)

We made up our mind from the beginning

that we were going to try to disengage from Vietnam.

♪ ♪

MORRIS: That the war should end

was unquestioned.

The question was, how?

The question was, when?

The question was, under what circumstances?

With what honor, or sense of honor?

I want to end this war.

The American people want to end this war.

The people of South Vietnam want to end this war.

MORRIS: Very soon, the enormous sentiment against the war

that had haunted and driven Lyndon Johnson out of power

was going to be turned on Richard Nixon.

They knew that.

MAN: What do we want? PROTESTERS: Peace!

MAN: When do we get it? PROTESTERS: Now!

KEYS: What the Vietnam War did to many Americans

was shake their faith

that their country was decent and honorable.

Because it seemed like the United States

was fighting a war in a distant country

in an extremely brutal way,

using chemical weapons like napalm,

destroying villages,

massacring civilians.

MORRIS: And Nixon understood

you had to change course.

(reporters talking in background)

How are you doing, Mr. President,

in your efforts to end the Vietnam War?

Once the enemy recognizes

that it is not going to win its objective

by waiting us out,

then the enemy will negotiate,

and we will end this war before the end of 1970.

That is the objective we have.

LAKE: Nixon had to show that there is hope,

there's light at the end of the tunnel,

and we're going to get out-- but with honor.

KISSINGER: Ending the Vietnam War had been

the principal goal of Nixon's first term.

♪ ♪

Not only in order to bring peace,

but in order to end our domestic divisions.

♪ ♪

And I wanted to create the conditions

which would unify the country again

by having an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.

♪ ♪

DAVID KISSINGER: Foremost in my father's mind

was finding a way to end the Vietnam War

without a collapse of America's influence in the world,

without a betrayal

of millions of people

who had relied on us,

whose lives hung in the balance.

Melvin Laird, secretary of defense,

arrived in Saigon today for a firsthand look

at the progress of Vietnamization,

which he said was "irreversible."

BRIGHAM: The secret plan that Nixon had to end the war--

that wasn't so secret or really a plan--

was Vietnamization.

CAROLYN EISENBERG: Vietnamization is the brainchild

of Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense.

LAIRD: You cannot guarantee the will and the desire of any country,

but you can give them the tools to do the job.

(firing)

EISENBERG: The basic idea is

that we should begin a policy

as quickly as we can...

(firing)

...of pouring money

and training

into the military in South Vietnam.

(fires)

And that they'll be able to replace American troops.

REPORTER: 20% of these young men are farmers' sons,

out of the rice paddies and flying solo

in a matter of weeks,

and that's what the 300 South Vietnamese

are doing here:

learning to fly choppers for combat.

LORD: So, over a period of time, we felt

that we could gradually withdraw American troops,

which would maintain domestic support at home,

and buy time for the other prong,

which was secret negotiations.

♪ ♪

The fact is that there were some public exchanges in Paris,

but they were essentially propaganda battles,

but the real negotiations were secret.

REPORTER (speaking French):

I won't discuss any of the subject.

♪ ♪

LORD: Here's the way it would work.

We had to make a cover,

pretending we're still in Washington.

So I would leave the office and say to my compatriots,

"I'm going to take the weekend off."

And then I would join Kissinger.

We'd fly into the middle of France.

And we were met by a military attaché

who would sneak us into a safe house.

In the safe house, we used code names,

so that the housekeeper wouldn't know who we were.

I was Major Larkin, I remember.

I couldn't even be a lieutenant colonel.

It was one humiliation after another.

♪ ♪

If the negotiations were secret,

then Henry would have

much more flexibility in how to negotiate with them.

So, first point was

that they were secret not only from other governments,

but from the State Department

and the rest of the American government.

NEGROPONTE: We cut the State Department out of an awful lot of stuff,

and it was Henry versus them,

and he just didn't want them

to be involved or get any credit.

SCHWARTZ: Kissinger always feared,

to a certain extent, that the State Department

could undermine his control of foreign policy.

