Book Write-Up: Socialism, by Michael Harrington

Michael Harrington.  Socialism.  New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972.  See here to buy the book.

Michael Harrington was an American democratic socialist.  Some have argued that his book about American poverty, The Other America, helped inspire the Great Society in the 1960s.  I read The Other America in 1996.  I was a conservative at the time, and I read Marvin Orlasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, which some have claimed was an inspiration for President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives policy.  I read The Other America to get a left-leaning perspective on poverty.

I recently learned about Harrington’s book Socialism from a commenter on my blogger blog.  In 2013, I blogged through W.A. Swanberg’s award-winning biography of six-time Socialist Presidential candidate Norman Thomas.  Some of these posts have gotten a lot of views lately, and the reason may be that Bernie Sanders’ Presidential candidacy has made people curious about socialism.  I was struggling in reading Swanberg’s book to understand what exactly socialism was.  For example, is it totally against private property?  Many of the European countries labeled “socialist” have private industries.  Plus, even American socialist platforms have seemed to presume that, under the society that they advocated, people would own things.  The commenter mentioned Michael Harrington’s book on socialism.  Harrington dedicated his book to Norman Thomas.

A key point that comes out in Michael Harrington’s book on socialism is this: left-wing ideology is far from monolithic, and Michael Harrington is not entirely happy with how it has been implemented.  In prominent cases, Harrington notes, it has led to the oppression and exploitation of people by the government.  This is the case with many Communist regimes, and Harrington argues that these regimes actually violate the teachings of Karl Marx, who, Harrington argues, had more of a peaceful, democratic view of revolution and society than many might think.  In a number of cases, Harrington argues, socialism, social democracy, or left-wing policies have left in place the class system.  The result has been that society, including the leftist ideas as implemented, continue to benefit the wealthy, the powerful, and the well-connected rather than (or more than) the people who need help.  This has been the case with the nationalization of industries and the welfare state.

Harrington tries to diagnose what has gone wrong and offers suggestions on what may work.  According to Harrington, a reason that Communism has not worked well is that many countries in embracing it have skipped a key stage of Marx’s historical scenario: capitalism.  Although Marx believed that capitalism would self-collapse, he thought that it would generate abundance, and then the abundance would be equitably distributed under Communism.  For the proletariat to control the means of production and use them for society’s benefit, in short, there need to be means of production.  But a number of countries that embraced Communism did not really have a capitalist stage of economic development: they had many peasants, but not a lot of producers.  Some, such as the Soviet Union, tried to make up for that, and they did not exactly do so nicely or efficiently.  Harrington supports socialism in prosperous countries such as the U.S. and Europe.  Moreover, he wants to include the Third World in the world economy in a non-exploitative manner.  For example, he is critical of imposing high tariffs on products from the Third World.

Harrington believes that socialism can work.  He points to the Tennessee Valley Authority as an example of socialism at its best: it makes money that it uses for its capital, and it provides low-cost electricity to people.  Harrington states at one point that the TVA is a better socialistic model than the post office!  Harrington also is not so naive as to believe that the U.S. can transition to socialism cold-turkey, but he maintains that feasible steps can be taken in that direction.  Steps can be taken so that businesses answer more to people and communities than their shareholders.  The tax system can be structured so that money is redistributed more equitably.  Harrington responds to the Wall Street Journal‘s argument that such proposals stifle innovation, invention, and job creation by contending that a number of investors profit parasitically rather than contributing to the well-being of people and society.

Harrington mentions Dostoevsky’s statement that socialism is too idealistic and disregards human nature.  Harrington states that Westerners perhaps are as they are because they have been conditioned by capitalism for years.  Harrington notes what he considers to be steps in the right direction, such as young people living in communes and rejecting materialism.  Harrington is critical of the totalitarian Communist regimes that tried to re-educate people from their capitalist assumptions, but he still seems to think that re-education may need to occur.  Perhaps he thinks that it can occur peacefully.

This book was published in 1972, and it is interesting to see what was on people’s radar then, and to compare that with what is on people’s radar now.  Income inequality and the struggles of the middle class were issues then, as they are now.  Harrington also mentions global warming, which he says may result in floods in 2070.  Knowing the outcome of what Harrington mentions was also interesting.  Harrington states that we will have to see how Salvador Allende’s Chile turns out.  This was written before Pinochet took over in a coup.

This is a worthwhile book to read.  I appreciated Harrington’s honest critique of how socialism and left-wing policies have been implemented.  I am not a libertarian myself, but the libertarian argument that government intervention has its drawbacks does resonate with me, and some of what Harrington was saying spoke to the part of me that feels that way.  I do believe that socialism is rather idealistic, that people need a reward to create and produce.  At the same time, I also think that successful models can be implemented that benefit people and society.

Lauren Bacall

Actress Lauren Bacall has passed on.  I only saw a few of her movies with Humphrey Bogart.  I also saw her in the Stephen King movie Misery, in which she played author Paul Sheldon’s agent.  Apparently, she was also in an episode of Family Guy, but I would have to watch that episode again, as parts of it I remember, and parts of it are fuzzy to me.

I was thinking this morning about Ann Coulter’s reference to Bacall in her book, Treason, which was Coulter’s defense of McCarthyism.  According to Coulter, both Bacall and Bogie ultimately distanced themselves from the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions by the House Committee on Un-American Activities about whether they were members of the Communist Party USA.

This stood out to me because I had often heard that Bogie and Bacall traveled to Washington, D.C. to support the Hollywood Ten, but not that they later rescinded that support.  Ann Coulter narrates that Bogie and Bacall were embarrassed by the Hollywood Ten’s extreme rants, such as the claim of one of the ten that the congressmen were Nazis and that concentration camps would be set up in America.  Lauren Bacall said, “We were so naive it was ridiculous.”  The article that Coulter cites for the Bacall quote, however, contextualizes it differently: Bacall was saying she was naive because reporters were asking her hard questions, and the actors and actresses there were accustomed to softball questions from movie magazines.  Bacall, after all, went on to say, “When the press started to ask us questions, they had a field day.”

Wikipedia acknowledges that Bogie and Bacall distanced themselves from the Hollywood Ten, but it narrates it a bit differently, as if Bogie and Bacall were trying to protect themselves:

“In October 1947, Bacall and Bogart traveled to Washington, D.C., along with other Hollywood stars, in a group that called itself the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA). She appeared alongside Humphrey Bogart in a photograph printed at the end of an article he wrote, titled I’m No Communist’, in the May 1948 edition of Photoplay magazine,^[47] written to counteract negative publicity resulting from his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bogart and Bacall distanced themselves from the Hollywood Ten and said: ‘We’re about as much in favor of Communism as J. Edgar Hoover.'”^[48] 

Moreover, wikipedia’s article on the Hollywood Ten states: “In his 1981 autobiography, Hollywood Red, screenwriter Lester Cole [who was one of the Ten] stated that all of the Hollywood Ten had in fact been Communist Party USA members.^[66] Other members of the Hollywood Ten, such as Dalton Trumbo^[67] and Edward Dmytryk,^[68] have also admitted to being Communists at the time the Committee questioned them.”

You can click on the footnotes if you want to see wikipedia’s sources.

Why was this of concern?  Because there was fear that Hollywood Communists would use movies as Communist propaganda, portraying the Soviets as good and capitalists as evil.

Whatever she did during the Hollywood blacklisting years, Bacall remained a liberal throughout her life.

Anyway, this was a rather tedious post to write.  Maybe someone will find it interesting.

R.I.P., Lauren Bacall.

The Final Days 7

On page 223 of The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein say the following about President Richard Nixon's negotiations with the Soviets to slow down the arms race:

"The President had often confided to Kissinger his most telling reason for slowing down the nuclear-arms race.  He feared that the United States would lose it.  Continued military competition was too expensive.  The country might not be able to sustain the costs of a prolonged cold war.  America, the President felt, was too likely to buckle under the pressure.  Besides the economic weakness of the country, Nixon perceived a weakness of will.  Too many of the same political critics who were pushing him to the wall on Watergate would not support a tough posture toward the Russians, he said."

In this post, I'll just assume that Nixon felt this way, even though I don't know for sure if that was the case.
It sounds as if Nixon saw detente as second-best, as if he would have preferred for the United States to have the guts to be tough with the Soviets and to win the nuclear arms race.  Not only did Nixon admire guts, but, reading some of his foreign policy books, Nixon looked back with apparent pleasure at the days when the United States had nuclear superiority and could appeal to that to get the Soviets to back off from some of the adventures that they were pursuing.  Nixon considered that to be keeping the peace!

But I think that there was another side to Nixon.  Nixon in his memoirs, especially the first volume, depicts himself as someone who wants peace.  He wanted peace when his father and his brothers fought.  He saw some of the horrors of war.  And he admired pacifists, even if he did not go so far as to be a pacifist himself.  I have my doubts that this side of Nixon saw detente merely as second-best.

Moreover, Nixon argues that he as President spent more money on domestic concerns than on military defense.  Maybe Nixon here is simply presenting himself as progressive, against liberal critics, and his point is that he has done more to further liberal concerns than liberals themselves have.  Or perhaps a part of Nixon had a sense that the arms race was costing the United States money, money that could be used to help people.

I admire guts, but I also don't think that peace and negotiation should be considered second-best.  I think that the best option is what Nixon said detente was: negotiation, but not negotiation that allows others to walk all over you.  Detente is tough negotiation, according to Nixon.

