American Experience

On May 8, 1970, "the Hard Hat Riot" erupted in lower Manhattan. At midday, construction workers, including those building the World Trade Center, violently clashed with students demonstrating against the Vietnam War. It was soon clear that something larger was happening — the workmen, who came to be known as "hardhats," were at the cutting edge of a new kind of class war. With the war in Vietnam raging on, it was the sons of the working class who were doing most of the fighting. Workmen saw the protesting students as privileged "draft dodgers" disparaging the country and those who fought for it. On the other side, many student activists saw the workers as pawns, unwilling to see the changes that America needed. 

Hard Hat Riot tells the story of a struggling metropolis, a flailing president, a divided people, and a bloody juncture when the nation violently diverged ― culminating in a new political and cultural landscape that radically redefined American politics and foreshadowed the future.

Kissinger begins with the devastating childhood experiences that helped forge Henry Kissinger's political philosophy. In August 1938, after Hitler's government had embarked on a campaign to destroy Germany's Jews, Kissinger's family fled to the United States. Their escape came two months before Kristallnacht and the outbreak of violence that would culminate in the murder of six million Jews (and millions of others), including 13 members of Kissinger's extended family, implanting in Kissinger the durable conviction that power was the prerequisite for liberty.  

As a refugee in New York City, Kissinger worked his way up from a job at a shaving brush factory to a stint as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army ferreting out Nazis in post-war Germany. He returned to earn an advanced degree and professorship at Harvard in government, marking the start of a dazzling career. He became an expert on nuclear weapons policy, eventually securing a position as National Security Advisor for President Richard Nixon at the height of the Cold War. He was an unlikely pick — an awkward academic with a thick accent who hired a staff of ideologically diverse young men, including film interviewees Anthony Lake, Winston Lord, Roger Morris, and Morton Halperin. 

Bedeviled by how to end the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the Nixon administration turned to increasingly audacious interventions to force Hanoi to the bargaining table, first secretly bombing, then invading neighboring Cambodia. Pundits debated whether these escalations were brilliant strokes of tactical genius or unconstitutional attacks on a neutral nation. Several Kissinger staffers resigned, and protests erupted across America. Public morale reached a bloody nadir on May 4, 1970, with the shooting of antiwar demonstrators at Kent State.

Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War had shown itself to be a mirage, and body counts kept rising. Only a brave, secret gambit to visit Mao Zedong's China shifted the political conversation. In 1971, Kissinger secretly entered China via Pakistan, clandestinely organizing a summit for President Nixon and stunning the American public.  

The opening to China remade the global chessboard, sidelining the Soviet Union and deep-freezing the Cold War in a new "triangular diplomacy." But Kissinger's policies were often concerned with global stability rather than with human rights. When a genocide erupted in East Pakistan, perpetuated by the same leader who helped Nixon reach China, Kissinger looked the other way. His eyes were on Moscow, where Nixon would soon meet Brezhnev for a series of consequential weapons negotiations. 

Kissinger's policies continued to have far-reaching human implications across the globe. When Chileans democratically elected the socialist Salvador Allende, Kissinger funded an effort to prevent him from reaching office, then directed the CIA to destabilize his government. Allende was deposed in a coup that led to his death; Kissinger embraced the subsequent dictator, Pinochet, reassuring Nixon that America's "hand doesn't show." 

Kissinger managed a final act before leaving the Nixon administration, seizing the opportunity of the Yom Kippur War to push the Soviet Union out of the Middle East and negotiating peace deals between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. On the cover of Newsweek, Kissinger was heralded as "Super-K," the peacemaking celebrity in an administration collapsing beneath Watergate.  

It was the zenith of Kissinger's fame, and his 50 following years out of office were rife with debate. Today, his legacy is still being written.