And he made it a point

of his role as national security adviser

to try to gather in

the authority of foreign policy to himself.

ALVANDI: And this gave Kissinger

just tremendous power, because really,

he was the only person that was fully in the loop.

SCHWARTZ: The North Vietnamese

want the complete withdrawal of American forces.

In effect, they want a type of American surrender,

and the North Vietnamese leaders

were far more unified and determined

to forcibly reunify their country

at almost any cost

than Nixon and Kissinger truly appreciated.

FERGUSON: Henry Kissinger always had

considerable and usually quite well-placed faith

in his ability to negotiate.

So, his assumption was that if he could get in the room

with a well-empowered North Vietnamese representative,

he could find some room for maneuver.

But they were also

the hardest negotiations Kissinger ever experienced.

KISSINGER: It was our misfortune that Le Duc Tho's assignment

was to break the spirit of the American people for the war,

and that he was engaged in a campaign

of psychological warfare,

so what he attempted to do to us

was extremely painful.

ALVANDI: The North Vietnamese negotiators drive Kissinger insane,

because he tries to come up with every conceivable formula

and variation of language

that would be enough to achieve some kind of deal,

but they just simply refuse.

(talking softly)

LAKE: We would sit across the table,

and it would be Henry and an interpreter and me,

and I would look at them very carefully.

And they were not in the slightest cowed,

as far as I could tell.

But after all, they had defeated the French,

they'd been holding off the Chinese for 2,000 years,

and it was hard to convince them.

FERGUSON: The problem was that his negotiating position

was weakened by the fact

that the U.S. began withdrawing troops

even before he began negotiating.

♪ ♪

LAKE: We were going to San Clemente,

the White House in California,

and I wrote a memo to Kissinger

saying, the problem here is

that if we are Vietnamizing,

then the first tranche of troops that come home

are like salted peanuts,

and the taste for further withdrawal of American forces

is going to become overwhelming.

The North Vietnamese are not idiots,

and they know that if they simply wait us out,

then we're going to be withdrawing, while they're not.

So, we've got a problem, and therefore,

we need to cut the best deal we can now.

Well, Henry took the conclusion off my memo,

made it his own memo to Nixon,

and then said that we have to threaten them all the more

with measures of great force

in order to make up for the weakness of our position

on mutual withdrawal.

INTERVIEWER: How would you characterize

Nixon administration's policy towards Cambodia?

Well, the, you know, there's been the charges

that have been made that...

♪ ♪

BECKER: What's important to know about Cambodia

was that it was in the middle of the war.

To the west was Thailand, which was the equivalent

of the air base for the American war.

To the north is Laos,

and to the east, of course, is Vietnam.

It's right in the middle, and it's neutral,

run by a very charismatic leader

named Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

(crowd cheering)

SIHANOUK (speaking French):

SURI: Kissinger believes that Cambodia is a real problem

for the United States in Vietnam,

because even though the Cambodian leader and others

are trying to play neutral,

the North Vietnamese are sending supplies

through Cambodia-- that's just a fact.

♪ ♪

REPORTER: U.S. bombing raids in North Vietnam

forced the creation of a primitive method

for keeping supply lines open.

GRANDIN: Nixon and Kissinger

came up with the idea,

"Well, we'll start bombing Cambodia."

(cannon fires)

FERGUSON: Kissinger thought

if the North Vietnamese supply lines could be broken,

if the flow of men and materiel

could be disrupted,

then the North Vietnamese would be greatly weakened.

(guns firing, explosion pounds)

LORD: The North Vietnamese were the ones who spread the war.

They were sitting in Cambodia,

along the border, for two years,

coming across the border,

killing Americans and South Vietnamese,

and returning to safe havens.

(explosions pound)

And so the bombing was to not let them have safe havens.

So we are not talking about an attack on a neutral country.

We are talking about the attack

on territory occupied by an enemy force

that is killing Americans from that territory.