I would like to mention one more thing.  On page 222, Woodward and Bernstein say: "The Soviet press had largely ignored Watergate.  When the matter was referred to, it was portrayed as a plot to destroy d[e]tente."  That actually overlaps with the argument of the book, Silent Coup: that there were military people in Nixon's Administration who did not like being shut out of the decisionmaking process, and who did not care for detente, and they contributed to President Richard Nixon's downfall.

Real Peace, by Richard Nixon

I read Richard Nixon's 1983 book, Real Peace.  This book overlapped in areas with the last foreign policy book by Nixon that I read, 1999: Victory Without War.  There were three things in Real Peace that particularly stood out to me.

First of all, Nixon in Real Peace seems to support reducing nuclear weapons, whereas in 1999: Victory Without War he appeared to be critical of President Ronald Reagan's START agreements and more supportive of limiting (as opposed to reducing) the number of nuclear weapons.  But I could be off-base on this, for I have not committed either book to memory, plus I may have missed some things in my reading, so perhaps Nixon in both books supported reducing nuclear weapons, without being committed to complete nuclear disarmament.

Second, in talking about China, Nixon says that he supports China and the Soviet Union seeking to reduce tensions with each other.  This stood out to me because some have said that Nixon sought to exploit the division between Red China and the Soviet Union, and that the United States' rapprochement with Red China gave the U.S. another card that it could play as it dealt with the U.S.S.R.  In Real Peace, Nixon says that it was preferable for the U.S. to reach out to Red China, since otherwise Red China in its vulnerability would have been pulled even more into the Soviet orbit, and that would not be good for the U.S.  While Nixon favors an easing of tension between Red China and the U.S.S.R., he doesn't want tensions to be eased that way (i.e., through the pulling of Red China into the Soviet orbit).  But Nixon does favor Red China and the U.S.S.R., as autonomous nations, easing tensions with one another, since hostility between the two could lead to war, perhaps even a world war during the nuclear age.

Third, on page 99, Nixon states regarding the Kremlin leaders that "We must not object to their attempts to spread communism as long as they use peaceful means to do so."

This surprised me, since Nixon throughout the book is concerned about Soviet expansionism.  So now he's open to it, as long as it does not occur through violence?  Did he consistently apply this policy?

What if Communism triumphed through elections?  Nixon in Real Peace criticized the leftists in El Salvador, saying that they were resistant to internationally-supervised elections.  What would he say about the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1984, in an election that the UN and Western European observers said was fair (see here)?  Well, there were conservative Americans who said that they were not entirely fair, since the Sandinistas restricted freedom of the press and assembly.  Was the election that the Sandinistas lost, the one in 1990, fair?  Many would probably argue that it was, yet a professor once told me that a number of Nicaraguans voted against the Sandinistas because they wanted the United States to leave their country alone: the U.S. was funding destructive contras on account of the Sandinistas, so let's vote out the Sandinistas!  Technically, that could have been a fair election.  But was it truly fair, considering the surrounding factors?

Anyway, those are my ramblings for the day.

1999: Victory Without War, by Richard Nixon

I read Richard Nixon's 1999: Victory Without War.  The book is entitled 1999, but it was actually published in 1988.  Come to think of it, I remember Dan Quayle referring to it as the 1988 Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in his debate with Senator Lloyd Bentsen (the "You're no Jack Kennedy" debate).

I have four items.

1.  Nixon discusses the end of detente, his system of negotiations and easing of tensions with the Soviet Union.  Nixon is against a number of arguments from hardliners and doves, and he apparently regards detente as a middle ground between those two extremes.  Because detente entails the U.S. talking with the Soviets, it allows the U.S. to have influence over what the U.S.S.R. does, whether that concerns Soviet expansionism or arms control.  When the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have a fairly easygoing relationship, Nixon argues, the U.S.S.R. is more likely to treat its own citizens well rather than abusing them, whereas isolating the U.S.S.R. is counterproductive.  Nixon also notes that, during his practice of detente as President, the Soviets did not make significant gains in terms of taking over other countries.

Nixon traces the end of detente to America's loss of the Vietnam War.  Essentially, he argues that this loss demoralized the U.S. from taking a tough stand in protecting its own interests, and thus the U.S. accepted any agreement the Kremlin wanted.  There wasn't any more tough negotiation, in which the U.S. does what the Soviets want in one area, if the Soviets do what the U.S. wants in another area.  Meanwhile, the U.S. was cutting its defense budget and hindering U.S. assistance to South Vietnam, even as the U.S.S.R. "increased its military aid to North Vietnam" (page 58).  But Nixon also notes an example of a hardline stance shattering the effectiveness of detente.  Because the U.S. Congress deprived the U.S.S.R. of Most Favored Nation Trade status, until the U.S.S.R. permitted more Soviet Jews to leave, the U.S. could no longer use trade as a "carrot" to encourage the U.S.S.R. to do what it wanted.  Nixon summarizes the demise of detente on page 58:

"When Congress refused to grant the Soviet Union most-favored nation status, it took away the carrot.  When it cut the defense budget and hamstrung the President's ability to react to Soviet aggression, it left the United States with a weak stick.  Those actions sent the wrong message to the Kremlin.  They in effect telegraphed Moscow that it could pursue its aggressive policies at little or no cost."

Joan Hoff in Nixon Reconsidered narrates the end of detente a bit differently, for she depicts it as a matter of increased hostility between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, rather than the U.S. letting the U.S.S.R. walk all over it.  Like Nixon, however, she acknowledges the significance of the undermining of MFN with the Soviet Union in the end of detente.  See here.

Nixon argued that America's loss of the Vietnam War contributed to the end of detente, and I should note that Nixon more than once discusses what he considers to be the negative consequences of the U.S. losing the Vietnam War.  According to Nixon on page 106, for example, American loss of the Vietnam War allowed the Soviets to "threaten sea lanes vital to Japan" from harbors of Vietnam.

2.  What does Nixon in the book 1999 think about President Ronald Reagan's policies regarding the Soviet Union?  He's mixed.  He likes Reagan's policy of assisting anti-communist forces in other countries, yet he laments that Reagan's bellicose rhetoric has encouraged many Western Europeans to fear nuclear weapons rather than Communism.  Nixon supports the Strategic Defense Initiative, yet he thinks that Reagan is over-optimistic about its effectiveness, and that it should protect American weapons sites rather than the entire country (since the weapons sites give the U.S. strike capability).  Nixon does not support trying to surpass the Soviet Union in nuclear capability, since that leads to an arms race, and yet he is critical of nuclear disarmament, as he sees nuclear weapons as a way to safeguard the peace and to discourage the Soviets from getting out of hand.  Nixon is critical of Reagan's agreement to remove a number of warheads from Western Europe, as the Soviets remove even more warheads, for he contends that this leaves Western Europe vulnerable to Soviet conventional forces.

3.  Did Nixon envision the end of the Cold War?  Again, he's rather mixed.  He doesn't appear to envision it ending, and he argues that Mikhail Gorbachev is still a Communist dedicated to Soviet expansionism, so he contends that the U.S. should be on-guard.  At the same time, he seems to acknowledge that the Cold War takes an economic toll on the Soviet Union, and he also argues that the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe is not particularly strong.  He says that, even in times when the U.S.S.R. sent in forces to squash anti-Communist revolts in Eastern Europe (in the 1950's and late 1960's), it had to send a large number of forces to accomplish its goal.

4.  A lot of these issues are not directly relevant today, since there is no longer a Soviet Union.  At the same time, I wonder if some of Nixon's insights can still be pertinent to today's world: how the U.S. interacts with Russia or China, for example.  I really don't know.  Putin does not seem to have imperial ambitions (as far as I can see, and I'm open to correction on this), at least not as the Communist Soviet Union did, yet he does like to flex his muscle on the world stage.  Missile defense is still a discussed issue, since Putin does not like for Eastern Europe to have a missile defense system, feeling that this make Russia vulnerable (or so I have read).  I would have to know more about the world before I could discuss the possible relevance of Nixon's insights to today!

No More Vietnams, by Richard Nixon

I finished Richard Nixon’s No More Vietnams.  In this book, Nixon defends the Vietnam War as a noble cause.  He critiques how his presidential predecessors conducted the war, defends his own approach, and blames the Democratic U.S. Congress’ failure to continue providing support for South Vietnam for Communist North Vietnam’s takeover of that country.  Nixon in later years would express regret for the title of this book, No More Vietnams, saying that he should have entitled it A Noble Cause.  Nixon’s argument in the book was not that the United States should be paralyzed from intervening in other countries out of a fear of another war like Vietnam, but rather that, if the U.S. had to intervene, it would do what it takes to win—-that it would not lose, as it did in Vietnam.

I was initially hesitant to read No More Vietnams because I had already read other books that discussed Nixon’s stances and strategies regarding the Vietnam War.  I read his memoirs, and his criticisms of President Johnson as well as his own approach to the war were significant elements in the narratives of some of the biographies about Nixon that I had read.  But I am glad that I read No More Vietnams because, overall, Nixon goes into more detail in that book in terms of defending his own point-of-view.  I wouldn’t say that this is the case regarding his explanation for why the United States entered the war, for, on this, he simply states that “The United States intervened in the Vietnam War to prevent North Vietnam from imposing its totalitarian government on South Vietnam through military conquest, both because a Communist victory would lead to massive human suffering for the people of Vietnam and because it would damage American strategic interests and pose a threat to our allies and friends in other non-Communist nations” (page 152, in an edition in which No More Vietnams is attached to another book by Nixon, Real Peace).  Nixon believes that the answer to why the U.S. was in Vietnam is “simple” and “apparent.”

