Preparation

December 31, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under China, Cold War, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

In his documentary based on his book War of the World, historian Niall Ferguson shows how fastidious attention to detail paid off for RN during his historic trip to China in 1972:

Christmas Coming In From The Cold

December 24, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Afghanistan, Cold War, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, North Korea, Russia, U.S. History, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

On Christmas day 20 years ago, Nicolae Ceausescu – long time dictator of Romania – was, along with his wife Elena, executed by firing squad just days after fleeing Bucharest, while his tyrannical regime unraveled before the eyes of a watching world. His demise and the surrounding events are etched in the memory of those of us who watched it all unfold via various news reports.

The look on the once strong-man’s face as a massive crowd began to boo during a speech on December 21st, was one of the defining moments of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. The scene of his helicopter flying him out of the city and his preoccupation during the interim with looking at his watch (which had been equipped with a tracking device for his security people, the gadget – unbeknownst to him – having been disabled by his captors) – these events moved with breakneck speed two decades ago this week.

And while much of the world rekindled almost forgotten traditions of faith and family, due to fresh-found freedom that Christmas of 1989, many Americans celebrated with televisions left on (volume muted), so as not to miss a story that was so compelling.

The Cold War was, in fact, ending.

It was a fitting season of the year for yet another piece of compelling evidence that the schemes of Marx, Lenin, and so many others, were indeed bankrupt and bore the fruit not of promised utopia, but rather tyrannical horror. One reason for this calendar-driven appropriateness was the irony that so many important Cold War stories had Christmas season components.

The French, following a World War II exile from their imperial hegemony in Indochina, landed there once again just before Christmas in 1945. That didn’t work out so well for them in the long run. Come to think of it, it didn’t help us much either.

Just in time for Christmas in 1968, and as astronauts prepared to send a Biblical message of peace to all of us on “the good earth,” 82 Americans were rejoicing in their freedom, though with bodies still racked by torture-produced pain. They had been “guests” of the “Democratic” People’s Republic of Korea for about 11 months. The men of the USS Pueblo had been taken captive that previous January and were hostages to Cold War politics and diplomacy. I had a conversation a while back with Harry Iredale, whose cover on the Pueblo (an intelligence gathering vessel) was his work as an oceanographer. He talked to me in great detail about the seizure of the ship and their brutal treatment.

On Christmas Eve, 1979, the Soviets invaded a place called Afghanistan, to prop up a faltering Communist regime in that neighboring nation. That didn’t work out for them, either – or again for that matter – for us. Paraphrasing Mark Twain’s quote, history may not repeat itself, but it surely rhymes.

A couple of Christmases later, in 1981, the Polish government was enforcing martial law, trying to break the back of something called Solidarity. That movement was reminiscent of what had happened in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and with the same result – a Soviet inspired crackdown. But there was something different about what was going on in Poland. Maybe, many thought, this was the beginning of something bigger, something that might morph into real freedom.

Eight years later, the Romanian despot was dead, the Berlin Wall was becoming a lengthy pile of stone-pocked dust, and the Soviet system was on the ropes, first trying to reinvent itself; then conceding defeat with barely a whimper. And on Christmas Day in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR, and the hammer and sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time.

Yes, there are a lot of Cold War stories that coincide with the season that speaks of peace on earth and good will toward men.

This Christmas there is another such story. Though the Cold War is now a too-distant memory in light of all that has transpired since in our ever-dangerous world, there is a vital effort underway to ensure that the period from 1945-1991 is never ignominiously relegated to the ash heap of history.

The Cold War Museum began many years ago with the vision of Gary Powers. You might recognize him through his full name: Francis Gary Powers, Jr. Of course, students of the Cold War, and certainly anyone who lived through it, remember that Gary’s father, Francis Gary Powers, was flying one of our U-2 Spy planes on May 1, 1960, only to be shot down over Soviet territory. He became a prisoner, sometimes pawn, and an iconic and brave figure from that era.

In a day and age when most Americans would think of U-2 as referring to an Irish rock band, there was a time when the men who piloted those magnificent planes played a vital role in national and international security. For example, we would have found out far too late in the game about missiles in Cuba in 1962, without the reconnaissance photos taken from a U-2 aircraft.

Founded in 1996, the Cold War Museum is a very real memorial to honor Cold War Veterans and preserve the period’s history. For years, a mobile exhibit has traveled around the country and world displaying historical artifacts (more than $3,000,000 worth), including some from the Berlin Airlift, U-2 Incident, Cuban Missile Crisis, USS Liberty, USS Pueblo, and Space Race. In addition, the museum has over $500,000 worth of Soviet, East German, and former Eastern Bloc flags, banners, and uniforms.

After many years of tireless effort and various offers and negotiations, Powers recently announced the acquisition of a permanent home for the Cold War Museum at Vint Hill in Northern Virginia. The significance of this site selection was highlighted by Mr. Edwin “Ike” Broaddus, Chairman for Vint Hill Economic Development Authority:

We are pleased to offer The Cold War Museum a home. It is highly appropriate for the museum to locate at Vint Hill, the former Vint Hill Farms Station used during the Cold War, by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the US Army to safeguard the United States against a surprise nuclear attack.

Vint Hill is part of The Journey Through Hallowed Ground national heritage area and in close proximity to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, the National Museum of the Marine Corps and the historic towns of Leesburg, Manassas and Warrenton, Virginia, existing major tourist destinations.

The Cold War Museum is a 501c3 charity, a Smithsonian affiliate, and worthy recipient of any support the public may be inclined to offer during this season of giving. This new home for the museum is, indeed, a Christmas gift to our nation’s efforts to remind and remember.

The museum’s board of directors includes some storied names reminiscent of that period in history, for example: Sergei Khrushchev (son of Nikita Krushchev), David Eisenhower (grandson of the 34th President of the United States and son in law of the 37th President), and Thomas C. Reed (Former Secretary of the Air Force).

As for Gary, he has interesting plans for 2010, involving a trip to Russia marking the 50th anniversary of the shooting down of his father’s plane. In fact, he is organizing a tour for those who might be interested (May 1-9, 2010), complete with a visit to the prison where his father (who died in 1977) was held for 21 months until his release in exchange for Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel.

As for the end of 2009, it is worthy of note that this has also been the 60th anniversary of the writing of 1984, by George Orwell, as well as the 25th anniversary of the year in the once-ominous title, one that was supposed to be synonymous with totalitarian, “Big-Brother-is-watching” government.

Setting The Record Straight

November 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Cold War, History, International Affairs, News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 2 Comments 

Last month the International Republican Institute honored Henry Kissinger with its 2009 Freedom award in recognition of his contribution to the security and progress of the United States.  HAK was introduced by his old friend Senator John McCain, and his former associate and fellow Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

HAK was interviewed by historian Niall Ferguson, a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and currently the holder of professorial chairs at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School.

After the presentation of the Award, HAK sat down for a conversation with writer and historian Niall Ferguson.  As an opener, Professor Ferguson asked if there is any historical parallel between our experiences in Afghanistan today and Vietnam back in the day.  HAK’s reply was concise and memorable:

First of all, I have a perception of Vietnam which is not the majority media perception of Vietnam.

I think in essence we defeated ourselves.  Vietnam was a problem of the American soul and not of the American performance.

And until we accept this we are not going to learn the lessons of the period.

We entered a war with decent motives and attempted to pursue it by judgments that turned out to be not applicable to the situation because they were drawn from a European experience.

And when I say “we” I mean the Kennedy and Johnson administration.

President Nixon attempted to disengage us from that war. And, while he is accused today of having prolonged the war, the only decision he made that prolonged the war was his refusal of the communist demand that, at the beginning of the peacemaking process, we had to replace the Government of Vietnam with a communist-dominated government, and after which we would have to withdraw our troops under fire.

Those two conditions he refused, and if that is prolonging the war, we would do it again.

The whole program, as broadcast by C-SPAN, concluding with the Kissinger-Ferguson conversation, can be seen here.

HAK at the IRI dinner, chatting with Gen. Brent Scowcroft, his erstwhile assistant and subsequent successor as National Security Adviser.

Will Mr. Obama Seize His Big Mac Moment?

November 27, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Afghanistan, American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, George W. Bush, History, Military, National Security, Obama administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 3 Comments 

This Tuesday, Barack Obama will travel to the United States Military Academy at West Point to deliver the most important address of his young presidency. He has obviously chosen the site for the speech with great care and in the hope that the backdrop – a storied scene on the Hudson – will engender an image of him as a strong and effective commander in chief.

It is probably a smart move, but one not without a measure of risk.

The President of the United States will be treated with respect and be received enthusiastically – all very appropriate and quintessentially American. But when the fanfare fades and the applause lines become fewer, he will have the tough job of articulating a compelling vision for the future of a war that has lost its name, if not its way.

Though Mr. Obama’s White House predecessor spoke at West Point twice – once in each term – not all presidents make this trip. Eisenhower, one of the two graduates of the academy who went on to become Commander in Chief (the other being fellow Republican, Ulysses S. Grant), never made a major speech there during his two terms as president. And his predecessor, the man from Missouri, avoided the place like the plague. President Truman saw West Point as a breeding ground for “stuffed shirts” – and at any rate, his firing of the academy’s former commandant – Douglas MacArthur – probably kept the presidential welcome mat in storage in the basement of the Thayer Hotel.

As Mr. Obama’s team prepares for this important speech, I wonder if the wordsmiths are taking time to consult the history of what has been said there by other presidents and prominent Americans?

Franklin Roosevelt gave the commencement address in 1939 to graduates who would soon be in harm’s way in Europe and the Pacific. He told that class:

During recent months international political considerations have required still greater emphasis upon the vitalization of our defense, for we have had dramatic illustrations of the fate of undefended nations. I hardly need to be more specific than that. Recent conflicts in Europe, the Far East and Africa bear witness to the fact that the individual soldier remains still the controlling factor.

However, when John F. Kennedy spoke to another graduating class on June 6, 1962 (inexplicably, for a president who prided himself on his sense of history, never mentioning that date as the 18th anniversary of D-Day), he shared a vision about changes in warfare, telling his honorable audience:

Your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces, but in less traditional roles. Men risking their lives, not as combatants, but as instructors or advisers, or as symbols of our Nation’s commitments.

He, though, never lived to see how quickly “instructors or advisors” would become “combatants.”

The most recent president to make a major speech at West Point was George W. Bush, a man who usually does not fare well in the eloquence department, especially when compared to President Obama. Yet, what he had to say back in 2002 should be reviewed, not only by White House speechwriters, but also by all Americans – because the words still ring true:

Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.

America confronted imperial communism in many different ways – diplomatic, economic, and military. Yet moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause.

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem – we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.

However, if I were on Mr. Obama’s speech writing team (corpulent opportunity), I would spend some time going over another famous speech made at West Point. It just may be the most relevant to current realities, not to mention one that we all need to hear again.

The date was May 12, 1962 and the speaker was retired General Douglas MacArthur. The Old Man was 82 years of age and his frail movements reflected it. But there was a spark of eloquence left in him; one that he fanned that day into a brilliant rhetorical flame.

When I watch Mr. Obama’s speech this Tuesday, it will be Big Mac’s speech that I use as the gold standard reference point. Here are some excerpts. The words speak for themselves:

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.

Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.

The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.

11.19.69

November 19, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Asia, Cold War, History, International Affairs, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Forty years ago, on 19 November 1969, RN welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato to the White House at the beginning of what would be a significant few days in the history of US-Japanese relations. Typically, the meeting was the result of long planning and negotiations; and, while there was room for spontaneity in the dealings between the two leaders and the two delegations, the general outline of the trip’s results were known before the Prime Minister’s limousine pulled up to the South Portico.

POTUS and Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato review an honor guard during the arrival ceremony at the White House on 19 November 1969.

The twenty-seven year occupation of the island of Okinawa, and the presence of American nuclear weapons on it,  had been an issue bedeviling relations between the two nations for some time.  As the Japanese economy began to revive and flourish, the desire to shake off American what was increasingly seen as an American yoke became focused on the island.  Such sentiment was easily provoked by left-wing parties and politicians, and Sato’s Liberal Democratic Party increasingly felt that its survival could depend on some kind of Okinawa settlement.

But the LBJ White House, State Department, and Defense Department, while turning over the Bonin Islands as a token of bona fides, were unable to do more than promise to study the reversion of the Ruyuku Islands of which Okinawa was a part.

“Moving from one’s position now is filled with difficulties”: A Christian Science Monitor cartoon depicted the US-Okinawa negotiations during the Johnson Administration.

In his seminal “Asia After Vietnam,” article in the Fall ‘67 edition of Foreign Affairs, RN mentioned Okinawa as a problem that would have to be addressed.  From his first days in the White House, in order to clear the diplomatic decks in order to prepare for an approach to China, he moved the resolution of the Okinawa issue to a front burner.  By the end of April, he had decided that Okinawa would be returned if the Japanese government guaranteed approval for US forces to remain based there and would undertake to carry out regional defense.

19 November 1969: RN in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Sato.  RN said that these three days of White House meetings “will probably be the most successful talks that have been held between our two governments.”

In one of the most egregious leaks of national security documents that plagued the administration’s first year, on 5 June, Hedrick Smith of The New York Times reported on a leaked Top Secret NSC document — NSDM-13: Policy Toward Japan — that gave away the ultimate US negotiating positions for the upcoming talks with Japan:

With respect to Okinawa, the President has directed that a strategy paper be prepared by the East Asia Interdepartmental Group under the supervision of the Under Secretaries Committee for negotiations with the Japanese Government over the next few months on the basis of the following elements:

1. Our willingness to agree to reversion in 1972 provided there is agreement in 1969 on essential elements governing U.S. military use and provided detailed negotiations are completed at that time.

2. Our desire for maximum free conventional use of the mlitary bases, particularly with respect to Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.

3. Our desire to retain nuclear weapons on Okinawa but indicating that the President is prepared to consider, at the final stages of negotiation, the withdrawal of the weapons while retaining emergency storage and transit rights, if other elements of the Okinawan agreement are satisfactory.

Two career diplomats —U. Alexis Johnson at  the State Department and Ambassador Armin Meyer in Tokyo— played important parts in working out the details of the agreement that would be signed at the White House in November.

Foreign Minister Kiichi Aichi had sworn off smoking as long as Okinawa wasn’t under Japanese control.  As Secretary of State Bill Rogers and Prime Minister Sato watched, RN gave the Foreign Minister a pack of Japanese cigarettes to celebrate the agreement.

A fifteen-point joint communique covering the matters of mutual interest discussed during Prime Minister Sato’s visit was issued on 21 November at the conclusion of the visit (Points 6-15 dealt with Okinawa).

In the Rose Garden: On Prime Minister Sato’s last day in Washington —21 November 1969— RN announced plans for the return of the Ryukyu Islands —including Okinawa— to Japan.  The reversion took place on 15 May 1972.

In an extensive and fascinating 1996 oral history interview, US Ambassador to Japan Armin Meyer described a conversation with RN shortly after the above photo was taken:

While I’m thinking of it, one thing that always affected me, was on that very first November day, when we, when Nixon and Sato, concluded that treaty, that statement that was issued, communiqué, which we had spent three months drafting, because that was the heart of the whole Okinawa negotiations, Nixon and I walked Sato back to his car and on the way back Nixon told me… I mean he never saw ambassadors the way earlier presidents had, he just didn’t have time for them, but there was one brief period there when he and I were chatting and he said… “You know our job is to keep the LDP in power, that’s your job, to keep the LDP in power.” And that was really what was moving him on going ahead with Okinawa, on going ahead… because he realized that the election was coming up, that the treaty arrangement was up in another year, and so on. Well, as I mentioned, I went down to Okinawa three days after I presented my credentials, looked around, came back, and wrote a telegram that said, “as Okinawa goes, so goes Japan.” It was preaching to the converted, obviously, because Nixon was way ahead of me on it, but it helped a lot. In that connection, I might say, that among the non-converted, usually, were the military. One time when I came back, one early time, I remember Henry saying, “now Armin, don’t you dare talk to the military, they’re my people, I don’t want you talking to them.” Because he was keeping them in line on this whole Japan policy.

At the Rose Garden farewell ceremony on the last day of the Prime Minister’s visit —21 November— the President said:

There have been many meetings between the heads of government of Japan and the United States over the past 25 years. I am confident that history will record that this is the most significant meeting that has occurred since the end of World War II.

It is customary on such occasions to say that a new era begins in the relations between the two countries involved. I believe today, however, that there is no question that this is a statement of the fact that a new era begins between the United States and Japan, in our relations not only bilaterally in the Pacific but in the world.

As the joint communiquй which will be issued at 11:30 indicates, we have resolved the last major issue which came out of World War II, the Okinawa problem. And further, we have made significant progress in the resolution of other bilateral issues in the economic field, as well as in the field of investment and trade, not only between our two countries, but in the Asian area.

The Fertile Crescent

November 13, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Ethics, Faith, History, Islam, Islam and the West, Military, National Security, Religion, Terrorism, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

Every time I read, view, or hear the latest attempt to portray Nidal Malik Hasan as a “loner” or “victim of racism” or “psychotic” – or (this may be my favorite) someone suffering from something called “PRE-traumatic stress disorder,” I am torn between the desire to scream or laugh. My internal conflict increases when I hear Chicago Mayor Daley suggest the problem is that Americans love guns too much.

And then there’s the granddaddy of all recent rhetorical absurdities when Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey uttered the incredibly clueless thought: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

Can someone explain to me how the death of 14 (one of the victims was pregnant) can be trumped by the importance of a particular political agenda? The General should include a very real apology in his resignation letter.

It would be funny if not for the fact that it is all so dangerously sad. As I take it all in, it’s like the ghost of Groucho Marx is sitting on one of my shoulders making me smile at the outrageousness of such comments with his famous, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your own eyes?” This is all balanced by the difficult to ignore presence of the ghost of Gen. George S. Patton, who sits on the other shoulder and regularly fills that ear (this would be the right ear, by the way – in every sense of that word) with words I am not completely able to translate in this column.

Psychologists use the term “denial” to describe a way some people interpret reality. This manifests itself in denying something ever actually happened, or that it happened but it wasn’t to big of a deal (the “isolated event” approach), or even in something called “projection” which admits that something has indeed happened, but deflects blame and responsibility. We are a nation in official and pervasive denial.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis (c. 1962), if an American soldier would have opened fire on his comrades while wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt and yelling, “Long Live Lenin, Khruschev, and Castro,” it is doubtful that the guy’s communist sympathies would have been dismissed as irrelevant and peripheral. The commies were the enemy. And, if an investigation into his background would have yielded clues to his political feelings and fanaticism, there is no doubt that the case would have been a slam-dunk. And those who should have picked up on his radicalism before the awful fact would have been held accountable.