(device beeps)

GRANDIN: But the real reason for the bombing

was to put into place what Nixon and Kissinger

had come to call the Madman Theory.

This was the idea that Nixon was so crazy,

so unhinged, that he might do anything.

And it was supposed to project to North Vietnam

a sense of fear,

and sort of, and force them back to the bargaining table.

♪ ♪

So, Operation Menu is launched, in which sorties

secretly bomb the problematic area

where the Ho Chi Minh Trail is located.

MORRIS: Technically, there was no sanction for this

in the U.S. Congress of any kind.

And you're, you're coming at a time

when there's enormous pressure to wind down the war,

enormous pressure to limit the war,

not to extend it,

not to expand it in any way.

♪ ♪

EISENBERG: It was very clear to everybody,

including Kissinger himself,

that if the American public learned

that they were bombing Cambodia,

that there was going to be an explosion

in the United States.

HEDRICK SMITH: And so that's why they went secret.

Because they knew damn well

they couldn't get it any other way.

♪ ♪

GRANDIN: Kissinger was intimately involved

in choosing the bombing sites.

He came up with basically a dual bookkeeping system

in which bombs that were supposed to be

dropped along the border within South Vietnam

were actually dropped in Cambodia.

There's descriptions of him in an office

in the, in the basement of the White House

with his maps, picking out the bombing sites

and working in this very clandestine manner.

(explosions pounding)

♪ ♪

This had the effect

of really kind of pushing the White House

deep into paranoia,

into a sense that,

that there were enemies all around.

RAY SITTON: We were told that this is so sensitive,

that it must be done

with the absolute minimum number of people

being exposed to it.

At one point,

Dr. Kissinger even suggested that,

why don't we do it using Skyspot radar?

Even the crews won't know where they're dropping.

BRIGHAM: Mel Laird, Nixon's secretary of defense,

was opposed to the secret bombing of Cambodia.

LAIRD: The manner in which

they wanted to carry out that bombing

I thought would lead to trouble.

BRIGHAM: He thought there was no way

that Congress wouldn't eventually find out.

And I told the National Security Council,

the president,

the presidential adviser for national security,

and the secretary of state

that their proposal to keep it secret

just would not work.

SURI: It was monumentally stupid to think that they could

actually get away with doing this in secret.

At some point, someone,

some low-level Air Force official,

would hand the books to a reporter.

Which is what happened.

EISENBERG: There's an article

that appears in "The New York Times"

by William Beecher.

If you blinked, you might have missed it,

but Kissinger and Nixon don't miss it.

And that really sets Nixon and Kissinger off,

enraged, like, "How did he get that news?

Who told him?"

And so that's the point at which they make

a very fateful decision

to start wiretapping people in the government,

as well as wiretapping certain reporters.

(people murmuring)

SMITH: Nixon and Kissinger were paranoid about leaks.

They wanted not only to control policy,

but they wanted to control the narrative about policy.

They wanted to decide when the public could find out,

when the Congress could find out,

when other members of the administration could find out.

SCHWARTZ: Kissinger had brought to Washington

a large number of officials

in his National Security Council staff

who were known to politically lean

more toward the Democrats.

And this immediately raised the suspicion

that they leaked this in order to undermine

the policy of the administration.

SMITH: Kissinger was convinced

there were people in his own staff--

Mort Halperin, Tony Lake, Roger Morris, you name it--

that were deliberately undermining their policy,

that if they had an argument behind closed doors,

that these guys were going public with it.

That actually was a major subject for discussion, but...

SMITH: Nixon and Kissinger were both

conspiratorial themselves,

and if you're conspiratorial yourself,

you tend to suspect everybody else

of being conspiratorial, too.

♪ ♪

SARAH B. SNYDER: I do think that Nixon and Kissinger--

and, and I think it's important to think about them together--

they fed on one another's paranoia,

they fed on one another's need for secrecy,

and they saw enemies in a very stark light.