But Nixon does go into detail when he defends his point-of-view on relevant issues: why he believed that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist rather than merely a Vietnamese nationalist; how we can know that Nixon’s military strategy was not targeting civilians; why Nixon did not believed that most young people were against him; and the list goes on.  When defending his decision to intervene in Cambodia, where North Vietnam supposedly had bases from which it was channeling supplies to the Communists in Vietnam, Nixon responds to the charge that he was violating Cambodia’s neutrality under a Geneva agreement by quoting the agreement itself: it said that the U.S. did not have to honor a country’s neutrality if its enemy was using that country as a base.  Nixon also argues that, under President Lyndon Johnson, there actually was a Gulf of Tonkin incident, contrary to the claims of some that the U.S. made that up as a pretense to escalate its involvement in the Vietnam War, for Nixon states that the North Vietnamese account of the war assumes that the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred.  And, while Nixon seems to acknowledge that the Tet offensive was on some level a loss for the U.S., he also notes that it severely damaged the Communist forces in Vietnam and set them back significantly. There were often times when I wished that Nixon would document his claims, either through footnotes, or by referring to sources within his text.  There were times when he did, but I wished that he had done so more.  Overall, however, I found his arguments to be detailed and thoughtful.

Something that interested me in reading No More Vietnams was that Nixon, although he criticized his predecessors for not being tough enough in their prosecution of the war, acknowledged that he himself was limited in terms of his ability or willingness to be aggressive.  Nixon said that President Johnson was reluctant to be too tough because that could anger the Soviets and the Chinese, but Nixon indicated that he himself had similar concerns when he was President.  Another factor was the lack of popular support for the war, which Nixon apparently found to be constrictive.  Overall, I found Nixon’s discussion of the Vietnam War in No More Vietnams to be open and honest about its challenges, at least in comparison to what he wrote in his memoirs.  Nixon, in both his memoirs and No More Vietnams, portrays the South Vietnamese army as brave and heroic, against detractors who considered it to be a lost cause.  But Nixon in No More Vietnams acknowledges that his policy of Vietnamization (which is having the South Vietnamese army take up more of the slack of fighting the war) took a while to be effective.

There is a lot more in No More Vietnams than what I mention in this blog, but I will stop here.  I found a lot of what Nixon said to be persuasive, but I should probably read a source that is more critical of his policy on Vietnam.  I’m hoping that Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland can be that source.  I have already read some critiques of Nixon’s policies: Jerry Voorhis had his criticisms in The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon, Joan Hoff was rather critical, and, in biographies about Nixon, there is often a summary of the arguments that certain Nixon aides were making when they were suggesting that the President not attack Cambodia.  But, overall, I have not found their arguments to be persuasive, for, if Cambodia was being used by North Vietnam as a base for supplies, then it makes sense for the U.S. to attack the North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia.  The only anti-Nixon or anti-Vietnam War argument that makes sense to me is that the war was taking the lives of many innocent civilians, and that makes me second-guess whether the war was worth the effort, even if I can understand the rationale for it.  Consequently, while I accept Nixon’s portrayal of North Vietnam as a brutal Communist country, I am open to hearing whatever pacifist arguments there may be as to what alternatives there were to war: was there a way to stop Communist North Vietnam’s expansion, without military force?  I am skeptical, but I am open.  The issue is relevant even today, as the U.S. continues to debate military interventions, whether in the form of drones, troops, or bombs.

President Nixon: Alone in the White House 16

On page 371 of President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Richard Reeves talks about President Richard Nixon's belief that the U.S. Government under President John F. Kennedy was complicit in the overthrow of President Diem of South Vietnam, and that this deepened American involvement in Vietnam.  President Nixon in a press conference said that this was why he would not use any leverage to get rid of President Thieu of South Vietnam, stating that the overthrow of Thieu would result in coup after coup (and, based on what Nixon says in No More Vietnams, this is because Nixon feared that Thieu would be replaced by weaker leaders, as Diem was after his assassination).  Reeves goes on to narrate:

"The President thought he had raised the question and could sit back and let the press do the investigating.  But nothing happened outside the White House.  Inside, Hunt, on orders from Colson, had collected 240 cables between Washington and Saigon in October and November of 1963----Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were killed by officers of their own army on November 1, 1963----but was unable to find one showing any kind of direct order from Kennedy.  So, using a razor blade to cut out words, and some paste, then photocopying his handiwork, he fabricated a cable, dated October 29, 1963, to the American embassy in Saigon.  The phony cable read: 'At highest level meeting today, decision reluctantly made that neither you nor Harkin should intervene in behalf of Diem or Nhu in event they seek asylum."

In his 1980 book, The Real War, Nixon stated on page 113, when discussing the coup that ended Diem’s life, that “Charges that the U.S. government was directly involved may be untrue and unfair.”  Nixon goes on to say, however, that the Kennedy Administration “greased the skids for Diem’s downfall and did nothing to prevent his murder.”

In his 1985 book, No More Vietnams, however, Nixon manifests a stronger belief that the evidence shows U.S. Government complicity in the overthrow of Diem (though Nixon says that Kennedy was surprised that Diem was murdered, as if a coup would not lead to a murder).  Nixon makes this argument on pages 175-179.  Here are some documents that Nixon quotes:

August 24, 1983 telegram (approved by President Kennedy) from Averell Harriman, Roger Hillsman, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Undersecretary of State George Ball to U.S. ambassador in South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge (who, in the 1960 Presidential election, was Richard Nixon's running mate): "We wish [to] give Diem reasonable opportunity to remove [his brother] Nhu, but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem.  You may tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown [of the] central government mechanism."  The telegram recommended that Lodge "urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement if this should become necessary."

Nixon quotes a cable from Lodge to Rusk saying: "We are launched on a course from which there is no turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government...The chance of bringing off a Generals' coup depends on them to some extent; but it depends at least as much on us."  Nixon goes on to say that Rusk told Lodge to cut off aid to Diem when Lodge chose and to do what he could to "enhance the chances of a successful coup" (Rusk's alleged words), and that Rusk instructed the leader of the American military mission in Saigon to form a liaison with leaders of the coup.

Nixon quotes Nguyen Huu Tho of the National Liberation Front saying about the coup, "The Americans have managed to do what we couldn't do for nine years."

Nixon also talks about snubs that the Kennedy Administration made against Diem, the CIA cutting off support for special forces in South Vietnam, and Kennedy's statement in a televised interview that South Vietnam "needed changes in policy and 'perhaps' in personnel" (Nixon's words).

Unfortunately, Nixon does not provide footnotes----he just narrates.  Moreover, a question that I have is why Hunt felt a need to fabricate a document linking elements of the Kennedy Administration with the coup that overthrew Diem, when Nixon claims to be referring to a telegram and a cable demonstrating that such was the case.  Did Hunt miss that documentation when he was accessing and looking at the 240 cables that Reeves talks about?  Perhaps one could argue that Hunt did not find anything linking Kennedy personally with the coup, and, yes, the stuff Nixon quotes largely appears to be from high-ranking people in Kennedy's Administration, rather than Kennedy himself.  But, if what Nixon says is correct, Kennedy approved the telegram to Lodge and implied his desire for a change in South Vietnamese leadership in a television interview.

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 3

For my post today about Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, I'd like to comment on Aitken's treatment of Richard Nixon's 1946 congressional campaign and the Alger Hiss case.

1.  Aitken's biography is largely considered to be pro-Nixon, and I'd say that is mostly true in his narration of Nixon's 1946 race for Congress.  Aitken disputes that Nixon's campaign was heavily funded by wealthy special interests, for the Committee of 100 had a number of small businessmen; any oil or utility company donations to Nixon's campaign (if there were any) did not surpass $500; about a third of Nixon's $37,500 campaign budget was from the Republican National Commitee; and Nixon's budget amounted to "less than twenty cents per voter" in "an electorate of 205,000" (pages 130-131).  Aitken notes that Nixon's campaign did not "spend money on radio advertising" (page 130), and he states that, "Compared to the personally wealthy and politically well-connected Voorhis, Nixon only had shoestring campaign finances which grew to adequate but far from lavish levels" (page 131).  Against the possible charge that Nixon traded favors for contributions, Aitken states that "Indeed, there are old men living around Whittier and Alhambra who still complain about Nixon's lack of generosity to his supporters in the form of government contracts, appointments and political favours" (page 131).

While Aitken acknowledges that some right-wing rogues may have behaved irresponsibly in 1946, calling voters and telling them that  Nixon's Democratic opponent, Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis, was a Communist, Aitken does not believe that Nixon was responsible for this, and Aitken states that "The evidence of these calls is of doubtful provenance, for they were never raised by an actual recipient, and only emerged as an issue some months after polling day" (page 132).  Aitken seems to imply that Nixon's charge that Voorhis was being endorsed by a Communist-infiltrated union was not particularly fair, for the hard-core leftists in the CIO opposed Voorhis due to his anti-Communism, and its sister-organization, the NC-PAC, which did endorse Voorhis, was "a milder coalition of non-union progressives with noticeably less Communist influence" (page 123).  But Aitken does not appear to buy into the prominent narrative that Nixon was exploiting fear of Communism for his political gain, for he states that Communism in 1946 was not particularly feared.  Aitken states that at the time "there was little anti-Russian hostility in the United States" and "Communism did not gain its connotations of treachery and espionage until the Hiss case of 1948 and the McCarthy era of the 1950s" (page 131).