In fact, if some white-hooded fool were to open fire on a group today in the name of a fiery cross and a virulent racist perversion of certain passages in the Christian Bible, it is unlikely that such a terrorist would have any apologists reluctant to tie what he did to what he believed. Religious violence, be it of the cross or crescent, is always worthy of condemnation and contempt.

But when it comes to Islamism, the various contortions some use to distance what a Jihadist did from the ideology that so-obviously informed his actions are very difficult to watch.

Of course, I very much understand the complexities of this issue. We are a free society and among the most precious of those freedoms is that of religion. But as with another vital right – the freedom of speech – there are clear limits. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. And religious liberty notwithstanding, you cannot advocate the violent overturning of our constitutional way of life in this country in the name of any God.

Anyone, therefore, who embraces Sharia law and believes that it should become the code of a new America, should be disqualified from serving in the military. At any rate – how can they really take the required oath? Clearly one day long ago, the Fort Hood terrorist said:

I, Nidal Malik Hasan, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

We are told “officially” that there are 3,572 Muslims in our military ranks. Although it’s interesting to note that The American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council has that number much higher, in fact, four times higher – at more than 15,000. What do they know that those in the barracks don’t?

Some might want to counter that bad things have been done – violently so – in this country and the world throughout history, in the name of my religion – Christianity. And, sadly, I must confess that this has been the case, on occasion. But it has never been the norm. And those who do such stuff certainly don’t get their instructions from Christian doctrine.

To get from the teachings of Jesus to murderous evil requires a tortured, twisted, ignorant, and monumentally long journey. Yes, people have done bad things in Christ’s name – but in doing so they have, in effect, denied him.

Some ideologies, however, are much more friendly to the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. For example, when it comes to economic theory, you are hard pressed to find any possible pathway from Milton Friedman’s monetary ideas to killing a bunch of people. On the other hand, when you take a look at the writings of Karl Marx (no relation to Groucho), history has shown that the distance from theory to bloodshed is not all that far. In fact, Marxism and violence are close cousins because you really have to force people to turn from self-interest – all for their own good, of course.

The thing that too many in our nation are simply ignoring is that when it comes to Islam, as opposed to any other religious idea extant, the journey from ideology to what happened at Fort Hood is also not a very long one. For any Christian to become so radicalized as to open fire people in the name of his or her religion would require a virtual repudiation of the faith. Could it happen? Sure – anything can happen. And if it did, the mainstream media in this country would have no qualms about wrapping the deed around the doctrine.

But the quantifiable fact is that such things really don’t happen with Christians the way they do with Muslims. And even when certain violent acts by professed Christians, such as the killing of a doctor who has performed abortions, make the news, usually among the first and loudest expressions of condemnation and outrage are from Christians.

Does anyone hear all that many Muslim voices condemning Hasan?

Much has been made of the fact that the Fort Hood Jihadist/Terrorist was harassed for his beliefs. First, let me be clear – I think it is wrong, un-American, and certainly un-Christian to at all persecute someone for what is believed and practiced in the context of our Constitutional freedoms. And when it comes to Christians – who have known the pain of persecution throughout the centuries – there is no Biblical mandate for a follower of Jesus to ever persecute another human being. If fact, in our way of thinking, and from the wonderful Jewish scriptures that inform our faith, we are ever admonished to love neighbor as self.

The Christian response to persecution is never to be that of reactive violence. The Apostle Peter gave instruction near the end of his life on this matter:

Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. ‘Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened.’ But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. – I Peter 3:13-16 (NIV)

Gentleness, respect, hope, and love – these are the watchwords of the follower of Jesus. But there is no “turn the other cheek” stuff in Islam. And at some point people in this country need to stop ignoring the obvious.

So I respect my Muslim neighbors and want them to be treated justly. This means, when there is peace, community, love of law, love of country, all will be well. And when these values are violently violated there must be justice of another kind – to punish evil, especially the egregious wickedness of terrorist murder.

But I also, taking another cue from Jesus, must be “wise as a serpent,” and this means I need to be aware that certain ideologies are more fertile when it comes to hate and violence. And, like it or not, they – and those who espouse such teachings – need to be watched very carefully.

Too many people have been looking the other way in America. It’s time to focus.

The November Chronicles

November 6, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, Europe, History, International Affairs, Iran, Islam, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

Mark Twain often suggested that history doesn’t always repeat itself, “but it does rhyme.” This chronological cadence is particularly true when you note some of the key events in the past century that happened in early November.

November 7, 1917 was when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, unleashing a still too-often ignored and dismissed era of tyranny and terror (the idea of an “October Revolution” has to do with the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars). Long since discredited by the verdict of history, the ideas that formed the basis of what Ronald Reagan aptly called an “evil empire,” have found new adherents – some in high places in our land. But ignorant neo-Marxists in our midst notwithstanding, the reality of what took place under the czars-of-all-things-Soviet for more than seven decades was horrifying.

Much is rightly made of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in Germany and we are regularly reminded that we must never forget. I agree. But while remembering all the depravity wrought by Hitler and his henchman, why do Communist leaders and regimes so often get a pass these days? Even by conservative accounts, more than 100 million people died via Communist oppression. Yet some apparently feel that the ideas behind the system are somehow still valid. Really?

Fast forward to November 4, 1956, and see Soviet tanks penetrating the Pest side of the Danube in Budapest, Hungary, in their offensive to put down a nationwide revolt against the so-called Peoples Republic of Hungary. Brave patriots sought to wrest control of their nation from the grip of Soviet-style Stalinism.

Meanwhile, America stood sadly down. The great General, who had led the allies to victory 11 years before, sent mixed signals. Freedom fighters were emboldened by what we were saying on Radio Free Europe, but the official policy turned out to be nothing more than impotent ambivalence. Within days, the courageous movement was crushed.

Speaking of the 4th day in November and presidential impotence, let us now move ahead to the year 1979 – the moment Iranian “revolutionaries” seized control of our embassy in Tehran, initiating a 444-day Hell for 52 American hostages. This was the moment when many average Americans first came face to face with the ugly egregiousness of Islamism. Jimmy Carter lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in those days, but his presidency would languish due to lack of foresight, insufficient resolve, and malaise-driven methodology.

Exactly one year later – yep, you got it – right smack dab on November 4, 1980, Ronald Wilson Reagan trounced Mr. Carter, who vainly sought re-election, with the networks calling the race even before many Americans had voted. The hostages would thereafter celebrate the very moment of Reagan’s inauguration the following January 20th as their moment of liberation. Clearly, the nuts running the show in Tehran had the requisite lucidity to know that they did not want to deal with the Gipper.

Another November 4th, this one in 1989, saw a crowd of nearly 1,000,000 people cram Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, rallying for freedom. This would lead in less than a week to something for many years thought to be unthinkable – the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. A little more than two years earlier, that same Ronald Reagan had challenged his Soviet counterpart-though-no-real-match, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall.” Those words penetrated hearts, minds, not to mention concrete that day, leading to the barrier’s ultimate demise as a metaphor.

Eventually, we came to yet another November 4th – this one in 2008, with Barack Obama’s election as U.S. President, an event that to many heralded a whole new world to come. But the “change we can believe” soon began to appear more and more like an awkward combination of antiquated socialism and naïve geopolitics. Frank Gaffney, president of The Center for Security Policy in Washington, suggests that the “Obama Doctrine” can be summed up in nine words: “Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country.”

You see, the toxins of Lenin’s bunch in 1917, and those of the gang in Tehran in 1980, share common and deadly DNA. To miss this leads to the very real potential for unparalleled peril.

Once we had leaders who instinctively understood the danger of sinister ideology. Now, all evidence seems to indicate that people in key roles overestimate Marxism and underestimate Islamism. The welfare state, once nearly dismantled after we had apparently learned its dark lessons, is now expanding exponentially once again with a vengeance. Our government preaches stimulation, but practices hegemony. Mr. Reagan always reminded us about the virtue of creating wealth. Mr. Obama seems dead set on redistributing it.

And this Monday, November 9th, on the 20th anniversary of the day Reagan’s instruction about that wicked wall was enthusiastically followed by a Berlin crowd, our new president will be a no-show. He has nothing against speeches in Berlin. Been there; done that. It’s not the venue that makes him uncomfortable. It’s the message.

When the wall came tumbling down, it was the most dramatic demonstration of the inherent bankruptcy of the ideas of Marx in actual practice. Sure, the doctrine promises hope, change, and the idea that human self-interest will one day “wither away,” but it has never really delivered – simply because it can’t. Harvard professor Richard Pipes has suggested the Soviet system collapsed because of “the utopian nature of its objectives.”

And when it comes to Islamism, the continued and persistent minimizing of its threat is not only misguided, it approaches political malpractice. The president, this past November 4th, reached out to Tehran seeking “a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” In response, leaders there vow to continue to show “unquenchable anger against the Great Satan.”

That, by the way, is how a clenched fist responds to an extended hand.

So here we are in another November in time and a 39-year old Army major – a psychiatrist and lifelong Muslim – climbs onto a table crying, “Allahu Akbar,” and opens fire on fellow-soldiers. Many die, while others cling to life. But will anything be learned?

It seems that the history of the past 100 years has been, in many ways, a battle of Novembers. At times, tyranny has temporarily triumphed; at other times freedom’s flag has flown. Yes, Mark Twain said that history could rhyme. But often these rhymes – so simple and clear – come across as riddles to those who are apparently determined to miss the obvious.

Russians Reject Our Reset Button In Favor Of Theirs

October 16, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, History, U.S. History, Vice President Biden | 2 Comments 

U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got a lesson in geopolitics this past week. It may be best described by comparing the now-all-rage reset button metaphor to that gizmo put out by office supply giant, Staples – yes, that red button that when pushed says, “That was easy!”

From the moment the use of the term “reset” as a synonym for do-over, start-over, or make-over, entered the political vocabulary – inserted by none other than that wonderful wordsmith, Vice President Joe Biden – it has been applied foremost to our relationship with Russia. But as a recent, likely very reluctantly chosen, headline in the Washington Post indicated, a reset button can often create an error message.

“Russia Not Budging on Iran Sanctions: Clinton Unable to Sway Counterpart,” was how the largely pro-administration paper put it.

This past week, while my wife and I were enjoying a few days in Maine, she went shopping for things for the grandkids and I, as is my very predictable pattern, gravitated toward the local bookstore, this one a newly constructed establishment in Kennebunkport. Among my catch for the day was an interesting and well-written work by Nicholas Thompson, who has, in fact, written for the Washington Post, about two men who greatly influenced U.S. policy during The Cold War – George Kennan and Paul Nitze. The author is actually the grandson of the latter. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, is a great read describing two giants who maintained an uneasy friendship, while usually working on opposite sides of the foreign affairs street.

Early in the book, there is a passage about a memo written by George Kennan in May of 1945. The diplomat was living and working in Moscow when the war in Europe ended. Most Cold War buffs, such as myself, know very well of Kennan’s memo writing skills. His February 1946 “long telegram” is considered to be one of the seminal documents of the period, in which he described the Soviet Union’s “neurotic view of world affairs” and the “instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” not to mention their, “secretiveness and conspiracy.”

But the memo written roughly 10 months earlier, though largely overlooked at the time due to his relatively insignificant role as “nothing more than a highly competent clerk,” is one that all the reset button aficionados in the State Department and elsewhere should revisit right about now.

Kennan began with the quaint, “Peace, like spring, has finally come to Russia,” but the reader is quickly confronted with the fact that the change of seasons was “far more noticeable on the Moscow scene.” And in language similar to what he would use in 1946, he bluntly acknowledged that Joseph Stalin knew just what buttons to push to get the United States to do his bidding. The Russians were already manipulating reality and events and had been all along. Kennan wrote: “They observe with gratification that in this way a great people can be led, like an ever-hopeful suitor, to perform one act of ingratiation after the other without ever reaching the goal which would satisfy its ardor and allay its generosity.”

In case some haven’t noticed, all this talk about the United States pushing the reset button is meaningless because the Russians have long since pushed theirs. And it took them back about 65 years.

Jesus told some of his disciples of the need to be at times “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” This kind of clear-headed approach balances good intentions with a realistic view of the fact that others may not be operating from similar motives. You can almost see the image of Gorbachev rolling his eyes about now, as he stood next to Ronald Reagan again and again and heard that phrase, “Trust, but verify.”

By the way, is it just me or has anyone else actually tried to reboot a computer to fix a problem only to have the error right there again on the screen when the machine came back on?

Political reset buttons are, of course, pure contrivance. What some are really longing for is to erase the past eight years – or the past 50. Let’s all go back to August of 2001, or December of 1989, or July of 1941 – wouldn’t that be cool? Sure. It also, though – and please get this – can’t happen. To even try to do so is like trying to glean public policy philosophy from the script of Napoleon Dynamite:

Uncle Rico: Kip, I reckon… you know a lot about… cyberspace? You ever come across anything… like time travel?
Kip: Easy, I’ve already looked into it for myself.
Uncle Rico: Right on… right on.

Many these days are betting the future on the fact that the leaders of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela will approach global politics with the same level wisdom as those serving on the Nobel Peace Prize committee (did they meet in Amsterdam this year?). Good luck with that. Go ahead and press all the reset buttons you can find or create. But in the end, let’s hope that someone, somewhere has kept a paper copy of the map back to reality, because it will certainly be needed.

An aging and seriously ill Franklin Roosevelt gave the store away to Mr. Stalin and company at Yalta. His inexperienced successor, Mr. Truman, didn’t do much better at Potsdam. But of course, they were dealing with a Soviet dictator and we are dealing with Vladimir Putin. Putin is nothing like Stalin, right?

Of course he’s not. Putin is taller and looks better without his shirt (possibly channeling his inner-Mussolini). Anyone knows that.

Actually, Mr. Putin has more in common with the pock-faced “man of steel” than most people care to notice. He is driven by power and operates as his own Lavrentiy Beria. The guy is one dangerous dude.

It took a glorified clerk and a recently-rebooted-out-of-office politician to remind the world that danger was the default human experience. Kennan wrote his telegrams, read by insiders, and a man named Winston Churchill gave a speech about “the sinews of peace” and that ominous “iron curtain,” heard by the world.

Let’s hope that there are clerks somewhere in our camp writing about reality and that their warnings will be noticed. Let’s also pray that there will be voices crying in a wilderness disguised as never-never land, voices that will refuse to be silenced. The message of danger is never a comfortable one to deliver or receive, but without it we may find ourselves with no real comfort zone at all.

I say let’s forget about this whole reset button nonsense. Frankly, what some in Washington should actually be concerned about is an eject button. It is shaped like a lever and every voting booth in the country will be equipped with one over the next few Novembers.

The Statue In Yorba Linda

October 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under China, Cold War, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Yorba Linda | 6 Comments 

“Leader’s Exhibit:” A statue of Mao ZeDong is featured with the bronze likenesses of nine other world leaders during RN’s presidency at the Nixon Library.

Today, as is noted elsewhere at TNN, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. The day is being marked with celebrations throughout that nation and in Chinese communities around the world. But there are also a considerable Chinese with a profound distrust and dislike of Communism who are, here and there, registering their protests of the PRC’s policies.

Probably the largest number of active protesters are associated with the Falun Gong movement, but there are also some whose animosity toward the PRC’s institutions is very personal and heartfelt. One of these people is Kai Chen. Chen is a 56-year-old resident of Los Angeles in the real-estate business. He was born in the People’s Republic, into a family associated to some degree with the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, who had, in 1949, been forced to leave the mainland for Taiwan. This status meant that Chen’s family suffered considerably in the Cultural Revolution, and that he was, as a teenager, denied a university education and sent to work in the countryside.

However, it happened that by the age of fifteen, Chen had reached the height of six-foot-seven, quite unusual for a Chinese, and, around the same time, discovered the game of basketball. By this time the Cultural Revolution was moving toward its final stages and the PRC’s premier, Zhou Enlai, envisioned basketball as one of the sports that might enable his country to end its twenty years of comparative isolation and reach out to the world.

Of course, the big breakthrough in this area came when the PRC’s ping-pong team, after playing against its US counterpart in Japan, invited the Americans to China, which dovetailed with behind-the-scenes diplomatic overtures and helped make possible President Nixon’s historic trip to China in February 1972. But although it would take a few more decades before players like Yao Ming became NBA superstars, the Chinese basketball team, on which Chen played for a time, played a significant part in the 1970s and 1980s in building friendly relations between the PRC and the West.

In 1981, Chen moved to Los Angeles to further his education. After obtaining his degree from UCLA, he went into business in California, found success in his field, and raised a family. But his memories of his mistreatment in the China of Mao Zedong have remained, and, as such interviews as this one (and his 2007 autobiography One In A Billion) show, he feels that not only was he exploited as an athlete for the political purposes of a regime he has long detested, but that Beijing has continued to use sports in the same way to the present, most spectacularly in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Last year, Chen visited the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, and entered the room which features one of its most prominent and written-about exhibits. What he found there upset him, and led to the protest which he made, with several others at the Library today.

When the original staff of the Library was planning the building’s permanent exhibits two decades ago, they decided to devote one of the rooms to a set of life-size bronze statues of nine men and one woman, from around the world, whose leadership qualities had formed the subject of individual chapters in Leaders, one of RN’s most readable and fascinating books. The ten statespersons selected for the Hall of World Leaders were, alphabetically, Konrad Adenauer, Leonid Brezhnev, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Nikita Khruschchev, Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, Anwar al-Sadat, and Shigeru Yoshida, and Zhou Enlai. In the exhibit Mao and Zhou are depicted sitting on couches, much in the way that they had talked with Nixon during his trip in 1972; the others are standing. Near the statues is this quote from the President: “They are leaders who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because they have willed it.”

When Chen came to the Library, he was angry that Mao, a person he regards as a mass murderer comparable to Hitler and Stalin, was featured among the other leaders, and he wrote about this to Timothy Naftali, the current director of the Nixon Library. Chen’s letter and Naftali’s response can be found here.

For a while, word of Chen’s dismay with Mao’s presence in the Hall was limited to his own website and to a handful of blogs. But yesterday the Los Angeles Times published Mike Anton’s article describing the controvery and Chen’s plan to stage a protest. In it, Chen is quoted as saying: “Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history. His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. … How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It’s a perversion of American freedom. You don’t put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum.” Naftali wrote to Chen that he personally was less comfortable with having a statue of Mao in the room than was the case with the other leaders, and his view of the issue, as reported in the Times article, is much the same:

“I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect,” he said. “I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they’re all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

“It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum,” Naftali added. “I don’t think it’s the best way to teach history.”

Naftali’s remarks have met with some puzzlement and criticism from those who worked, full-time or on a volunteer basis, at the Nixon Library during the decade and a half that it was operated by the Richard Nixon Foundation before becoming a part of the National Archives group of presidential libraries a few years ago. In all that time, Foundation assistant director Sandy Quinn told Jessica Terrell of the Orange County Register yesterday, no visitor made a complaint about Mao’s being featured in the Hall. Since Chen’s correspondence with Naftali a notice has been put in the Hall saying that the presence of these ten figures in the room does not constitute an endorsement of all of their policies.

