Was Henry Kissinger Evil? Tom Wells on the Kissinger Tapes

01:00 | Andrew Keen: What should you, or what do you make of our Epstein age? I’m less interested in your ideas on Jeffrey Epstein himself and on the idea that his files, his tapes, now seem to be accessible by everybody, in contrast with the age of Nixon and Kissinger.

01:19 | Tom Wells: Well, generally speaking, I'm for releasing as much information as possible. So that would include the Epstein files and certainly include Kissinger's phone transcripts.

01:31 | Andrew Keen: Tell me more about these tapes. I'm sure a lot of our viewers and listeners aren't even aware that Kissinger secretly recorded his phone conversation, especially in a post-Watergate America. It seems a little odd. Why did he do that?

01:48 | Tom Wells: Well, I think primarily for two reasons. One is he—I think he wanted the material for his memoirs. He needed the record for his memoirs, and also he needed this stuff to just stay organized.

02:04 | Tom Wells: He wasn't the most organized person in the world, and I think the phone transcripts allowed him to keep tabs on what he told to whom, when, and what obligations he had.

02:16 | Tom Wells: And I think he also wanted to get some of his colleagues on the record in case they wanted to back away from their positions they’d taken with him. I think he also wanted to protect himself against leaks, so he would have himself on the record for stuff.

02:32 | Tom Wells: So he was trying to cover himself, but I think primarily he wanted the material for his memoirs. And if you look at his memoirs, he used his phone transcripts heavily. I mean, there's whole sections of his memoirs that parallel his phone transcripts. But again, he also needed to stay organized, and I think his phone transcripts helped him do that.

02:54 | Andrew Keen: Tom, you're the author of The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam. You're clearly on the progressive side of things, I'm guessing, at least in the context of Vietnam. You're not a great fan of Henry Kissinger. Did you come to this project—the Nixon tapes project—as a Kissinger hater, as a skeptic, or did you come open-minded?

03:19 | Tom Wells: I came as someone who was very critical of Henry Kissinger because of his policies, primarily his policies in Vietnam and the mass killing of civilians in Vietnam as a result of his and Nixon's policies.

03:36 | Tom Wells: And in other areas in the world. And so I've always been critical of Henry Kissinger. I came to respect him and admire him in other ways; I mean, he was an incredibly hard worker. He had incredible stamina. He was able to balance a lot of things at once without losing it.

03:59 | Tom Wells: He had some real talent. He’s very smart. He was very good at dealing with the bureaucracy in which he operated. So, I mean, he—and I think in his diplomacy, he was really good at knowing how what he said to one party would affect his relationships with another party.

04:19 | Tom Wells: He was very good at keeping a lot of issues in mind when he was pursuing his negotiations. I mean, plus his stamina, I'm sure, helped him enormously through these long negotiations.

04:31 | Tom Wells: But so, I mean, I came to respect some of the things he did and can do and his capabilities. But on the other hand, his policies I've always had a big problem with, particularly in Vietnam but also in other areas.

04:46 | Tom Wells: Supporting the Pakistani military government that carried out a genocide in East Pakistan. His involvement in the secret wiretaps of government officials and journalists that he was really the prime force on those wiretaps.

05:04 | Tom Wells: And then he repeatedly lied about it afterwards. He said he didn't request any wiretaps on anybody, didn't have anything to do with the decision to conduct wiretapping.

05:14 | Tom Wells: And also his role in the secret bombing of Cambodia and the false reporting system that they used to carry that out. And then afterward, he just kept lying about it. He kept saying he didn't know anything about a false reporting system, he had nothing to do with how the military conducted its reporting.

05:32 | Tom Wells: So, I mean, that was one of the things I learned during the course of going through his phone transcripts and writing the book—was he actually lied more than I thought he did.

05:43 | Andrew Keen: And I'm guessing you probably thought he lied a lot, so it must have lied a conspicuous amount. Tom, a huge amount has been written on Henry Kissinger. Again, I'm sure you've read most of it and you've written your own stuff. Is there something in the Kissinger tapes that we didn't know? Is there breaking news about Henry Kissinger that will shock or scandalize admirers or critics of Kissinger?

06:08 | Tom Wells: Well, I mean, one of the things that struck out to me looking at the Vietnam transcripts was how callous Kissinger was and Nixon were to the civilian casualties. I mean, you can see them in there taking great gratification about all the dead bodies piled up following bombing strikes in Vietnam.

06:30 | Andrew Keen: Explain that. You mean in private calls, he was making jokes about dead Vietnamese civilians?