As I compare Aitken's arguments with the narratives of Nixon critics such as Roger Morris and Anthony Summers, it is interesting to me that Aitken and Morris don't really disagree on how much Nixon spent on his campaign.  Morris states on page 337 of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician that "Nixon backers would finally admit that the actual tallied contributions had been between $24,000 and $32,000"; Summers, however, thinks it may have been more than that, for Summers refers to a person he interviewed who claimed to have donated $10,000 to Nixon in 1946.  Contrary to Aitken's portrayal of Nixon as the financial underdog in the race, Morris notes that files in Sacramento indicate that Voorhis spent $1,928.  On the anonymous phone calls calling Voorhis a Communist, Morris refers to recipients of such calls who mentioned receiving them.  On whether Nixon traded favors for contributions, Morris highlights more than once that Nixon's political ideology and the policies that he supported were consistent with the agenda of the wealthy special interests, whether or not he gave specific favors (and those kinds of accusations----of special favors----would dog Nixon throughout his political career).

On whether or not Communism was feared in 1946, I can somewhat see Aitken's point, for America had just fought World War II alongside its ally, the Soviet Union, plus some of the events that would increase Americans' apprehension of Communism were yet to occur.  But I ultimately have a hard time accepting Aitken's argument, for it seems to me----from what I have read about the the 1946 campaign, from even Aitken's acknowledgement that there were businessmen who disliked unions because they saw them as Communist-infiltrated, from the existence of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and simply from the very fact that Nixon was making Communism an issue in 1946----that Communism was indeed opposed and feared as early as 1946.

2.  Aitken's discussion of the Alger Hiss case is so-so.  I was disappointed that Aitken did not (as far as I could see) address the argument that the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss was manufactured after Hiss' wife had supposedly typed those documents that Chambers was to relay to the Soviets.  Roger Morris made that argument, and Morris is in Aitken's bibliography, so Aitken should have addressed it, rather than just assuming that the typewriter was a slam-dunk that revealed Hiss' guilt.

Where Aitken's contribution to the discussion about the Hiss case is salient is on the role of Father John Cronin.  Did Father Cronin feed Nixon information about Hiss before Hiss and Chambers appeared before HUAC, or is the opposite the case, as Nixon would claim in Six Crises?  I guess why this question is important is that, if Nixon were receiving information from Cronin, he had reason to be confident about Hiss' guilt from the beginning, and his story that he executed sound judgment when others were not and placed his political career on the line is not particularly credible.  In other books, I have read that Cronin for years claimed that he fed Nixon information prior to the initial appearance of Hiss and Chambers, yet Cronin would retract that claim in the 1990's.  My impression is that Cronin allegedly retracted his long-standing claim to Aitken.  (Anthony Summers wonders how Cronin even could have retracted it, for Cronin in January 1991 “was in a home for the aged, deaf, and…unable to hold a cogent conversation”; see here).

On page 155, Aitken quotes Cronin as saying to him in 1990: "The stacked deck remark was unfair.  Nixon might have read something about Hiss in my reports, I don't know whether he did or not, but we didn't discuss the case until after Hiss had made his public denial.  From then on I worked with Nixon a lot and gave him everything I had on Hiss.  He needed that help.  He was very unsure of himself at the beginning."

Aitken has other grounds for believing that Cronin and Nixon had not discussed the case prior to Hiss' first public denial.  If Nixon had information about Hiss during Hiss' initial appearance before HUAC, why didn't Nixon challenge Hiss on that occasion, especially when so many people----even people on HUAC----were believing Hiss?  On this, perhaps one could say that Nixon was playing it cool: that Nixon didn't want to reveal his cards all at once, but preferred to wait a while, to let others buy into Hiss' act so that he (Nixon) could later step forward and be the heroic exception.

On page 158, Aitken quotes Bill Rogers, who would later serve as Dwight Eisenhower's Attorney General and as Nixon's Secretary of State.  Rogers was on the scene during the Hiss case, and he said that Nixon was initially doubtful about the case against Hiss.  So there you have the eyewitness testimony of someone who does not think that Nixon was sure from the beginning.  One question that I have, however, is whether Cronin even had intelligence information that would have made Nixon absolutely certain about Hiss' guilt.  Cronin was working with Nixon after Hiss' initial appearance, according to what Cronin said in 1990, yet my impression (and I'm open to correction on this) is that Nixon even in that time was not completely certain about Hiss' guilt.  (Hiss first testified on August 5, 1948, and Rogers met Nixon five days later, which was supposedly the time when Nixon was unsure about the case.  I guess the question is when Cronin started to work with Nixon----was it in the five days in between?)

Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life 2

I was thinking about Fawn Brodie's biography of Richard Nixon while I was reading Jonathan Aitken's more positive portrayal.  Brodie speculated that Richard Nixon was unloved by his parents, and that this contributed to his political hunger.  But Aitken referred to examples of Nixon being loved by his father, and also by his extended family.  On page 84, Aitken talks about how Nixon's father, Frank, worked at Nixon's orange juice company (or, actually, Nixon was one of the owners of it), Citrifrost, for free.  Aitken also tells about how Richard was a favorite of his grandmother, Almira Milhous, and how many in Nixon's family envisioned him accomplishing great things, perhaps even being President.

Brodie chooses to focus on other things, however.  If I recall correctly, she made the point that Frank Nixon required his son Richard to pay him back for the time that Frank contributed to Nixon's expenses at law school.  Sounds cold?  Sure, but Frank also worked at Nixon's orange juice company for free.  Doesn't that count?  Both are part of a larger picture.

I was thinking about Brodie's discussion of Nixon's war record when reading Aitken's narration of that.  Brodie essentially argues that Nixon exaggerated his own war record, and she bases that (among other things) on contradictory stories that Nixon himself told about it.  Aitken, however, appears to accept Nixon's story that he was in foxholes due to bombing.  Incidentally, it interested me when reading Julie Nixon Eisenhower's biography of Pat that Julie did not mention foxholes or bombing when discussing Nixon's war record.

Roger Morris' biography also came to my mind as I was reading Aitken.  Morris argued that Nixon was heavily financed by wealthy special interests in his 1946 congressional campaign.  Aitken, however, depicts a time when Nixon was actually outspent and out-staffed by the Democrats in 1946, and he notes that Nixon used a lot of his poker winnings for his campaign.  Aitken quotes an eyewitness who related that Pat was complaining to him about the lack of money.  Aitken, however, goes on to say that Republican money started to come in.  That makes me wonder: perhaps Morris and Aitken are both correct.  Maybe there was a time when Nixon's campaign was financially struggling, but that problem was soon corrected.  One would have to set up a timeline and plot when authors say events happened in order to get a fairly accurate view of the situation, perhaps.

I'd like to make one more point, which is not particularly relevant to my discussion in this post thus far.  James Stewart----not the actor----served with Nixon in World War II, and Stewart said that Nixon at that time did not particularly care for General Douglas MacArthur.  Stewart stated that Nixon felt MacArthur "was prolonging the hostilities through personal vanity" (Stewart's words, quoted on page 104).  That's pretty intriguing, considering Nixon's support for MacArthur during the Korean War, and Nixon's rather positive portrayal of MacArthur in his book, Leaders (though Nixon does criticize MacArthur's insensitivity at least one time in that book).  That makes me wonder about the stages of evolution of Richard Nixon's belief system, and I have been curious about this topic before.  Irwin Gellman in The Contender narrates that Richard Nixon was not anti-Soviet during World War II, since he deemed Hitler to be the greater threat, and that Nixon's awareness of the threat of internal Communism really took off when he began serving on the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  But, if that is correct, I wondered, why did Nixon run a Red-baiting campaign in 1946, before he even became a Congressman?  From what I have read in many books about Nixon, Nixon during his youth was a Republican; and yet that wasn't an absolute, for Nixon admired Woodrow Wilson, and Nixon could manifest certain liberal ideas in an essay that he wrote as a Whittier College student.  One can probably put Nixon into a box as effectively as one can put his father in a box: both had convictions, on some level (Frank probably more so than Richard), but their beliefs could fluctuate.

Anyway, that's my rambling Nixon post for the day!

Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story 9

I finished Julie Nixon Eisenhower's Pat Nixon: The Untold Story.

1.  Julie recounts that her mother as First Lady was devoted to reading and responding to her mail, and to helping people whenever she could.  On page 323, Julie tells about a time that her mother helped a first-time offender who was having difficulty finding work:

"An impoverished young girl wrote Mrs. Nixon and confided she had been caught shoplifting and had been unable since then to get a job.  An impersonal letter expressing 'concern' was attached to the girl's letter and then placed in one of the bulging brown folders of mail destined for the small wooden table for messages outside Mrs. Nixon's bedroom.  When my mother got to the letter, she wrote across the top, 'Gwen, this is fine but it doesn't really help her, does it?'  Rewritten, the letter referred the girl to a Civil Service rehabilitation program for first-time offenders, and eventually she was employed.  One more person had been helped."

I love this story for three reasons.  First, Mrs. Nixon helped someone whom not everyone would want to help.  Her attitude was not "She made her bed, now let her sleep in it."  Some may criticize Julie's book by saying that it portrays her mother as a saint.  Frankly, after reading a couple of books that portray Pat as a chain-smoking drunk or as an empty shell of a woman, seeing Pat's altruism highlighted is quite refreshing.  Second, it interests me that Mrs. Nixon referred the young lady to a government program.  That reinforces in my mind that we don't have to choose between the government helping people and people helping people, for both can work together as a team.  Mrs. Nixon apparently had that mindset in this case, even though it seems to me (from what Julie says) that Pat Nixon held a number of politically conservative positions.  Third, Pat used her power for good.  Why have power if it won't be used for good?  Pat's power, in this case, was that she had access to information that many people probably did not have: that there was a government program that could help first-time offenders get a job.

