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The Trials of Henry Kissinger [VHS]

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When George W. Bush wanted to appoint Henry Kissinger as chairman of the 911 Whitewash comittee, a lot of people stood up and protested over this blatant and arrogant choice of the elite.
After all, Henry Kissinger is the kind of guy who has to check out with his lawyers before he enters a certain country, because there are so many charges against him all over the world.

For those who wonder why, this movie could answer a lot of your questions. You will see what Henry Kissinger has done over the years, his involvement in world politics and the games he played behind the scene.

I remember growing up and having no qualms whatsoever about the greatness of Henry Kissinger. I mean, that's the popular mythology: a brilliant man devotes his life to public service, and helps to forge the tough, realist diplomacy that helped America win the Cold War. But as one gets older, and learns how to learn, the facade of many national myths slides to the floor, and what's left is often cruel and ugly. This film lays bare the disparity between what we want to believe about ourselves, and what is actually true. The brilliant German expatriate diplomat is actually a deluded, homicidal madman, drunk on the hooch of power. Kissinger is the perfect illustration of how secrecy and centralized power are the ultimate evils of a democracy, no matter how sincere the original intent. Buy this DVD, then share it with your friends.

Inspired by Christopher Hitchens' magazine articles and book, THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER is a fascinating indictment of its title character. It's a fairly traditional documentary, following a rough chronology of events and employing a voice over narrator (Brian Cox.)
Understandably enough, Kissinger wanted no part of this project. His chief accusers are a pair of pit bull investigative journalists, Hitchens and Seymour Hersh. To their credit, the filmmakers follow each accusation with either an archived taped response of Kissinger answering the charge in another forum and/or a rebuttal by former aides and associates, including Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft, William Safire and Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson. Indeed, given the high powered wordsmiths in this one it's Haig who delivers the best line when at one point he leans forward in his chair and calls Hitchens a "sewer pipe sucker."
Kissinger's major crimes, the actionable and the other, are all treated here. Included is his duplicitous behavior while negotiating a peace agreement with North Vietnam while a member of President Johnson's negotiating team - Kissinger funneled information to the Nixon campaign, which may well have tipped the close election to our last Quaker president. The complex story of Kissinger's involvement in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia are treated, as is his decision to wiretap his aides, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and finally his involvement in events leading up to overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende.
I wouldn't say THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER is balanced (as director Eugene Jarecki and writer/producer Alex Gibney rightly claim in the "Making Of" special, Kissinger has had 25 years to burnish his image and bury the evidence; this is the other side of the story) nor is it entirely convincing. It deals with issues much too complex to develop in a mere 80 minutes.
I was a little surprised to note that this traditional documentary comes with a commentary track. It's already filled with talking heads and archive images, but I found the commentary just as interesting as the movie. Jarecki and Gibney know their subject and provide many insights into not only the issues involved, but background on material used and rejected.

About 2,500 years ago, a Scythian philosopher, Anarcharis, maintained that "laws were like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong."

The moral question posed in this compelling 80 minute documentary is, 'Are American citizens, and US government officials in particular, exempt from prosecution and trial when charged with crimes against humanity?' The world community, represented by the International Criminal Tribunal, with its uniform definitions and international laws, is clear on what constitutes crimes against humanity. In the wake of the terrible tragedy of September 11, and the war in Iraq against Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime, this question takes on additional importance, and new meaning for Americans. Are we to hold ourselves, and our country's leaders, to a lesser standard than we apply to all other nations? How do government leaders make decisions between power and morality; between national interests and idealism? Is there a middle ground between these choices - a possibility to act morally as a country, while protecting our own national interests? Do war criminals reside only in nations whose interests are unfavorable to our own?

On September 11, 2001, mass murder was committed against innocent US civilians, by a group of terrorists, all belonging to the same organization. The US government, and the international community, has sworn to bring to justice those who conceived, organized and commanded the tragic event, and to destroy their organization.

After WWII, those who committed atrocities against humanity were brought to trial, judged and punished accordingly. In our recent history, Slobodan Milosevic and Augusto Pinochet have been detained, indicted and tried for causing the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children in the name of their nation's welfare. Is the US exempt from investigating its own officials who are accused, with ample evidence, for committing similar acts?