The questions that Chen’s protests raise are not that easy to dismiss. The website of the NBC station in Los Angeles played the controversy for laughs today with an article titled “Pinko, Commie Statues Shock, Offend At Nixon Library.” The piece is credited to Olsen Ebright and Joseph McCarthy (presumably not that one, returned to earth at age 101) and is illustrated with the familiar photo of RN flashing the double V at the entrance to the helicopter on August 9, 1974 – but tinted as pink as, presumably, the late Helen Gahagan Douglas’s underwear.

However, Chen is deeply serious about his complaint, and his years of trauma in the turbulent China of the 1950s and 1960s make his anger at Mao’s presence in the Hall understandable. But I don’t think the founder of modern China should be removed from his couch. Mao is in the Hall because, although he wrested power violently from the Kuomintang regime in a civil war that killed tens of millions; although his misguided ideas of a “Great Leap Forward” and a Cultural Revolution brought about the deaths of millions more; and although his troops bitterly fought United States and United Nations forces for two and a half bloody years in Korea, in his last seven years he sought, with Zhou, to set aside violence and extend the hand of friendship to the United States. President Nixon reached out as well, and, with substantial help from Dr. Henry Kissinger, Winston Lord, Dwight Chapin and Foundation president Ron Walker, and many others, the stage was set for the handshake at the Shanghai tarmac between Nixon and Zhou, and the meeting with Mao, which ended almost a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility, helped prevent the possibility of a third world war between the superpowers, and made possible ties which have been truly beneficial to both countries.

As former Library director, TNN’s John Taylor, points out here, Nixon was a lifelong anti-Communist. He spent more time face-to-face with Chiang Kai-shek than with Mao. But in his years as Vice President, he was ready to have a dialogue with the Soviet Union, in the years after it emerged from Stalin’s shadow, and so met Khruschchev and then, as President, Brezhnev. Both of those men had been part of Stalin’s savage world for decades in their early careers, but when they came to power, they proved able to move beyond that awful legacy.

And so, too, did Mao and Zhou, in the years after 1969, make their efforts to move beyond the chaos, misery and isolation of the Cultural Revolution. That’s why these four men are in the Hall of Leaders – because they met that ultimate test of leadership, to try to make a more peaceful world for coming generations.

The Lion And The Bear

August 28, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, History, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

When then President Bill Clinton spoke at former President Richard Nixon’s funeral, he suggested that the “day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” The speaker had no clue at the time how much he would need that kind of big-picture graciousness later on, but these sentiments are common on such occasions.

Having been a member of the clergy for 32 years, it has been my duty to officiate memorial services, comforting mourners while doing my best to eulogize the deceased. The word eulogy is rooted in scripture, most often translated as some form of “bless,” it literally means “to speak well of.” It is actually not intrinsically a word for funerals, but that’s where the concept shows up for the most part in our culture.

Apparently the idea is that to eulogize someone before death is, well, premature.

Of course, it is easier to eulogize some people more than others – always the minister’s dilemma. What do you say when there is a shortage of good anecdotal material? Vernon Johns, the legendary, eloquent, and controversial forerunner to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, reputedly once made quick work of a funeral sermon for a particularly notorious man. Against the grain and at the risk of offending the sensibilities of his very proper audience, he uttered a few sentences about the dead man’s notable wickedness and then ended with an abrupt: “Now, carry out the body!”

But usually it’s nice stuff that is said. Much of it is true and most of it is presented with a positive spin. It is, of course, this way with the various tributes, remembrances, and yes – eulogies – about Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who died the other day after a valiant battle with brain cancer.

Mr. Clinton’s fantasy about no bigger-picture judgment notwithstanding, it is simply not realistic, nor is it very honest to ignore the “warts-and-all” aspects of someone’s life en route to putting it all into perspective. His executive order delivered to a crowd of mourners in Yorba Linda, California on April 27, 1994, was not obeyed. In fact, it was almost instantly dismissed, largely because Nixon wasn’t one of “them” – the liberal media elite.

Of course, if someone is a liberal lion and has made a career of championing the “right” (the term used in the sense of “liberally enlightened,” not as a directional cue) causes, it is generally more acceptable to give the person a pass on other embarrassing stuff. Therefore, the scandalous death of a young woman is not a crime, it’s a tragedy that means – in the ultimate example of missing the point – an anointed man won’t ever be president. Yet, even in that “tragedy” there are seeds of hope, because the man gets to become the greatest senator since, like, Cicero.

I have tried very hard to find the basis for authentic eulogy in the current hagiographic moment, but in the final analysis (a pet Kennedy phrase – Jack, Bobby, and Teddy all used it), I find myself frustrated. You see, I really think there are some good things that can be said – and were I speaking at the service, I would emphasize those.

Mr. Kennedy was a surrogate father, and effectively so, to the children of his fallen brothers. I find that endearing and worthy of commendation. He also seemed to mellow in later years, following his marriage to Vickie Reggie in 1992. She may have tamed, or at least tempered the lion. And he once helped conservative columnist Mona Charen parallel park her minivan on a busy Washington, D.C. street.

But again, in the final analysis (it really is a very good phrase) it is hard, in fact virtually impossible, to ignore the enormous body of evidence that so obviously speaks to the fact that Ted Kennedy was a deeply flawed man, who could here-and-there do some good things.

Most of his flaws are being noised about right now, but one that seems to regularly escape public view has to do with the Lion of the Senate’s machinations at a particularly crucial moment during the Cold War.

The year is 1983, and it is beginning to appear that Ronald Reagan will be virtually unbeatable for reelection the next year. One of the Gipper’s passions is to end the Cold War – and he is a strong advocate of peace through strength. Reagan is playing hardball with his Soviet counterpart, former KGB (once KGB, always KGB) chief, now premier, Yuri Andropov over the potential deployment of Pershing II missiles in Western Europe.

Years later, a letter from that time (May 1983) held in KGB files surfaced, one that reflects very badly on the man being remembered right now. It was written to Andropov by KGB head, Viktor Chebrikov and labeled “Special Importance.” The subject head read: “Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y.V. Andropov.” Apparently, long-time Kennedy friend, former U. S. Senator (D-CA), John Tunney – the son of Dempsey-beating heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney – had recently visited Moscow and acted as Ted’s emissary.

The would-be Lion was reaching out to the big-bad Bear.

The letter is interesting to say the least – and also a window into the political soul of Mr. Kennedy, who is now being remembered for his propensity for bi-partisanship (?). The senator from Massachusetts was clearly interested in undermining Mr. Reagan politically, and flying close to the flame of actual treason. Among the things the letter said were:

Kennedy believes that, given the current state of affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people. In this regard, he offers the following proposals to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Y.V. Andropov.

1. Kennedy asks Y.V. Andropov to consider inviting the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting in July of this year. The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA. He would also like to inform you that he has planned a trip through Western Europe, where he anticipates meeting England’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Mitterand in which he will exchange similar ideas regarding the same issues.

If his proposals would be accepted in principle, Kennedy would send his representative to Moscow to resolve questions regarding organizing such a visit.

Wait, there’s more:

2. Kennedy believes that in order to influence Americans it would be important to organize in August-September of this year, televised interviews with Y.V. Andropov in the USA. A direct appeal by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. The senator is convinced this would receive the maximum resonance in so far as television is the most effective method of mass media and information.

If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. Specifically, the president of the board of directors of ABC, Elton Raul and television columnists Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters could visit Moscow. The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.

This entire episode is described in detail by historian Paul Kengor in his book, “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan And The Fall Of Communism.”

Had this all come to light back then, would Ted Kennedy have been able to survive politically? No one, of course, knows the answer to that question, but it is possible that the brightness might have faded from Camelot’s apparently endless “brief and shining moment.”

Now, here we are more than a quarter of a century later, with the Cold War a fading memory – a conflict won by our side largely through the work of Mr. Reagan and in spite of Mr. Kennedy – reviewing a life writ large. With all the eulogies – all the attempts, rightly so, to “speak well of” someone in the tender moments following his passing – let us resolve “in the final analysis” not to give him a complete pass on the things he did that fell short. Some of those things really mattered.

Rules For Witnesses

August 7, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, Congress, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Faith, Healthcare, History, Movies, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Public Opinion, Religion, U.S. History | 14 Comments 

There is a scene early on in the movie Patton, where the feisty general watches the forces under his command do battle with those led by the legendary German Panzer leader, Erwin Rommel. To prepare for this particular skirmish, “Old Blood and Guts” studied the writings of his adversary, prompting the memorable line uttered in a gravely voice by actor George C. Scott: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

Later, the general found out that Rommel himself had not actually been present for the confrontation, but he is comforted by an aid: “If you defeat Rommel’s plan, then you defeat Rommel.”

It is a fascinating thing when an adversary ironically uses a methodology that was previously owned by an opponent – especially when he does so with surprising effectiveness. When a football team known for its excellent running game throws the bomb on the first play from scrimmage, when a home run hitter bunts, and when a political adversary takes a page from the book of the other guy, well – you gotta love it.

Under any credible definition of the phrase “dazed and confused” there now appears the look on Nancy Pelosi’s face. Yes, that one. That, “we are the good guys, why are people giving us a hard time, they must be Nazis, or just nuts” look. Surely you’ve seen it. I have had a persistent “where-have-I-seen-that-look-before?” feeling when seeing the speaker’s visage on the screen, but it took me a while to make the connection.

The date is December 21, 1989 – the place Bucharest, Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the man who had ruled his country with an iron first for a couple of decades, was on his balcony trying to address an increasingly unruly crowd. It was a moment of truth for the dictator. The look on his face – one of complete incomprehension – was one of the Kodak moments capturing the scene at the end of the Cold War.

That look might be described by my grandkids as: “clueless.” Others might simply say that it is a facial expression that begs the question, “what the?” But it is a look that is botoxed in place for Ms. Pelosi. And that same expression has recently been found on the faces of many members of the House and Senate as they have gone home to meet with constituents.

Sadly, the time has come in America where recess is no longer any fun.

What Nancy Pelosi is seeing is her side being on the receiving end of some of the kind of methodological medicine the left has been forcing down the country’s throat for quite a long time. I recently got around to reading Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. Yes, I know I should have done so long ago, but I thought I had a good enough grasp on what the man said back in 1971 via the thorough treatment his musings have received from the conservative punditry.

I was wrong. My bad. Every American should read it. It’s chilling.

I believe what we are now witnessing is a case of people being, as the saying goes (and as is actually used in Alinsky’s book) “hoisted with their own petard.” Fire is being fought with fire. The reflexive dismissal of angry citizens showing up at town hall meetings these days to give Washington insiders a piece of their mind as somehow orchestrated, notwithstanding.

This is not a top-down campaign with a few sinister puppeteers pulling the strings. The opposition to liberal health care machinations and other stuff is very real. What they see as orchestration is actually mobilization. And it is only the beginning. We are, I think, on the verge of seeing one of the great collapses of political popularity and good will in American history. The nation is on the verge of a Network moment, where “Yes, we can” is being drowned out with cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

George Washington died because of misguided notions about how getting the bad blood out via leeches would cure his ailment. It was a case of a cure that killed. Sure, his cold was gone, but so was he. In a sense, the draconian measures some would use to remake our nation’s fabric, from health care, to national security, to the economy itself, are somewhat akin to bleeding the nation en route to restoration. All this will do is make us weaker. Or dead.

I shared a sermon last Sunday at my church based on a haunting passage from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah called, A Dying Nation At A Crossroads. The prophet was a patriot, but he knew that sometimes patriotism involves even more than waving a flag – a stand must be taken. His message was:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

Jeremiah was speaking to a nation at a pivotal moment – a time that called for clear thinking and action. They had been on a slippery slope for a long time and the clock was running out. Nothing short of a return to what made them strong – even great – in the first place would correct the problem.

The week Winston Churchill traveled to diminutive Fulton, Missouri to deliver his most famous speech – the one that talked about a sinister iron curtain born of Soviet expansionism – Time Magazine published a review of two recently publish books. One was a work by Frederick L. Schuman, the Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, called Soviet Politics. It was basically a defense of the Soviet system. The other was by Saul Alinsky, who had written Reveille For Radicals, the spiritual ancestor of his 1971 work. The title of the review was: Problem Of The Century.

The reviewer suggested that, “the dominant problem of the 20th century is the reconciliation of economic liberty with political liberty.” He saw this issue resolved in Schuman’s book by simply “liquidating political liberty.” He saw Alinsky’s ideas in a little more favorable light, suggesting that it was written with a “burning honesty” and that the author had “glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.”

In other words, the review for Time saw something constructive in what Alinsky was saying in those days immediately following World War II and as the Cold War was just barely being noised about. But he indicated that only time would really tell.

In fact, that reviewer did not live long enough to see the fruit of Saul Alinsky’s attempt to put his vision into those “practical terms” in Rules For Radicals. He died 10 years before that. His name was Whitaker Chambers.

He never got to write a review of that book, but he did write one of his own and it became a classic called simply, Witness. It was his treatise as a man who had once been a communist, even an agent. Then he had seen the light and spent the rest of his days fighting, at a great personal price, his former faith. Along the way, he exposed a traitor or two, gaining him the wrath of the liberal elite in America, though he has long since been vindicated as a truth-teller by many infallible proofs.

He began his book with a letter to his children, letting them know the nature of the struggle and the craftiness of the enemy:

Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world.

The Communist vision has a mighty agitator and a mighty propagandist. They are the crisis. The agitator needs no soapbox. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where desperation lurks. The propagandist writes no Communist gibberish. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where man’s hope and man’s energy fuse to fierceness. The vision inspires. The crisis impels.

Too bad Mr. Chambers didn’t live to see the demise of such thinking. But then again…

Support Your Local Sharia

July 31, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Europe, Immigration, Islam, Islam and the West, Religion, Terrorism, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

It is pretty clear at this point that barring some kind of last minute reality check the Fairfax County (Virginia) Board of Supervisors will approve the Islamic Saudi Academy’s application for a special exemption this Monday, August 3rd.   This will enable the Saudi-funded madrasa to expand and plant even deeper roots in America’s backyard, teaching in the anti-democratic traditions of wahhabism.

It will happen despite the fact that neighboring home owners associations are opposed, the land use and legal issues argue against the school and would have been a death knell to any other application, and the academy in question has on many occasions failed to honor previous county agreements, not to mention state law.  

Oh, and the wise ones on the panel defiantly refuse to factor in the fact that the Saudi curriculum taught at ISA is filled with hateful things that most Americans would find repugnant – even dangerous.   We’re not talking about mere religious ideas.  What has been taught there in the past should have caused the powers that be to shut the place down years ago.

Interestingly, just a few days ago one of the academy’s past students – in fact, a former valedictorian and a young man voted “most likely to be martyred” (really) named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali – was resentenced to life in prison for plotting with al-Qaeda and trying to kill President George W. Bush.  As the cool song says: “I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”  He graduated in 1999, bounced around for a bit and wound up in Saudi Arabia in 2002.

In his written confession, Abu Ali said: “It was decided that I would go [to the United States] and live a normal life [overtly] to keep attention away from me, marry a Christian woman, and at the same time I would prepare as best I could for operations.”  If all this seems decidedly inconsistent for someone who practices a religion of virtue and peace, bear in mind that there is an Islamic doctrine called taqiyya.  What it basically means is that deceit is a legitimate weapon when dealing with infidels (read: “We the People”).

Grasping the fact that our determined enemies will at times use monumental deceit to further their cause is imperative right now.   The members of the Fairfax County panel seem oblivious to this. More than a quarter of a century ago the board of supervisors denied a similar application by a Christian school, citing traffic concerns.   Of course, the traffic is much better now.  Right.

“I cannot put the safety of the American citizenry at risk,” said U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, when he handed down Abu Ali’s sentence.  Good call, your honor.  Now, would you ever consider becoming a county supervisor? 

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, has written a book called, Reflections On The Revolution In Europe.  In it he notes: “In the middle of the 20th century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe.  At the turn of the 21st century, there were between 15 and 17 million.”  Now in many major European cities the most common baby names Mohamed, Ayoub, Hamza, etc.

He suggests that these Muslims have not assimilated, but rather have formed “a parallel society.”  And they are bringing anti-Semitism back big time.

“Imagine that the West,” Caldwell writes, “at the height of the Cold War, had received a mass inflow of immigrants from Communist countries who were ambivalent about which side they supported.  Something similar is taking place now.”

And it’s not just happening over there.

The expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy may not seem to be that big of a deal to some and certainly the members of the board of supervisors see no threat in allowing them to get a better foothold.   But such things are, in fact, part of a pattern of denial and outright stupidity on the part of people who should be intelligent enough to know better. 

Convinced, though, of the liberal notion of “enlightened tolerance,” such political leaders are playing a dangerous game of mindless appeasement.   There is a growing subculture in this country, a network of nefarious groups sharing a common theo-political vision for taking over everything.  Operating under the aegis of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and so many others, they all say one thing, while doing another.  

Ignore what they say; watch what they do.

Their unmistakable goal is the dominance of Sharia-law in this country – the world for that matter.   In other words, they envision a political overthrow and remaking of everything we know, love, and hold dear as Americans.  And they are using the Bill of Rights and opportunities created by a systemic decrease in vigilance to gain ground toward their objective. 

I believe in the Christian faith.  I therefore do not believe in the tenets of Islam.  Nor am I into Buddhist doctrine.   I do, though, believe in religious liberty and free speech.  But what we are seeing is a case where religious liberty and free speech have become weapons in the hands of would-be terrorists and tyrants.  

I will defend with all my heart the right of any Muslim to pray and live according to the precepts of that faith.  I will also do all in my power to bear witness about Christianity in the free marketplace of ideas.  But if anyone, in the name of religion, or under its cloak, seeks the overthrow of the very system that grants us those freedoms, that’s where the line is drawn. 

Free speech ends with the cry of fire in a crowded theater.   Religious freedom ends when there is deception en route to coercion that would ultimately lead to an end of liberty for all.   And no municipality or government entity should deliberately ignore the toxicity of certain ideas that would undermine the Constitution.
 
What if the Ku Klux Klan wanted to put a school in Fairfax County?  How about if Kim Jong-il decided to put a nice North Korean institution in our backyard – fully funded?   I imagine such enterprises would not even get a hearing.   Why then the Saudis?  The wahhabism taught at the Islamic Saudi Academy should be every bit as objectionable to freedom-loving Americans as what some other enemy might espouse.  

But some might ask: What about “moderate” Muslims?   Well, as Bruce Bawer points out in his book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam – Sacrificing Freedom, “that while there are such things has moderate and liberal Christianity, there is no such thing as a moderate or liberal Islam.  Yes, there are millions of good-hearted individuals who identify themselves as Muslims and who have no enmity in their hearts for their non-Muslim neighbors and coworkers.  Some of these Muslims are religiously observant, some are not; but their moderation is not an attribute of the brand of Islam to which they officially subscribed but is, rather, a measure of their own individual character.” 

