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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
When it comes to heads of state and government like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, there’s nothing new under the sun.
Unfortunately, the sun doesn’t shine often enough to reveal what they say in secret so that this can be compared with what they are saying in public at the same time; and in order for the record they are making to be measured against the records of their predecessors and successors.
That sun can shine on the future if it exposes enough of the past. When White House and presidential documents from the past are declassified and published years after they were filed, they reveal a great deal about truth-telling (that’s called history); about the character of the individuals (psychopathology); about calculated and miscalculated deception (war).
From the release of White House records on private meetings and telephone conversations over the past decade, much has been learned from Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin out of their own mouths – which the Kremlin continues to keep shut. For example, here are some of the records on Yeltsin [3] (2016) and two years later in 2018 [4]. The records of Putin speaking in secret with President George Bush can be read here [5] (2025) and here [6] (2026)
For much longer the sun has been shining on Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. However, because Kissinger managed to stay alive for so long, public release of the tape-recordings he made himself of his telephone calls with Nixon, as well as with other White House and administration officials has been delayed until now. Tom Wells [7], an American historian, has just published the book, The Kissinger Tapes — Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations [8]. The records start in January 1969 and end in August 1974. The new book leaves out Kissinger’s secret tapes of his time in the Gerald Ford Administration, 1974-77.
Wells introduces his record with the story of how Kissinger cleaned and changed the transcripts of what he had said, and also prevented the release of the sanitized version while he remained alive; he died on November 29, 2023. There are about 15,000 telephone records and 20,000 pages of transcript for the Nixon period.
For the first time this archive allows comparisons between the Kissinger-Nixon record and the record which President Donald Trump is making today. From this comparison, it is possible, as never before, to show that Trump’s foul mouth is no fouler than Nixon’s and Kissinger’s mouths were. “Bullshit” was the Nixon-Kissinger preference; it was recorded thirteen times. On February 5, 1972, for example, when Nixon was anxious that his orders for bombing North Vietnam were not being implemented, “bullshit” was his way of emphasizing that he wouldn’t brook delay at the Pentagon. “Give him [US Army Chief of Staff, General Creighton Abrams] this responsibility to see that carriers are moving and the [B-]52s are moving. I don’t want any bullshit…I want the air force and navy to follow this without compromise. I want them to hit everything in the B-3 area [Central Highlands of South Vietnam] or northern part of the DMZ…Knock the hell out of them. One of the problems before was that they never concentrated on anything.”
“Shit” was less popular; used four times by Nixon, three times by Kissinger referring to people they disliked. “Fuck” was used three times by Kissinger, once by Nixon. “Prick” was used once in five years – in Nixon’s hearing by his friend and lawyer, Leonard Garment. The two of them meant it about the Republican Senator, Lowell Weicker.
Trump has made his swear words public to appeal to US voters; Nixon and Kissinger kept theirs a state secret. The difference isn’t between them; it’s between the way the American public and media interpreted the expletives then and interpret them now.
It is also revealed for the first time that a half-century ago, the White House believed there was an exceptional “fondness” for the Jews inside the Kremlin just as the Trump White House knows it of Putin today. Then Leonid Brezhnev was sitting in the General Secretary’s seat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. “Hebrew”, Kissinger was saying on the telephone on June 11, 1973 — “I think he [Brezhnev] would love, particularly given the Russian fondness with Jews.”
Kissinger was speaking at the time with the chief executive of Paramount Pictures about the dubbing of films Kissinger was requesting for the entertainment of Brezhnev when he arrived in Washington for a state visit. On paper and in retrospect today, this comment may be interpreted as sarcasm, meaning the reverse. The telephone record of 53 years ago suggests not. In the Trump White House there is no secret of their confidence [9] in, and no sarcasm about Putin’s fondness for the Jews.
Then there was Nixon’s love of bombing as “real American”, according to Kissinger’s record, which he expressed just as enthusiastically as Trump’s bombing of Iran has been proclaimed to Make American Great Again. In Kissinger’s recording of his telephone call with Nixon on March 26, 1970, the President was asking Kissinger to confirm that the bombing he had ordered of anti-aircraft missile battery sites in North Vietnam had been carried out, along with “tak[ing] out those troops coming through the SAM sites”. Kissinger replied: “That’s done…That’s also done”.
Nixon had his 20-year old daughter Julie with him by the telephone, so he told Kissinger he was putting her on:
[10]In the tape-recordings of Kissinger’s discussions with Nixon of Israeli and Arab military clashes, there is one big difference from today’s Middle Eastern warfighting in the Trump White House. “I can’t imagine any Arab can survive very long if he has to call upon the Israelis to save him,” then-Secretary of State William Rogers said to Kissinger and Nixon as they were discussing their options to save King Hussein of Jordan from the overthrow plan then under way from Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian forces in the Black September [11] fighting (aka Jordanian Civil War) from September 1970 until July 1971.
The tapes reveal how sycophantic well-known foreign affairs reporters of the time were towards Kissinger at the New York Times, Time magazine, CBS and the Los Angeles Times. Seymour Hersh is revealed in his telephone conversation with Kissinger as expressing his support for Kissinger’s secret wire-tapping practice as well as for some of Nixon’s secret bombing runs in Cambodia.
Listen to the way Hersh spoke with Kissinger on May 15, 1973, advising him sympathetically on how to do a better job of keeping national security operations secret:
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