And so there was always a sort of us-versus-them.

I was on vacation

on Martha's Vineyard

when Seymour Hersh called me.

(phone ringing, receiver picks up)

And he said...

(on phone): "I'm running a story tomorrow

"that you, your phone was tapped,

and they've been listening to your telephone."

(in interview): And I was really pissed.

I mean, I threw rocks at seagulls for a while.

(gulls crying)

I don't find out about the wiretap for four years,

but my home was wiretapped, my family was wiretapped.

The kids' conversations,

my wife's conversations with her mother.

I, I've got the wiretap logs now.

"Neighbor talks to Mrs. Smith.

"Mrs. Smith said they would be leaving

"in ten minutes for the weekend,

"destination not given,

"and wanted the neighbor to hold the papers for her.

"Mrs. Smith calls Hazel, the maid,

"and asks if she is coming over tomorrow.

Hazel said she would be there."

This is outrageous!

I mean, what the, what is the government doing,

listening to our phone calls, and, and...

Even if they were looking for national security,

not having the decency and the smarts to say,

"We don't need this."

Unless they thought maybe we were passing secret signals

to the neighbor or Hazel.

(people talking in background)

EISENBERG: It's a fateful decision to wiretap,

because it begins a policy

of distrust of your own people.

You know, even if they're your friends,

even if the people on your staff

came on your staff,

as many did for Kissinger,

because they think that Henry Kissinger

is going to bring peace, and they're there to help,

they're there to pitch in and make that happen.

And now, he's gonna start treating them

like they're enemies.

And when that happens,

sort of the level of paranoia

begins to grow exponentially.

MORTON HALPERIN: There was secrecy, subterfuge,

and confusion,

and you learned that Kissinger's word could not be trusted.

Whatever he told you,

you knew something else was going on.

He played off everybody against each other.

(talking in background)

LAKE: The truth,

as my Victorian grandmother used to say,

was not always in him.

Nice to see you.

You could tell when

the eyebrows would come together

and he would be like this that he was being

perhaps a little devious.

But he was very effective,

mostly because of how smart he was

and because he had absolute certainty in his views.

♪ ♪

HOSKINSON: He sought celebrity status,

and he got celebrity status.

There was something about him that was different.

(people talking in background, piano playing, glasses clinking)

SALLY QUINN: The first time I met Henry Kissinger

was at a party for Gloria Steinem,

and about halfway through the dinner,

I looked up and saw

this little guy standing alone in a corner.

So, I knew who he was,

because I'd seen his picture,

so I walked over to him, and I said,

"Dr. Kissinger, how are you?

I'm Sally Quinn from 'The Washington Post.'"

And I said, "Why are you hiding over here in the corner?"

And he looked at me, he said...

(imitating): "Well, I'm really a secret swinger."

(chuckles)

KISSINGER: I said, "I'm too busy

"to do any public swinging,

"and I don't want you to think that I don't do any swinging,

so why don't you just assume I'm a secret swinger?"

The next day,

he was inundated with calls from movie stars.

REPORTER: Kissinger is cutting quite a swath

on Washington's social scene.

He likes to spend well-publicized evenings

in the company of such ladies

as Jill St. John or Shirley MacLaine,

who add luster to his image

as the playboy of the Western Wing.

He was at Sans Souci restaurant

every night, every lunch,

with some babe.

It was incredible.

He became this sex symbol in Washington.

FERGUSON: Others watched in bewilderment,

trying to work out why this somewhat portly, overweight,

bespectacled Harvard professor with a strong German accent

could possibly be appealing to actresses.

NIXON: Where the hell

do you think Kissinger was

over the weekend

when I was trying to call him?

ROSE MARY WOODS: Probably out with some babe.

Why did he encourage

the secret swinger reputation?

I think he truly was just having fun.

I mean, you know,

when Marlo Thomas and Candice Bergen

are interested in going on a date with you,

and you're a 46-year-old single man,

who wouldn't?