Director Eugene Jarecki's and Producer Alex Gibney's intense BBC production provides evidence in documents, and through expert testimony, sufficient to indict Kissinger on at least four counts of mass murder. Such notables as: Seymour Hersh, author of "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House," William Shawcross, author of "Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia," and Walter Isaacson, Kissinger biographer, provide testimony against the former Secretary of State. Defending Kissinger's actions are Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft, and William Safire. Mr. Kissinger comes to his own defense in newsclips and interviews. He refused to be interviewed for the documentary, however. Christopher Hitchens, a controversial journalist, and author of "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," also speaks his piece here. His book inspired the documentary. Now, I am not a fan of Mr. Hitchens. His writing is incendiary, and he is a harsh, biased critic of Henry Kissinger. However, writing style aside, his information and evidence are accurate, and damning.

The evidence documents that Kissinger undermined President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnamese Paris Peace Talks, prolonging the war for seven more years, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers, innocent Vietnamese civilians, and Cambodian civilians, not to mention the statistics for the dead North and South Vietnamese soldiers, which are not included. He engineered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and continuously mislead and lied to the US Congress. Kissinger approved Indonesian President Suharto's use of U.S. arms to massacre 100,000 East Timorese, many of them innocent civilians. He was very instrumental in planning the military coup that murdered democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, which lead to a reign of terror in Chile for many years. He was responsible for the murder of Rene Schneider, a Chilean military commander, who had sworn an oath to protect and support his president and refused to break it. Schneider's family has initiated a law suit against Mr. Kissinger.

Jarecki had a personal interest in making this film. His father fled Nazi Germany a year after Kissinger's family left. He says, "But while my father took from his experiences in Nazi Germany the idea that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, Kissinger found it necessary to find and then re-seek power."

There is much biographical information included which makes this work a more balanced effort. Narrator Brian Cox does an excellent job. The only thing about the film that I object to is the musical score, which is so repetitious and annoying that it almost drove me crazy. I agree with a speaker at the movie's end who says that whether Henry Kissenger is publically tried or not, he knows what he did, and has to live with his actions, and their consequences, for the rest of his life. Below is a quote from Henry Kissinger:

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." Henry Kissinger, commenting on the US sellout of the Kurds in Iraq in 1975
JANA

I'd read Hitchens' original Harpers essay and the subsequent book, and one won't find a lot of surprises if you're familiar with those. This documentary is a BBC production, sort of triggered by Hitchens' TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER, but it is not necessarily a Hitchens-focused work, although he pops up in it. Thus, this is not a polemic and doesn't pretend to draw final and ultimate conclusions about Kissinger. In one of the extras, the director puts it well, saying they're "making a case for a case" against Kissinger. An indictment, if you will, but not a trial.

Kissinger's early career is only very briefly covered; the producers want very quickly to get us into his machinations during the 1968 Paris peace talks, and the case for Kissinger's manipulation of said talks to affect the outcome of the 1968 election in favor of Nixon. A fascinating interview with a candid Anna Chennault is included. I wish I could have seen the entire interview (Sterling Seagrave's THE SOONG DYNASTY and LORDS OF THE RIM will help give some background on the Chinese right-wingers that ended up in the US). Nixon's backchannel to S. Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu (and LBJ's knowledge of it via the FBI) is now fairly undisputed. Read Larry Berman's scathing and merciless NO PEACE, NO HONOR: NIXON, KISSINGER, AND BETRAYAL IN VIETNAM for an excellent, primary source-based study on this subject (most of the documents are from National Archive and the Ford Library, since Kissinger still has the lock on his files).

The makers here focus on three of Nixon-Ford-Kissingers' Cold War foreign policies: (1) the prolongation and expansion of the Vietnam/Indochina war, (2) the murder of Chile's Gen. Schneider and the subsequent military overthrow of Allende, and (3) the green light to Indonesia's Suharto for the disgusting invasion of East Timor.

Various Kissinger dissimulations on these three areas are rebutted with documentary evidence and interviews with various henchmen, many of whom look fairly haunted and uncomfortable by their roles. The dissembling Alexander Haig is Kissinger's most prominent and outspoken defender, but ends up looking like a deer in the headlights, as he simultaneously defends blatantly illegal policies (murder, congressional limitations on arms, secret bombing, that sort of thing), while attempting to deny they happened (through inept legalistic arguments).