In other words, their moderation comes not from a particular interpretation or variant, but rather “they have chosen to put a certain distance between their own religious thought and practice and the strict tenets of institutional Islam.”

Those of us in Fairfax who oppose the expansion of the Islamic Saudi Academy will likely have to concede defeat this Monday. But in doing so we will long remember – at least until the next county election – where the supervisors stood on the issue.   Stay tuned.

It appears that many liberal-minded types want us to be more like Europe and their views may be ascendant these days, but those who see European-socialistic-democracy as a model for our future should pay attention to how it is being threatened by an enemy within. 

As Mr. Caldwell says in his new book about what is happening there, “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture (Europe’s) meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines (Islam’s) it is generally the former than changes to suit the latter.”

 

Been There Done That

July 6, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Cold War, International Affairs, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Pat Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

From Confrontation to Negotiation: RN with Nikita Khrushchev in the famous Kitchen Debate in Moscow in 1959, and with Leonid Brezhnev (who had been part of Khrushchev’s official entourage in the Kitchen) on the Truman Balcony at the White House in 1973.

In a few hours, President Obama will be arriving in a cool and rainy Moscow.  After less than six months in office, Mr. Obama is already well-traveled; even his presidential campaign had a European leg.

The first time the Stars and Stripes flew over the Kremlin was thirty-seven years ago —in May 1972— when RN stayed there during his first —of three— Soviet Summits.

The externals have changed radically —President Obama will be visiting a fledgling democracy on the economic ropes rather than the competing superpower with which RN had to deal.

But the more things change the more they stay the same, and it’s not too late for 44 to learn from some of 37’s experiences.

26 May 1972: President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signing the SALT 1 Interim treaty freezing US and Soviet weapons at their current limits.  Although spouses weren’t invited, PN wanted to witness the historic late-night post-banquet Kremlin event.  She followed RN’s advice and watched surreptitiously from behind a pillar.

When Air Force One lifted off from Andrews Air Force Base on 20 May 1972 (en route to Moscow via Salzburg) the thin backstory of Soviet summitry wasn’t auspicious to say the least.

Eisenhower’s meeting with Khrushchev at Geneva in 1955 and Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the US were at least uneventful.  But the plans for Ike’s 1960 visit to Russia had to be scrapped when Khrushchev withdrew the invitation in the wake of the U2 spy plane debacle.  And JFK’s 1961 Vienna meeting with Khrushchev turned out to be disastrous.

The 1972 Soviet Summit had been long and carefully planned.  From the first weeks of his administration, RN had initiated a pragmatic policy of hardheaded détente, and insisted on the linkage of Soviet conduct (particularly in North Vietnam, North Korea, and the Middle East) to America’s willingness to negotiate on issues of interest to the USSR.

Indeed, many had direly predicted that RN’s refusal to be intimidated by North Vietnam’s invasion of the South the month before —which he countered with the bombing of Hanoi and  the mining of Haiphong Harbor— would lead the Soviets to cancel the Summit at the last minute.  RN noted that, after Air Force One was airborne, Henry Kissinger “came into my cabin and exuberantly said, ‘This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times!  Three weeks ago everyone predicted it would be called off, and today we’re on our way.”

When RN and PN arrived in Moscow on Monday, 22 May 1972, the greeting was polite — but no more.  Brezhnev, whose power was supreme but whose official title was a few pegs down the totem pole, wasn’t among the official greeting party.  But as soon as the President and First Lady were installed in rooms in the Kremlin, Henry Kissinger arrived with word that Brezhnev was waiting in his office.

Although this would be their first official meeting, RN and Brezhnev had crossed paths before.  In the uncropped photographs of the 1959 Kitchen Debate —when Vice President Nixon confronted the belligerent Premier Khrushchev with some home truths about American capitalism— the  young communist party official Leonid Brezhnev had positioned himself directly behind the young American Veep.

In RN, RN recalled:

Brezhnev’s office was the same room in which I had first met Khrushchev, thirteen years before.  Like Khrushchev, Brezhnev looked exactly like his photographs: the bushy eyebrows dominated his face, and his mouth was set in a fixed, rather wary smile.  I was sure that neither of us, standing shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen at the American Exhibition thirteen years before, had imagined that we would one day be meeting at the summit as the leaders of our country.

For the next few days, the communist leaders —Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgordny— alternately applied the complete Soviet arsenal of surprise, belligerence, crudity, charm, schmaltz, erratic and late hours, and, of course, gallons of vodka.  President Obama can expect these techniques to be indigenous —as familiar to Count Nesselrode as to Sergei Lavrov— and should be prepared accordingly.

Throughout, RN remained calm, unruffled, resolute, and unfailingly diplomatic diplomatic.  And, no less important, he didn’t lose his sense of humor.

In the first plenary session at 11 A.M. with Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, Gromkyo, and Dobrynin, I decided to establish the straightforward tone I planned to adopt during the entire summit.

“I would like to say something that y Soviet friends may be too polite to say,” I began.  “I know that my reputation is one of being a very hard-line, cold-war-oriented, anticommunist.”

Kosygin said dryly, “I had heard this sometime back.”

“It is true that I have a strong belief in our system,” I continued, “but at the same time I respect those who believe just as strongly in their own systems.  There must be room in this world for two grea nations with different systems to live together and work together.  We cannot do this, however, by mushy sentimentality or by glossing over differences which exist.”

All the heads nodded on the other side of the table, but I guessed that in fact they would have much preferred a continuation of the mushy sentimentality that had characterized so much of our approach to the Soviets in the past.

This first Soviet Summit produced the first SALT (strategic arms limitations talks) Treaty establishing a temporary freeze on the numbers of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles that either side could have or build until a permanent agreement could be reached.  RN also signed the ABM treaty, stopping would would have become a headlong arms race to defend American and Soviet cities from missile attacks.

As RN later wrote, “Together with the ABM treaty, the Interim Agreement on strategic missiles marked the first step toward arms  control in the thermonuclear age.”

Susan Jacoby’s Notes From The Middle Ground

May 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Yesterday David Chambers, whose grandfather Whittaker Chambers was one of the two primary figures in the case that brought Richard Nixon to the notice of the whole nation and then the world, reviewed Susan Jacoby’s Alger Hiss And The Battle For History in the Washington Times. Mr. Chambers makes its clear that, to put it mildly, he is far from impressed by Ms. Jacoby’s thesis that Hiss’s actions of the 1930s and 1940s, and subsequent perjury when testifying about them, was less significant than the rise of the anti-communist right that she believes the negative publicity surrounding Hiss helped to further, to the country’s detriment. Here’s one passage from the review, which notes Ms. Jacoby’s less-than-thorough research on the case:

Perhaps strangest is this book’s omission of new findings by another recent Yale publication. “Spies” (May 2009) opens with the bold chapter title, “Alger Hiss: Case Closed.” It claims to seal the coffin (if not bury the grave plot) on Mr. Hiss’ guilt. Nothing from “Spies” appears in Ms. Jacoby’s book. According to “Spies” co-author Harvey Klehr, Yale’s editor Jonathan Brent offered her access to the book’s new findings. Apparently, Ms. Jacoby took a pass.

Overall, it is distressing to read this book. Clearly, Ms. Jacoby prizes secular, liberal intellectualism. Yet her book is compromised by the very type of bias she claims to despise in her intellectual opposites.

Cue “Victory At Sea”

May 12, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Frost/Nixon, Movies, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

There’s been a lot of comment in the last 48 hours about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s appearance on Face The Nation, and it was probably a matter of time before he was dubbed “the new Nixon” by someone.

That someone turned out to be Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, famed around the world as the former husband of Sharon Stone. A representative quote from his post yesterday on the Chronicle’s site:

This Cheney role comes just in time for those of us who were reminded by “Frost/Nixon” just how much we missed the original. As knotty as the man was himself, he could somehow make everything else seem clearer. Life without him appeared colorless, less darkly symphonic. While he was around, kicked after a defeat or voted in by a landslide, he provided psychological hand-holds in a post-1950s world where there was always mysterious and dangerous trouble lurking somewhere. He gave a face to your fears, whether you feared him or worried about the things he feared.

Later in the column, Bronstein speaks of the “philharmonic complexity” of the President’s character, which led me to refer to RN’s favorite late-night music in the title of my post. The comments to his post are also worth reading; a surprising number (since this is a Bay Area newspaper) are favorable toward RN, including one that gives him credit for ending the Cold War.

Take “Das Kapital” And Shove It, Nikita

April 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Cold War, Richard Nixon, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Jeffrey Lord on the contrast between Obama vs. Chavez in Trinidad and Nixon vs. Khrushchev in Moscow 50 years ago.

Speak Softly And Carry A Big Schtick

April 9, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Barack Obama, Cold War, Europe, History, International Affairs, Islam, Terrorism, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

My wife and I have five wonderful grandchildren – four boys and a girl. We await the arrival of another grandson in a few weeks. Dealing with our children’s children is vastly different than what it was like raising our own – especially in the area of discipline. As parents, we tried various methods and tactics to effectively influence the behavior and mold the character of our kids.

As grandparents, we do nothing. It’s very cool.

Well, actually, there are times – occasionally – when I watch my wife attempt to muscle up and scold one of the grandkids. Me? I avoid such moments, usually by finding the most readily available refined sugar delivery mechanism. But once in a while the mother of my children tries to play tough with an errant grandchild.

It’s amusing to watch. Usually it starts with a warning: “Don’t do that.” Then, the always pointless counting, “one, two – I promise, I mean it – three, three and a half.” And it’s always the same – an exercise in familial futility.

Why? Because our brilliant (really, they are!) grandchildren simply don’t believe she has the resident resolve to actually follow through on a tough love tactic.

In a very real sense, this is similar to what we seem to be seeing and hearing these days from the new administration with respect to its foreign policy machinations. Gone are the days when the mantra “speak softly and carry a big stick” was the coin of America’s diplomatic realm. These famous words were first uttered by Theodore Roosevelt two weeks before he ascended to the presidency in the wake of the assassination of William McKinley. We speak softly these days, but there is no big stick.

The stick has been traded for schtick.

The new diplomacy, advanced at every stop on President Obama’s recent foreign tour, is about reaching out, waxing cathartic about America’s shortcomings, flattering Europe, and bowing toward the Muslim world. And when the nation-formerly-known-as-part-of-the-axis-of-evil defies us by lobbing a missile into the air and sea, our voice is slightly raised, but not too much.

Everything is being tempered by a new international ethic of “moral authority.” The idea is that if enough nations will say to naughty North Korea, “Shame on you,” Kim Jong il will get – as we say in church – “under conviction” and “repent” of his roguish sins. And the nations will sing with one voice the song Cum-bay-ah.

We can all then look forward to even bigger geopolitical goose bumps as we are led toward a brave new world.

The problem with all this, though, is that a “moral authority” approach to behavioral change only works when someone really wants to change. Trust me. Ask Dr. Phil. Moral instruction requires a teachable spirit and an open mind. No matter what the motives for the recent presidential “we”a culpa tour, there is simply no precedent for the idea that speaking softly will soothe the savage terrorist or that any of it will work.

Barack Obama is systematically dismantling a foreign policy that – though far from perfect – has kept us free and relatively safe. He is being more than simply “un”-Bush, he is taking advantage of this unique moment while our nation sleeps and moving us toward the kind of international socialist model so many in this country now seem to admire.

Europe has let us down again and again in the past decades, yet now we are apologizing for our “arrogance.” We are not against Islam is now the cry, and we are sorry for how “we” have misunderstood things in the past. America – instead of being the guardian of so much of the good stuff in the world, is now the perennial bad guy. We have grown accustomed to such criticism from adversaries and fair-weather allies in the past. Now we must learn to like it when these same thoughts are uttered from behind the presidential seal.

While I find the recent Europhilia annoying – even troubling – I am far more concerned about the administration’s body language, not to mention verbal language, toward the Muslim world. Mr. Obama is reaching out in ways that I’m sure are giving many Americans pause, even some who voted for him. He has been on a diplomatic fast track during these first hundred days of his term and we are seeing the world change before our very eyes. And not, I fear, for the better.

The recent selection of a new secretary-general for NATO this past week gives us a glimpse into how Mr. Obama will conduct foreign policy when Islam is a factor. Chosen as the new leader for the 60-year old alliance, one formed long ago when the world was emerging from its most devastating period of conflict only to find itself in the middle of another, was Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. But his selection was not without a measure of controversy. It took the intervention of President Obama to make it all work.

Turkey objected to Rasmussen. Why? Well, among other things, mainly for the fact that in 2006 he dared to speak out in favor of freedom of speech and the press during the uproar over a Danish newspaper’s publication of cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. You may recall that there was a global Muslim response to the cartoons – one that included the burning of embassies, storming buildings, and more than 100 deaths.

Bear in mind that NATO, its Cold War mission now history, is now largely focused on Islamism as an enemy. Nearly fifteen years ago, one leader of the strategic alliance said: “Islamist militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security.”
Enter President Obama. Participating in a series of extensive and intensive negotiations, Mr. Obama gave “guarantees” that reportedly included one new NATO deputy would be from Turkey and that Turkish commanders would be “present” at the alliance’s command.

Daniel Pipes has written about this recently, asking the question: “Does Turkey Still Belong in NATO?” He suggests that the 28-nation organization faces “a completely novel problem – that of radical Islam, as represented by the Republic of Turkey, within its own ranks.” Pipes adds that NATO is becoming “an institution hobbled from within, incapable of standing up to the main strategic threat for fear of offending a member government.”

It seems long ago now, but it has really only been two months since Barack Obama sent a bronze bust of Winston Churchill – one that was the pride of George W. Bush – back to Great Britain. In light of what seems to be happening here and abroad however, that act may now be best seen not as a benign expression of decorative taste, but as a very, very red flag.

Michael Kimmage To Discuss His Trilling/Chambers Book

April 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

I’m still working on getting a copy of Michael Kimmage’s The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (which I noted in an earlier post) and hope to review it before the end of the month. In the meantime, it’s worth mentioning that Kimmage will discuss his book at Columbia University’s Butler Library this Thursday.

The Most Important Visit

April 1, 2009 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under China, Cold War, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

RealClearPolitics has a list of the 10 most important presidential visits to other countries.  If you cannot guess which one came out on top … then you probably stumbled onto this blog by mistake.

A New Chapter In Revisionist History

March 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, China, Cold War, Election 2008, Europe, History, International Affairs, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Russia, U.S. History, UN, White House | Leave a Comment 

As President Obama travels to Europe to confer with leaders there about how to come to grips with the worldwide recession, Kate Pickert, at Time.com, compares the trip to earlier Presidential travels overseas.

Ms. Pickert is a native of Watertown, New York, and started her career at the Watertown Daily Times, a very highly regarded newspaper; for decades it has been one of the smallest dailies in the country to have a full-time reporter in Washington. The late Alan Emory, who ran its DC bureau from the 1950s to the 1990s, was one of the most respected figures in the Beltway press corps.

Unfortunately, Ms. Pickert seems to have some way to go to fill his shoes.

The reporter starts with a pretty good point – that Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs, at a briefing the day before the President’s departure, was not asked a single question about the trip, since the members of the Fourth Estate present were more concerned about the forced resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner. Ms. Pickert notes that days of old “a President could dominate the news by simply leaving the country and posing for some photo ops. Maybe he’d even sneak in some history-making diplomatic feats. Exhibit A: Richard Nixon.”

Yes, she’s talking about the China trip. The round-the-clock TV coverage that event received – the first time all but a handful of Americans had been able to see China up close and personal – was apparently, in the reporter’s mind, equivalent to a series of “photo ops.”

After giving an account of the visit which reads like a condensation of its Wikipedia entry, Ms. Pickert continues:

Nixon’s China trip was successful, but it’s not as if he ended a war. Woodrow Wilson’s trips in 1919 to the Paris Peace Conference, however, led to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the first World War.

Let’s leave aside the perennial debate about the degree to which the terms which Germany had to accept at Versailles, mainly at the insistence of the French government, set the stage for the rise of Hitler and another world war.  The useful point to make here is that, while RN’s visit to the PRC may not have ended a fighting war, it brought one major part of the Cold War – the isolation of China from the United States for nearly a quarter-century – to an end, and thus helped to diminish the possibility of a third world war.

Ms. Pickert goes on to discuss the 1945 Yalta Conference, which she says produced as its “end result [...] the partition of Germany and the creation of the United Nations.” It was the Dunbarton Oaks meeting in 1944 which laid the plans for the founding session of the UN, which took place a few days after Yalta; what FDR accomplished at the Black Sea resort was to get a commitment from Stalin to have the USSR join the UN.

But the really startling paragraph in the article is this one:

Of course, not all presidential trips abroad are known for altering the course of world politics. John F. Kennedy’s 1963 trip to Berlin was notable for the speech expressing support for a free West Germany, but infamous because of the four words he used to drive the point home: “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which can be interpreted to literally mean “I am a jelly-filled doughnut.” Some reports say the statement wasn’t mocked in Berlin at the time, but this hardly matters. In popular memory, Kennedy committed an embarrassing gaffe, something presidents try hard not to do while abroad, where they operate under more scrutiny than usual.

Really. JFK’s speech was “infamous?” Then why does Ms. Pickert think Obama, when a candidate last year, chose Berlin to make his one major appearance outside the US during his campaign – an appearance which drew hundreds of thousands? Why is JFK’s speech so prominently featured in his library in Boston? Why was it one of the highlights of former Nixon White House staffer Bruce Herschensohn’s acclaimed documentary Years Of Lightning, Day Of Drums? Why does the “Berliner” line inspire fond memories in older Europeans to this day, many of whom, I daresay, would regard it as a very significant event of the Cold War?

The Watertown Daily Times article about Ms. Pickert’s hiring by Time states that she has a master’s degree from Columbia. The major is not identified, but I’ve got my doubts that it was American history.

More Sleepless Nights For Elizabeth Drew

March 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Last night Stacy Keach completed his run as RN in Frost/Nixon at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre, triumphantly fighting back, in the best Nixonian tradition, to retake the stage after being hospitalized for a week by a mild stroke. Tomorrow through Sunday, he appears with the production at Arizona State University in Tempe. (As was the case with the final weekend at the Ahmanson, understudy Bob Ari will take over as RN for the Saturday and Sunday matinees.)

Yesterday Kerry Lengel of the Arizona Republic interviewed Keach. As he has done in nearly every press interview on this tour, the veteran actor emphasized his belief that Richard Nixon, in the decades since he left the White House, has emerged as a figure as compelling as any in Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, and just as worthy of portrayal by an actor seeking to reach the heights of his profession. (Or maybe I should add “her” – could it be that one day we might see, say, Meryl Streep or Glenn Close in a Frost/Nixon revival, much as Dame Judith Anderson or Sarah Bernhardt once played Hamlet?)