06:36 | Tom Wells: No, they weren't making jokes about it, but they were like reveling in it. I mean, Kissinger would say stuff like, "if they just dropped the bombs out the door without even aiming at anything, they'd have to have hit something."

06:51 | Tom Wells: It's those kind of statements. And they talk about like 350—they found 350 bodies piled up following a bombing strike. And Nixon actually said, "I don't care about the civilian casualties."

07:06 | Tom Wells: During the Laos invasion, which was an invasion by South Vietnamese troops supported by American air power and artillery, Nixon said, "I don't even care if they lose the 10,000 South Vietnamese that are in Laos now."

07:21 | Tom Wells: It's that level of callousness that's just stunning. I mean, I knew these guys—that morality was not really part of their calculation. They're looking at the big geopolitical game, right?

07:34 | Tom Wells: And Kissinger tended to see most conflicts within the context of the U.S. rivalry with the Soviet Union. And he would talk about it in terms of the balance of power in the world.

07:47 | Andrew Keen: Tom, Kissinger is famous for—he was a professor of history at Harvard for many years and a theorist of Realpolitik. I think his great heroes were Metternich, the architects of Realpolitik in the 19th century. To what extent is this, what you call this callousness about civilian casualties in Vietnam, is it a reflection of Realpolitik versus just an odd kind of indifference to human suffering?

08:16 | Tom Wells: Well, I think it's a reflection of what you're talking about, his general approach to foreign policy. And also I think a reflection of his ambition personally to carry out the policies and to achieve the results he's trying to achieve. So he's willing to look the other way in terms of the human cost of his policies.

08:40 | Tom Wells: But I think generally what you're talking about, his kind of general approach to foreign policy, it's a product of that. But he was also very ambitious and he really looked out for Henry Kissinger and he was certainly trying to achieve certain things foreign policy-wise and I think he looked the other way when it came to morality and the human toll a lot of this stuff.

09:03 | Andrew Keen: Although, again, I'm not sure that's huge news. Last year we had Edward Luce, the Financial Times’s man in D.C. He has a wonderful new biography, a big new Brzezinski—I'm sure you've seen it—Zbig, in which he places Brzezinski very much in parallel with Kissinger.

09:22 | Andrew Keen: They were in a sense rivals, but they also had different notions of America's responsibility, moral responsibility in the world. In your Nixon tapes, does he recognize moral criticism or moral critics? Does he defend his position? Are there conversations with people like Brzezinski who didn't share his view of the world?

09:47 | Tom Wells: I don't recall his conversations ever really talking about morality except in so far as he might say something to the effect that morality is not the issue. The issue is the balance of power and U.S. national interest.

10:04 | Tom Wells: And I don't think he saw morality, in the sense that we're talking about it, as part of his pursuit of American national interests as he saw them. I think he looked more at the American role in the world and its power, its ability to use its power. He was not shy about using American power. That was much more important to him than morality.

10:27 | Andrew Keen: Did you—I mean, you've listened to these tapes. How many of them were there?

10:33 | Tom Wells: No, what he did is the tapes don't exist anymore. What he did is he had his secretaries and other people—at first they were just listening in to these phone conversations and taking notes, right? And then they started producing fuller transcripts of these conversations.

10:53 | Tom Wells: And then shortly he set up phone recording systems. But what he said was that the phone tapes themselves were destroyed shortly after they were transcribed.

11:06 | Andrew Keen: Okay, so but my question is then, okay, so maybe you didn't listen to all of them, but you read many of them. You've invested a significant amount of time in it. What kind of man was Kissinger? What wisdom can you bring on this, Tom, for historians of this period and Kissinger in particular? Is there some sort of interpretation? You just think he was ambitious, he was hard-working?

11:32 | Tom Wells: No, he was very skilled at what he did and in terms of how he saw the world and how he saw American interest. He was very skilled at achieving the results he was trying to achieve, partly because he was so smart and he was a very good bureaucratic operator.

11:49 | Tom Wells: He had tremendous stamina. His work ethic—he worked incredibly long hours and he seemed to do this day after day and he didn't seem to require a lot of sleep.

12:02 | Andrew Keen: So what about—I take your point, you've already talked about his work ethic. What was his ultimate ambition? Did he want to be recorded in history as the great man of the last part of the 20th century?

12:16 | Tom Wells: Yeah, I think he wanted to be remembered as a tremendously skilled and successful foreign policy maker. And again, a lot of that was basically asserting American power and American standing in the world as he saw it, and thwarting the Soviet Union, limiting Soviet influence around the world.

12:39 | Tom Wells: That was certainly a big part of it. And like I said, a lot of these areas in the world where there're conflicts, he tended to see them in terms of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and limiting Soviet influence. And he tended in some cases to exaggerate how much influence the Soviet Union had.

12:57 | Tom Wells: For example, in Vietnam, he thought the Soviet Union had more influence over the North Vietnamese than they did by far. The same thing during the India-Pakistan conflict. I think he thought the Soviet Union was influencing India more than they were.

13:16 | Tom Wells: And in other areas, he was always looking at basically what's happening with the Soviet Union, what are they trying to do. I mean, at one point in Jordan, there was a Palestinian uprising in 1970, and Kissinger was very attuned to what possible role the Soviet Union could be playing in this conflict.

13:36 | Tom Wells: And when Syria sent some tanks and armored personnel carriers into Jordan, he and Nixon thought to some extent the Soviets were behind this move by Syria. And I think that actually the Soviet Union was urging restraint on the Syrians. But that's the way he tended to look at things. He always was very much attuned to what the Soviet Union was up to.

13:59 | Andrew Keen: Very much a zero-sum. What does your reading, your analysis of the Kissinger tapes tell us about his relationship with Nixon? My understanding was that if he didn't patronize Nixon, he certainly perhaps in some ways looked down intellectually on him. Is there any truth in that?

14:18 | Tom Wells: Well, actually in the transcripts, he was constantly deferential to Nixon.

14:24 | Andrew Keen: In front of Nixon, but privately?

14:27 | Tom Wells: Oh, well behind his back he would say some nasty things about him, but to his—in the phone transcripts, he was always very deferential to Nixon. He always addressed him as "Mr. President."

14:38 | Tom Wells: Because, you know, Nixon—I mean, he was always aware of his standing with Nixon. He was insecure about it, which Nixon fed. So he was always concerned about how he stood with his boss.

14:51 | Tom Wells: And so he was very deferential to him. But behind his back, of course, he'd say a lot of critical things about Nixon. But Nixon and Kissinger didn't really trust each other. They didn't know what they were thinking.

15:06 | Andrew Keen: It does sound like they—certainly Nixon never trusted anyone. Did Kissinger trust anyone? Who was he close to from these tapes?

15:15 | Tom Wells: I think he trusted more people than Nixon did, which is not saying much. The people he spends a lot of time with on the phone besides Nixon would be Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who he had a rivalry with.

15:31 | Tom Wells: I mean, they were both very devious and they were both master leakers. And I think they came to actually respect each other for their deviousness. But they would say one thing and do something else with each other.

15:46 | Tom Wells: But I think they actually came to respect each other for it because Laird was actually quite clever. He was a former congressman and he was very good at operating around people, and I think Kissinger respected that.

16:00 | Tom Wells: But they didn't trust each other. And Kissinger thought very low of the Secretary of State William Rogers, and he was always trashing Rogers behind his back. Kissinger did this with a lot of people.

16:14 | Tom Wells: He was very two-faced. He would say one thing to a person and say something totally different behind their back.

16:20 | Andrew Keen: But isn't that unusual, certainly for politicians, is it, Tom?

16:25 | Tom Wells: No, but I think Kissinger did it a lot. I mean, he—it's just that's the way he operated. I think that's partly his ambition and trying to achieve his goals and I don't think he was too concerned about that.

16:40 | Andrew Keen: What about his private life? In contrast with Zbig, he was very much of a ladies' man, man around town. Do the Kissinger tapes reveal anything about Henry Kissinger's private life? In our age of Epstein, of course, we seem to be obsessed with sex. What do the Kissinger tapes tell us about what Henry Kissinger got up to outside the office?

17:05 | Tom Wells: Well, he did have these relationships with Hollywood celebrities. That comes up a little bit, but not that much. But I know that he seemed to take great pleasure in his playboy reputation.

17:19 | Tom Wells: This was part of his nightlife. After working these long days, he was going out at night and often on these dates. It doesn't come up a lot in the conversations, but he seemed to take great pleasure in it. He enjoyed his playboy reputation.

17:33 | Tom Wells: I know he hated it when actresses used him for publicity. I think he was skeptical of what they might do in that regard. He liked to flirt with female journalists. There was a woman for the Washington Post he seemed to like to flirt with, Marilyn Berger.

17:51 | Tom Wells: But also Barbara Walters. He seemed to kind of have an interest in Barbara Walters.

17:56 | Andrew Keen: I think they dated at some point, him and Walters.

17:59 | Tom Wells: Well, I don't know. She was not interested. I mean, there was like some rumors around that she was separated from her husband at one point and there were rumors that she had left him for Henry Kissinger.

18:13 | Tom Wells: And I think Kissinger actually liked those rumors, but she did not at all. She needed access to Kissinger and I think Kissinger enjoyed the fact that he was linked to her publicly.

18:28 | Andrew Keen: Tom, next week I have an interview with Daniel Ellsberg's son, who's the editor of a new book called Truth and Consequences. Ellsberg, of course, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam. Ultimately you mentioned Vietnam many times in this conversation on the Kissinger tapes. What do they tell us new about the American misadventure, the catastrophe in Southeast Asia?

19:00 | Tom Wells: Yeah, I think they enlighten a lot the divisions inside the administration about the bombing campaigns and when to bomb, who the bombing was directed at, whether the bombing should be focused primarily on North Vietnam or South Vietnam.

19:18 | Tom Wells: There were a lot of divisions inside the administration over that, including between Kissinger and Melvin Laird. And there was a lot of frustration with the U.S. military commander in Vietnam, Creighton Abrams, who also wanted the bombing focused primarily on South Vietnam as opposed to North Vietnam.

19:37 | Tom Wells: And there was a lot of talk about how the bombing would affect the Soviet summit and whether we should not bomb because of how it might affect the Soviet summit or whether we bomb or the Soviets are going to pull out of the summit and how do we calculate all that in relation to the Soviet Union.

19:55 | Tom Wells: I mean, there's a high level of detail about the bombing campaigns, when they should be held, when they should be undertaken, who they should target, when they should stop, who are we worried about.

20:10 | Tom Wells: There's a lot of strategizing over the bombing. There's a tremendous amount of focus on the invasion of Laos in 1971.

20:20 | Andrew Keen: Which, understandably, which was another moral catastrophe. Tom, you've noted that Kissinger didn't have any moral concern with the death of Vietnamese or Laotian or Cambodian civilians. What about on the American side? Did he care about the—because many Americans were also being killed under his watch. Of course, this catastrophe resulted in previous administration senior administration figures, McNamara for example, having nervous breakdown. Did it have any impact on Kissinger? Did he care about American casualties?

20:56 | Tom Wells: I think they saw it as a big political problem.

21:00 | Andrew Keen: Did it bother him that American kids were being killed in Vietnam?

21:04 | Tom Wells: Yeah, I think they looked at it as a major political problem. They wanted to limit American casualties and they looked at it totally different than Vietnamese casualties.

21:15 | Andrew Keen: Where was his heart? Does he have a heart in your view, Kissinger? Did he care? Was there any kind of examples in the tapes of him being morally outraged?

21:28 | Tom Wells: Occasionally you'll see—I remember at least a couple places he asked about when they're discussing potential bombing campaigns and where they would bomb. I remember a couple times he asked about, "well, how many people would we kill?"

21:44 | Tom Wells: And he raised the issue two or three times, but the question is he raising it because he's worried about the political fallout of civilian casualties in Vietnam or is he raising it because he's concerned about the morality?

21:58 | Tom Wells: I think he's much more concerned about the political fallout, because you see him elsewhere where they are so callous to the number of people they're killing, so it's hard to believe it was primarily a question of morality. I think they're more concerned about the international repercussions and the public opinion fallout of killing a lot of civilians.

22:19 | Andrew Keen: So it sounds to me the more you talk about him—and I take your point on his work ethic and his ambition—but there was a monstrous quality to Henry Kissinger which you seem to be suggesting comes out in these Kissinger tapes.

22:33 | Tom Wells: Yeah, it does—I mean, the lack of consideration for morality and the human cost of these various—I mean, when they were backing Pakistan who was massacring people in East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh.

22:50 | Tom Wells: They were secretly getting arms to the Pakistani military dictatorship that was committing these atrocities. And this was a horrible genocide in East Pakistan and they were secretly getting weapons against a U.S. arms embargo that was still in place to the Pakistani military dictatorship.

23:09 | Tom Wells: And they partly because they needed Pakistan for their opening to China because Pakistan was a channel to China when they were developing relationship with China. But that's how he looked at it—the opening to China was much more important to him than the fact that all these people were getting slaughtered.

23:28 | Andrew Keen: Right, and just to remind people in this Bangladesh genocide, there were—I mean, at least according to Wikipedia, somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million Bengalis were killed, including raping somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women. So these are terrible numbers.

23:49 | Andrew Keen: Tom, Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the banality of evil when she was covering the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in the early '60s. Some people have connected Arendt's work on the banality of evil with the behavior of senior bureaucrats or politicians like Kissinger. What's your take? Is there something banal and whether we should even use the E-word with Kissinger? Was he evil?

24:20 | Tom Wells: I think they get used to carrying out these policies and looking the other way when it comes to the human toll, and I think they almost get immune to it. But I think their goals are just beyond that.

24:34 | Tom Wells: I mean, that's not what they're focused on. They're focusing about foreign policy victories and public opinion victories and advancing American interests in the world and American standing and limiting Soviet influence.

24:47 | Tom Wells: And that's far more important to these guys than how many people are dying in Vietnam and how many people are dying in East Pakistan and other places. That's just not how they look at it. They don't look at it that way.

25:00 | Andrew Keen: No, I take your point, but is there an equivalent with Kissinger in turning a blind eye to the murder of millions?

25:10 | Tom Wells: Well, I think he did turn a blind eye to a lot of the killing around the world.

25:15 | Andrew Keen: So what do the Kissinger tapes—what do they tell us about America in the 2020s? I mean, at some point maybe someone will come out with the Trump tapes or the Trump files; we'll know more and more about what Donald Trump has said. Are there warnings about America in the 2020s—invasion of Venezuela brewing, war with Iran and Cuba? What does reading the Kissinger tapes inform us about the America of the mid-2020s, America in early 2026?

25:52 | Tom Wells: Well, I think one of the things that they would tell you is you can't—that these people are not necessarily telling you the truth and they might be saying something totally different in their discussions behind closed doors about why they're doing certain things and what they might do and what their goals are.

26:12 | Tom Wells: I mean, for example, during the invasion of Laos in 1971, the public line was that things are going well and the South Vietnamese are making advances and they're capturing all this enemy supplies that are coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

26:27 | Tom Wells: Whereas in private, they're wringing their hands over what a disaster the invasion is and why the South Vietnamese are retreating and actually running away as opposed to staying on the offensive. And they're really concerned about it, and Kissinger's wringing his hands over this, but in public they're talking about the invasion's going well.

26:47 | Tom Wells: So I think one things these inside conversations you learn is that these people are often not telling you the truth.

26:54 | Andrew Keen: I think we would be amazed if Donald Trump was any more truthful than Henry Kissinger. Finally, Tom, I know your book The Kissinger Tapes covers Kissinger's take on the Yom Kippur War. And of course, Israel, Gaza, Palestine is still a huge issue in the world today, as is Russia and Ukraine. Any sense from reading the Kissinger tapes what Kissinger himself would make of the current situation either in Ukraine or Gaza?

27:31 | Tom Wells: Well, I'm not sure, but I think that he'd be very much—given his focus on limiting Soviet influence in the world—and I don't know what his position on this stuff was before he died, but I would think he'd look at Ukraine as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

27:54 | Andrew Keen: Well, it's not the Soviet Union anymore. Was he just fearful of the Russians as opposed to the Soviets?

28:02 | Tom Wells: No, he was fearful of the Soviets. He looked at Soviet Union as a rival in the world and he wanted to limit their influence.

28:13 | Andrew Keen: So my question is, as Russia is a kind of rival to the U.S. today, in a way—although it's probably not its principal rival, China of course more so, particularly over Taiwan—do you think that the Kissinger doctrine, if Kissinger was around today, what would he make of Russia's invasion of Ukraine from America's point of view, or for that matter the growing threat of war in the South China Sea over Taiwan?

28:44 | Tom Wells: I think he'd be both trying to restrain Russia and be trying to restrain China while at the same time trying to develop good relationships with them.

28:55 | Andrew Keen: Tom Wells, the author of The Kissinger Tapes, an important new book out: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations, which reveals Henry Kissinger's hard-working, ambitious, callous, and dishonest—is that a fair generalization, Tom?

29:16 | Tom Wells: I think that'd be a fair synopsis.

29:18 | Andrew Keen: Well, thank you so much, and congratulations. It's an important book, an important contribution. The more we can know about Kissinger, I think the more clarity we can bring to a particularly turbulent period in American history. Thank you so much.

29:34 | Tom Wells: Yeah, thanks for having me on, I appreciate it.

29:39 | Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We’re on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the places. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.