The expansion of the bombing into Cambodia, and the methods for hiding it, is well-explained. Personally, I understand and somewhat agree with Kissinger's calculation in taking the war to Cambodia. The idea of it as a "neutral" country, while the Vietnamese used it to stage attacks on Americans, is ludicrous. And the idea that it expanded the war to a place where it was already being waged from is fatuous as well. HOWEVER! Wholescale bombing of the agrarian population, Industrial Revolution warfare at its worst, is genocidal in its method (and the documentary hints at Kissinger's direct involvement in target selection, which implicates him in intent as well). The makers skillfully illustrate the effect on Cambodia (the mass refugee flight to the cities, political destablization) giving us a view of the Khmer Rouge's rise that has long been obscured by the self-indulgent ravings of Noam Chomsky.

Kissinger's power, in effect, was in riding the top of the vast bureaucratically-minded war machine, from where he was able to unleash massive quantities of power, with no qualitative standards to measure or guage it, and to hold it to account of course (see the excellent recent DVD documentary on Robert S. McNamara, THE FOG OF WAR). Thus, he had the power of a gigantic machine, and no perspective of the nature of the power he wielded beyond the nineteenth century politics he was enamored with. To understand his public ethics, read his first book, A WORLD RESTORED: METTERNICH, CATSTERLEAGH AND THE PROBLEMS OF PEACE 1812-1822, I believe it explains a worldview he's held consistently for decades.

The great problem of Kissinger, though, was his inability to distinguish raison d'etat from his own ambition. That's partailly what leads to the trite formulation that Kissinger sought power for the sake of power. It's a bit more complex than that. Ultimately, at the height of his power, it was not realpolitik that drove his decision-making, but rather narcissism. I think focusing on the difference there is essential to any attempt to make a case for war crimes. While I often agree with the political realist that the capacity to be cruel is often a political necessity to fulfill one's role, there is always a crucial point in time where the despotic character takes over, and its cruelty itself finds itself needing to be sustained, rather than the "legitimate" political goals that cruelty is supposed to serve.

I don't think that Kissinger's viciousness can be rationalized by saying his decisions were a matter of making "hard choices in war time." I'm sure the Nazis, Saddam's regime and every other tyranny used lines like that. Kissinger's positions, like those of other killers, had to do with money and power and an utter disregard for the lives of other people. He also enjoyed the sex that came with his position, stating that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." Like the Bible says, the prostitutes of Babylon will make themselves available to blood-soaked war mongers with plenty of wealth. John Perkins makes a similar point in his book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Men" about the powerful addiction of sex that kept him and others in a profession that was doing incalculable harm to people across the globe.

Ford just died, and amid all the praising of him as a "healer" of this nation, there has been little said about how Ford and Kissinger destroyed another nation, East Timor. "The Trials of Henry Kissinger" includes a section on how our masters of war supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, supplying 90% of the weapons that killed a third of that nation's people. In fact, Ford and Kissinger were clinking champagne glasses with General Suharto the night before Indonesian forces charged into East Timor. Amy Goodman (the host of Democracy Now! radio) was almost beaten to death while she was in East Timor, and appears in this film. More details of the destruction of East Timor can be found in the film "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media."

The "threat of communism" and now the "threat of terrorism" is a convenient cover for the harm America's power elite bring to people throughout the world, including the domestic population. Our nation's aggressors utilize an ounce of truth to extract a pound of deception to deflect attention away from the threat our corporatists pose to the entire global South. The list of our victims, oppressed via our tax dollars and lack of opposition, is long - Guatemala, Vietnam, Iran, Laos, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Haiti, El Salvador, Chile, Angola, and many others. After a while, one would hope we would begin to laugh in disgust when we hear about the threats others pose to us, and instead could look ourselves in the mirror and see the blood on our own hands.
Jarecki has a more recent documentary that explains our pathological violence, it's called "Why We Fight," and includes clips of Eisenhower's famous speech about our military industrial complex.

Maybe an International Criminal Court will bring people like Kissinger to justice some day, and America's "good Germans" will stop making excuses for the barbarity that calls itself "realpolitik."

