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BLOG ADMINISTRIVIA NOTE

For whatever reason – being trendy is my guess, though control-freakishness or co-worker stupidity with spam and viruses is not to be excluded – my place of work has blocked all the mainstream, major, email sites. So if you send something to zenpundit@hotmail.com during normal business hours I am now unlikely to see it until late evening. Thus, email responses from me ( and I try to respond to everyone in a timely fashion, though, admittedly, I do not always succeed) are now subject to a minimum 24 hour delay.

If anyone knows of a reliable but obscure email service that flies under most IT department radar (I know they have blocked only specific sites) I’m open to suggestion for an alternative.

RAMBLING RECOMMENDATIONS

Due to an aggravating surfeit of mundane but absolutely necessary tasks, the third part of the Nixon series will have to wait a day or two.

Some minor recommendations:

Secrecy News put out by Dr. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists is a high quality, almost unbelievably good, blog deserving of much wider notice. I say this as someone who thinks that while Dr. Aftergood is sometimes too cavalier in his attitude toward what I would regard as vital (i.e. things that actually should be classfied) secrets, he shines a much needed, expert, light on the counterproductive secrecy empire of the security bureaucracy.

Shloky.com is also, IMHO, vastly underrated. A blog that punches well above its weight class.

John Robb highlighted ISN Blog recently. Worth checking out.

Vibrant and edgy discussion about Iran’s latest nuclear technology provocation at The Glittering Eye. Jeff Medcalf and Collounsbury are going head to head.

Two gentlemen I respect: Colonel Austin Bay features a guest post by Naval War College professor Dr. Tom Nichols.

Two important military theory related posts by Dr. Barnett and John Robb that I probably would have critiqued at length had I not spent the last hour trying to fix the F-ing dresser that the Son of Zenpundit somehow damaged ( I strongly suspect there was some kind of “ladder” scenario going on with the drawers to get the “Buried Treasure” hotwheel type toy that was out of reach).

An article: ” A Decisive weapon: A Brigade Commander’s Perspective on Information Operations” (PDF). Hat tip to PHK of Whirledview.

I’m going to get another glass of vino now….

ON NIXON, PART II.

One quality Richard Nixon possessed that seemed to be acknowledged by friend and foe alike was a capacity to think deeply and long on difficult questions. From his days as a young man at Duke Law student with ” an iron butt” to his old age, a widower, staying up underlining passages in texts on classical philosophy, Nixon appears most at ease with himself when he was wrestling with problems alone.

Even on the famous Nixon tapes, which are slowly being released and transcribed by the National Archives ( and are mostly being ignored, except perhaps by historian Stanley Kutler , Chicago Tribune reporter James Warren and the odd grad student), Nixon is at his most revealing when he is engaged in a monologue with a trusted aide or one of his few personal confidant. If Nixon was equal to his predecessor LBJ in deviousness and casual profainity, he had none of Johnson’s garrulous extroversion and manic need to make a human connection. Nixon viewed small talk with distate and emotional scenes with dread. Relentlessly, Nixon pressed H.R. Haldeman to reduce his level of contact with Congressmen, Cabinet appointees and even his own White House Staff.

Nixon’s preference for self-imposed isolation and his analytical bent paid dividends in terms of insight. I offer a sampling of Richard Nixon, drawn from many sources, in his own words:

“…our diplomats have a pervasive tendency to negotiate with themselves on behalf of the Soviets. Every hardline negotiation option discussed within the U.S. government encounters a chorus of derision on the grounds that ‘ the Russians will never accept it’ “.

“Our first task is to distinguish between vital interests, critical interests and peripheral interests….strategy means means making choices, and making choices means enforcing a set of strategic priorities”

” What we do outside our negotiating sessions is as important as what we do inside them “

” Democratic government is an art that requires vision”
“Public opinion polls are useful if a politician uses them to them only to to learn approximately what the people are thinking, so he can talk to them more intelligently”

“Public opinion responds to threats, not oportunities. It is easy to mobilize support to meet a clear threat but difficult to rally to seize a fleeting opportunity. If our leaders put foreign policy on the backburner until world events produce a new threat, our moment of opportunity will have vanished”

“…reaction and response to a crisis are uniquely personal in the sense that it depends on what an individual brings to bear on the situation”
“Reading can be particularly useful in times of crisis. It is then that a leader most needs perspective. If he is to keep his mind focused on his long-range goals, he must step back from the problems of the present. Reading helps him do that. He may not find the answer to his problem in what he reads, but new thoughts will refrsh his mind and permit him to tackle problems with renewed energy“

“Small states love to play a role – that’s why we used Ceaucescu with North Vietnam. He was a good channel.”
[ Ed. Note: Ceaucescu was also used by Nixon to contact China before using Yayah Khan of Pakistan. Khan received few rewards for his troubles but Ceaucescu was richly rewarded by Nixon with access to trade, diplomatic honors and Western credits]

“This is what the Chinese have done. They have scrapped the economic side [ of Communism] in order to hang on to the political side. This is why the hardliners in China, like Li Peng, want to isolate China and the reason why they want the United States to isolate them. Then their political power is ensured. They won’t have to worry about all this corrupting Western influence”

” The Chinese will watch what the United States does elsewhere in the world just as carefully as they watch what we do in China.”

