National security advisers Henry Kissinger. In some ways, nixon is one of the most brilliant people to occupy the white house. He had incredible political gifts. But on the other hand hes one of the worst people to occupy the white house because he had a broad streak of para nnoia and course in the end ruined himself by bringing about his his own catastrophic downfall in the watergate scandal of 1972 to 1974. Were going to look at the good and bad side of the nixon presidency with National Security adviser kissinger. Im going to share the screen so we can look at powerpoint pictures as we go through the sequence. First of all, here is president nixon himself. He had been born back in 1913 in california and grew up in a lower middle class family. Went to the local college there with the college. He graduated and went to Duke University law school and this is in the worst years of great depression. The mid1930s. During the second world war, he joined the u. S. Navy. You can see the photo of nixon as a young navy officer. He served in the pacific as a logistics expert, getting the right equipment to the right place at the right time and was given a series of commendations. He had a great ability to bluff when playing poker and thats a valuable quality in someone who was undertaking Foreign Policy at a high level. In 1946 after he had been demobilized from the navy, nixon ran for congress. You can see his a poster from his first election campaign. In 1946, a lot of world war ii veterans were elected into congress and into the senate. One of them was nixon himself who won. John f. Kennedy, another was joe mccarthy who was going to give his name to the era of mccarthyism. And nixon rose very rapidly through the ranks. He was an anticommunist. He worked hard to understand communism and understand why briefly during the depression Many Americans had been attracted to communism. And he understood that it was a good weapon to use against the democrats, a characteristic of republican rhetoric in the late 40s was the assertion that in the state department and other parts of the government, communists were at work and truman knew that and had done nothing to get rid of them. In 1952, he had only been in politics for six years, he was chosen by eisenhower to be his running mate. Between 46 to 52, he goes to a freshman congressman to being Vice President ial candidate. Because he won the election of 52, he was inaugurated in 53. In 1960, he was the republican candidate in the election against john f. Kennedy. Here are the two candidates together. This was an election which he lost narrowly. One of the closest elections of the 20th century. And to make matters worse, he lost again in 1962. So in 1962 when he was in his late 40s, it seemed as though his political career had now come to an end and he could sink back into the relative obscurity of the life of a new york lawyer. But the disastrous failure of Barry Goldwater in the campaign of 1964 in which gold water was the Unsuccessful Republican running against Lyndon Johnson gave nixon the opportunity to revive his political career. In 1968 he was back again, won the republican nomination and won the election that fall against the democratic candidate hubert humphrey. By then, of course, the vietnam war was in full swing. This was the election in which johnson, although he had been entitled to run, had withdrawn from the race after the offensive and after he had been challenged by Jean Mccarthy and robert kennedy. Nixon comes into the white house inaugurated in 1969. Now, Henry Kissinger was the man he chose to be his National Security adviser. Kissinger had been born ten years later than nixon. He was born in 1923. And he was born and raised in germany. Loved playing soccer as a kid. Very, very good in school. But he was jewish. As the nazi persecution escalated in the 1930s, the family took the decision to emigrate. By doing so, they almost certainly saved their lives. He was 15 when he came to the United States for the first time. He became a citizen during world war ii. He joined the army. And because he was perfectly fluent in german, he was a valuable person for the american armys fighting in europe. He was involved in the battle of the bulge, the german counterattack against the americans in the winter of 1944 to 1945. He had the job of organizing a newly liberated town in germany from the nazis and his organizational abilities made his superiors look favorably upon him. When the war had finished, kissinger went to College First at harvard and then at the Harvard Graduate School where he wrote his dissertation on clemons mattenic. He contributed to the pacify indication of europe at the end of the knnepolatinic wars. He understood the balance of power and importance of using hard political realities. Kissinger was a great believer in balance of power politics. It isnt that theres no moral components to political life. Its just that it has to be subordinated to current political realities. In the late 1950s, kissinger who by this time got a faculty appointment at harvard and soon got tenure published a book called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. He was interested in the same kind of questions as paul nitz. The question of what to do when you had Nuclear Weapons. They thought it was possible to fight a limited nuclear war. And in its small way, this became a best seller and contributed to kissingers name being spread across people in washington who were looking for up and coming Foreign Policy advisers. During the early 1960s, he was an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller belonging to the opposite wing of the party from Barry Goldwater. After nixons victory when nixon approached him with the probability he might become National Security advisor, he was willing to jump over to the nixon camp and seize this marvelous opportunity to become a policymaker inside the new nixon white house. Izen haur was a bipartisan kind of politician. The democrats had also asked him to be their candidate. In a way this was the first time the republicans had been in the presidency since Herbert Hoover left office. There wasnt a pool of experienced republican officeholders as there were democrats. Because