“Nixon has become an iconic figure, a tragic American figure,” Keach says. “Just as there are many great Hamlets and many great Lears, there are many great Nixons. Anthony Hopkins was a great Nixon. Rip Torn was a great Nixon. So I am adding a notch in my belt in the Nixonian tradition.”

And what does he add to the Nixonian tradition [asks Lengel]?

“I think my contribution is the humor,” [Keach] says. “He’s very engaging, and humor is one of the means of humanizing the character, which is one of Peter Morgan’s objectives.

“This play has done more to rehabilitate Nixon’s image in the world than the original interviews ever could have.”

Indeed, Keach’s temporary departure from the production and his replacement by Ari for a week emphasized, perhaps better than anything else, that playing Nixon is starting to become one of the litmus tests for an actor’s range and capability. The understudy’s performance in the role was examined by Mike Boehm at the Los Angeles Times’s site (“Ari, who was also Frank Langella’s understudy on Broadway, revealed a markedly different take on Nixon than Keach’s: gruffer, deeper-voiced, more raw and less able to disguise the insecurities and disappointments that nag at him”) and at considerable length by Evan Henerson at Examiner.com. That is to say, Ari’s handling of the part received almost the kind of attention at those sites that New York newspapers would have given to the performance of Richard Burton’s understudy in Hamlet in the 1960s had that eminent thespian been laid up for a week.

And, at Canada’s National Post, in the course of a review of Susan Jacoby’s new book on the Alger Hiss case, Philip Marchand suggests a new area of RN’s career for any playwright with the skill and ambition to take it on:

It is strange that Hollywood, which has aimed to make high drama out of such relatively insignificant political events as CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s televised attack on Senator Joe McCarthy (Good Night, and Good Luck) and David Frost’s interviews with Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon), has neglected the story of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. The 1948 confrontation between the two men — Hiss, the cool, handsome, high-ranking government official, versus Chambers, the talented, scruffy, emotionally erratic, repressed homosexual writer and editor — truly was dramatic.

There was a PBS miniseries back in the 1980s in which Edward Herrmann played Alger Hiss, but it was a rather undistinguished affair. And the story is rather too complex for a 100-minute movie. A carefully constructed 3 1/2 hour play, however, might well be as spellbinding from beginning to end as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial or Inherit The Wind. Any takers?

Two New Books On Hiss-Chambers

March 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, History, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

May 31 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Alger Hiss’s first trial for perjury, during which the onetime advisor to FDR at Yalta and secretary-general of the founding session of the United Nations in 1945 managed to secure a hung jury, thanks to an all-out attack on his accuser Whittaker Chambers by his attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker. Shortly afterwards, a second trial was held, in which Claude B. Cross, who replaced Stryker at Hiss’s bidding, led the defense. The jury at this trial, given a less dramatic atmosphere, found Hiss guilty and he went to jail, still insisting on his innocence – as he continued to do until he died at age 92.

It has been more than a decade since Hiss’s death and nearly a half-century since Chambers passed away. 2013, four years from now, will see the 100th birthday of Richard Nixon, whose dogged determination to seek the facts of the case helped launch his political career. But in spite of all the decades that have gone by since Chambers appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and made his charges, the Hiss case still generates strong interest. Indeed, this month sees two new books about its principal figures from America’s two leading university presses.

Yale University Press has just published Alger Hiss and the Battle for History by journalist Susan Jacoby, and it’s reviewed in today’s New York Observer by Glenn C. Altschuler. The writeup is favorable, but I don’t know how keen I am to read the book. Ms. Jacoby is well known for her polemics championing the enlightened center of the political spectrum. Her interpretation of the case, in this context, seems to amount to the argument that sure, all the evidence points to Hiss’s guilt – as has been the general consensus since Allen Weinstein published his definitive book Perjury in 1978 – but the real question is, did the atmosphere of the times prevent Hiss from getting a fair trial? One somewhat wishes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were still here to point out that Hiss got two trials, rather than the one that most defendants have to get by with, and that every attempt on his part to seek another trial was rejected by one judge after another over the span of three decades, right into the decidedly liberal era of the late 1970s.

A book that interests me rather more is by Michael Kimmage of Catholic University: The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism, which Harvard University Press just released. Former New York Sun book reviewer Adam Kirsch discusses this volume at nextbook.org, and from what he says, it promises to be the most carefully considered examination of Chambers’s pivotal role in American political thought since Sam Tanenhaus’s landmark biography in 1997. Here’s how the HUP site describes it:

Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American politics: the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism, crucially shaped by anti-communism. Taken together, these developments constitute a conservative turn in American political and intellectual life—a turn that continues to shape America’s political landscape.

This Time Abe, FDR, And JFK Can’t Help

March 13, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, History, Obama administration, Presidents, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

During recent remarks to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Barack Obama waxed a bit defensive in response to mounting criticism that he may be spreading himself, his vision, and his obvious political capital too thin in these early days of his administration. He is calling for reform in our health care system, the same for education, while ending torture as the bad guys have known it, opening the stem cell floodgates on an ethical slippery slope, while trying to fight two wars and fix a troubled economy. We may be witnessing the birth of the modern octo-presidency.

To his credit he is being very up front about his agenda, not to mention consistent with much of what he campaigned about en route to the presidency. I am sure his actions are being met with enthusiasm by the diehard portion of his electoral constituency. However, I am also quite confident there are some who voted for him who really didn’t expect him to be so aggressive toward the left, but rather to lead more from the center. Wherever that is.

To answer his critics – and those who support him but are somewhat concerned about the potential for early-administration-burn-out – he told the crowd:

I know there’s (sic) some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time.
They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.

As during the campaign and ever since – and we can assume it will be the same for the foreseeable future – when the going gets tough President Obama pulls out his favorite triumvirate trump card. The names of his historical bff’s Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy are always near the tip of his eloquent tongue. And why not? After all, they have always been seen as like the coolest presidents ever.

Mr. Obama is, by all accounts, a brilliant guy. Years ago, he was the editor of Harvard Law Review – so he knows a thing or two about something called precedent. What he seems to have missed during his recent speech is that the cases he cites to bolster his argument in favor of him being the multi-tasker-in-chief are not exactly on point.

In fact, when closely examined, they are not relevant at all.

There is no indication that Abraham Lincoln spent any significant time on the railroad issue during the early weeks and months of his presidency as the country was falling apart. In fact, various bills on the subject had been languishing in Congress since the administration of Franklin Pierce, and when Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law on July 1, 1862, he had been president for more than a year. Some biographies of our 16th president don’t even mention it. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, devotes part of one single sentence to it in her tome about Honest Abe. I think there are copies of this book around the White House these days; it’s the hot Lincoln book right now. I wonder if anyone looked it up? In fact, the biographer describes the signing ceremony as one where Lincoln signed several bills “rushed through in the final days of the term” of Congress. By the way, he signed the Homestead Act in law during that same quickie ceremony.

Sure life went on and Lincoln had to step away from his number one priority and do other stuff, but nothing got his attention like the raging war.

Then there’s good old Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Mr. Obama tells us that FDR “didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a depression and fighting a war.”

Sure he did. He had at least five years and was well into his second term, and dealing with a second Depression of his own making, before he had to begin to seriously look at what was happening in Europe and Asia around 1938. All one has to do is glance at the calendar to note that there was a long gap between his “fear itself” speech and the one that started “Yesterday, December seventh, nineteen-forty-one…”

In fact, a great argument can be made that had it not been for war clouds on the horizon, Mr. Roosevelt might not have been reelected to an unprecedented third term in 1940. The economy was in shambles and the president had recently overreached to try to pack the Supreme Court. World War II saved him politically.

It also cured the Great Depression.

So, Mr. Obama is stretching history some to make it fit his situation when he brings Abe and FDR into the discussion – but what about John F. Kennedy? Well, here again the president swings and misses at a curve, when he was looking for the fastball.

Obama said: “President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon.” Yet history tells us that how JFK dealt with these issues, one a long-standing wrong, the other a long-range goal, is not really a precedent our current president should use to enhance his argument.

The fact of the matter is that the space program itself, not to mention the idea of sending a man to the moon, was not something Kennedy had much real passion about. It was never part of his campaign for the presidency. As a senator, he tended to agree with President Eisenhower that the space program was waste of money. It was the chronic and often annoying enthusiasm of Vice President Lyndon Johnson that wore JFK down. Of course, Johnson’s interest had much to do with the fact that NASA was headquartered in Houston, Texas.

When the Russian Yuri Gagarin went into space in April of 1961, it pushed Kennedy’s Cold Warrior buttons. This was, of course, right around the time of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. It is important to note that much of the passion for putting a man on the moon flowed from his desire to beat the Soviets. And John F. Kennedy did not really buy into the idea of it all until shortly before he spoke to Congress on May 25, 1961 about “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

It was as much political posturing and theater as anything else.

In fact, according to presidential biographer Richard Reeves in President Kennedy: Profile of Power, just two months before his prime-time announcement about going to the moon, Kennedy told James Webb, the head of NASA, “that he had decided against giving new funding to Project Apollo. The American moon project was to be put on hold.”

This is hardly something to compare with some of the “core-Obama-values” stuff our new president is promoting. Kennedy simply used the space program as a Cold War weapon.

How about JFK and civil rights? Surely some would think that Kennedy really worked hard on that one. But again, the record says otherwise. He simply didn’t – at least early on in his administration – have much fire in the belly for the issue. Reeves wrote: “In fact, Kennedy was most concerned about domestic racial troubles as a foreign policy problem. He didn’t want to see the problems give the country a bad name abroad.”

Kennedy’s preoccupation with international affairs is often cited as the reason he was actually, at best, lukewarm on the issue of civil rights during his administration. He was, in the words of author Nick Bryant, “The Bystander” – a leader who squandered opportunities. It would fall to President Lyndon Johnson to follow through, by that time having full access to political capital generated by the emerging Camelot myth.

At any rate, when Mr. Kennedy did begin to step up on the issue of civil rights – as with his address to the nation in June of 1963 – he was more than two years in to his presidency. How this at all relates to President Barack Obama’s ambitious and multi-faceted agenda right now is not clear at all.

I like it when presidents read history. I like it when they quote it. I like it when they learn from it. What I have a problem with is when they get the history wrong.

Seeing All Sides In The Middle East

March 7, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Israel and Palestinians, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

Why the debate over Chas Freeman’s appointment to a top intelligence position is like Cold War attacks on Richard Nixon for being soft on the Soviets.

* * *

A colleague suggests that I shouldn’t neglect charges against Ambassador Freeman that he has financial conflicts of interest that preclude his serving. Andrew Sullivan analyzes the trajectory of the Freeman controversy and shows that it began with outrage over his views. I’m with Sullivan. If there’s a compelling financial question, then it should be judged strictly on its demerits.

Half An Alternative

March 5, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Movies, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Richard Nixon and the movies these days — whoa! There’re now almost as many references to “Watchmen” as there were last month to “Frost/Nixon.” From Canada’s Globe and Mail:

Watchmen is set in an alternative 1985, in which the Cold War is still raging and Richard Nixon is still president.

Actually, the Cold War really was still raging in 1985.

Vanity Fair Game

February 12, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

In this “Vanity Fair” excerpt from his upcoming book about Reagan and Gorbachev, veteran journalist James Mann, a former LA Times columnist, quotes from a memo former President Nixon wrote to his own file about his April 1987 meeting with President Reagan in the White House family quarters. I called Mann this morning and asked (graciously, I hope) whether a copy of RN’s memcon had somehow ended up in a public archive somewhere, since as far as we know, it’s still in non-deeded post-Presidential files at the Nixon Library. Mann graciously declined to tell me where he’d seen it.

Leon Panetta, Jack Bauer, And The Bad Guys

January 9, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Barack Obama, Book Review, Cold War, Ethics, History, Intelligence, Obama administration, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 1 Comment 

This weekend, Jack Bauer returns to save all things great and small during the latest fictional crisis to be played out over one agonizingly long day. No doubt he will be the same old Jack, not a man known for subtlety or nuance. Bullets will fly, some bombs will explode, while others tick away, and the good guys will ultimately prevail.

In a strange and ironic juxtaposition, as faithful viewers begin another seasonal journey with 24, a real-life drama is unfolding, one that involves the appointment of someone who represents ideas as un-like Jack Bauer as possible. President-Elect Barack Obama is tapping old Washington hand Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Panetta is, by all accounts, an able manager and savvy politician – both qualities will certainly help him in this new role. But many have raised questions – serious ones (and not all by Republicans) – about his qualifications for this unique role. I hear the Secretary of Commerce position is open once again, wouldn’t a manager do well there? There is a difference between management and leadership.

It doesn’t take a mind reader to discern that Mr. Obama is determined to tame the CIA and bend it to his will and vision. Not all of his appointments have demonstrated the kind of change he campaigned about, but this one surely does. He is taking a cue from his hero, John F. Kennedy – specifically the JFK who tried to clean the spy house after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Goodbye, Allen Dulles the espionage expert, and hello, John McCone the efficient manager.

Panetta is the new McCone.

The only thing the Leon Panetta appointment and Jack Bauer have in common is the lack-of-subtlety thing. A signal is being sent to the nation and nations. A kinder-gentler sheriff is in town. No more ugly stuff – certainly no hint of torture. And GITMO? Well, we’re going to shut that bad place down and bring its residents to our mainland – maybe even a backyard near you.

Americans are decent people. We understandably flinch and recoil at violence. We deplore senseless killing. We cannot even begin to grasp the fanatical insanity of our Islamist enemies.

But the mistake often made is to assume that others – in places far away and vastly different – think and feel as we do. We regularly and all too predictably underestimate the wickedness and bloodthirsty nature of those who would just as soon wipe us off the face of the planet as look at us. Too many think that people are all basically reasonable and we just need to find some common ground.

Lyndon Johnson used to speculate that if only he could sit down with Ho Chi Minh and promise him some kind of Tennessee Valley Authority-like public works initiative for Vietnam that the communist leader would make peace. But LBJ missed the point that some people are wired differently – especially those who use actual wires tied to bombs.

It is a monumental mistake for anyone on our side to think for a moment that there is any point or place of accommodation that will bring peace, when those we are fighting have a ferocious and fanatical passion for our complete demise.

So – when we telegraph our punches (or better, pull the punch) by putting someone in charge of our major intelligence arm who has long indicated there are some things we will not do in this war, we need to understand that our enemies are not going to be impressed with our “humanity.” Instead, they will know that they have gained an important upper hand in their struggle.

Torture is an ugly word. It is unpleasant and decent people abhor the very idea of it. But, if it is permissible and considered as a necessary evil by a just society to kill terrorists, to bomb them, to send missiles their way, and to otherwise fight them with cruel might, why is torture, under certain circumstances, where we draw the “moral” line?

Years ago, when then heavyweight boxing champ, Muhammad Ali, refused the draft and was stripped of his title, comedian George Carlin (not yet famous) appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and mocked the pugilist. He suggested, humorously, that there was some inconsistency in a case where a man was claiming to be a pacifist who regularly beat people up for a living.

We can’t have it both ways in this current international climate. We can’t profess to fight a war on terror – using violent means. We can’t target enemy leaders for death, launch missiles, or drop bombs to kill terrorists, but say at the same time that we won’t rough up a “detainee” to obtain vital life-saving information. The Panetta appointment is, in effect, a public indication that the new sheriff in town will – as Sean Connery put it in the movie, The Untouchables – be bringing a knife to a gun- fight.

Of course, intelligence work is a murky business. But it is a necessary evil in war. Many are drawing parallels between our times and 1929, when the wheels fell off the economy en route to the Great Depression. There is, however, another interesting comparison between then and now. That year, Henry Stimson – Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State – shut down a spy operation while uttering the famous and naïve words: “Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.”

It’s a pretty good thing we grew out of that notion – considering what unfolded during the ensuing decades. Stimson meant well, in trying to “civilize” a business that is inherently uncivilized – war. But the time for such tenderness is after the battle is won, not when guns are blazing.

Torture is certainly horrific. But is it at times necessary – in at least some forms? Henry Kissinger once said, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

It would seem that the important factor is context – in other words, a case-by-case approach is the best way to make such moral judgments. For example, no decent human being would consider torture for the sake of torture (getting sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain) to be morally acceptable under any circumstances. And, even in cases where authorities used torture to obtain a confession in a criminal proceeding – that would be inappropriate and of bounds.

But how about when a “detainee” is believed (strongly believed) to have important information – the kind that, if known, would save the lives of civilians or military personnel?

Former Chief of CIA Counterintelligence, James M. Olson, has written an excellent book about all of this – one every American concerned about this issue should read. In Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying, he traces the history of espionage back to the days of the Bible and beyond. With an intelligence career that included assignments in Moscow, Vienna, and Mexico City during the Cold War, he knew first hand of the challenges and issues of conscience spy work involves.

Now serving in a key academic post at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, he teaches about intelligence and national security issues.

In the book, Mr. Olson describes various scenarios – some involving the potential use of methods considered by some to be torturous. He has interviewed leaders from several walks of life – from intelligence agents, to clergymen, to professors, even someone from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – and chronicles their opinions.

Torture is just one of many methodologies Olson analyzes – others include: journalism cover, homosexual blackmail, kidnapping, truth serum, missionary cover, feeding a drug habit, bogus websites and chat rooms, – even plagiarizing a Ph.D. Dissertation. For anyone interested in the moral implications of intelligence work in a dangerous world, Fair Play is a must-read (originally published in 2006, it is now out in paperback).

Olson concedes “spying is a dirty business,” but asks: “Should we put all our trust in overt sources of information, diplomacy, and the peaceful arts – and hope are enemies will not take advantage of us?”

At a time when a highly and fanatically motivated enemy is watching and waiting to strike at the heart of all we hold dear, Mr. Obama seems to be sending the clear, unmistakable, and potentially ominous signal that the CIA is an entity to be managed and tempered.

I am sure radical Islamists worldwide are going to be very impressed. But I find myself earnestly hoping that we keep a few guys like Jack Bauer around – just in case.

Castro/Nixon

December 30, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Cuba, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

As the Cuban government celebrates the proud achievement of perpetuating Stalinism for 50 years, a reprise of a couple of my New Nixon blog entries from early 2008, as Fidel passed the fatigues to Raul. The first, posted on Feb. 23, was written after a distinguished journalist tried to lay what he characterized as the failure of U.S. policy at the feet of you-know-who:

In this NPR commentary, Daniel Schorr (a distinguished reporter and commentator and regular participant in Nixon Center programs in Washington) argues that 50 years of misguided U.S. policy toward Cuba began when Vice President Nixon, after meeting Fidel Castro, said he was “incredibly naive about communism.” Schorr implies that every misstep in U.S. Cuba policy, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Kennedy Administration’s assassination schemes, grew from RN’s observation. That’s hard to believe based on Mr. Nixon’s complete analysis, contained in a long memo he sent President Eisenhower after meeting alone with Castro for three hours in April 1959:

Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere. He is either incredibly naive about communism or under Communist discipline — my guess is the former, and as I have already implied his ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed that those of almost any world figure I have met in 50 countries. But because he has the power to lead to which I have referred, we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.