The narrator of this documentary adopts a tone of unbiased inquiry, stating at the end of it that whether or not Henry K is a war criminal, looking at his record brings up many interesting insights into the perils of power and secrecy in govt. Well the actual evidence presented in this film proves that one has to be pretty irrational, morally dense and worshipful of American state power to deny that Kissinger is a war criminal.

The first issue discussed is Kissinger's direction of the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia. 600,000 Cambodians were slaughtered, the country's economy destroyed, its social infrastructure dismantled. The environment was ripe for the Khmer Rouge to seize the reins of power. The narrator says that the Khmer Rouge killed 3 million people. This is a figure taken from Vietnamese propaganda in the late 70's. It was probably between a million and a million and a half.

The film observes that the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam of December 1972 was completely gratuitous. Many civilians died and were maimed because Kissinger wanted to prove to President Thieu that the United States would be willing to use force to protect him after the agreement with Le Duc Tho that Kissinger had secretly agreed to in October 1972 was put into effect. The film also mentions the 68'Nixon presidential campaign's efforts to encourage President Thieu not to cooperate with American peace negotiations with North Vietnam during the 1968 election season. The film asserts that the Johnson administration's peace plan towards the end of its run was hardly different from the one Kissinger finally accepted five years later. I'm not sure about that.

Too really understand Kissinger's criminality in the war, one should probably be given a much broader history about American involvement including the nature of the regimes we supported in Saigon, and how hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese still are suffering terribly from the effects of our chemical warfare on South Vietnam. This film does not do so obviously because space was short in the film. But the discussion of Cambodia in the film is certainly appreciably superior to the often dishonest and idiotic American norm.

We then move to Kissinger's role in the overthrow of Allende. We hear about the meetings granted to executives of ITT and Coca-Cola to express to Nixon their concerns about the economic nationalist policies of Allende. They were greatly upset about Allende's immediate fulfillment of his campaign pledge to nationalize Chile's copper (a measure which was supported by most Chileans regardless of class. Government run copper firms have been a big part of Chile's economic well being since Pinochet fell). In any case, the viewer is shown CIA cables and transcripts of meetings describing how Kissinger was continuously involved and coordinating with the CIA in plotting Allende's overthrow. A big first incident in this plot was the attempt to neutralize General Rene Schneider, the chief of the Chilean armed forces, who while not apparently enthusiastic about Allende's policies, firmly believed that the Chilean military should respect Allende's election. Kissinger claimed that he called of the entire effort against Allende, including the Schneider sub-plot on October 15th 1970. However the film presents the reader with transcripts from October 15th where Kissinger asked the CIA to continually apprise him on their efforts to destabilize Allende's regime. The military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Santiago and the U.S. ambassador in Chile in 1970 Edward Korry both say in this movie that Kissinger is lying about the alleged 10/15 coup call-off. Schneider was eventually ambushed while in the backseat of a veichle and murdered. The chilean leader of the group conducting the ambush recived a package of rifles from the CIA just before the act and afterwards the CIA sent $35,000 dollars to one of the members of the ambush group. The excuse afterward, repeated in this film by Al Haig is that no CIA individiual is responsible for murder because the action was originally supposed to be a mere kidnapping and the murder was not planned. Apparently the aforementioned military attaché was a key figure for passing CIA money and arms to anti-Allende groups and I think is the same guy from the CNN cold war series declaring that Pinochet's coup was a good thing because Allende's regime was full of bad people.

The last major topic is Kissinger's backing of Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor in December 1975. David Newson, U.S. ambassador to Indonesian in 1975 and Kissinger (speaking on NPR) utter some vague apologies such as there was nothing that the U.S. could do to stop it and Suharto's government was an important ally and guarded important sea lanes and it was the cold war,etc. In response to this the film quotes transcripts of a meeting of Kissinger and his staff eleven days after Indonesia's invasion where he yells at them because they couldn't prevent someone in the department warning congress that U.S. arms export laws were being violated. U.S. military aid provided almost all Indonesia needed to conduct the invasion (and subsequent horrendous occupation). In response to the statement of one of his subordinates that U.S. military aid was supposed to be used only for self-defense he responded "And we can't construe a communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?" The film does not say so but the main nationalist movement dominating East Timor, Fretilin,was probably construed by Kissinger as "communist" on the ground that it appeared to be not 100 percent welcoming to the relentless economic exploitation of its people. The film does not also challenge the statement of ambassador Newson that Kissinger was worried about "Chinese Communist influence" in East Timor. Of course, not that the invasion would be justified if it were true, the evidence for this influence is nill.