the democrats had dominated the recent generations. Now, one of the things that nixon and kissinger did together was to revolutionize americas diplomatic posture in the with respect to two of the great two of the other great powers in the world. One was the soviet union and the other was china. The Nuclear Weapons race had been going on ever since the end of the of world war ii with growing urgency since 49 when the russians had tested their Nuclear Weapon for the first time. By 1969 the low population states of the great plains and the Mountain West were honey combed with missiles silos and so were the great plains of siberia, with which side willing to fight Nuclear Weapons against the other. They realized they had a common interest in preventing nuclear war from ever taking place because its destruckiveness was so complete. They reached a condition of m. A. D. And they reached the point of overkill. They could kill each others populations many times over. It was a time to start rethinking how to understand the arms race and whether it made any kind of sense. Both signs had appreciated when they signed the treat any in 1963 that they had a common interest in not testing these weapons in the atmosphere. And by 69 they also recognized a common interest in trying to deescalate back from the brink of an accidental war. The photograph on the right shows Neil Armstrong walking on the surface of the moon and this took place in the first year of the Nixon Administration. Summer of 69. An incredible achievement. But people who were interested in weapons understood that any rocket which can take men to the moon can be packed with Nuclear Warheads and be fired against the other side. One of the characteristics of icbms is that theyre fired into space and they come down at supersonic speed to attack their targets on the ground. A new wrinkle in the weapons by 68 was called the mirv, the multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle. Instead of having just one warhead, there will be nine or ten packed into the nose cone of the rocket. They could be fired together and disperse in space and each would head for a different target. It added another layer of danger. These were the conditions under which nixon decided it was time for a new approach to the soviet union. And a policy that went by detente. Here is a cartoon from the time showing that some of the paradoxes of Nuclear Weapons. Two armies facing each other, both loaded with these enormous enormously powerful bombs. And the sign says, on no account to be used, because the enemy might retaliate. On the other side, no account to be used because the enemy might retaliate. Each to stand off, and here they are firing bows and arrows because they cant use the most powerful weapon in their arsenal. One of the characteristics of the nixon, kissinger style of diplomacy was not to use the regular channels. Not to go through the state department and not to use the professional Foreign Policy staff who were trained to do exactly this kind of work. They opened back channels with a soviet ambassador in d. C. He first became a soviet ambassador in 1962 when kennedy was president and he remained in that job right through until 1986. He worked with president s kennedy, johnson, nixon, ford, carter and reagan. A long continuity of office overseeing the interests of the soviet union inside the usa. Everyone who met him agreed he was charming, cult vative and knowledge able about Foreign Policy affairs. Nixon and kissinger began talking about the principle of detente with the soviet union premier. Here is nixon talking with him and hes leaning in to make sure he gets the nuances of the translation right between them. And nixon was able to persuade him of the rightness of reducing their nuclear arsenals. Each side was spending far too much money on these nuclear arsenals. Each was increasing the danger of an accidental war, and therefore theyve got a mutual interest in deescalating. So negotiations began, the strategic arms limitation talks, whose acronym is s. A. L. T. , very characteristic of that period. And it led in 1972 to the signing of the s. A. L. T. I agreement. One interesting aspect of it which is depicted ongoing the photograph of the right there, the photo on the right shows an antiballistic missile. One of the thoughts the planners had had was this, if the enemy fires its Nuclear Weapons against us, well surround our cities with defensive missile bases. If our radar shows that missiles are coming towards us, well fire antiballistic missiles which will intercept them. That seems like a very good idea because it makes the city safer. But as you know, one of the characteristics of war planning and war gaming during the cold war was to think very carefully about the way in which the enemy would interpret your actions. You have to make sure that your intention is understood by the adversary. And the american war planners, the negotiators of the s. A. L. T. I treaty said this, if we build an antiballistic Missile System and surround our cities with it, what the enemy might think is this, thats a sign that the americans are planning a first strike against us. Theyll fire air missiles, when we retaliate, theyll be able to shoot sit down our air strike. Thats dangerous because it escalates the mutual perception of threat so then the question becomes, all right, how do we reduce the danger that thats what theyre going to think . And the answer they came up with, which is embodied in the s. A. L. T. Treaty was this, were not going to build these systems. Were going to leave ourselves defenseless because by leaving ourselves defenseless, were making it less likely that our intentions will be misunderstood because then the adversary will understand that. We know if they launch against us, well be utterly destroyed. But they wont do so. Each side uses that as a way of reducing the danger of nuclear war. Its a complicated way of thinking but it was an internal logic. It was at a summit meeting in 1972 that the soviets and the american leaders signed the treaty which went into effect from that time on. Because the u. S. Senate also endorsed it. Of course there were people in america who were horrified by this. Oldstyle