2.  On page 149, Julie summarizes Pat Nixon's views about the controversial Red-hunting Senator, Joseph McCarthy:

"My mother wanted to believe that Joe McCarthy had his facts straight and that those he charged as being Communists would soon be out of government.  The experience of the Hiss case had convinced her that the issue of Communist infiltration was a real one.  Moreover, during her 1953 world trip, she had been disturbed by the number of State Department officials, most of them long-term careerists, who seemed to be lukewarm advocates of our own government and apologists for local insurgencies and, occasionally, Communism.  Some had gone so far as to tell her outright that the people of the country where they served would be better off under Communism.  Even as growing numbers of Americans questioned McCarthy's sincerity, my mother resolved not to do so, but she soon recognized that with his reckless charges, sloppy research, and insatiable desire for headlines, he was his own worse enemy."

I like this passage because it gives insight into Pat's political views, and the basis for one of her positions.  Personally, I'm doubtful that the State Department people who expressed some sympathy towards Communism were themselves card-carrying Communists, but my guess is that they were well-meaning people who thought that Communism was better for the poor than the poverty that they were experiencing.  Was it still dangerous for the U.S. to have such people in the State Department, when the Cold War was going on?  Well, I don't condone Communism, for I recognize that it was (and, to some extent, still is) a tyrannical and brutal system.  Still, I do believe that there should have been people in the government who were compassionate towards the poor, who recognized the existence of systemic problems, and who tried to see Third World countries as something more than pawns in the Cold War.  I don't entirely know what the U.S. could have done in situations where peasants were mobilizing into Communist movements as a way to ameliorate their conditions: How could the U.S. have addressed humanitarian concerns, while still fighting Communism?  My impression is that this was easier said than done!  Not long ago, I watched a movie called Path to War, which was about America's growing involvement in the Vietnam War during the Lyndon Johnson Administration.  Johnson desired to help Vietnam in a humanitarian sense, but Ho Chi Minh did not want that help, according to Johnson in the movie.

3.  On pages 446-447, Julie criticizes the book The Final Days, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which portrayed Pat Nixon as one who drank heavily and the marriage between Richard and Pat as cold.  Julie is skeptical about the authors' claim that they only included stories that were confirmed by at least two sources.  She quotes Ray Price, who said that this means that "if two people have heard the same rumor, [the writers] weave a story around it, wrap it in manufactured detail and sprinkle it with quotation marks, and present the story as fact" (Price's words).  Julie also quotes a public statement made by her husband David Eisenhower, who was interviewed by one of The Final Days' authors.  When David was asked about the interview by the Washington Post, the Post distorted David's response, Julie quotes David as saying.  David denied to the Post that the Nixons had an unhappy marriage, saying that such a notion was "a general characterization of that relationship which would require forty-five minutes to rebut, forty-five minutes the reporter and I did not have" (David's words).  The Post, however, just quoted David's statement that the notion was "a general characterization".  David went on in his public statement to say that "The Nixon family is a close family", and that "The love and respect of each for all is a beautiful thing."

I've read a couple of anti-Nixon books that use material from interviews.  A question that enters my mind after reading Julie's account on pages 446-447 is: Did they quote their sources accurately?  I don't know.  I don't dismiss everything that they said, for some quotes are hard to put into a positive or a neutral context: if a quote looks negative about Nixon, it looks negative about Nixon, and I can't envision a context for that quote that would make it positive!  At the same time, I am open to the possibility that there may be more to people's thoughts than what they expressed on one or more occasions to an interviewer.

Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character 4

My latest reading of Fawn Brodie's Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character was about the Alger Hiss case.  I won't go into a lot of detail about that, but I will say that Brodie says some things that I did not learn from other books about Nixon that I have read.  For one, as I've said before, there is controversy about whether Congressman Richard Nixon got intelligence information about Hiss from Father John Cronin before Whittaker Chambers and Hiss testified to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  Nixon in Six Crises said that he first learned of Hiss and Chambers' accusation that Hiss was a Communist when they initially appeared before HUAC, whereas Father John Cronin said for years that he fed Nixon intelligence prior to that point, a claim that Cronin supposedly retracted later.  The debate usually centers around Cronin and whether his retraction occurred or was trustworthy, but Brodie brings in another consideration: that Nixon himself "would mention the Cronin briefing to [biographers] Earl Mazo and Bela Kornitzer, both of whom published the fact" (pages 201-202).  Second, according to Brodie, French and Canadian intelligence cast suspicions on Alger Hiss.  I don't recall reading that elsewhere.  I read about Venona and Soviet intelligence, but not French and Canadian intelligence.

What I want to use as my starting-point in this post is something that Brodie says on page 203.  Whittaker Chambers (who would later accuse Alger Hiss of being a Communist and of engaging in espionage) left the Communist Party, and he went on to write for Time Magazine, eventually becoming the magazine's editor.  Brodie quotes Chambers as saying: "Time gave me back my life.  It gave me my voice.  It gave me sanctuary, professional respect, peace, and time in which to mature my changed view of the world and men's destiny, and mine in it."

The part about Chambers being given the space to mature in his new view of the world stood out to me, for some reason.  Chambers had left an environment that many could label as fanatical and cultish, the Communist Party in the United States.  After leaving his old worldview, where would he go from there?  Could he build another worldview in its place?  What would be his compass and identity?  Being a writer and an editor for Time gave him a chance to explore the world and what he believed, and why.

There are plenty of people in Chambers' sort of situation.  There are people who become Christians, and they wonder how they can mature in their newfound faith.  They may find answers in solitude, as they read the Bible and commune with God in prayer.  They may also receive guidance from communities and people who have been in the Christian faith for a long time.  There are people who quit drinking and join Alcoholics Anonymous, and they are seeking to learn the ropes of a new life.  They do so by going to meetings and by being mentored by other recovering alcoholics, including a sponsor.  There are people who are detoxing from fundamentalist Christianity, after concluding that it has been an unhealthy worldview and an abusive environment for them.  They may do some searching on their own, reading books.  Perhaps they, too, receive help from some sort of community, maybe online.  They're leaving the old and entering the new, and they are looking for ways to mature on their new path.

I myself have been reluctant to get "help" from other people or communities on whatever new path I have found myself on.  I fear that others will try to recreate me into their image, rather than allowing me the freedom to grow as I wish.  On the other hand, there are times when I realize that I need guidance from outside of myself, since my own head can be a lonely place that distorts reality and focuses on the negative.  Perhaps a solution is for me to listen to the advice of others, while remembering that I have the free choice to accept or to reject it.

The Arrogance to Power 4

President Richard Nixon wanted to pressure the CIA to limit the FBI's investigation into Watergate, and his rationale to CIA director Richard Helms was that one of the Watergate conspirators, E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA, might go on blabbing about the Bay of Pigs, which was a failed attempt under the Kennedy Administration to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.  H.R. Haldeman, a close aide to President Nixon, would write in his book The Ends of Power (which he co-wrote with Joseph DiMona) that "Bay of Pigs" could have been a code-word for the Kennedy assassination.

What did the Bay of Pigs have to do with the Kennedy assassination?  Don Fulsom, in his book Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President, states that the connection was probably that "the cast of characters employed in the 1960 plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and kill Fidel Castro and the cast of characters employed in the plan to assassinate Kennedy in 1963 were the same" (page 130).  You may have seen Oliver Stone's JFK, which posits that prominent elements of the U.S. government and anti-Castro Cubans were involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  According to this narrative, the anti-Castro Cubans were upset the Kennedy left them hanging in their attempts to overthrow Castro, whereas certain forces within the U.S. government did not particularly care for Kennedy's (alleged) desire to scale back on America's involvement in the Vietnam War, to reach an understanding with the Soviet Union, and to shatter the power of the CIA.  Meanwhile, there were American business interests that profited off of war, and that also did not care for losing their investments in Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power.  Oliver Stone was also open to the possibility that the mob was involved in the JFK assassination, albeit at a "lower level".  Some believe that one reason that Nixon appealed to the Bay of Pigs in encouraging the CIA to limit the FBI's Watergate investigation was that Nixon was essentially telling the CIA that, unless it acted, the way that its Bay of Pigs operation led to the Kennedy assassination could be exposed.

Oliver Stone in the movie Nixon may have the same idea as Fulsom: that Nixon meant the Kennedy assassination when he mentioned the Bay of Pigs because some of the anti-Castro Cubans and intelligence agents involved in the Bay of Pigs  participated in the plot to kill President John F. Kennedy.  Both Fulsom and Anthony Summers argue that Nixon, during the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, was involved in plots to overthrow Fidel Castro.  After I first watched the movie Nixon, I read reviews that said that Stone was alleging that Nixon felt somehow responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy, since Nixon was an integral part of the plots against Castro, the plots that some believe boomeranged into the Kennedy assassination.  Fulsom actually goes a bit farther than this.  On page 151 of Nixon's Darkest Secrets, Fulsom states: "Was Richard Nixon really in Dallas on November 22 for a PepsiCo convention, as he said, or could his presence have been some sort of signal to his friends in the Mob and the CIA and among the Cuban exiles----the eventual chief suspects of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists?  Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana proudly told relatives that, as the mastermind of the JFK assassination plot, he and Nixon had a preassassination meeting there to discuss the plot."  Fulsom refers in the footnotes to a book by Chuck and Sam Giancana.  Can we trust Sam on this, or was Sam merely saying it as a way to sell more books?