QUINN: Well, listen,

I was not in the bedroom with them.

(laughing): But, but I don't think that it was real romance.

But then he met Nancy,

and they were inseparable from then on.

♪ ♪

DAVID KISSINGER: She's a very brilliant,

warm, and charismatic person,

very confident in her own right,

and her energy, her ability to live a big life,

matched his.

And she also doesn't lack for self-confidence.

So, they just made for a very fulfilling pair.

Nancy was the love of his life.

You know, my parents divorced in 1962,

shortly after my birth,

and he had met Nancy in 1968.

I think he was ready to marry her

from the moment they met.

So, all these other detours were really just that.

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: The reality was, Henry Kissinger

was more a workaholic and a control freak

than he was a secret swinger.

But Kissinger understood that this gave him

not only stardom,

but more importantly,

some real influence.

Being popular with the journalists

can matter a lot,

particularly when, as invariably happens,

Washington politics turns nasty.

KEYS: Kissinger was a master manipulator of the press.

This was at a time

when diplomatic correspondents

needed official sources of information,

and Kissinger knew how to feed information to them,

pretend to share secrets, flatter them.

MORRIS: He lied to them,

he deceived them, he rewarded them.

He paid attention to them ceaselessly.

He curried the press

as no foreign policy figure before him.

REPORTER: When he signed on Henry Kissinger,

the president had no idea

how effective he would turn out to be with the press corps.

FERGUSON: His backgrounders,

the background briefings,

became the most popular events

for the Washington press corps

that there had been in years.

REPORTER: How do you like the reporting on the backgrounders?

I like the way that my anonymity is maintained.

(all laughing)

SMITH: Kissinger was a charmer,

and he knew how to turn on the charm.

QUINN: But Henry was always using everybody.

That was his thing, that's what he did.

So, of course he was using the press.

I mean, he, he was very cynical about the press.

I mean, there are plenty of people in Washington

who use people all the time.

But Henry took it to such another level of,

of expertise. (chuckles)

You can't come back there with us.

QUINN: So when you're with Henry Kissinger,

you always had to weigh two things.

(laughing): Your own morals,

values, and ethics,

and the fact that there's a really brilliant guy

who was fun to be around, had a good sense of humor.

CROWD: ♪ We shall overcome ♪

REPORTER: On October 15,

the first moratorium against the war

turned out huge crowds in cities all across the nation.

(shouting)

SCHWARTZ: In 1969,

there are massive demonstrations

throughout the United States

calling for an end to the war in Vietnam.

(chanting)

MORRIS: Now, we were, we were seeing those protests

from the outside and the inside.

Tony Lake and I had at one point stood outside,

on the South Lawn of the White House,

and watched our wives and children...

(chuckling): ...demonstrating down Pennsylvania Avenue

against the war.

(chanting): Peace now! Peace now!

Peace now!

LAKE: And I can remember, in the Old Executive Office Building,

when I went up to the fifth or sixth floor,

there were American troops sitting there

with their backs to the walls and weapons,

in case the White House

was attacked by the demonstrations outside.

And I agreed with the demonstrators,

but there I was.

(protesters chanting)

SCHWARTZ: This has an enormous effect on Nixon,

who does not want to admit it has an effect.

What he does do in response

is give the "Silent Majority" speech.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

Tonight I want to talk to you

on a subject of deep concern to all Americans

and to many people in all parts of the world,

the war in Vietnam.

FERGUSON: He has the kind of epiphany

that everybody else has missed.

If there is an educated minority

implacably opposed to the war...

...their government has told them about our policy...

...doesn't that mean that there's a majority

that doesn't feel that way?

To you,

the great silent majority

of my fellow Americans,

I ask for your support.

I pledged in my campaign for the presidency

to end the war

in a way that we could win the peace.

FERGUSON: Nixon had his own innate disabilities as a politician.

What he also had, though,

was this ability to read the public

and to sense what the moment called for.

North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.

Only Americans can do that.