anticommunists, the toughest of the anticommunists, people like Barry Goldwater thought this was dismaying. His view was, the russians wont have assented to it unless they believe it can help them. If it helps them, it cant help us as well. There were people who said, whatever one side gains, the other side must lose. This is a condition in which both sides can gain because most can be reassured of the reduction of the danger of nuclear war. Another thing that made it painful was that only the year before, or the year before nixon came into office, 1968, soviet tanks had rolled into prague. They attempted to establish a little bit of distance between themselves and soviet control. Even the new czech government was in no way hostile to the soviet union, it wasnt subse e subservant. This is one of the many traumatic events of 1968. It was one more sign that the soviet union is utterly untrustworthy. It was only because nixon had got some such strong anticommunist credentials that he could get away with doing this in the first place. If a democratic president had done this, it would have united the opposition of the republicans and never would have come about. Nixon understood he was in a position to do something that his democratic rivals probably could not have managed. The other Great Development of the first Nixon Administration was the diplomatic opening to china. I mentioned that the Chinese Revolution was completed in 1949 and we encountered the chinese the use of chinese troops in the early days of the korean war when they attacked across the china north korean border when the forces were moving north in north korea. The United States didnt have diplomatic relations with communist china, the peoples republic of china, at all. The United States continued to recognize taiwan, the offshore island in the pacific, to which they defeated and retreated the nationalist chinese at the end of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. When on the few occasions when an american diplomat needed to talk to a chinese diplomat, they met in warsaw behind the iron curtain and had normal talks. By 71, nixon was thinking, theres something odd about this situation. In fact, nixon had written an article in the journal of Foreign Affairs which was published in 1967 in which he said this, taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave family outside the family of nations there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. By 1969, 1970, it was becoming clear that communism was not monolithic. There were differences between russian communists and chinese communists. Differences, again, between them and vietnamese communists and it was possible to see a little bit of daylight between these various brands of national communism. Of course one of the central principles of Foreign Policy is the idea the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So as border incidents began to take place between china and the soviet union on the long, long land border in asia, nixon and kissinger understood if we can befriend china, or at least achieve diplomatic normalization of relations, thats going to add pressure on the soviet union. Although we want to coexist with the soviet, we dont want to give them an easy time. Were continuing to hope, as George Cannon had said in 46, that eventually the soviet system is going to fold up because of its own imperfections. Heres this is a little badge. This shows you his selfconception. The people in the background from left to right are carl marx, lennon and stalin. He saw himself in this line, the classic lineage of communism as the next of the great leaders. Things inside china had been incredibly turbulant. The great laep forward, perhaps the most catastrophic policy decision ever made, this was an attempt by china to introduce a fiveyear plan to increase Grain Production in the chinese countryside and also go through a crash course of industrialization. What actually happened was, the peasant farms were collectivized and you can see people working on great collective farms. The hope was that the rationalization and efficiency of largescale farms would lead to a sharp increase in Grain Production. What happened is the resentful peasants whose land had been taken away from them, found less incentive to work on the farms than they would have done if they had been working on lands of their own. Productivity went down very sharply. Another aspect of the great laep forward was the decision to have a crash course of industrialization. The system is predicated on an Industrial Society and marx expected that the industrial working class were the revolutionaries. People were encouraged to build blast furnaces and bring all of their metal goods and melt them down in the hope that china could become a mass producer of steel goods. This is another policy initiative which failed drastically. Just to give you an idea of the scale of the calamity, the famine is regarded as the single worse famine in the entire history of the world. Millions, perhaps as many as 50 Million People died in the 1959 through 1961. One of the policies was against the program against the four pests, rats, flies, mosquitos and sparrows. When the chinese also attempted to kill all of the sparrows on the grounds that they ate a lot of grain, the natural predecessor against insects disappeared and the killing of the sparrowed was followed by a great plague of locusts whose damage was on a biblical scale leading to mass famine and to the calling off of this crazy program. This graph gives you a little glimpse of the damage that was done. The green spike is the chinese death rate. You can see that during the great leap forward, it takes an enormous jump. It was followed by a sharp rise in the birthrate as families struggled to replace the lost population. And that led to the chinese one child policy which is a highly controversial human rights issue from then really right through until the present. The other noteworthy policy that mao under took was the cultural revolution. He could see that the Chinese Revolution was becoming routine. The initial euphoria of 1949 and 50 has worn off. Class stratification was beginning again in china. There was a lot of