It is important to remember that all U.S. administrations since World War II have engaged in very blantant war criminality and international terrorism. One will discover such things if one reads Noam Chomsky who conducts his intellectual inquiries in a manner quite the opposite of the one Mr. Hitchens has been following since 911. There have been plenty of war crimes in this Iraq war that Hitchens has supported. Don't get me started on Hitchens's conduct since 911. However all that does not take away from the fact that Hitchens's book on Kissinger on which this film is based is a very fine piece of work and certainly more comprehensive than this movie.

This is an indictment. You'll have to read Kissinger's memoirs for the defense. I'm not planning on doing that myself, time constraints and other things to do being what they are.

In this 80-minute documentary, director Eugene Jarecki follows the intent of the book by Christopher Hitchens, which was to put Kissinger on trial before a world court with himself as prosecutor. By the way, note the slight, but perhaps significant difference in the title: the book is The Trial [singular] of Henry Kissinger. In a strange way the plural title of this documentary almost suggests The Struggles of Henry Kissinger, which would be irony number one.

I also thought it strange that Jarecki doesn't include Hitchens in the credits. I would say, one wonders why, but I really don't care.

What I care about here is:

First, the incredible irony of Kissinger being a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. But then one recalls that Yasser Arafat also won one of those. Maybe I should win the literary prize for writing this review.

Second, the bizarre irony of Kissinger being a German Jew with relatives who died in the concentration camps becoming a man who ends up regarding his fellow human beings with the same sort of cattle to the slaughter mentality that characterized the Nazis. I think Henry called it "realpolitik."

Third, the slippery irony of Kissinger working for Democrat Lyndon Johnson, liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, and conservative Republican Richard Nixon, while having loyalty only to his own lust to power and his delight in exercising it.

Fourth, the comedic irony that now in the 21st century, decades after the fact, with Kissinger in his eighties, we get a call for a war crimes trial. Is this some kind of joke?

Fifth, the theoretical irony of realizing that it is Kissinger himself who believed that heads of state (and their top lieutenants) operate according to laws different than those imposed on private citizens because people in such elevated positions are often faced with only "a choice of evils," and so inevitably end up doing evil themselves.

Sixth, the media circus irony of Henry Kissinger being thought of as sexy and a Playgirl kind of centerfold because "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," an image that delighted Kissinger who was quoted in the New York Times (Jan 19, 1971) as saying "Power is the great aphrodisiac."

Seventh, the judicial irony of Kissinger being put on trial for war crimes when it was his boss, the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, who had the ultimate responsibility for what happened in, for example, Cambodia.

Finally, it may be a kind of historical irony that it is George W. Bush who is most adamant that the US not give authority to a World Court that might try American government officials.

This is an easy documentary to view, done according to the "Sixty Minutes" formula. We are shown official documents with blacked out lines, archival footage, and interviews with some of the people who are still alive. There's Nixon's one time Chief of Staff Alexander Haig who sticks up for Kissinger (his old boss), but there is also the son of Chilean General Schneider who was assassinated in order to bring the horrific Pinochet to power and to protect American interests. And of course, the documentary reports that the principal indictee himself, Henry Kissinger, refused to be interviewed.

However I think the emphasis in any documentary that covers the material that this one covered should have been on our Cold War foreign policy itself (hardly original or unique to Kissinger), a policy that led the United States to commit and support the most amazing atrocities in the name of anti-communism, atrocities for which we are still paying the cost in world opinion, especially in the Middle East.

I should note that there's something wrong with the DVD in that it gives great close ups of the talking heads, but truncates their names and titles.

I also didn't care much about that.

For decades now, there has been a tug of war between those who advocate 'realpolitik' and others who contend that nation states have the same duties and responsibilities to each other as human beings do in their interpersonal relationships. Perhaps nowhere does the conflict between these two perspectives collide more dramatically than in contemplating Henry Kissinger's role in forming US foreign policy throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s.