(teletype machines clacking)

REPORTER: Public reaction to the address was prompt,

and some of those regarded as a silent majority

broke their silence.

FERGUSON: He's deluged with positive feedback to that speech.

And it helped him in the polls,

which he, of course, obsessively tracked.

And it helped him in the kind of feedback

that he got from telegrams and calls to the White House.

REPORTER: The White House says it received

thousands of letters and postcards,

the vast majority supporting the president on Vietnam.

In addition, many...

FERGUSON: It gave him time.

It gave him the time he desperately needed

to find some way out.

(film reel whirring)

And Kissinger had a plan.

(jet engines roaring)

KHATHARYA UM: The bombing campaign in Cambodia

was a secret, maybe, to the American,

but certainly not to the Cambodians.

EAR: Cambodia was never

in the foreground of the Vietnam War.

(explosion pounds)

Cambodia's suffering

was not in the public eye, and therefore

allowed to continue,

because nobody knew about it.

American B-52s ultimately dropped

539,000 tons of bombs.

That is more than Japan during World War II.

(people talking in background)

EAR: The bombing eviscerates the country,

and two million people end up in Phnom Penh

as basically internally displaced persons.

REPORTER: Some families manage to cling together.

Somehow they survive and find a sort of peace.

EISENBERG: The secret bombing of Cambodia sets in motion

a set of events which result

in the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk,

and almost within a year,

a relatively stable place

has been turned into a hellhole.

KISSINGER: We could not permit the Communists

to act in Cambodia with total impunity,

which they had occupied before we did anything.

The situation that is confronting

both Nixon and Kissinger

in April of 1970

was that Cambodia was disintegrating politically.

REPORTER: Many children still go to school,

but many others carry guns.

The war in Cambodia touches everyone

and knows no age limits.

EISENBERG: What they were now confronting was, not only are you

going to have Communist troops

right on the border of South Vietnam,

but that the whole country is going to go Communist,

and then any possibility

of an acceptable deal in South Vietnam,

you know, would really begin to evaporate.

♪ ♪

FERGUSON: Kissinger argues that there was an opportunity here

to impact the course of the war.

The case he made to Nixon and to others

was, air power has its limits.

There's only so much you can do with a B-52.

You need to go in on the ground.

♪ ♪

MORRIS: He managed, I think,

to make his view Nixon's view

in a very skillful way,

while leaving Nixon with the impression

that Nixon had made the policy.

That it was Nixon's brilliance and not Henry's.

REPORTER: From CBS News in Washington,

this special report.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the president of the United States.

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

BECKER: President Nixon went on air.

He stands in front of the map

and he says,

"We are going into Cambodia,

"and we are going to go after the North Vietnamese,

"who they don't want in their country,

and sending the North Vietnamese back to their country."

NIXON: If North Vietnam also occupied

this whole band in Cambodia,

or the entire country,

it would mean that South Vietnam was completely outflanked.

BRIGHAM: And he explains, you know,

there are North Vietnamese troops

clearly inside of Cambodia,

violating Cambodia's neutrality,

and that those troops and supplies

pose a direct threat to the United States.

We will be patient

in working for peace.

We will be conciliatory

at the conference table.

But we will not be humiliated.

KISSINGER (dramatized): The president wants

a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.

He doesn't want to hear anything.

It's an order-- it's to be done.

Anything that flies on anything that moves.

(receiver replaced)

LAKE: In April of 1970, Kissinger called in

me and Roger Morris,

and then three others, I believe.

At the meeting,

Kissinger said that we are going

to go into Cambodia.

And, "What do you think?"

And then we argued that this was bad strategically,

because Cambodia is now in play, et cetera, and domestically,

it was going to be a firestorm of some sort.

MORRIS: I remember banging my fist on the desk

to the point that some of the papers actually rose.

So, I said, "If there's one (muted) trooper

across that line, I'm out of here."

Because I felt it was just,

it was the last straw of escalation.