“The toughest personnel choice he [ the President] has to make is between a friend who is loyal but not competent and someone else who is competent but not necessarily a friend”

” In the last forty years, the upper crust of America in terms of education, money
and power has lost its sense of direction in the world.”

Coming soon, Part III: Nixon’s Long Shadow.

RECOMMENDED READING -4GW THEORY EDITION

A few comments from me as well:

William Lind at DNI – “Beginning to Learn“. Whenever I read Lind’s On War column, I pretty much have only three possible reactions: He’s dead right; He’s dead wrong; He’s had too much German lager today. Lind was dead right in this one.

Purpleslog – who adds a valuable twist on to considerations of resilience and 4GW conflict with
” 5GW Thought: Would a Goal of a 5GW Organization Be To Reduce the Resiliency of the Target State?“. It’s cool to find someone else seeing something I clearly missed.

Dan of tdaxp – continues a long dormant but much praised series of applying 4GW theory to the history of Christianity’s rise, with “Jesusism-Paulism, Part IV: The Fall of Rome“. It might be helpful to read Part I, Part II. and Part III. first however.

That’s it.

ON RICHARD NIXON , PART I.

When we write or discuss the 19th century in terms of broad American history, it usually comes down to a handful of names. Abraham Lincoln, of course, enjoys pride of place but in his vanguard march Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson and John Calhoun. They march there not because everything they did was great or good but because, unlike lesser figures, even formidible ones like Mark Hanna or Thomas Hart Benton, these men and their battles defined the age. For the twentieth century, among the very few figures that historians will select to stand alongside Franklin Roosevelt will be Richard Milhous Nixon.

Nixon ran for national office no less than five times, winning four out of those five times and losing to John F. Kennedy only by one of the slenderest of margins in American history and winning reelection as President, in the midst of an unpopular war, by one of the largest landslides. Nixon served in both houses of the legislative branch where he established himself as a force to be reckoned with despite his lack of seniority. His exposure of Alger Hiss as a Communist spy earned Nixon the undying hatred of the left-liberal wing of the Establishment in a way that Nixon’s bareknuckle red-baiting against Jerry Voorhees and Helen Gahagan Douglas did not. Nixon’s comeback in 1968, after his crushing defeat (and subsequent televised self-destruction) in California’s gubernatorial election, was a skillfully executed rise from the political dead.

Space in a mere blog post does not permit detailing the heights of Nixon’s accomplishments in foreign policy or his ignominious fall in his criminal conspiracy of Watergate. For that, books are required:

If you are and remain a devoted Nixon-hater, your best bet in terms of scholarship would be historian Stanley I. Kutler’s Wars of Watergate and Abuse of Power. If you are an admirer of Richard Nixon, he wrote a slew of books of which his memoirs, RN, may be the most interesting from any American president other than those of Ulysses S. Grant. I would also recommend Six Crises. For a more balanced (though hardly favorable) view than Kutler’s, of this analytically brilliant, at times visionary and deeply flawed man, I like Richard Reeves’ biography, Richard Nixon:Alone in the White House. Nixon’s role in the Hiss case is illuminated by Sam Tanenhaus in his biography Whittaker Chambers.

Alongside Nixon and his critics are a few books by Nixon’s collaborators and aides. The postumously published The Haldeman Diaries are an indispensible resource for historians that far eclipses Haldeman’s The Ends of Power. Less meticulous, but a still interesting sampling of Nixon administration mentality, was From: The President, edited by Bruce Oudes. Henry Kissinger’s ponderously large, three volume memoirs have numerous valuable commentaries about Richard Nixon and especially, his foreign policy, must be included in any serious study of Nixon.

Most of the books produced by the Watergate conspirators tend to be at least as self-serving as Nixon’s account without the benefit of Nixon’s selectively incisive intellect. Dean’s Blind Ambition is probably among the worst of the lot but none of them, often written hastily in the face of mounting legal bills and fines, add much substance to that covered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. John Ehrlichman’s cynicism is occasionally amusing as is G. Gordon Liddy, though often unintentionally. Of lesser figures, little need be said.

Next, Part II. Nixon in his own words: