American Experience

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President-elect Nixon today named Dr. Henry Kissinger,

the German-born Harvard professor,

as his White House policy adviser

on defense and foreign affairs.

In 1968,

when Henry Kissinger was named national security adviser,

he was not at all well-known,

and certainly not as famous or as celebrated

as he would become.

I enthusiastically accept this assignment

and I shall serve the president-elect

with all my energy and dedication.

There was something about him that was different,

like the way he talked.

I have tried to avoid labels

like "hard" and "soft."

Here's this Harvard professor,

kind of a nerd, nerdish guy,

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

I believe that what America does

is of great consequence to the peace of the world

and to the progress of humanity.

He entered the realm of power

and bestrode it as a geopolitical colossus.

He had enormous power,

more power than any unelected official

probably in the history of this country.

And the moments he lashes out most

are the moments he feels powerless.

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

The secrecy, the lying, the denial of reality,

those are all Kissingerian.

I don't think that he had much concern

for the human costs of his actions.

The question about the relationship

of morality to foreign policy

is a very complex one.

I don't think he'd deny

that he overlooked certain human rights.

He would just say,

"There were other factors at stake."

Sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils.

He wasn't trying to win a popularity contest.

He was trying to implement his ideas.

I believe we have an obligation

to prevent the totalitarians

from taking over the world by force.

Yes, he was brilliant.

But in the end, his legacy is about

the number of people--

and we're talking hundreds of thousands--

that died because of the arrogance of his policy.

Nobody before or since

has played such an important role in American foreign policy.

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

Tonight, Henry Kissinger

talks about war and peace

and about his decisions at the height of his powers.

I was brought up in a totalitarian society,

and therefore I had perhaps a better sense

for the fragility of institutions,

and for the potential evil

that can break forth when restraints disappear.

One has to remember that Henry Kissinger

was born at a time

when Germany was in a state

of near-revolutionary upheaval.

In the 1920s,

the economic crisis of hyperinflation

that engulfs Weimar Germany,

combined with the sense of grievance

about the terms imposed on Germany

after the First World War,

generates the rise

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

Heil!

...for whom Jews are the scapegoats.

And the Kissingers, like a lot of German Jews,

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

Heil! CROWD : Heil!

- Heil! - Heil!

- Heil! -Heil!

Fürth in Bavaria had

a significant Jewish population in the 1920s.

Heinz Kissinger is born

into one of the Orthodox families in Fürth,

and grows up in a middle-class Jewish household.

Heinz had two distinctive features:

a brilliant mind and indefatigable energy.

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

he got that endless energy from his mother, Paula.

Their Jewishness is serious--

they're Orthodox, they're kosher--

but in terms of their work and education lives,

they see themselves integrated in German culture.

Despite his later reputation,

he's not a particularly studious child.

His mother complains that him and Walter

are always running away from kindergarten.

He always said that he was

a gregarious, fairly frivolous young man.

And he maintained that he had a rather happy childhood.

But the childhood came to an abrupt end

with the rise of the Nazis.

The Jewish community,

which had been very well integrated

into a fairly liberal and cultured Germany,

suddenly finds itself

the target of the wrath of the German right.

For people like the Kissingers, this is a shock.

There is a deep reluctance

to believe the depth that this depravity can reach.

Kissinger remembered that when he and his brother

would take their bicycles to go visit their grandfather,

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

And Kissinger commented later

about how everything seemed changed.

I was prohibited to go to German schools.

All the German people with whom my parents associated

more or less cut off all contact with us.

:

A policy of segregation for Jewish people was created,

and my father lost his job.

Sieg! CROWD: Heil!

Because Louis is an employee of the German state,

he is sacked,

and it, it devastates him.

He got so much fulfillment

out of his job as a teacher,

and then suddenly he was bereft, he was lost,

and he withdraws in on himself,

and Kissinger feels distanced from his father.

My father was a teacher and not a practical man.

And he was sort of paralyzed

in the face of the evil the Nazis represented.

I can't imagine how destabilizing

and terrifying it must have been for Kissinger to see

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

that a society that was

seemingly so civilized, so refined

could descend into this kind of madness.

There is a sense of a lost world

that he'll never be able to return to.

His childhood featured that profound loss of innocence,

of joy and prosperity

and, and ease.

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

It was the possibility

that what had given you security

could disintegrate.

My mother was extremely practical,

and she decided that they should leave Germany.

My father didn't object.

In 1938, they leave.

They take a couple of trunks

with a few precious personal items,

and then they have to leave everything behind.

The Kissingers left in the nick of time,

just weeks before the huge pogrom

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

[glass shattering, flames crackling]

Mobs across Germany torch Jewish homes,

they attack Jewish people in the streets,

they destroy synagogues.

[people shouting, objects shifting]

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

to the town center.

And they have to stand there and watch

as the synagogue burns to the ground.

The Kissingers are not spared the Holocaust in Germany.

Kissinger loses 13 members of his family in the Holocaust,

and I think for Kissinger, it generated a deep pessimism

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

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

that's going to protect you is power.

There was this cousin of mine who brought us here,

and when we arrived by boat,

as we came down the gangplank,

he said, "Your name now is Henry."

The Kissingers settle in Washington Heights,

which has a large community of German Jews.

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

And they try and build a life

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

They didn't have any money.

My brother and I slept in the living room.

We had no privacy.

But I did not feel that I was suffering.

The challenge, of course, was to arrive

in the United States in the Depression.

That was why Henry Kissinger had to get a job.