corruption inside the government offices. And he hoped to restore a source of permanent revolution inside china. With the use of the little red book, the booklet of maos own sayings, he set about trying to unsettle the stability which china has begun to achieve by the mid1960s. And this included the public denunciation of the intellectuals. Heres a common treat scene in the late 1960s in china where people who are being accused of intellectual deviant si. You could be sent off to labor camps or executed, but also rituals of public shaming. These four men have been accused of being intellectuals and theyre made to stand on chairs in the Public Square with placards around their necks deannouncing them. Also an incredible period when everybody was made to participate in the harvest. When late summer came about, an urban depopulation took place as chinese officials who no longer worked in agriculture were forced to go back to the land to work in the harvest, to keep the life and memory of the roots from which they had come. Nearly all books from the west were bound unless they were books of marxists. And so the cultural revolution is remembered as a horrible period of repression and mass persecution. This is a period when theres a lot of border incidents along the boundary between the soviet union and china when its becoming clear that although chinese and the soviet union are communist nations and mao greatly admired stalin and wanted to be his disciple, they created some distant between these two great communist rivals. One of the first times when the icy distance between the usa and china began to diminish was when the American Table Tennis Team visited china in 1971. The teams had met in japan in a tournament. And the chinese political handlers understood or interpreted this as a diplomatic advance from the American Government and invited the americans to go and play. The chinese were better at pingpong than the americans and it was a massive win for the chinese team. That was good for their morale. The American Team apparently said weve never seen the game played at this level. It was a moment suggesting perhaps its going to be possible for us to talk. What happened later that year is that Henry Kissinger went secretly to china to talk with mao. Here they are meeting. He gave himself the code name for this mission of polo. Thats a reference to marco polo, the European Merchant and adventurer who had visited china centuries previously on one of the first occasions when china started to be opened up to the rest of the western world. He was on a visit to pakistan and he claimed to have fallen ill and someone else impersonated him in the as he recuperated. And kissinger flew off to china and got into negotiations of mao about the possibility of restoring normal diplomatic relations between the two and regarding china rather than taiwan as china at the united nations. Nixon was eager for this to be done secretly. Rogers, the secretary of state, didnt even know that this had happened. But it worked and the welcome given by mao to kissinger opened the way to a visit by nixon in the following year. So it really would be hard to overstate the shock that photographs like this had when they first appeared in the American Press in 1972. Richard nixon whose whole life had been based on anticommunism shaking hands with the leadership of communist china. It astonished the world and it had a revolutionary effect upon diplomatic relations. On the same journey he visited both china and the soviet union for the s. A. L. T. I treaty. And he understand he was able to get a lot of positive mileage out of these two diplomatic accomplishments setting up his Reelection Campaign and he won the nomination and reflection overwhelming in the election of 1972. Once again, anticommunists like Barry Goldwater and for like Ronald Reagan who was the governor of california were horrified by this. They thought it was a betrayal of longstanding principles. But nevertheless, this was the agreement that was made and from that time on, china and the United States moved towards the normalization of diplomatic relations. As you know in the decades since then, very, very strong trading relations have sprung up between the two. Heres a this is probably the most iconic photograph taken from that visit. Its common now. Half the a third of the families in america have got relatives who visited the great wall of china. But a photograph like this had been unimaginable since before world war ii. To see nixon with mrs. Nixon and dignitaries from the chinese and the American Governments on the great wall was a spectacular and amazing sight. In 1973 the war between israel and its arab neighbors, something were going to get into in more detail, led to the first gasoline crisis in the 1970s. Henry kissinger was right in the midst of negotiating a diplomatic solution to this crisis and he developed a technique called shuttled diplomacy in which in his own play he was going back and forth between israel and egypt. He is speaking with the egyptian leaders and making trips to saudi arabia and damascus. And this exhausting back and forth laid the groundwork for the treaty which was going to be signed in a subsequent administration in 79 between egypt and israel against something that had been unimaginable a few years previously in which kissinger helped to bring about. Here is a typical cartoon from the time. I think the way to interpret the cartoon is like this, the mideast is like a bomb, its a about to blow up. Suddenly like the genie coming out of the bottle, up pops Henry Kissinger. He became very famous. Normally the secretary of state isnt a person of particular interest except to people who are very inside in politics. But kissinger became a celebrity. Even though he spoke english with a german accent, he almost sounded like a cartoon german. Nevertheless he was interviewed and fated, people asked him about his girlfriends, they talked to him about power as and so on. This is at a time when nixons fortunes are sent nixon is a month or two of resigning. Kissinger is riding high and theyre comparing kissinger to superman. Superk. If you look at the picture on the right, this is a picture from the political left, the