When Castro argued that his people didn’t want free elections because they’d produced bad results in the past, Mr. Nixon replied that he should therefore hold elections as soon as possible “to restore the faith of the people in the democratic processes.” Castro soon demonstrated that he had no interest in redeeming Cuban democracy. As for the naive faith in communism Mr. Nixon identified, it laid waste to Cuba’s economy and turned it into Moscow’s pawn (and a potential ground zero) in the missile crisis of 1962.

Mr. Nixon acknowledged the force of Castro’s personality, predicted his regional influence, and tried to persuade him to serve his people. How could he have done better?

 Too late for W. An opportunity for O?

The Spy Who Really Came In From the Cold

December 17, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, History, Russia, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

Several years ago, David Cornwell (better known by his nom de plume, John Le Carré) told an interviewer that, “espionage was not really something exclusive and clandestine. It was actually the currency of the Cold War. Spies were the poor bloody infantry of the Cold War.”

They still are – though these days we are in a different war and battling another pernicious ideology.

Cold War spy novels make for entertaining reading, but the more we learn about the nuts and bolts of what actually went on back then, the more we come to understand that truth is in many ways even more dramatic than fiction.

Consider, for example, the case of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski. He was a Polish patriot who may have saved his nation, the whole continent of Europe – maybe even the world – from massive suffering at the hands of a Soviet war machine once poised to race from behind Warsaw Pact borders to the Atlantic Ocean.

I recently attended a symposium at Langley on the life and work of this remarkable unsung hero who risked life, limb, and loved ones to pass along vital information at a crucial moment during the Cold War.

Under the watchful eye of CIA Director General Michael V. Hayden, and as part of a very real “social-contract” with this country, voluminous de-classified materials are being made available to researchers and the public at large. General Hayden was a history major back in college days and has not lost his love for thorough and informed analysis of the past. This passion has clearly informed his directorate.

The most recent historical symposium corresponded with the release of materials relating to Rsyzard Kuklinski and his work on our behalf, but especially that of his beloved Poland. In fact, Kuklinski, who died in 2004, did not see himself as working for “us” – rather he consciously recruited America, via the CIA, to work on behalf of Polish freedom during a dark and difficult time.

In August of 1972, Kuklinski sent a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, West Germany, establishing contact with our intelligence operatives. Signing it “P.V.” (later Kuklinski said this stood for “Polish Viking”), this singular act began a relationship that would bear the fruit of literally thousands of vital documents and crucial information helping us to understand Soviet doctrine and intent.

The definitive account of the Polish spy’s fascinating story is a book written by Benjamin Weiser, a reporter for the New York Times, entitled, A Secret Life: The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, and the Price He Paid to Save His Country. Rsyzard Kuklinski is described at the time of his espionage work as “a small man with tousled hair, penetrating blue eyes and the gestures and mannerisms of a man within whom an unbounded supply of energy is bottled up.” He focused that energy on doing everything he could to prevent his country from being sacrificed during the Cold War, as it had been in so many ways during the Second World War.

Kuklinski was motivated by patriotic fear. His role as a high-ranking staff officer made him privy to information about what a major Soviet offensive in Europe would mean. Though always framed via lip service as “defensive” in nature, the Soviet and Warsaw Pact war plans, in fact, were entirely designed to be offensive operations.

The salient point, as far as Kuklinski was concerned, had to do with the so-called Second Strategic Echelon – a massive potential Soviet offensive involving roughly 2 million soldiers and at least a million armored vehicles. Rsyzard and others in a place to know about these plans discerned accurately that the only real response NATO forces would have to counter such a massive Soviet mobilization would be nuclear.

And those bombs would drop, not in Moscow, nor in Western Europe – rather they would obliterate Poland – the perpetual 20th century European pawn.

In fact, the materials passed to us by this highly effective Cold War spy enabled the United States and NATO to effectively plan for such a scenario. And the other guys never knew we had the information.

But even beyond the role he played for us strategically, he also became our eyes and ears during those turbulent months (1980) as the world watched a fledgling political movement known as Solidarity, led by Lech Walesa, begin to achieve political traction in Poland. The world also wondered if and when the Soviets (with the complicity of their puppets in charge of things in Warsaw) would intervene as they had in Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968). It seemed like only a matter of time.

Rsyzard Kuklinski was uniquely positioned in those days to report on what was going on – enabling us, in the waning days of the Carter presidency, to effectively warn the Soviets off. At one point, he sent a 16-page letter to the CIA describing high-level meetings of the Polish government where the discussion included the potential for a Soviet invasion of their country.

And the next year, 1981, as it became clear that the Polish government led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, was preparing to declare martial law in the land, Kuklinski kept us informed in great detail. He despised Jaruzelski, writing in one covert dispatch that the strongman was “unworthy of the name Pole.”

In a dramatic moment on November 2, 1981, Rsyzard Kuklinski was summoned to a meeting in the office of one of his bosses. Six men sat at a T-shaped table and learned that there was a “mole” among them – someone had been leaking information to the Americans. Somehow managing to keep his composure, Kuklinski joined the chorus of voices in the room denouncing such an act of “treason.”

But he knew his days were numbered and soon found a way to communicate to his handlers: “I urgently request instructions for evacuating from the country myself and my family. Please take into consideration that the state border is possibly already closed for me and my family.”

For several days, CIA personnel in Warsaw tried to carry out a plan to evacuate Rsyzard, his wife, and their two sons. Eventually they were spirited away for the long drive to Berlin. I spoke with the driver during a reception near the famed CIA floor seal in Langley’s lobby, and he told me that they managed to get through three checkpoints en route – though acknowledging he still gets chills when thinking about that perilous trip – even 27 years later.

Life in America was no picnic for this Cold War hero and his family. They had to live under an assumed identity and avoid relationships, particularly with Polish-Americans, for years. The two Kuklinski sons met with untimely accidental deaths less than a year apart, breaking the hearts of mom and dad. Questions were raised about the nature of the deaths – one in a boating accident (the body never found) – the other on a college campus, felled by a hit-and-run driver. But no evidence (beyond the circumstantial) was ever discovered that pointed to anything conspiratorial or sinister.

Rsyzard Kuklinski was tried in absentia in 1984 in Poland, found guilty of treason, and sentenced to death. After the Cold War ended, his sentence was commuted to 25 years (something that hurt Kuklinski deeply). In 1995, the chief justice of the Polish Supreme Court annulled his sentence. Then in September of 1997, all charges against him were revoked, enabling him to return to Poland a free man.

In April-May 1998, Rsyzard Kuklinski made an 11-day tour of several Polish cities. He was greeted by some as a hero – on a level with Pope John Paul II. Others, however, protested that he was – and would remain – a traitor.

Lech Walesa, for all his good work in the cause of freedom, never completely accepted Kuklinski’s account of things – even suggesting publicly that Rsyzard was a “double-agent” working for the Soviets, as well as the Americans. No such evidence exists – in fact, as new information comes out the case being made that Kuklinski was a Polish patriot and one of the good guys gets stronger and stronger. But Walesa’s remarks highlight the tension when “state” becomes synonymous with “country.”

Frankly, Rsyzard Kuklinski’s work – his willingness to risk it all for what he believed was right – left the world a better place. The Soviet Union eventually fell apart and freedom broke out in his beloved Poland. Neither would have happened had Warsaw Pact nations acted on clearly defined plans for continental – even global – hegemony.

When Kuklinski died in February of 2004, then Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet said: “This passionate and courageous man helped keep the Cold War from becoming hot, providing the CIA with precious information upon which so many critical national security decisions rested. And he did so for the noblest of reasons – to advance the sacred causes of liberty and peace in his homeland and throughout the world.”

Long before that, Rsyzard Kuklinski reflected, “I am pleased that our long, hard struggle has brought peace, freedom, and democracy not only to my country but to many other people as well.”

So are we.

Hey, Ron: How About “Moorer/Nixon”?

December 16, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Frost/Nixon, Richard Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate | 4 Comments 

During 1969-73, before he was consumed by Watergate, Richard Nixon redrafted the geopolitical map, repositioning the United States in relationship to the Soviet Union and China and helping usher in the global era. His administration also conducted secret talks with the North Vietnamese in the hope of bringing U.S. involvement in Indochina to an honorable end.

These initiatives and others made Pentagon hawks so nervous that they spied on the President and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Papers illegally stolen from the White House over a 13-month period by a Navy yeoman were passed up the line to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer, who eventually admitted he’d read them without inquiring too aggressively where they’d come from. The thefts were uncovered by the famed White House Plumbers, figures of fun for most historians, little-sung heroes in this case.

New details about the Radford affair, which struck at the heart of the concept of civilian authority over the military, are revealed in an article by Fox News’s James Rosen, author of a remarkable new biography of John Mitchell whose new insights about Watergate and John Dean, though startling, didn’t merit a review in the New York Times.

Perhaps for some of the same reasons, Radford never got as much as attention as Watergate. Those who like to say that Mr. Nixon was undermining the Constitution have never seemed exercised about the tunnel the brass were busy digging under the White House. As “Frost/Nixon” shows, Nixon as sinner is potentially big box office. When he was sinned against? Rarely green lighted.

One reason may be that for the sake of the military’s credibility, the President chose not to make more of the affair. According to Rosen, here’s how he put it on one of the tapes:

“Admiral Moorer,” Nixon told an aide in May 1973, “I could have screwed him on that and been a big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing … Why didn’t I do it? Because I thought more of the services.”

A One Time Only Invention

December 9, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, China, Cold War, History, Science | Leave a Comment 

In today’s New York Times, veteran science correspondent William A. Broad previews two new books that combine to do some rewriting —or at least some major revision— of the atomic history.

The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman and The Bomb: A New History, by Stephen M. Younger are both based on extensive research supplemented by insider insight and information.  And both conclude that the atom bomb was only invented once — by the scientists of the Manhattan Project led by J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The proliferation that now plagues the world is the result of spying that leaked the secrets and national policy or ideological interests that spread the technology.  A striking graphic charts the claim.

All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

 “Since the birth of the nuclear age,” they write, “no nation has developed a nuclear weapon on its own, although many claim otherwise.”

Among other things, the book details how secretive aid from France and China helped spawn five more nuclear states.

The book, in a main disclosure, discusses how China in 1982 made a policy decision to flood the developing world with atomic know-how. Its identified clients include Algeria, Pakistan and North Korea.

Two of the major sources, and resources, for nuclear proliferation have been China and France.

Why did Beijing spread its atomic knowledge so freely? The authors speculate that it either wanted to strengthen the enemies of China’s enemies (for instance, Pakistan as a counterweight to India) or, more chillingly, to encourage nuclear wars or terror in foreign lands from which Beijing would emerge as the “last man standing.”

A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists “were observing and participating in” the French program of weapons design.

The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, “two nations went nuclear.” And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel’s own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test “2,600 feet under the Negev desert.” The next year it built its first bomb.

Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.

 

Catch-2008

November 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, Economic issues, Election 2008, Entertainment, Humor, Nixon Administration figures, Obama administration, Sarah Palin, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Erica Heller is a New Yorker in her fifties.  In her twenties and thirties she worked in advertising. Then she dropped out of the field and wrote a novel, Splinters - a natural thing to do when one is the daughter of the late Joseph Heller, author of Something Happened, God Knows, Good As Gold, and that all-time bestselling antiwar novel Catch-22. 

Splinters was published in 1990 and, unlike most of her father’s books, was not well-received; Publishers Weekly called it “pretentious and self-indulgent.”  So Ms. Heller went back to advertising, where she remains.  Recently she began blogging on The Huffington Post.  Just before election day, she wrote there that her father – who, she acknowledged, never voted in any election in his life, because he was, by his own admission, “anti-political” – would surely have trooped down to the booth, were he still living, to choose Sen. Barack Obama. 

 (That strikes me as doubtful. Heller, a very shrewd fellow as his many interviews attest, would have likely foreseen that doing so would help bring about the situation this week where Dr. Henry Kissinger, the target of innumerable venomous barbs in Good As Gold, expressed his support for the President-elect’s choosing Sen. Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.)

This week, Ms. Heller, perhaps like many another writer with an Amazon sales ranking in the low seven digits, is on the warpath about the book deals being rumored for Gov. Sarah Palin and secured by Joe the Plumber.  She seems convinced that S. J. Wurzelbacher is receiving a fortune from a small press for his book.  In fact, what Joe is earning is probably just a shade above the $1000 or so her dad got for what was then Catch-18 nearly a half-century ago, and far below the advances for every other book he wrote. 

 Ms Heller also fulminates about the $7 million that’s being tossed around where the Palin book is concerned, bemoaning all the trees that will fall to make it.  Well, President Clinton was paid considerably better for his memoirs.  And a lot of trees fell to get it to the stores.  And, most strikingly of all, that rather soporific tome was edited by none other than Robert Gottlieb, the brilliant editor who helped make Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 a classic.  (I should point out Mr. Gottlieb always has my admiration.  Imagine being in one’s late seventies and fielding 3 am calls from the man who remains the First Night Owl, not to mention trying to get Robert Caro to finish those last thousand pages of his LBJ saga.)

Most bizarre of all is an aside where Ms. Heller reminisces about the good old days when Catch-22 is published and in which the series Mad Men is set.  She reminds us that back when Roger Maris was earning his asterisk, gas was 33 cents a gallon and stamps were four cents.  Well, guess what?  If her liberal idols in Congress and the White House can’t figure out how to get us out of the recession and deflation sets in, prices may drop to those levels again.  The difference will be that you won’t see too many people wearing clothes as good as the ones in Mad Men.  On the bright side, there will be plenty of free grass, growing up from the sidewalks, and in some places from the floorboards.

Speaking of Robert Gottlieb, time for me to tell my favorite story about his many quirks.  A friend of mine – we’ll call him Hank, because his first name’s the same as Gottlieb’s – was in the early ’60s an up-and-coming editor, as Gottlieb was.  One day he got a call from his colleague.  “Come over for lunch,” quoth young Bob.  His habit, then as now, was always to eat a sandwich at his own desk at Simon & Schuster (and, later, Knopf), so Hank stopped at an Italian deli, got some antipasto, and proceeded to S&S’s offices.

This particular afternoon, incidentally, was a day or two after JFK’s speech announcing the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba.  Things were pretty weird in Manhattan all around. Even so, Hank was a bit surprised, when he arrived at Bob’s office, to find it unoccupied.  Assuming that the editor was in the restroom, he waited a while in the hallway.  Then he asked Gottlieb’s secretary where he was.  “In there – he hasn’t left all day,” she replied.

So Hank stepped in and approached his friend’s desk.  There came a whisper – from under it. “That you, Hank?”  Hank stepped around and found Gottlieb crouched underneath, sandwich in hand. “I talked to my shrink this morning – he sounded kinda worried,” Bob said by way of explanation. “There’s some space here – sit down.” So Hank squeezed in and took out the antipasto.  “Just a second,” said Bob. He then emerged from the desk, went to the window, lowered the blinds, and got back under.  Thus suitably protected from the threat of The Big One – in an office in the midsection of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan – the two young editors dined and chatted as usual.

Ah, those wild, crazy days of Mad Men.

McCain’s Solomon Moment

September 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Democratic Party, Election 2008, History, Presidents, Republican Party, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

For much of the 20th century, the Blackstone Hotel, located at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balboa Street in Chicago, was known as the “hotel of the presidents.” The 21-story facility, recently renovated by the Marriott people with a price tag of 128 million dollars, has long been listed on local and national registers of historic places.

The Blackstone was where the legendary political phrase “smoke-filled room” entered the American vocabulary. It was a description of where and how Warren Harding’s Republican presidential nomination was decided in 1920. Harry Truman was staying there when he was picked to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1944, as was Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was notified that the GOP had nominated him on the first ballot in 1952.

The most dramatic Blackstone presidential moment, however, took place on the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1962. Hours before, after a long day on the campaign trail for local politicos, President John F. Kennedy sipped clam chowder in his suite and decided to return to the White House rather than continue his tour. Having made a speech in Chicago, he was scheduled to go to Milwaukee – then out to the west coast to work on behalf of several Democratic candidates.

The fact that the Soviets were installing offensive missiles in Cuba, which had been kept pretty much below media radar for several days, was about to become a very public national crisis. Things were reaching critical mass.

By breakfast time, Secret Service agents were sweeping the lobby, along with every nook and cranny in the common areas of the historic hotel. At mid-morning, Mr. Kennedy emerged from an elevator, adorned with an overcoat and rarely worn hat, and walked briskly though the lobby toward the main door and his limousine.

Less than 24 hours before, he had entered the hotel through the same door after seeing a protest sign calling for, “Less Profile – More Courage.” There were no such signs this morning though, few even knew that Lancer would be on the move – not even the press. Reporters, many of whom were already on busses ready to go to Milwaukee, were informed that the president had a cold and a slight fever and was heading back to Washington on the advice of his doctor.

The collective response of the press was, “yeah right.”

This mysterious malady was apparently quite contagious, even leaping several time zones, because Vice President Lyndon Johnson was similarly afflicted and also leaving the campaign trail. He flew that day from Honolulu back to the nation’s capital.

JFK and LBJ knew a thing or two about politics and governing. They understood with Solomon-like wisdom that, “there is a time to campaign, and a time to break off campaigning.”

It’s a leadership thing.

John McCain was right to do what he did recently when he announced the temporary suspension of his presidential campaign and returned to the Senate. Barack Obama was caught flat-footed and, one suspects, a little upset that he didn’t think of it first. Both men are sitting U.S. Senators. In a campaign famous for chronic discussions about experience and preparation for the job they seek, one way to size these men up is to watch how they actually do the jobs they already have.

Mr. Obama has suggested that John McCain’s decision indicates an inability to multi-task. But that dog won’t hunt. The issue is not whether or not a person can do two or more things at once – as both men clearly can. The real question is – are there circumstances that loom so large, that become so compelling, that transcend the times in such a way as to call for unusual, even unprecedented, attention and action?

Of course, the answer is yes.

This is clearly a time for such action and leadership. What is more presidential – making a stump speech, participating in a debate, or actually taking some time away from center stage to do a job one has already been elected to do?

John McCain instinctively gets that. Barack Obama does not.

If President Bush were at his ranch in Crawford, or on some foreign farewell tour, or doing some other ceremonial president-stuff, both candidates would be rightly calling for his return to Washington to deal with the crisis at hand.

On September 11, 2001, the local election campaign in New York City stopped. It became instantly insignificant in light of the horrific developments of that day. Politics went away – leadership kicked in. We need that kind of gut-level “work the problem” approach from both of the men running for president this year.