But back to Haldeman's claim in The Ends of Power that Nixon meant the Kennedy assassination when he referred to the Bay of Pigs.  Anthony Summers, in a note in The Arrogance of Power, interacts with Haldeman's later retraction of that claim.  Haldeman would blame that claim on his co-author, Joseph DiMona.  But Summers does not buy Haldeman's retraction because of indications that Haldeman was intimately involved in the composition and editing of his book (The Ends of Power), and Haldeman was quite particular about what went into his book and what came out.  Summers also notes that Haldeman told him (meaning Summers) in 1989, when Summers was working on a book about J. Edgar Hoover, that he (Haldeman) was merely speculating that Nixon's reference to the Bay of Pigs related to the Kennedy assassination.  Haldeman had not yet retracted the claim.

What interested me in reading Summers is that what Haldeman said in The Ends of Power (according to Summers) differs significantly from the narrative that some of the anti-Castro forces involved in the Bay of Pigs later participated in the Kennedy assassination.  Summers states on page 199 of The Arrogance of Power: "If the Cuban leader decided to retaliate, Haldeman surmised, then the U.S. plots to kill him 'may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy.'  The CIA, he suggested, 'desperately wanted to hide that dark possibility.'"  What this seems to suggest is that, according to Haldeman, the Bay of Pigs could have been associated with the Kennedy assassination because the Bay of Pigs made Cuban leader Fidel Castro mad, and so Castro may have retaliated by contributing to the assassination of Kennedy.  In this scenario, it is not anti-Castro forces that were responsible for Kennedy's death, but Castro.

This is actually a fairly popular idea.  I remember watching the Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, and (if I'm not mistaken), Ramsey Clark, who had served as President Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General, stated that Johnson expressed to him a belief that Castro was somehow behind the Kennedy assassination.  In the movie JFK, a bullying government agent tells one of Jim Garrison's assistants that Oswald didn't pull the trigger, but Castro did (which is not to be taken literally, but simply expresses the belief that Castro was behind the shooting of Kennedy).  And, in a documentary about the Kennedy assassination, Jack Anderson (whom Fulsom praises in his book) posits that a combination of the mob and Fidel Castro participated in the plot to assassinate JFK.  I wouldn't be surprised if the mafia played both sides (pro and anti) when it came to Fidel Castro.  Remember David Ferrie's rant in JFK, in which he said that Castro was almost on "our" side, and everyone is always switching sides?

The Arrogance of Power 2

In my post today about Anthony Summers' The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon, I will write about the Alger Hiss case, in which Congressman Richard Nixon played a prominent role.  I've summed up the Alger Hiss case more than once on this blog, but I'll do so once more.  (I could copy-and-paste from my previous posts, but I'm suddenly in the mood to write about the highlights of the Alger Hiss case.)  Whittaker Chambers was an ex-Communist who was accusing Alger Hiss of engaging in espionage for the Soviets back when Hiss was a U.S. State Department official.  Hiss initially equivocated about knowing Chambers, but Chambers was claiming to know personal information about Hiss, some of which was accurate, some of which was not.  Hiss eventually admitted that he knew Chambers under another name, George Crosley, and Hiss said that he (Hiss) sublet an apartment to Chambers.

Eventually, Chambers would say that Hiss' wife, Priscilla, copied U.S. Government documents on the Hiss's Woodstock typewriter, then gave those copies to Chambers so that he could relay them to the Soviets.  Chambers hid those copied documents, or perhaps it was microfilm copies of the documents (quite frankly, I don't know, since I vaguely recall reading the latter, yet Summers seems to suggest that the former was the case), in a pumpkin on his farm.  There was a search for Hiss's Woodstock typewriter, since, if the type on the copies of the documents matched the type that the Woodstock typewriter produced, that would supposedly indicate that Hiss's wife indeed had typed copies of those documents and given them to Chambers.  Nixon himself said that typewriters were like fingerprints: that each typewriter produced its own unique kind of type.  A Woodstock typewriter was brought forth, and it was said to be Hiss's typewriter.  Hiss was widely believed to be guilty of espionage on account of that.  The thing is, unbeknownst to the public, there were problems with the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss: it was manufactured later than Hiss's typewriter.

Summers speculates that the FBI (perhaps collaborating with Nixon) may have manufactured the typewriter that was said to belong to Hiss.  Summers states on page 71: "...typewriters have been expertly forged, and with the government's blessing, in a very relevant time frame.  By 1941, as part of World War II liaison between American and British intelligence, operatives had developed machines that, according to one of the British officers involved, 'could reproduce faultlessly the imprint of any typewriter on earth.'  One successful anti-Nazi operation achieved precisely that by rebuilding an old Italian typewriter."  Summers states on page 73 that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover "himself had visited the secret installation in Canada where typewriter fabrication and similar acts of wizardry were perfected."  Summers in the documentation part of the book refers to Allen Weinstein's Perjury, Morton and Michael Levitt's A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss, Montgomery Hyde's Room 3603, and William Stevenson's A Man Called Intrepid (and Summers, if I'm reading his note correctly, says that Stevenson's book has a photograph of an October 30, 1941 letter).  One would probably have to look at those books to see if what they say about typewriter forgery is solidly supported.  Summers also refers to a statement by Horace Schmahl, who claimed to have been a "consultant" on typewriter forgery during the Hiss case.

So was Hiss an innocent man, who was deliberately framed by the FBI and Nixon?  Summers does not exactly go that far.  Summers contends that the FBI may have sincerely believed that Hiss was a Communist, on the basis of "Soviet cable intercepts", but that it could not reveal this.  After all, if the Soviet Union learned that the U.S. could intercept its cables, it would take steps to ensure that the U.S. couldn't intercept future cables.  Summers asks on page 73: "Could there have been some twisted reasoning along the lines that since Hiss was now apparently clearly guilty, but the real proof of it had to remain concealed, it was justifiable to fabricate another sort of 'proof'?"

Summers does not appear to believe that Hiss' guilt was rock-solid, however.  Hiss questions the reliability of some people behind the Iron Curtain and in the Soviet Union who claimed that Hiss was spying for the Soviets, while being open to others.  Summers also refers to Soviet sources that denied that Hiss was spying for the U.S.S.R.  On the Venona cables, which have been argued to indicate Hiss's involvement in espionage for the Soviets, Summers expresses doubt that ALES was Alger Hiss.  Summers states on page 77: "John Lowenthal, a lawyer who has long been a student of the subject and who maintains Hiss was innocent, has noted that----unlike the ALES of the 1945 message----Hiss was never accused of betraying 'military' information."  Summers also asks why Hiss equivocated about knowing Chambers, and he inquires if it could have been because of a homosexual relationship.  Summers states that Nixon said this to congressmen on a presidential yacht (for this, Summers cites a November 1975 article in Esquire), and he mentions a report that the FBI received saying that Chambers had a sexual relationship with Alger Hiss's stepson, Timothy.  Overall, because many Soviet and House Committee on Un-American Activities documents have been sealed, Summers states that "Until we have full access, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated" (page 77). 

I think that Summers does well to ask questions, and I found his discussion of Venona and the foreign Communists who claimed that Hiss was a spy to be impressive, and comprehensive.  I have some questions, however, about whether the typewriter was manufactured by the FBI.  Roger Morris, in Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, does not appear to accept that the typewriter was manufactured by the FBI.  On pages 498-499, Morris refers to the claims of William Sullivan, who worked with the FBI, that the Bureau's lab was "weakly staffed and managed" (Morris' words).  On page 499, Morris states: "'Had Nixon asked the FBI to manufacture evidence to prove his case against Hiss, Hoover would have been only too glad to oblige,' Sullivan believed from his intimate perspective on the case.  But 'even if we had wanted to, we simply would not have been capable of it.'"  Summers on page 74 quotes the first statement by Sullivan, in arguing that Hoover would have had a motive to manufacture evidence, but he did not quote Sullivan's statement that the FBI was incapable of it.  In the notes in the back, on page 491, however, Summers says that Sullivan, in talking to Hiss, backed away from a former statement he had made and said that the FBI was not able to fabricate a typewriter.  I don't know if Sullivan made both statements at once, or made the former statement, only to later back away from it.

Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full 33

I finished Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full.  On page 1052, Black says the following about Henry Kissinger's eulogy to Richard Nixon at Nixon's 1994 funeral:

"At this critical moment, all rivalry between the two men finally vanished, and Kissinger's own best instincts came naturally to his eulogist's task.  His voice broke slightly at one point, when he referred to hearing 'the final news, by then so expected but so hard to accept, [when] I felt a deep loss and a profound void.'  (He told the author that he felt that 'part of me died with him.')"

That's one narrative about Richard Nixon's funeral: that it was an incident at which Americans were brought together.  Similarly, Daniel Frick states on page 4 of his book, Reinventing Richard Nixon:

"Had the Nixon funeral contained only...preaching to the converted, the ceremony could only have been expected to exacerbate old divisions.  Whatever evocative power the funeral service might have had must have come from its enactment of a ritual of political forgiveness between longtime warring camps.  Nixon himself could not have selected a more perfect candidate to fulfill this task than Democratic president Bill Clinton.  First of all, as a Vietnam-era college student who had avoided the draft and protested the war, he effectively symbolized the irresponsibility and lack of patriotism that Nixon had claimed epitomized too many in the baby boom generation.  And, second, Watergate had been pivotal in opening Clinton's political career...So, when in his eulogy, President Clinton affirmed that Nixon had made mistakes and that these were part of his record, no one could miss the unspoken reference to Watergate.  Only someone well-schooled in the catechism of anti-Nixonism could credibly offer the absolution that followed: 'Today is a day for his family, his friends and his nation to remember President Nixon's life in totality.  To them, let us say: may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close...'  As an attempt to face the past and move on, this moment was the political high point of the ceremony: offering to Nixon's memory a pardon more genuine and complete than the merely legal one that Ford had granted."