We were working very hard,

night and day, literally, on a,

on a peace settlement.

(helicopters flying)

The notion that we would, at that point,

escalate very decidedly

with an armed invasion of, of American forces?

No, I mean, I just, I thought it was intolerable.

LAKE: I bore the brunt of the argument,

and at the end of it,

Kissinger said, and I can still hear his voice,

"Well, Tony, I knew what you were going to say."

And I thought to myself, "I can leave now.

"I can send him

"a subscription to 'The New Republic' or something,

and I can go."

And afterwards, I said to Roger, "Okay, this is it.

I've had it." And he agreed.

And so we wrote a joint letter to him,

and handed it to Al Haig, and said,

"Please give it to him

on the day the invasion takes place."

Which he did.

And Kissinger was not pleased.

NEWS ANCHOR: There are several thousand American troops

moving into Cambodia tonight.

The dimensions of the war

have certainly widened.

NEWS ANCHOR: It's a gamble,

both in terms of the reaction of the enemy

and the reaction of American public opinion.

(shouting)

FERGUSON: As usual, when the United States escalates in any way

in the Vietnam War,

the anti-war movement goes into action.

College campuses erupted.

(canister bursts)

(people yelling)

BECKER: What in the hell were we doing invading Cambodia?

(protesters shouting)

Everybody was angry-- they were waiting for peace.

And Congress was furious,

because this was done without their consent.

(protesters shouting)

The student population went insane.

SCHWARTZ: It led to an explosion of unrest

at universities across the country,

leading to the tragic killing of students at Kent State.

(guns firing)

REPORTER: National Guardsmen

opened fire with semi-automatic weapons.

EISENBERG: Suddenly, you have the National Guard,

like, shooting at students.

I mean, this is absolutely stunning.

REPORTER: After the shooting,

one young man dipped a black flag of revolution

in the blood and waved it about.

EISENBERG: You know, and then you have thousands

and thousands of students coming to Washington.

(shouting and chanting)

WALTER CRONKITE: Mr. Nixon bore heavily

his decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia

and the awesome explosive impact of that decision here at home.

BECKER: It's hard to exaggerate the anger.

REPORTER: A few of the demonstrators

confronted a cordon of buses at Lafayette Square

protecting the White House,

and from the other side,

police eventually responded with tear gas.

PROTESTER: It was a peaceful rally.

Peaceful until it was attacked

in a vicious and brutal manner...

SCHWARTZ: Nixon came close to a nervous breakdown

in the wake of Kent State.

This was the price we paid for opposing Nixon

and his genocidal policies.

SCHWARTZ: And Kissinger felt himself

surrounded by protesters in his office.

PROTESTER: ...over and over again,

in the blood of our young people.

They certainly felt very much under siege.

KISSINGER: The biggest problem domestically

was whether we could finally unite the country,

in which those who wanted peace would have peace,

and those who wanted honor

could live with themselves.

MORRIS: I think Kissinger harbored the notion

that he could somehow pull off what Nixon wanted,

which was peace with honor.

But I think the quest for an end with honor

was really a prolongation

of the senseless waste and casualties.

(explosion pounds)

That he did not pursue ending the war in Vietnam,

as he might have, with all of his gifts,

that he did not use his genius in that way,

I think is his,

his ultimate indictment.

♪ ♪

ANNOUNCER: Next time...

WINSTON LORD: From the very beginning,

Kissinger was running all the major elements

of foreign policy.

JOHN NEGROPONTE: And it was Henry versus them.

ROHAM ALVANDI: This gave Kissinger

just tremendous power

because really he was the only person

that was fully in the loop.

DAVID KISSINGER: In his mind,

he was advancing the strength of the United States,

because America was the last best hope of humanity.

ANNOUNCER: The conclusion of "Kissinger"--

next time on "American Experience."

Made possible in part by Liberty Mutual Insurance.

♪ ♪

"American Experience: Kissinger" is available with PBS Passport

and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