Antiwar Movement for whom kissinger was a devil figure. Nixon and kissinger came into office in 69, it was clear that the americans have to find a way out of the vietnam war. To the Antiwar Movement, it seemed absolutely disgraceful that four more years had gone by before the final american disengagement. More americans were killed. Vietnamese people had died, the american incursion into cambodia set off the cambodian genocide. He was an extremely controversial figure. But nevertheless, a very significant one who played a role in the reorientation of american Foreign Policy at that time. Lets leave the pictures now and move on to the next stage of todays class which is the discussion of part of kissingers memoirs. This book came out in 1979 when he had been out of office for three or four years and the book is nearly 1,000 pages long. If you want to know every single detail of kissingers work, sometimes literally hour by hour, this is the book for you to read. Its full of, i think, great stuff. I dont agree with it all, but nevertheless its fascinating. Lets look at some of the things he talks about, particularly describing what its like to be in the position he found himself in. I wonder if you could go first, telling us about the relationship between Political Officeholders like kissinger with the Washington Press corps. Sure. Throughout the reading, i would say kissinger makes it clear that the press can be both your friend and your enemy, if you hold Political Office or youre a member of the administration. On the one hand, theres the pretty funny anecdote of lyndon b. Johnson saying if the press is saying good things about a member of your cabinet, theyre your leak and should fire them immediately. I thought that was funny. And thats a good example about how for people who are lower in the administration, the press can serve as a good way to build their own reputation by taking credit for things that go well and shifting blame for things that dont go well. But theres the sense gnthat th press is at odds with the u. S. Government because theyre always trying to find out, whats the dirt going on in the background. Whats going on. But kissinger also will talk favorably about them in terms of the intelligence and the knowledge of the people in the press corps. For example, on page 21 at the top of the page, he says, i too must be said was ignorant of the ways of washington or government when i proclaimed at the press Conference Announcing my new position that i would have no dealings with the press. Appoint my appointment was announced, members began calling me to look me over. I was no little awed by the famous men who i had listened to for years and whom i was meeting firsthand. He goes on to say, i had the impression that he had suspended judgment about the that part is not as important. He goes on to say that these men know more about Foreign Policy than he himself did or any other person in the cabinet that thats right. People like walter lipman, he had been famous since world war i. He was the grand old man of american journalism. He had accumulated experience. And can you also read at the bottom of the page there, beginning that the journalist has motives. The journalist has motives in his contacts with the official. He must woo and flatter the official. Without his good will, he be deprived of information. A love hate relationship is almost inevitable. Yeah, thats the point, isnt it . Kissinger quickly realizes, i see, their job is to exploit me and my job is to exploit them right back. Exactly. And im sure you had the experience of reading a newspaper story that you cant suspecting that theres been some kind of at least informal quid pro quo which the policymaker said, if you Say Something nice to me, ill give you access to the next set of secrets. If you dont have that access, its difficult to be a journalist. Professor kissinger realizes that might work on him at harvard, its not going to work in d. C. Hes got that very insightful summary of the national of social life in d. C. Which is calibrated by positions of power. James, why was William Rogers chosen as secretary of state and with what consequences. Nixon and rogers had a previous relations. They knew each other as lawyers and they both worked under the in the eisenhower administration. Nixons main idea behind appointing rogers, he did not have any Foreign Policy experience which nixon saw as a great plus. Because it meant that rogers would not enforce the will of the state department and that Foreign Policy would largely be controlled by the National Security council. Nixon intended that policy direction would remain within the white house. So the consequences were that kissinger sets this appointment enhanced the state department and the press and sort of backfired on nixon because rogers would not offend nixons policies but cater to the attitudes of congress and within the press. Oftentimes, he supported policies that contradicted nixons stances. There was a power struggle that department and the white house, not very little cooperation. Nixon would exclude rogers from negotiations. He had a lot of negotiations that went to the white house that were typically back channels for diplomacy, but became the standard for interacting with foreign governments and he really did not keep rogers in the loop. Kissingers secret shift to china that we talked about and rogers did not know until kissinger was on the way which is interesting. They would say Different Things to foreign actors. They would contradict each other and kissinger said the soviet union was able to perceive that and that they werent on the same page. Thats right. Exactly. And at one point, kissinger says ideally the secretary of state would be someone with whom the president is very close, because if theyve got the right kind of personal relationship its incredibly mutually supported. This is on page 31. This is where as it gets into more details about his relationship or his relationships inside the government, he admits that he likes his own vanity get the better of him and sometimes he exploited nixons weakness in his own interest. Look at the middle of page 31 where it says the relationship was bound to deteriorate. The relationship was bound to deteriorate, had both of us been wiser we would have understood that we would have served the country best by reinforcing each other. This would have reduced nixons tempt tagzs that he fomented, and all of our attempts, rogers was too proud, i too arrogant and and bureaucratic headaches. Thats where nixon admits my problem was excessive arrogance and nobody who studied him would disagree with that judgment and some have made the case even more strongly than he did himself that it would have been better if hed had the wisdom and broad mindedness to be able to say i need to keep rogers informed and we need to work together, and the mutual suspicions in that hothouse atmosphere of the Administration Made it impossible. Bethany, what causes have melvin led the secretary of defense . Yeah. I think he actually had a number of really good qualities that made him effective at his position. Just starting, hed had a lot of experience and hed worked for approximately 16 years for the House Appropriations committee which meant that he also knew a lot of people, you know, like in washington. He had a lot of Strong Networks and powerful connections. He knew the professional language in washington. He was also extremely intelligent and good at solving daily problems as they arose and more on the, like, military tactician side, he was unwilling to give up an advantage when he saw one. Kissinger says on page 33 that he did not believe in fighting losing battles and then on page 32 he liked to win, but unlike nixon, derived no great pleasure from seeing someone else lose. So that juxtaposes like, you know, rigidness in fighting for what hes believing in or his aim, but also kind of like a sobering aspect of humility in the fact that hes also he wanted to win, but he understood when people lost. Yes. Sorry. He constantly looked for ways to circumvent challenges that came up. He was very kuning and on page 33, kissinger said it was safest to begin a battle with laird, by closing off in so far as possible all escape routes so he had to box him into a corner to make sure if youre trying to get something done with him to make sure he wouldnt look at something with a new angle and then lastly, he was also very much willing to respect publicly the authority of the office of the president , though in private he was also more than willing to offer dissenting opinions, but as soon as a decision had been made and it was finalized and he went public with it he was always willing to stand behind it as there was a unity in your defense presentation. Good. Thats right and hes one of the relatively few people to whom kissinger has a my measure of praise. And in fact, there is a line there just after the one you read where there was a buoyancy and a rascally good humor that made with him as satisfying as he could on occasion, and it was hard to dislike him and he was a bureaucratic in fighter that took an indirect root to getting his own way and thats another member of his staff. Becka, lets talk now about the joint chiefs of staff, and why were the chiefs of staff demoralized by 69 . Kissinge r attributes the psyche lodge investment in the war. Kissinger argues that it was really easy for leaders to focus on these sort of strategic, technical aspects of preparing for war and there was not enough emphasis placed on the concepts of fundamental values. He describes this on page 34 saying the military found themselves designing weapons on the basis of abstract criteria, carrying out strategies in which they did not really believe and ultimately conducting a war that they did not understand. He also points out that military leaders were too vulnerable to be swayed by external ideas such as being swayed toward traditional tactics of attrition that were not compatible with the guerilla warfare that they were facing and he says that oftentimes leaders would acquiesce these ideas and these would create further divisions and weekend morale even more. Kissinger explains that there were several internal battles between wanting to move to new systems and this confusion led them to be no clear cause to effectively rally behind. He mentions while wheeler came into the mistake, and he only made small adjustments and readily utilized his access to nixon. Kissinger said that the members of the joint chiefs by being willing to challenge nixon further. Wheeler had participated in the series of decisions in which he was able to defend and the cumulative impact of which he could not justify to himself. Yeah. Wheeler is one of those world war ii veterans who has then gone on to a very distinguished career in military life and hes never been able to recapture the euphoria of victory in world war ii which came along with the darn danger, but clearly at the end of world war ii it was possible to say heres a victory and even more so in vietnam and victory wasnt an option and there was a limited war of the most demoralizing kind. The Antiwar Movement at home made the army more and more unpopular and many of the people fighting in the army were fighting reluctantly and the army itself is being the policy wonks and they were battlefield soldiers that they didnt really believe in. As kissinger says, they didnt have the strength of mind to take the transformation taking place around them. The army is defiant against the civil authorities, and in the case of Douglas Macarthur and the army is pathetically willing to fall in with what the civil authorities want and this is the case in point. Contrary to some of the public mythology they rarely challenge the commander in chief and they seek excuses to support and not oppose him and that comes out vividly, as well. Another thing that kissinger and nixon understood perfectly well is that the very broad consensus which had formed around containment which worked pretty well and the late 60s was now completely falling to pieces in vietnam. And thats the next question. And there is this passage in page 62 with whats going wrong with the concept of deterrence. Yes, sir. Starting with this policy of containment. This policy of containment was flawed in three ways. First, our excessively military conception of the balance of power and its corollary, the policy of deferring negotiations for a postwar settlement and gave the soviet union time to consolidate, and redress the nuclear imbalance. So looking back on it, hes saying, unfortunately, containment wasnt it wasnt effective at preventing the soviet development of a Nuclear Weapon which consolidated the soviet position, and the bottom of that paragraph, the relative strength was never greater with the cold war. Secondly secondly, the nature of military technology was such that the balance of power could no longer be thought of as uniform. Nuclear weapons were so cataclysmic that as the arsenals grew they proved less and less useful to have every conceivable aggression. Thirdly, our containment could never be an adequate response for communist ideology and traps form relationships between states into conflicts between philosophies and pose a challenge to the balance of power through domestic upheavals. Can you paraphrase that one . Basically, hes saying that the policy of containment that george outlined back in i think early 50s, late 40s wouldnt work now just because these conflicts arent simply just like wars anymore, and with germany it was a direct conquest of territory back in world war ii whereas now its more of a conflict between, you know, ideologies like communism versus capitalism. So youre saying it would have worked better if the adversary would have been the british, and it was a matter of straight power. Im not sure if i would say that, but let me just put it to you this way. Why was the vietnam war so unpopular . After all, that was containment in action. There was no end goal and they didnt want to push forward to expel the communists from there. They basically wanted to prevent the north vietnamese from invading South Vietnam and basically keep the communists out of South Vietnam. So is it because in other words, it doesnt meet the psychological test. Its just not gratifying to have an everlasting holding action. Right. It doesnt seem like theres an end goal in sight. It feels like the soldiers are fighting a war that seems unwinnable, essentially. And the incentives of each particular american in vietnam are far lower than the incentives that the particular vietnamese person especially those that believe in the rightness of expelling the imperialist powers. Thats right. So kissinger realizes the consensus thats held us together at this point isnt good enough anymore. We have to start thinking about a new way of going about it. Paige, lets jump on to you, which way does he strike tw morality and power considerations. Kissinger is pretty ethical. This is when most evidence when he refused to hire people that were promised positions in the government, and he, like, that created a standard of merit within his administration. You mean after nixons been elected and he said ill take these people because they worked on the campaign and kissinger says no, theyre not good enough. Yes. Because he, like, hes pretty selfaware and pretty opinionated so he wanted to put that up against the most intelligent men and women he could find. This doesnt respect the chain of command because he realizes that in order to be an effective secretary of state you need a strong connection with the president and to have confidence because he recognizes the failures of previous secretaries of state that competed with the president and then lost their influence. Actually, paige, let me stop you there for a second and im thinking not so much as his personal position as his approximately see position. Watch the role of morality in the actual policy theyre going to pursue. In pack, let me ask you to read us a passage. This is on page 55. Have you got it there . Yeah. Okay. Look at the first four paragraphs on 55 and read, as history teaches. If history teaches us anything is that there could be no peace and no Justice Without restraint, but i believe that no nation could face or define its choices without a moral compass that set a course through the ambiguities of reality and thus made sacrifices meaningful. Can you paraphrase that . I think hes basically saying that in, like, decisions of leaders, they have to have a sense of moral judgments and if theyre going to have that power, they are making sdegdzs. Thats right. You inherit a situation situation and you have to r, and i assume right now and sometimes that makes you do hardhearted things like not coming to the rescue of poland during world war ii, for example. He goes on to say that doesnt mean you can be completely con te temptuous of moral questions. The willingness to mark the fine line. The willingness to mark the fine line is the academics and morality and that of statesman. The outsider thinks in terms of absolutes. For him, write and wrong are defined in their conception. The political leader doesnt have his every partial step is inherently moralee and morality could not be approximated without it. Keep going . A bit more, yeah. The philosophers test is the reason behind it. The state midcaps test is not only the exaltation of his goals of the catastrophic catastrophe universe. Thats right. They found themselves of having to answer questions leak this. Shall i atom bomb in hiroshima that would kill 100,000, to which sometimes the answer is yes. It is very hard for a philosopher to say yes, it is justifiable to an atom bomb that kills 100,000 people and hes talking to a philosopher who looks at it in abtract and the statesmen look at it in context. They cant be completely be o oblivious of moral context and he has to be more so than those thinking in the abtract would be. We look at that example when truman could justify the use of the atom bomb and to climb that, it would it would save the rives of many more and kissinger is harkened back to that point, isnt he . And hes reflected on the fact that hes come out of academic life. In this respect only, he was an academic history professor who spends his time teaching about it, speculating about the principles and chatting about it with gifted and intelligent students like you guys. Easy, calm, safe and suddenly hes pick t hes pictured into a war and even potentially new changes going and suddenly hes got to make decisions and therefore, hes got to get it clear in his mean. What