Frankly, we can learn more about a potential president by the response to real problems, than we can by the response to a question in a debate. McCain and Obama are already elected officials. One way to demonstrate that you can do a bigger job is to be faithful and diligent in your current assignment.

If Mr. Obama does not see the need to at least go through the motions of working with the Senate on the bailout package President Bush has sent to congress, then he should resign his seat – and let the citizens of Illinois get someone to Washington who will condescend to a role that Barack may see these days as an annoyance.

Barack Obama needs to move beyond trying to one-up John McCain, who is clearly skilled at keeping an opponent off-balance by not telegraphing his punches. He may need to ask himself what his hero, JFK, would do. Kennedy understood that sometimes a campaign has to take a back seat to a crisis.

It might also be good for Mr. Obama to figure out that a wise leader not only comes up with good ideas, but is also capable of recognizing value in those developed by others – even political opponents.

The Left’s Second Thoughts On The Rosenbergs

September 21, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, History, National Security, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

In recent days interest in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted on Federal espionage charges in the early 1950s and sent to the electric chair, has been revived after Morton Sobell, the last living defendant charged (and convicted) with them, acknowledged to Sam Roberts of the New York Times that he and Julius Rosenberg had in fact spied for the Soviet Union. In the Week In Review section of today’s Times there is a very illuminating article by Roberts discussing how widespread belief in the innocence of the Rosenbergs has affected the whole direction of the American political left since 1953, and how some of the notable figures in that movement are reacting to Sobell’s admission.

Those quoted in the article include E.L. Doctorow, the writer who first made a major impact with his novel The Book Of Daniel, based on the Rosenberg case (and later adapted into a film directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Timothy Hutton); pre-eminent leftist historian Howard Zinn (who says, “I never was going along saying I know they were innocent, and I’m not shocked by the fact they turned out to be spies. To me it didn’t matter if they were guilty or not, the most important thing was they did not get a fair trial”) ; SDS founder Tom Hayden; longtime Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky; and Leonard J. Lehrman, co-director of the National Committee To Reopen The Rosenberg Case.

The End has Come

September 17, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Cold War, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Ron Radash writes today in the LA Times that the controversial debate surrounding the Rosenberg case is a fait accompli. In a recent confession, co-defendant Morton Sobell has re-affirmed the couple’s guilt, a development that should bury any inkling of national guilt brought on by their left-wing supporters.

Hiss And The Rosenbergs In Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

September 16, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, History, National Security, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Bob Hoover, the book-review editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (and, thus, belonging to a breed now perhaps more rare than the ivory-billed woodpecker) has written an article for that paper concerning Sam Roberts’ recent New York Times stories about the Rosenberg case, in which he also discusses the lingering echoes through the decades of the saga of Alger Hiss.  Included are several quotes from G. Edward White, author of Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars. Well worth reading.

The Spy Who Almost Stayed In The Cold, and RIP DFW

September 13, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, History, In Memoriam | 2 Comments 

The London Times has just published a lengthy interview, conducted by the paper’s Rod Liddle, with renowned British spy novelist (and former MI6 agent) John Le Carre. He spends most of it reiterating his anger, often manifested in his recent statements and writings, regarding neoconservatism and the war in Iraq. But there is one rather startling item:

And then there are the things [Le Carre] didn’t do but perhaps almost did – such as defecting to the Soviet Union when he worked for MI6. This is the sort of confidence I hadn’t expected, to tell you the truth.

“You were genuinely tempted?” I ask him, in some surprise.

“Yes, there was a time when I was, yes,” he says.

“For ideological reasons, like the rest of them – Blunt, Philby, Maclean?”

Le Carré is considered to be on the left these days, of course – a consensus arrived at largely through his visceral dislike of recent US foreign policy. One of that coterie of British literary greats – Pinter, Hare, Amis – railing at the supposed cretin in the White House, snarling about rendition and Guantanamo and Halliburton. Surely, though, he was not that far to the left, back then?

“God, no, no, no. Never for ideological reasons, of course not . . . ” “Then why?” Not money, surely, I think to myself.

“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know, find out the rest.”

Further on in the interview, Le Carre notes that in 1987 he was offered a chance to dine with the most notorious defector in espionage annals, Kim Philby – the model for the character Gerald in his own novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the man who blew Le Carre’s cover to the Soviets and forced him out of espionage and into writing about it - not long before the latter’s death, but declined the opportunity because he did not want to meet the man responsible for the deaths of dozens of British agents sent into Albania in the 1940s.

In sadder literary news, David Foster Wallace (known to his legions of fans by his initials), the fiction writer, MacArthur fellow, and professor at Pomona College, author of the brain-bendingly complex (but widely acclaimed) thousand-page novel Infinite Jest, was found dead in his Claremont home Friday night, an apparent suicide at the age of 46.

Martin Tytell – 1913-2008

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, In Memoriam, Lifestyle, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

On the day after the 91-year-old co-defendant of the Rosenbergs finally admitted that he was, like them, a spy, comes word of the death of the 94-year-old typewriter expert who was dragooned into service for the appeal lodged by Alger Hiss’ defense team.

Hiss’ appeal finally boiled down to what amounted to a “who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes” defense.  The secret documents he was accused of stealing had been retyped before being passed on to a Soviet courier on a Woodstock typewriter — the typeface of which was identical to one owned and used by Alger and Priscilla Hiss during the period in question. 

Everyone knew that typewriters were like fingerprints — each unique and uniquely identifiable.  So, with the dramatic discovery of the Hiss’ old Woodstock, the case seemed to have been solved and closed.

And that’s where Mr. Tytell came in.  Hiss’ attorneys tasked him with recreating in his workshop a typewriter whose characteristic product would be identical —right down to the tiniest indented Rockwell serif— to that of the damning Hiss machine.  

Martin Tytell was apparently able, after two years working on it, to do what he was asked.  All his work went for naught when the the appeal requesting a new trial was unsuccessful.  

Mr. Tytell’s obituarist, Bruce Weber, notes that, in addition to providing the basis for the abortive appeal, Mr. Tytell’s recreated machine became, after Hiss’ release from prison in 1954, “the foundation of…the debate over his guilt, which goes on to this day.”  I don’t know anything about the circles in which Mr. Weber moves (presumably the ones in which Morton Sobell’s innocence is still an article of faith), but they must be pretty rarefied if that debate is still current among them.

 

 

 

 

I’m sure that at least some TNN readers are old enough to remember (and remember fondly) the typewriter technology of the mid-to-late twentieth century.  They will, like me, still revel remembering the sight and sound and feel of a stately solid old office Underwood (the kind PN would have used when she taught typing at Whittier High School, with the bell to warn you of the approaching margin, and the satisfying heft of the carriage return); or the sleek sensual thrill of boarding a plane carrying a bright new Olivetti portable (designed by Ettore Sottsass who, alas, died in Milan last January at the age of 90); or the no-nonsense authority of the IBM Executive (the only machine on which Rose Mary Woods would type RN’s White House documents); or the IBM Selectric’s “end of history” technology (with its easily interchangeable tying elements and its automatically spooling correction tape that made errors obsolete).

For those of us, there will be great charm —and not a little nostalgia— in the more professional details of Mr. Tytell’s obituary:

Mr. Tytell worked on typewriters that could reproduce dozens of different alphabets appropriate for as many as 145 different languages and dialects — including Farsi and Serbo-Croatian, Thai and Korean, Coptic and Sanskrit, and ancient and modern Greek. He often said that he kept 2 million typefaces in stock.

He made a hieroglyphics typewriter for a museum curator, and typewriters with musical notes for musicians. He adapted keyboards for amputees and other wounded veterans. He invented a reverse-carriage device that enabled him to work in right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew. An error he made on a Burmese typewriter, inserting a character upside down, became a standard, even in Burma.

Martin Kenneth Tytell was born on Dec. 20, 1913, the next-to-last of 10 children whose Russian Jewish immigrant parents lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Eventually, going to school mostly at night, he earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and an M.B.A. from New York University.

But as a boy he worked in a hardware store, carrying a screwdriver everywhere, and one day in school he got himself excused from gym class by volunteering to answer the telephone in a nearby office. Sitting on a desk was an Underwood typewriter, which he took apart. The man who came to fix it gave him his first lesson in typewriter repair. Before he was out of high school he had the typewriter-maintenance account for Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.  

In 1943, a contraband shipment that included 100 Siamese typewriters was seized by the federal government, and with typewriters needed by overseas forces and typewriter producers having largely converted to other wartime manufacturing, Mr. Tytell, then in the Army, was asked to convert the Siamese typewriters for the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.   His machines, capable of reproducing 17 different languages, were airdropped to O.S.S. headquarters at various war fronts.

Mr. Tytell wore a white lab coat and a bow tie while waiting on customers who included writers and journalists such as Dorothy Parker, Richard Condon, David Brinkley, and Harrison Salisbury.  Both Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower were among his clients.  He was sufficiently established to have letters addressed to “Mr. Typewriter, New York,” delivered to his premises at 116 Fulton Street in lower Manhattan.

It is one of my firmly held (and, I realize, not entirely orthodox) beliefs that God, Who recognizes eternal excellence, continues to use His old Remington.  So perhaps Mr. Tytell is still wearing his lab coat and bow tie and simply pursuing his honorable old trade in a new and  better place.

Illustrations (top to bottom): Woodstock, Olivetti, IBM Executive, IBM Selectric, Underwood.

The Last Shoe Finally Drops

September 11, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, National Security, Richard Nixon, Russia, U.S. History | 6 Comments 

Not all old men forget.  Morton Sobell, one of the three defendants in the Rosenberg case, is now 91 and living in the Bronx.  And he has just admitted, in an interview with Sam Roberts of The New York Times, that he was, in fact, guilty as charged: a Soviet spy during World War Two.

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he responded to Mr. Roberts’ direct question whether he was a spy.  “I never thought of it as that in those terms.  What I did was simply defensive, an aircraft gun.  This was defensive.  You cannot plead that what you did was only defensive stuff, but there’s a big difference between giving that and stuff that could be used to attack our country.”

Mr. Sobell was drawing a distinction between plans for radar and artillery devices —which were what he claims to have passed along, and which could be considered defensive weapons— and the secret of the atomic bomb, which is what he and his Rosenberg co-defendants were charged with having stolen and betrayed.

All three defendants pled not guilty.  All were convicted (of espionage rather than treason because at the time the alleged events occurred, the Soviet Union was an ally).  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing  on 19 June 1953.

 Morton Sobell refused to testify at his trial; his silence saved his life and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  He served 18 —including five in Alcatraz— and was released in 1969.  Up until this interview with Mr. Roberts, he has insisted on his complete innocence.  In 1974 he published a long memoir —On Doing Time— that revisited the spy case and reaffirmed his innocence, but mostly dealt with his experiences in prisons and the prison system.

His former wife, Helen Sobell (they divorced in 1980), died in 2002.  She was one of the leading activist proponents of saving the Rosenbergs’ lives; she obtained endorsements from Bertrand Russell and Pablo Picasso.  After their execution she focused her attention on the National Committee to Secure Justice for Morton Sobell — for which she helped raise the more than $1 million that funded more than eight appeals.  She seems to be (unlike Ethel Rosenberg) a case in point of the observation that women are often the more fiercely committed partner in an ideological marriage.

Two major books led to substantial revisions —as well as continued controversies— regarding the Rosenberg case.

In 1983, Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton published The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth.  (When it was updated for a 1997 edition, the subtitle was dropped.)

The authors, whose liberal credentials were well furbished, reached the conclusion that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged (although he more so than she); that the government had resorted to underhand means, and the court to unfair conduct, in their prosecution; and that their execution had as much to do with the temper of the time as the seriousness of their offense.

In 2001, the Times’ Mr. Roberts published a major breakthrough study of  The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair.  Mr. Roberts’ conclusion, basically, was that the Rosenbergs were guilty but had been set up by her brother, David Greenglass.  The book was based on interviews with Mr. Greenglass — who was no more attractive or less reprehensible an individual in 2001 than he had been in 1952.

And now Mr. Sobell has squared the circle by admitting his guilt.  And only a real naïf would imagine that this will allow the case to be closed.

For starters, Mr. Sobell’s current state of mind will rightly be considered.  Mr. Roberts, however, is inclined to accept what he says, and he has found confirmation from another knowledgeable source:

 Mr. Sobell is ailing, but says his long-term memory is sound. He has repeatedly professed his innocence and has said earlier of the Rosenbergs, “I would not take the position that they were absolutely innocent.”

In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Sobell affirmed what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg was aware of her husband’s espionage, but did not actively participate.

“She knew what he was doing,” Mr. Sobell said. “The only thing she may have done is talked to her brother, but Julius knew her brother as well as she did.”

Mr. Greenglass, in an interview for a book by this reporter, “The Brother,” acknowledged that he had lied when he testified that his sister had typed his notes about the bomb — the single most incriminating evidence against her. That allegation emerged months after Mr. Greenglass and his wife testified before the grand jury and only weeks before the trial was to begin.

Government prosecutors later acknowledged that they hoped a conviction and the possibility of a death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg would get her husband to confess and implicate others, including some agents known to investigators through secretly intercepted Soviet cables.

That strategy failed, William Rogers, who was the deputy attorney general at the time, admitted: “She called our bluff.”

Mr. Sobell has been interviewed a number of times recently by Walter Schneir who, with his wife, Miriam, wrote a damning indictment of the Rosenberg prosecution years ago, but, on the basis of decoded Soviet cables and other information, have since reconsidered their verdict that Julius was innocent and was completely framed by the government.

“Do I believe Morty?  Yes,” Mr. Schneir, who is writing a memoir, said on Thursday. “The details that he’s given us so far we’ve been able to check the peripheral parts and they check out.”

During my 1983 interviews with RN, I asked him about the Radosh book — which had only just been published.

FG: There’s a book that’s recently been published about the Rosenberg case, which, if it’s true, upsets the liberal pantheon in that, based on government and other documents, it indicates that the Rosenbergs were, in fact, guilty — at least Julius Rosenberg was specifically guilty and Ethel to a perhaps to a lesser extent. But it also indicates that the government went overboard in framing a case against them. Does that–did that shock you as you read about that, or surprise you, or make you feel vindicated?

RN:  No, as far as the Rosenberg case was concerned, of course, that final decision, the decision not to delay the sentence, was President Eisenhower’s. I was in the room when it happened. It was in the Cabinet Room, and I recall very well the attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and Bill Rogers, the deputy attorney general, bringing the facts to the president, to his attention, and the decision was made. Not in that room  —he made it later—as he always did.

FG:  Did anybody argue for clemency?

RN:  No. The evidence was clear. There was no question about their guilt, as even this book–in which the authors started out convinced they were innocent and then came around to becoming convinced they were guilty.

FG:   Does it bother you, though, that some of the evidence–although they were apparently guilty–that some of the evidence was–was cooked by the F.B.I. to make them appear even more guilty — which might have affected the judgment on clemency, at least for Ethel Rosenberg?

RN:  Oh, certainly. If I had known–if we had known that at the time–if President Eisenhower had known it, he might have taken a different view with regard to her. In other words, tainted evidence, even though a person is totally guilty, is a reason to get him off.

Take Daniel Ellsberg. Daniel Ellsberg was guilty of illegally taking top-secret papers from the Pentagon and turning them over to be published in a newspaper. And yet, because the evidence was tainted, he’s scot-free, making a lot of money on the lecture circuit, particularly at the elite Ivy League colleges. So, as far as Mrs. Rosenberg was concerned, she was entitled to get off on that basis, too.

FG:  Does it disillusion you about J. Edgar Hoover that presumably he —it wouldn’t have been done without his knowledge, if, indeed, without his direction— that the F.B.I. was cooking evidence in such a way?

RN:   Well, I wouldn’t — if I followed that book that you refer to. And the case they made for cooking the evidence is–is pretty weak. It’s–it’s a question of, really, a matter of judgment, and if you look at the times then, if you look at the fact that the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb two to three years before we thought they could, all the evidence points to the fact they wouldn’t have gotten it if it hadn’t been for not only our atomic spies, but the British atomic spies.

You can see why overzealous prosecutors, and those that are assisting prosecutors, like J. Edgar Hoover, would certainly tilt their prosecution and their investigation in a way toward guilt, rather than toward innocence. Now if you look at it coolly, in retrospect, at this point, certainly we would have preferred that it not be done. But at the time I understand why it was done. And let us understand–Mrs. Rosenberg was guilty. This wasn’t a case of somebody not guilty going to the chair.

A Conversation with Khrushchev

September 10, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Cold War, Election 2008, History, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

I had a conversation recently with Sergei Khrushchev, son of the late former Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, as part of my work with the Smithsonian-affiliated Cold War Museum.  Mr. Khrushchev is a member of the museum’s advisory board.

Our discussion was wide-ranging and included his thoughts about a so-called new Cold War.   We also talked about his father’s relationship with Presidents John F. Kennedy (including the assassination) and Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as Josef Stalin, Vladimir Putin, and the current U.S. Presidential campaign.

This is part of a series of podcasts I have developed and hosted for the museum.  You can hear the complete interview here.

Also, with the 40-year reunion of the crew of the USS Pueblo in the news, there is an earlier podcast interview I conducted with one of the crew members also at the Cold War Podcast site.

Old Hot War, Not New Cold War

August 14, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, International Affairs, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Counting those who seem to look at Russians and see Soviets, Andrew Sullivan makes an important distinction:

Wasn’t the entire point of the Cold War that totalitarian expansionist states are different than authoritarian ones? Are we now going to elide this…distinction when it comes to Russia? Putin is not a saint; and his attitude is Cheney-esque in his fondness for secrecy, brute force and contempt for international law. But he is not a communist and he is not attempting to take over the world. The West fought the Cold War based on this distinction. Why should we forget it now it’s over?

Moscow Rules

July 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Iran, Israel and Palestinians, Russia | 2 Comments 

The International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. displays a list of what are called Moscow Rules – commonly accepted guidelines for the good guys during the Cold War. Basically, they are based on a through-the-looking-glass approach to reality, where nothing is as it appears to be.

Some directories note as many as forty of these espionage nuggets, including things like, “float like a butterfly; sting like a bee” (guess who inspired that?), or “Murphy is right,” or “technology will always let you down” (actually, I think that one’s true). But ten are in the commonly accepted list:

1. Assume nothing.
2. Never go against your gut.
3. Everyone is potentially under opposition control.
4. Don’t look back; you are never completely alone.
5. Go with the flow; blend in.
6. Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
7. Lull them into a sense of complacency.
8. Don’t harass the opposition.
9. Pick the time and place for action.
10. Keep your options open.

Author Daniel Silva has brought these deep-background precepts to life in his latest novel that bears the actual name, Moscow Rules. His eleventh book is a bit of a departure from recent ones because it shifts from using the Middle East as a backdrop in favor of the intriguing world of present-day Russia.

The spy novel has come back home.