Having read the Christopher Hitchens article on which this documentary was based, I was both surprised and pleased to find this a far more nuanced and thoughtful consideration of Kissinger's impact on US foreign policy, one that remained both significant and controversial for many years longer than he actually served in any kind of formal role. The film doesn't duck away from the question of whether Kissinger's strategy of the means -- secret negotiations, covert warfare, etc. -- justified the ends that he felt was the most vital goal of all: protecting the strategic interests of the United States. It's a debate that persists to this day, in the context of the so-called war on terror, and understanding what Kissinger believed to be acceptable in pursuit of a 'higher' objective is informative, regardless of which side of the spectrum the viewer belongs to.

But while Kissinger's defenders can at least find a rationalization (and a long historical tradition) for his geopolitical manoeuverings in Indochina and East Timor, other aspects of Henry Kissinger disclosed in this documentary are far more damning. In his public pronouncements and published writings, Kissinger has taken the moral high ground, claiming that his actions were always motivated by 'the greater good'. The evidence assembled by the filmmakers appears to contradict this outright, particularly with respect to the Vietnam peace accord finally reached in Paris in 1973 -- on terms no better than the US could have secured nearly five years previously. The film demonstrates -- with the help of former Kissinger aides -- that personal ambition played a significant role in Kissinger both undermining the earlier accord and negotiating the second. Moving on to events in Chile, and the coup that deposed democratically-elected president Salvador Allende, the evidence is still more damning: campaign donations from US businesses to the Nixon regime were the motivating force for CIA and other covert involvement in destabilizing Allende's government, with Kissinger clearly feeling the need to protect his own position within that power structure.

I'm not sure that the final word has yet been written about Kissinger -- I await the day when his personal papers will finally be made available to researchers, five years after his death. It would be too simple to dismiss him as purely evil, notwithstanding the fact that had he been a publicly-elected official, he would long since have been called to account by Congress for illegal actions such as the invasion of Cambodia. (One of the most chilling moments in this documentary, to me, was Kissinger's almost Jesuitical defense of those military actions.) Ultimately, Kissinger remains fascinating to many of us not because of his actions -- many politicians in the Bush 2 regime have followed eagerly in his footsteps -- but because of his odd combination of intellectual brilliance and utter indifference to the human consequences of his realpolitik.

The one flaw? This film assembles the evidence against Kissinger and even-handedly gives the man's admirers a chance to defend him. But there is at least one gaping hole: Kissinger's China policy, which, as the film does note, was part of his effort to cope with an inherently unstable bipolar world of two superpowers. The gradual rapprochement between the US and China has had far greater ramifications for the world in which we live than any other of his actions, for better or worse, although it's less dramatic material than the human rights violations that followed the Pinochet regime in Chile or the horrors of the Vietnam War. This would have been a stronger and more complete film had its producers found a way to incorporate the China story into the narrative.

This documentary is a great start for those who don't recall firsthand the events that made Kissinger such a lightning rod for controversy, and who didn't grow up in the geopolitical world that formed his philosophy and policies. Those who did experience the world as Kissinger did are likely to divide into two camps; those who emerged challenging the political system in the 1960s will love it and those who cling to ideals of American exceptionalism will love it. To me, it's simply a fascinating look at one of the most intriguing characters we have had on the public stage in America, and a sharp reminder that while we may deplore the lack of intellect in our leaders, there may be such a thing as too much intellect and not enough heart...

For those looking for more insight into the war in Cambodia, I'd suggest reading Sideshow, Revised Edition: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. Daniel Ellsberg offers an intriguing look at Nixon in his memoirs, including thoughts about the addictive nature of secrecy and power at the highest levels of government: see Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. For a thoughtful look at Kissinger's role in the China rapprochement, see Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World or Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. While many people will automatically turn to Hitchens' lively attack on Kissinger after viewing this documentary, Walter Isaacson's biography remains the one to read for anyone genuinely looking for insight into this enigmatic figure rather than merely confirmation of their own existing beliefs.

If you want to know the real and true history behind major events that changed the world, then you need to watch this DVD. Sometimes you have to go behind the history books they tell you to read in class. Self-education.