is per messible to do or not do. I think that one is a big one one and there sarah, were kissingas draefr trfrp a lot, but broadly speaking, kissinger saw the United States as being profoundly fractured and he Nixon Administration was the first to conduct Foreign Policy without consensus. Domestically and internationally, presented nixon a host of problems in terms of Foreign Policy, specifically with the fact that kissinger saw the world as a totally different one than had existed a few years prior. Inconsistencies were being prayed out on a global scale and all continents were interacting and it would foster uncertainty and the disjoint and fracture, in terms of direction, kissinger makes it clear and more center of decision needed to happen. In that sense the United States couldnt be fully responsible for holding up the helm of the noncommunist world. We need to provide meaningful with the communist powers. Okayed he he says understanding the war of the was priority and nixon needed to lay out a foundation for the longterm strategy and both in regard to changing the policy and doctrine of containment and he thought we needed to march the global rivalry with the soviet union far better in light of the fact that Nuclear Weapons and their chateau sort of cast a dark shad over owe over the gup and he mentions even though he thinks we are friends and we need to coopt relationships with them in order to not be the single threshold for noncommunist countries within the entire world. He says both, doesnt he . On the one hand, he says its very important that we cultivate these other nations and presumably, what hes thinking about is france, west germany, increasingly japan. On the one hand hes including them and hugging everything to himself from the people immediately around him. One of the implications of sharing the leadership is having less power and being willing sometimes to say heres an area where we cant get our own way, and although he was an incredibly talented negotiator he also found the middle east a maddening place because the various leaders he encountered there were more stubborn than he was and wouldnt do what he wanted. So while there are a lot of things going on to unravel. On the one hand he says its not enough to deal with immediate crises as they come up and day after day. Weve also got our longterm approach to the middle distance into the future if were going to create conditions of great instability and this is also a chronic problem in Foreign Policy making. Whats the appropriate time scale for thinking . And because america is a democracy, it is very important to think about the next election. Every member of the house is, and theyre up for election every four years and so to get them to think about an issue we should play out over 100 years is almost impossible. Thats the great problem with the politics of Climate Change today. Climate change happens very gradually and the people who will suffer most from a warming planet havent even been born yet or are born and still in their infancy. So its hard to bring it, and when there are day to thing problems. Did he give you a good impegz. Yoi probably already know about it . . It it worsen it . I think it did. Ee loot of times he makes a concrete judgment on that, at least in the Second Chapter he does chair about morality to some degree. While he may not live that out in every single policy, at least he states nominally that there is a room for moral judgment in determining the countries need to make in their Foreign Policy and i think thats something that often gets lost when just reading about surface level depictions of kissinger in American History. For reasons of time we need to leave it to this point, but we need to be looking quite a lot more at kissingers actions in the 1970s, and well also, one of the things well be glancing at later on is after 1977 when jimmy carter came into the white house to replace gerald ford, kissinger, hes still alive now and for at least the next 30 years into his 80s and 90s he kept on hoping that hed be called back to some Senior Administrative point, but each republican president in turn looked at kissinger and thought about it and then said no, no, i dont think we will. So hes written some great books things sense then. That might all the a you can watch lectures in history. We look at topics ranging from the American Revolution to 9 11. Thats saturday at 8 croc p. M. And midnight eastern on cspan3. Weeknights this month were featuring American History program as a preview of whats available on cspan3. Since the 1970 s, david pilgrim has collected everyday objects that mock and dehumanize africanamericans. The founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum of racist memorabilia argues that although the artifacts are offensive they can be used as teaching tools to promote conversation and understanding. Tonight we visit the museum at Ferris State University in big rapids, michigan, to see a selection of artifacts from their collection. Watch tonight at 8 00 eastern and enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan3. American history tv on cspan3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on civil war, opiate addiction among civil war veterans with jonathan jones. At 8 00 p. M. On lectures in history, university of maryland Baltimore County Professor William blake on new deal politics and the role of Public Opinion on issues such as Court Packing and executive power and on sunday, American History tv will mark the 400th anniversary of the pilgrims arrival in massachusetts starting on reel america with four films. At 5 00 p. M. Eastern, a look at the virtual mayflower project which uses Virtual Reality to build the ship at the harbor and a tour of a Living History Museum in plymouth, massachusetts and also the home of the mayflower 2, a fullscale reproduction of the original ship. Exploring the american story. Watch American History tv, this weekend on cspan3. Nicole Meyers Turner is the author of sole liberty, blackel ijous politics in post emancipation era. She breaks it down with the civil war era who cohosted this event and provided the video. It is my pleasure to
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