With the feel of a Cold War story, and a pace unmatched by most war-on-terror thrillers, this book is likely Silva’s best to date. Spy-Mystery-Thriller writers all have their favorite characters. John Le Carré gave us George Smiley, William F. Buckley introduced us to Blackford Oakes, Jack Higgins writes about Sean Dillon, and, of course, there’s Vince Flynn’s creation, Mitch Rapp. But in art restorer-Israeli top spy Gabriel Allon, Silva has a hero for all seasons, shapes, and sizes – a man who is intensely human, fiercely intelligent, and quite good at what he does.

In Moscow Rules, Allon finds himself moving with ease between worlds of religion, politics, and history. From the Vatican, to a CIA house in Georgetown, to the dark and dank inner-sanctum of old Soviet-style brutality in the Lubyanka, he’s a hero for everyone who still believes that there are good guys and bad guys.

Mr. Silva’s style matches the prose gold standard of Mr. Le Carré. He then, however, leaves the Brit far behind to wallow in his well-worn and historically inaccurate arguments about Cold War moral equivalency between east and west. Moscow Rules reminds us that the U.S. and Israel, though far from perfect, provide the world a vital strategic partnership against enemies of freedom. And it’s especially important to have such a relationship up and running when nations like Russia and Iran draw close to each other for their own ends and agendas.

In a sense, Daniel Silva has written a new Cold War novel. By that I mean, a story that’s very much about how an old enemy has come back from the abyss to taunt and haunt us once again. History is repeating itself. This time, however, the weapon we ultimately used to defeat that old “evil empire” – our economic strength – is no longer completely available to us. And it’s very available to them.

Today’s Russia is vastly different from the empire we tried to contain fifty years ago. It’s a place no longer marked by colorless uniformity and severe deprivation. Quite the contrary, today we find a land of great contrasts and contradictions. And we also find a nation recently flooded with petro-dollars.

If the Soviets of old had been able to tap into that kind of resource-driven wealth, the Cold War would have never ended. And the rules of engagement, even history itself, would have been very different.

The fact is that Russia today represents a greater threat to the security of the world than it ever did in the days of Cold War bipolarity. And our old adversaries are taking great pains to reconstruct an empire, one that would include their strong presence, as was once the case, in the Middle East.

Daniel Silva’s story is told against this backdrop, and it has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Readers encounter stories that are reminiscent of recent real-life dramas such as the intriguing murder of former FSB Colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko, who died while investigating the death of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The new Russia is starting to strongly resemble the old Soviet Union – only with nicer cars.

Along the way, the novel takes the reader on a jet-set paced ride to places like Saint-Tropez, Courchevel, Paris, London – but back time and again to Moscow. All the while it tells a cautionary tale, one that should be widely heard these days. It’s not just the Islamists we should be watching – and watching out for – we need to keep our eye on that big old bear roaming once again in the global woods.

As Russia becomes stronger and stronger, and as its leaders tighten the reins more and more on all aspects of national and international life, the world becomes a more dangerous place with each passing day. Vladimir Putin and his puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, have an agenda. They have empires in their brains. And, if the past is any indicator of the future (of course it is!), they will also play by a sinister set of rules – the most important one being: the ends justify the means.

When it comes to characters out of Cold War literature and media, I can’t help but resonate with something said by Boris Badenov. No, he wasn’t a KGB leader. Nor was he ever on the wall overlooking Red Square as the missiles rode by on May Day.

Boris was a diminutive fellow with a distinct accent who, along with his wife and side-kick, Natasha, tried to foil the good guys, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose. He had a memorable saying I thought about as I read Daniel Silva’s book, Moscow Rules. It came to mind every time one of the bad guys did something rotten. In fact, what Mr. Badenov had to say should be heeded by both candidates for the presidency this year.

He said:

“Never underestimate the power of a schnook.”

People Of The World…

July 24, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Democratic Party, Election 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Well, the Senator has spoken. And while the avalanche of clips hadn’t reached Youtube when last I checked, the prepared text of Sen. Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin has now appeared online.  It’s one of his canniest, most carefully crafted addresses yet. Note his reference, in the opening minutes, to his Kenyan grandfather working as a domestic servant of British colonialists, ably playing on a rather ancient German sentiment - you can just picture most of the 100,000-strong crowd nodding and saying, “Ja, ja. The British are bastards. The Russians were right about that at least – they’re hooligans.” 

Then Obama moves on to quoting a famous speech – but it turns out to be the one made by Berlin’s mayor in 1948, Ernst Reuter, during the airlift.  “People of the world, look at Berlin,” Obama intones, echoing the burgomeister – it isn’t quite JFK’s “Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen!”  but it’ll do.

And, as several bloggers have noted, he said “tore down that wall” just like Reagan did – a  well-aimed gesture toward independents and wavering GOP supporters.

Obama concludes with his customary “this is the moment” finale, which may be a bit overused on these shores, but undoubtedly wowed the German audience.  Ah, if only they could all be airlifted here come the first Tuesday in November and driven to the nearest polling place.  All in all, it looks like another well-handled Barack moment.

Alger Hiss at Starbucks

July 21, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Election 2008, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

In a review of Conrad Black’s biography of President Nixon, TNN’s Jack Pitney (writing in the summer 2008 issue of the Claremont Review of Books) offers an account of the definitive conflict of RN’s early career:

As the 2008 presidential race unfolds, this book reminds us that Nixon’s career anticipated key features of contemporary politics. There has been much talk lately about the “latte liberals” who played such a big part in the early Democratic primaries. The term is fairly recent, but the concept was familiar to Nixon. During his first term in Congress, he fought liberal intellectuals over the Alger Hiss spy case. Whittaker Chambers, the repentant ex-Communist who exposed the story, contrasted “the glittering Hiss forces” with Nixon and his fellow anti-Communists. “The inclusive fact about them,” wrote Chambers, in Witness, “is that, in contrast to the pro-Hiss rally, most of them, regardless of what they had made of themselves, came from the wrong side of the railroad tracks.”

Hiss did not hide his disdain. Black recounts a hearing in which Hiss told Nixon: “I attended Harvard Law School. I believe yours was Whittier.” Hiss erred in two ways. First, he got his facts wrong: Nixon received his legal education at Duke Law School. More important, Hiss’s hauteur made it easier for Nixon to portray him as a villain. (It also helped, as declassified documents later confirmed, that Hiss was guilty as sin.) Nearly all of Hiss’s supporters were patriotic and well-intentioned, but a fair number shared his arrogance. “No feature of the Hiss case is more obvious, or more troubling as history,” wrote Chambers, “than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those who affected to act, think, and speak for them.”

Ich Bin Ein…..Halt!

July 9, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Democratic Party, Election 2008, History, International Affairs, Presidents, Russia, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

I rather suspect Sen. Barack Obama is welcoming former Gov. Jesse Ventura’s reported plans to run against Al Franken and Sen. Norm Coleman for the latter’s seat. After all, once “The Mind” starts making the rounds of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, the attention of the American public will be diverted not only from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s latest faux pas regarding the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, but also from the latest example of Obama’s tendency to overreach himself in spectacular fashion.

It’s one thing for the gentleman from Illinois to plan to move his acceptance speech from the 22,000-capacity Pepsi Center in Denver, where he (presumably) will be nominated at the end of August, to 75,000-seat Invesco Stadium at Mile High, home of the NFL’s Broncos, much as John F. Kennedy, after being chosen by his party in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, moved his acceptance speech to Memorial Coliseum. After all, his soaring oratory usually works better when his audience is bigger, and having the Rockies for a background doesn’t hurt.

But it’s quite another thing when Obama, moving into his “statesman” mode, decides to lead off a visit to Germany, France and Britain later this month with an speech on July 24 in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

The Gate, built in the 1790s by order of Prussian Emperor Frederick William I, has been the symbol of German unity since 1870. In the 1930s, no Nazi parade in the city was complete without a procession through the Gate, as shown in this photo of Adolf Hitler riding through it on the way to the 1936 Olympics opening ceremony.

But after 1945, and especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Gate gained a greater significance. The western border of the Soviet zone of occupation in the city (and of Communist-controlled East Berlin) ran just a few feet in front of the gate, and thus concrete and barbed wire went up, barring West Berliners from access to the national landmark. This remained the case for 28 long years.

On June 26, 1963 – just under 45 years and a month before the date of Obama’s proposed speech – President Kennedy visited the area in front of the Gate (the East German authorities chose to hang black cloth banners between the pillars to obscure his view of their side of the city), then traveled to Schoneberg Rathaus, Berlin’s city hall. There, before a massive crowd that filled Rudolph Wilde Platz (renamed John F. Kennedy Platz after his assassination), the president spoke from the Rathaus’ balcony. His address, one of the finest of his career, ended with words that have never lost their resonance: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” (The question of whether some in the audience thought he was saying he was the German pastry of that name is still debated.)

Just under 24 years later on June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin and spoke directly in front of the Gate and the Wall. Before another enormous crowd he issued the challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that, stunningly, was fulfilled just 29 months later: “Tear down this wall!”

But Obama’s hope to follow in the footsteps of JFK and the Gipper is being frustrated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has diplomatically, but unmistakably, made it known that in her view speeches at that hallowed monument of Cold War triumph and German nationhood are the province of leaders of nations, where politicians from overseas are concerned, not political candidates, whether or not they represent a unit within a nation as Obama represents Illinois. It’s hard to tell whether she can make that stick; Obama probably has a more enthusiastic following in Germany than any other European country, and in that land the media long since has anointed him der schwarzer Kennedy. But whether or not he does speak at the Brandenburg Gate, you have to wonder what he’s got up his sleeve for his birthday on August 4 – Scarlett Johannson singing “Happy Birthday” at Madison Square Garden, perhaps? (Assuming Michelle would permit it?)

Into Africa

June 25, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, International Affairs, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Foreign service officer Gregory L. Garland gives Vice President Nixon substantial credit for spurring the State Department to pay more attention to post-colonial Africa and adds this about his civil rights record:

[T]here’s a consensus that RN’s [civil rights] position at this point in his career was driven as much by morality and Cold War strategy as by ambition. In 1960, Jackie Robinson, the gifted second baseman of the Dodgers who had integrated professional baseball, wrote a favorable commentary about Nixon. Then a presidential candidate, Nixon thanked Robinson in a letter, noting that “I have consistently taken a strong position on civil rights, not only for the clear-cut moral considerations involved, but for other reasons which reach beyond our nation’s borders.” Without strong action on civil rights, Nixon continued, “we will suffer in the eyes of the emerging nations and uncommitted peoples. Beyond this, our present struggle with the forces of atheistic communism is an economic as well as an ideological battle. To deny ourselves the full talent and energies of 17 million Negro Americans in this struggle would be stupidity of the greatest magnitude.”

Appeasement and Detente: Two VERY Different Things

June 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under China, Cold War, History, International Affairs, Political Philosophy, Richard Nixon, Russia, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

The current on-going review of the history of APPEASEMENT during the 1930s and the lessons, if any, that can be applied to current geopolitics, has reminded some of the Nixonian philosophy of DÉTENTE. And there may appear to be a surface similarity.

The argument goes something like this: “Well, Nixon sat down with Chairmen Brezhnev and Mao, is that so different from Barack Obama wanting to break bread with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?”

Actually, it’s very different. There’s very little, if any, real comparison between the neophyte dreams of an inexperienced political celebrity and the well thought out and executed policies of our nation’s thirty-seventh chief executive.

One cannot imagine Richard Nixon sitting down with a volatile, mercurial, and visibly unstable foreign counterpart early on in his administration. Nor is it easy to envision Mr. Nixon promising to do so during a campaign. His penchant for appropriate secrecy and his practiced unwillingness to telegraph punches before they needed to be thrown would have inhibited him from that kind of political pandering.

He never said that he had a “secret plan” to end the War in Vietnam, nor can anyone remember him talking about the possibilities of having a steaming bowl of pho with Ho Chi Minh.

Also, his détente-driven overtures to the Soviets and Chinese were part of a STRATEGIC worldview, not mere tactics designed to impress American voters or assuage crazy warlords. In fact, Mr. Nixon risked his conservative political base with the China initiative – and could only pull it off BECAUSE of his bona fides as a Cold Warrior and anti-communist (“only Nixon could go to China”).

Years after leaving office, while writing a book about leaders (my personal favorite of all his writings), he reviewed the concept of DÉTENTE in light of the failed policies of Jimmy Carter and the increasingly successful ones of Ronald Reagan. “LEADERS: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World” was written in 1982.

Here’s what he said. This applies, I think, to the argument that APPEASEMENT and DÉTENTE are essentially the same. They are not:

“…to apply the Golden Rule to our dealings with the Soviets is dangerously naïve. President Carter, with the best of intentions, tried unilateral restraint in the hopes that the Soviets would follow suit. The result was disastrous. As he cut back on American arms programs, the Soviets stepped up theirs. Consequently, President Reagan has had to institute an arms buildup to restore the nuclear balance of power.

There are two kinds of détente: hard-headed and soft-headed. Hard-headed détente is based on effective deterrence. This kind of détente encourages the Soviets to negotiate, because it makes the cost of Soviet aggression too high. Soft-headed détente, by contrast, discourages negotiation, because it makes the cost of Soviet expansion so low that the Soviets find the rewards of aggression too tempting.

Hard-headed détente, backed by the force to make deterrence credible, preserves peace. Soft-headed détente invites either war or surrender without war. We need detente, but it must be the right kind of détente.”

“DSPQ/Can’t Be All We Say And Do!”

June 24, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, DSPQ, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Abundant thanks to Frank Gannon for naming, and acronyming, the beast.

I was lamenting just last night how much time I spend mired in my own DSPQ pathology. This was right after I wrote about how the liberals who idealize Sen. Obama’s small-amount givers might well despise a conservative’s. When it comes to campaign finance, it’s not just how much they give. It’s who they are and what they want, yadda yadda yadda.

But who’s that whispering in my ear?: So what?, deal with it, move on! There’s no question that President Nixon spent long hours computing the mammoth and no doubt infinitely frustrating DSPQs of the Vietnam era. Yet no matter how much DSPQ steam he let off in taped White House conversations, his legacy of principled, creative pragmatism is far more than that. I remember him during his post-Presidential years writing to young people interested in politics that if all they did was bemoan media bias, they wouldn’t get anywhere. He warned them that the double standard would always be flying. Republicans and conservatives had to take it for granted and govern anyway — and govern he did.

Got Smart?

June 23, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, Richard Nixon | 4 Comments 

“I’ve been wanting to do this since Nixon,” shouts the Chief (played by Alan Arkin in the new movie “Get Smart”) as he lunges across a conference room to attack the Vice President of the United States. The VP (who doesn’t look like Dick Cheney, but you’re definitely supposed to think it’s he) chairs a hidebound interagency task force at Homeland Security including CIA, the Secret Service, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and CONTROL, workplace of Agents 86 (Max Smart) and 99 (played in the new movie by Anne Hathaway). Shown a video of the Chief’s assault on the veep, a Bush-like President (James Caan) is perversely pleased. You know it’s supposed to be Bush because of Caan’s stab at a Texas drawl and because a Secret Service agent has to nudge the snoozing President during a concert at which works by Mozart and Beethoven are performed. Everybody knows George W. Bush hates the classics.

But what’s President Nixon got to do with it? It could just be a throwaway line. But before we decide, let’s apply the Is the goofy fed in the movie a white or black hat? test.

Here’s how it works. Thrillers and sci-fi movies sometimes have a character who comes from Washington to throw his weight around ineffectually and serve as a comic foil. He’s usually wearing a coat and tie in 120-degree desert heat. If the intefering fed’s a good guy, it usually means there was a Democratic President when the movie was being made. In “Broken Arrow,” for instance, a renegade military officer played by John Travolta steals two nukes. The hapless fed in the coat and tie turns out to be okay. Check the date: 1996 — Bill Clinton. How about “Starman,” in which Washington sends a creepy guy to try to capture and dissect benevolent space alien Jeff Bridges? It was made in 1984, so Ronald Reagan would’ve been dissector-in-chief. In post-Watergate spy comedies made during the Carter Administration such as “Hopscotch” (1980) and “The In-Laws” (that is, Arthur Hiller’s 1979 original), the feds are warm, fuzzy, and inoffensive, like the President (unless the fed has a picture of RN on the wall, such as the Ned Beatty character in “Hopscotch,” in which case he’s a bad guy).

In the new Indiana Jones movie, Harrison Ford being interrogated by humorless, red-baiting feds is an anti-GOP twofer: Steven Spielberg, making the movie in the Bush era, set the the movie in the Eisenhower era.

As for “Get Smart,” as a TV series, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, it straddled the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, premiering in 1965 and airing until 1970. As I recall, the show was more interested in making fun of James Bond than either Lyndon or Richard. The movie version, directed by Peter Segal (with Brooks and Henry serving as consultants), follows the prevailing Hollywood practice, recently identified by Ross Douthat, of avoiding identifying the United States’ principal enemies as violent Islamic extremists. Instead, Max and 99 take on a post-Cold War KAOS seemingly still operated by Germans, Russians, and Chechens. Nobody’s ready to laugh at Al-Qaos yet, anyway, especially when you remember that they’re actively trying to figure out how to get a dirty bomb into the multiplex (and I don’t mean “Showgirls”).

Discerning about its bad guys, “Get Smart” also has complicated fed semiotics. The film’s CIA and military intelligence characters? Incompetent — they overlook or discount credible threats. Secret Service? Doltish. Alan Arkin gets to punch one of them out, too.

In “Get Smart,” the only good feds are fictional feds — the ones from CONTROL, hanging on by that much since the end of the Cold War and frustrated that their complex studies of the motivations and tortured inner feelings of our adversaries don’t receive enough attention at Homeland Security. So the Chief’s angry at the VP and USSS for being obtuse, and at RN for…Watergate? For undermining CONTROL? For not understanding that we could make a more stable world by communicating better with our enemies (such as in Moscow and Beijing)?

It’s a great summer movie notwithstanding. As Maxwell Smart, Steve Carell is sublime, as always. Max gets to say all his signature lines. Hathaway is a wonderful 99 for the ’00s. The only problem is a glaring continuity error involving CONTROL HQ. First person to point it out gets a free copy of The Strong Man by James Rosen.

Not Real Nixon

June 20, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Cold War, Culture, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Al Weisel in “Newsday” on Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland:

Pearlstein [sic] is at his best in conveying the feeling, shared by those on the right and left, that America was hurtling into the abyss and only one side (your own) could stop it. The fact that Pearlstein is able to so vividly reconstruct the era, however, makes his portrayal of the man at the center of his narrative all the more disappointing. Pearlstein’s Nixon often seems more like someone wearing a Halloween Nixon mask than a real person. Everything Nixon says and does is reflected in the poorest possible light. There is no accomplishment that isn’t the result of cold political calculation, no action that doesn’t spring from the swamp of Nixon’s resentments.

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