Frick goes on to say that divisions still remained, even during and after Nixon's funeral.  But the narrative that Nixon's funeral was a place that healed divisions stood out to me on account of the opposite picture that I was reading in Anthony Summers' anti-Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.  After Richard Nixon's death, Alger Hiss, the ex-State Department official whom Nixon during the late 1940's said was a Communist spy, said: "I am not going to gloat...There are a lot of things in that man's life that were left unatoned for..."  Summers probably agrees with Hiss' assessment, since his book is about the negative things that Nixon allegedly did throughout his political career.

Summers also notes who did not attend Nixon's funeral.  Some of them (i.e., Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt) did not particularly surprise me.  But some of what Summers said on page xiv did stand out to me:

"Tens of thousands more Vietnamese died in the short time that remained until South Vietnam collapsed, less than a year after Nixon's resignation.  The ousted former president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, was not at the funeral.

"New research strengthens the suspicion that in 1968, on the eve of the election that brought him to the White House, Nixon manipulated the Vietnam War for selfish political ends.  Did he, fearful that impending peace negotiations would swing vital votes to his Democratic opponent, covertly urge Thieu to boycott the talks?  The prominent Republican Anna Chennault, who met secretly with Nixon and acted as a go-between with the South Vietnamese, claims he did.  She eventually came to despise Nixon and stayed away from the funeral."

I didn't know that Chennault came to despise Nixon, after allegedly serving him during the 1968 Presidential election.

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For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll start with something that Black says on pages 423-424.  The topic is where President Dwight Eisenhower ranked among U.S. Presidents.

"A couple of years into his presidency, Kennedy confidant and respected historian Arthur Schlesinger circulated a form among selected historians inviting them to rate America's presidents.  The recipients chosen assured a selection that would be indulgent of the Democrats, and Franklin D. Roosevelt came in with Lincoln and Washington in the top group, where Wilson and Jefferson also resided, with Truman and Jackson and Polk and Cleveland (all Democrats) just behind, and with Theodore Roosevelt as their only accompanying Republican.  Eisenhower was outraged to find himself in twenty-second position, with generally ignored presidents like Benjamin Harrison, Franklin Pierce, and Rutherford B. Hayes.  This was a gross injustice to a good president.  Eisenhower considered Roosevelt an artful but shifty political trickster (true up to a point but hardly an overall judgment of FDR), and Truman an incompetent (a preposterous opinion), and set down his own administration's achievements."

Black then goes on to list the achievements that Eisenhower enumerated.  Black accepts much of what Eisenhower lists as achievements (i.e., the highway system, the end to the Korean war, containment of Communism, a tax cut, HEW, aid to Latin America, etc.), while thinking that Eisenhower stretches some things, as when Eisenhower claimed to have defeated Communism in Vietnam.  Black believes that Eisenhower could have handled some things better, such as the Suez Canal crisis and Hungary, and he notes embarrassing episodes during the Eisenhower Presidency, including Sputnik and the U-2 incident.  But, overall, Black maintains, there was peace and prosperity in the United States under Eisenhower's Presidency, and America was largely respected throughout the world.  This, even though Eisenhower was "one ultimately too much identified with golf, uncertain cardiology, and fiscal humbug", to quote Black's wit (page 424).

I don't know on what basis the historians evaluated Presidents as they did.  It is tempting to say that the historians Schlesinger asked were mostly Democrats and thus they preferred Democratic Presidents, which is what Black essentially argues, but such a characterization, in my opinion, leaves certain questions unresolved.  While Black is correct that Democratic Presidents did well in the ranking, there were Democrats who ranked pretty high who were arguably conservative, by today's standards.  Grover Cleveland, for example, did well in the ranking, but he has been characterized, by both the right and the left, as a government-keep-out sort of President.  Perhaps the historians were looking at how Presidents handled crises, such as wars, and also the question of what long-standing accomplishments they made.  Still, I'd say Eisenhower should get a fairly high rank on these grounds.  I wouldn't say that his civil rights accomplishments were particularly spectacular, for the civil rights bill that he signed had been watered down, but he did break some ground in the area, and perhaps he set the stage for later progress.  But he did make some lasting accomplishments, such as the highway system and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and he also brought the Korean War to an end.

There are some who question the conventional manner of ranking U.S. Presidents.  I'd someday like to read Ivan Eland's book, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.  The description of the book here says: "Who were the best and worst U.S. presidents? In the past when historians and scholars have rated the presidents, their evaluations often have been based on individual charisma, activism, and service during periods of crisis.  Taking a distinctly new approach in Recarving Rushmore, Dr. Ivan Eland profiles each U.S. president on the merits of his policies and whether those strategies contributed to peace, prosperity, and liberty."  You'd think that this book is a bunch of right-wing clap-trap, but not so fast!  Eland doesn't rank Presidents along party lines: "As for more modern U.S. chief executives, Republicans will be astounded to learn that Nixon was the last liberal president and that Reagan wasn’t all that conservative.  Democrats will be amazed to learn that Clinton was in some respects more conservative than George W. Bush. Readers will learn why the author goes against the grain and anoints Eisenhower and Carter as the two best modern presidents."  I wonder how Eland (who strikes me as a less-government type of thinker) would evaluate Eisenhower's accomplishments in domestic policy (i.e., HEW, the start of federal health care for the elderly, etc.), or why exactly he ranks Jimmy Carter so high!  I probably would not agree with Eland's ideology, but I think that he does well to bring to my mind a good question: Why should we rank wartime Presidents so highly?  Maybe the low-key Presidents who presided over peace and prosperity deserve higher ranks that they usually get!

I should note that, nowadays, Eisenhower has a pretty good reputation.  In the midst of the Tea Party, liberals, moderate Republicans, and even some conservatives like to point to Eisenhower as someone who was a reasonable Republican.  Progressives like to appeal to Eisenhower's highway system as an example of the government stimulating the economy, Eisenhower's high marginal tax rates for the rich, and other factors.  And there are conservatives who point to Eisenhower as a President who was fiscally responsible, one who wanted to get spending under control before cutting taxes.  Eisenhower's Administration was probably a time of relative peace and prosperity.  At the same time, I don't think that it was a totally rosy time.  People were still afraid of the bomb.  Communism triumphed in Cuba, ninety miles off of the U.S.'s shores.  Democratic Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy referred to the problem of hunger in America.  Racism was alive and well.  There was a recession during part of Eisenhower's Presidency.

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For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I'll use as my starting-point something that Black says on pages 344-345.  The context is Hungary's 1956 revolt against the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of that revolt.  There are right-wingers who have criticized President Dwight Eisenhower for not doing anything to save Hungary from Communist repression, even though Hungarians were desperately pleading for help.  What I have wondered is what exactly Eisenhower could have done.  Send in tanks?  Would that have provoked a war between the United States and the Soviet Union?  On pages 344-345, Black offers his ideas about what Eisenhower should have done:

"As for Hungary, the desire of the United States to avoid war with the U.S.S.R. is commendable, but there was an opportunity for a useful initiative.  At the least, Eisenhower could have proposed a neutral status for Hungary, like that of Austria, or what came to be called 'Finlandization,' and offered in exchange to the U.S.S.R. some corresponding NATO withdrawal, even if only some force reductions, or the removal of some secondary bases, such as from Greece or Spain.  More interesting would have been to supplement this offer with the air landing, by invitation from Nagy [who was leading Hungary after it declared its independence], of some airborn forces in western Hungary.  In exchange for extracting the Anglo-French from their self-authored debacle at Suez, the United States could have got some of their forces to join them in Hungary, not with a view to war or occupation, but to destabilize the Russian empire and turn up the pressure for compromise.  Nagy did eventually ask for the help of the 'international community.'  Sending forces might have been a bold move, but might have been justifiable, if only to redeem the Churchill-Stalin accord of October 1944, which promised the Western Allies a 25 percent sphere of influence in Hungary, to the U.S.S.R.'s 75 percent."

I have to respect Black for taking a retrospective stab at this problem.  This is one reason that I am enjoying Black's book: his analysis of politics and policy.  Black's book is lengthy, but it does not spend a whole lot of pages on certain events in Richard Nixon's life, such as the time that President Eisenhower had a heart attack and Nixon needed to handle the Presidency.  Black only spent a page on that event, if even that.  But I'm actually happy that Black doesn't spend lots of pages on certain events.  When I came to Black's discussion of Vice-President Nixon's visit to Caracas, I thought, "Oh man, this again.  I've already read about this who knows how many times."  But Black's narration of that was not long, and it was rather painless for me as a reader.  Black just says what happened, offers some analysis, and moves on.  Some of you may not be looking for that in a book.  And, to be honest, if I started my Year (or More) of Nixon with Black's book, I myself would probably be dissatisfied.  But, after reading Ambrose, Six Crises, Nixon's memoirs, and the list goes on, I'm not necessarily interested in reading another extensive regurgitation of certain events in Nixon's life.  I'm more interested in reading some analysis, or an author's take on certain characters in the drama.  I'm finding that in Conrad Black's book.

As far as the substance of what Black says about Hungary is concerned, I'm probably inadequate in terms of evaluating it, but I will say that I can see some logic in what Black is proposing.  The Soviets may have been holding on to Hungary, in part, because they felt that maintaining control of Eastern Europe was a way to protect the U.S.S.R. from the West: Eastern Europe is like a buffer.  If that is the case, then the U.S. offering to withdraw some NATO forces or bases in exchange for Hungarian independence makes a degree of sense, in that it could make the U.S.S.R. feel more secure.  The thing is, was the U.S.S.R. just interested in holding on to Eastern Europe for the sake of self-protection, or did it have imperial or aggressive aims as well?  If that is the case, then the U.S. arguably would not have been wise to reduce NATO forces.

