All language subtitles for Henry Kissinger - Secrets of a superpower

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.