Black may be saying that the U.S. would have had to pressure the U.S.S.R. to compromise, since the U.S.S.R. would be very reluctant to do so.  Giving up Hungary would arguably be a big deal!  If the U.S.S.R. gave up Hungary, would that encourage other Eastern European countries to revolt?  Even if Hungary were officially neutral, could the U.S.S.R. be assured that it was actually neutral?  That could be why Black says that the U.S. should have brought in the British and the French for extra leverage.

What Black says about the 1944 Churchill-Stalin accord is interesting to me, in light of what Black has said in his book about Yalta.  Against right-wingers who allege that the Yalta conference sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets, Black argues that Yalta actually supported Eastern Europe's freedom, but that the U.S. and others failed to act on that.  Whether that helps me to understand the Churchill-Stalin accord, I do not know.  It seems that the Churchill-Stalin accord still gave the Soviets most of the influence in Hungary.  Maybe it would have been better had the Western allies had 25 percent of the influence in Hungary rather than none at all, as the Churchill-Stalin accord stipulated, but Black's statement that sending American, British, and French forces to redeem the accord between Churchill and Stalin makes me ask questions.  For example, Black says that the U.S. should have pushed for Hungary to be neutral.  But would it have been truly neutral, had the Soviets had 75 percent of the influence there, as the Churchill-Stalin accord stipulated?

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For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, I will use as my starting-point something that Black says on pages 311-312.  The topic is Vice-President Richard Nixon's impressions of foreign countries and leaders.

"[Nixon] said he was impressed by presidents Batista in Cuba, Cortines in Mexico, and Castillo Armas in Guatemala (who had recently replaced President Jacobo Arbenz Guzm[a]n, thanks to U.S. intervention disguised as a local uprising).  His description of Batista as an honest and socially progressive leader and a 'voracious' reader is not one that most Cubans would recognize.  His concern that the palace of the president of Mexico was more opulent than the White House, although people less than a tenth of a mile away from it 'lived in caves' was perceptive.  His belief that the United Fruit Company would see to the rising prosperity of Honduras was inexplicably foolish for such a well-qualified observer (that company had led the opposition to the former regime in Guatemala).  But his reservations about Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and about the desperate poverty of Haiti, were sensible, if not startling feats of observation.  He did advocate the gradual incentivization of more democracy in the region, and successfully advocate assistance for the Inter-American highway."

Richard Nixon's approach to foreign countries and leaders has come up often in my blog posts for My Year (or More) of Nixon.  There are times when Nixon appears to be quite progressive, empathetic with countries (particularly their problems with colonialism), and compassionate towards those impoverished by systemic injustice.  But there are also times when he is skeptical about democracy being the right system for every country right away, when he arguably treats the Third World as a battlefield for the Cold War while neglecting the problems of people in Third World countries, and when he has a belief (that some would call naive) that multinational corporations can save the day.  Like Black, I have the impression that Nixon's views on foreign countries and leaders were a mixture of idealism and realism.

There's also the issue of Nixon's admiration of leaders whom many would consider to be corrupt or repressive.  Black mentions Nixon's impression of Batista, the leader of Cuba who would be overthrown by Fidel Castro.  I think that the Shah of Iran is another example.  Nixon speaks highly of the Shah in his books.  He saw the Shah as someone who sincerely cared for Iran, highlighted the land reforms that the Shah helped to enact, denied that the Shah was particularly repressive, and affirmed that the Shah was an important bulwark against Soviet aggression in the Middle East.  When I watched the 2012 movie Argo and saw the brief documentary at the beginning about the Shah's repression, I wondered: "Man, is this the same guy Nixon was talking about, the humble gentleman Nixon was praising?"

It puzzles me how a leader can come across as an intellectual, as humble, as a visionary, as a reformer, and as one who cared about his nation, and yet be repressive and corrupt in his leadership.  And this does not just apply to right-wing leaders or dictators, for I have read about the same sort of thing when an American meets with a left-wing dictator with a reputation for brutality: the dictator actually is quite impressive, not the sort of person one would expect to be a horrible despot.  One could say that such leaders are merely putting on an act when they are meeting with American representatives, that they have the social skills to deceive and manipulate the big, strong Americans.  I'm sure that there's a lot of acting going on in these meetings, but I also think that, on some level, the controversial leaders are bringing who they are into their interactions with American representatives.  How, then, would I explain these leaders' insensitivity, harsh repression, and (in many cases) corruption, in light of their sensitive, intellectual side?  I don't know.  We are all mixtures of good and bad, of idealism and blind-spots.  Maybe that's what's going on.

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For my blog post today about Conrad Black's Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, my focus will be on Dwight Eisenhower's response to Senator Joseph McCarthy's attacks on General George C. Marshall.

According to Black on pages 264-265, "On June 14, 1951, McCarthy had harangued the Senate for eight hours with a sixty-thousand-word speech in which he reviewed General Marshall's career and accused him of complete incompetence as chief of staff, envoy to China, and secretary of state and defense, and concluded that Marshall's treachery had produced every communist triumph."  Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican Presidential candidate in 1952, admired Marshall.  Black states that Marshall should have had "solid and bipartisan" support anyway, since Marshall was instrumental in organizing the victory in World War II and was a "brilliant cabinet secretary" (page 265).  But Eisenhower had good reason to have a particular affection for Marshall, for Marshall, after all, was the one who promoted Eisenhower "from lieutenant-colonel to theater commander and four-star general in less than three years" (page 265).

Candidate Eisenhower was planning to put a paragraph in his Milwaukee, Wisconsin speech, and the paragraph would praise Marshall.  The paragraph would say that Marshall had been "dedicated with singular selflessness and profoundest patriotism to the service of America," and that the accusations against Marshall were "a sobering lesson in the way freedom must not defend itself" (quotation of the paragraph).  But Eisenhower ended up leaving that paragraph out, and this was supposedly because "Midwest Republican leaders told him it would be too disruptive to party unity to attack McCarthy in this way" (page 265).  The thing is, the text of the speech, with the paragraph praising Marshall, had been given to the press by Eisenhower's staff, and so many people knew that Eisenhower decided to leave the paragraph out to appease McCarthy's supporters.  As a result, Eisenhower was widely criticized: by the press, such as Edward R. Murrow; by Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson; and even by some conservative Republicans, such as Harold Stassen.  Eisenhower berated McCarthy in his only meeting with him, and Black says that Eisenhower felt bad about leaving out the paragraph defending Marshall.  On page 266, Black states that Eisenhower "tried to ignore it in his memoirs, and blamed his staff for misleading him about the implications of failing to defend Marshall."

So Eisenhower left out that paragraph defending Marshall because he was afraid of alienating McCarthy supporters, right?  Well, on pages 301-302, Black backtracks from this story-line, a bit.  Eisenhower and Nixon were having a slight disagreement about Nixon's rhetoric.  Nixon had blamed Dean Acheson, who had served as Harry Truman's Secretary of State, for the fall of China to the Communists, and Dwight Eisenhower, now the President, thought that such attacks were hindering his own ability to work with Democrats.  Nixon responded that he was attacking Acheson, not all Democrats, but Eisenhower was not buying that line of reasoning.  According to Black, Eisenhower then went on to blame Marshall for the fall of China to the Communists, for Marshall had pressured Chiang Kaishek (the nationalist leader of mainline China, before it fell to the Communists) to accept Communists into his government.  Black also notes that Marshall urged Chiang to have a cease-fire for two-weeks.  Black does not believe that these things were what led to the fall of China to the Communists, blaming it instead on the "corruption and incompetence of the Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang government" (page 302).  But Black notes that Eisenhower, on some level, was blaming Marshall for China's fall, even going so far as to echo some of Joseph McCarthy's allegations.  Black states that such a consideration "may go some way to explaining Eisenhower's failure to defend Marshall against McCarthy" (page 301).  Eisenhower was not a McCarthyite, and he even played a role in bringing McCarthy down; but did Eisenhower fail to defend Marshall against McCarthy's allegations in 1952 because he agreed with those allegations, on some level?  I seriously doubt that Eisenhower thought Marshall was treasonous, but perhaps he thought that Marshall exercised poor judgment on China.

I'd like to make two more points.  First of all, a long time ago, I read Joseph McCarthy's book, America's Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall.  McCarthy appealed to sources in making his arguments and asked good questions, but I think that it's good to read a variety of sources.  Sure, McCarthy is worth the read, but so are other works, such as Acheson's autobiography (not that I have read the latter, at least not yet).  I referred to some things in McCarthy's book in my posts here and here.

Second, I found it interesting that the guy who famously asked McCarthy if he had "no sense of decency", army counsel Joseph Welch, was that one who played the judge in the movie Anatomy of a Murder, starring James Stewart and George C. Scott.  That's what Black says on page 299.  As someone with one foot in and one foot out of the right wing, I'm not sure if I liked what Welch said to McCarthy.  Ann Coulter in Treason talks about how McCarthy was actually the one on the defensive in those hearings, that McCarthy was defending someone on his staff from attacks, and that Welch was essentially whining when he did not want to respond to McCarthy's points.  I don't know.  Again, it's probably a good idea to read a variety of books about this topic.  The thing is, whatever I feel about Welch's performance in the Army-McCarthy hearings, I actually liked the judge in Anatomy of a Murder: his little speech about the law, how he looked on with pride as Jimmy Stewart's character was pouring through law books to come up with a case, etc.