My Amazon Review of David Rubinstein's "The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians"

History Comes Alive

Private equity mogul and patriotic philanthropist David Rubinstein truly loves the history of our country and has lovingly written up a series of interviews/conversations with America’s great historians. The interviews took place at the Library of Congress with representatives and senators present where he discussed the lives of such great Americans as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon. The historians he interviewed included Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ron Chernow, Walter Isaacson and Bob Woodward among others. He also interviews Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court.

We get into the lives of the great personages who made our country. He asks the historians about their great strengths and foibles. It all comes across as a great series of conversations. There is much to learn here. The conversations really flow and the book is very hard to put down in the middle of any of the interviews.

I got sense as to how good David Rubinstein is when he interviewed Fed Chairman Jay Powell that was shown on CNBC.  Rubinstein knows his subject matter and his subjects. Given that most high school and college students don’t know history, I would highly recommend that this book be made required reading in every high school in America!

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/RAHM7T2XGLKFJ/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Dennis Ross' "Doomed to Succeed: The U.S. Israeli Relationship from Truman to Obama"

Myth Buster

Diplomat and former national Security Council member Dennis Ross has busted three important myths that have been guiding U.S. –Israeli policy since 1948. They are:

1   1)  Distance from Israel engenders Arab cooperation towards the U.S.  Ross convincingly notes that Arab states follow their own national interest irrespective of U.S. relations with Israel.

2   2)    U.S. cooperation with Israel will lose Arab support.  Fails for the same reason as above. And it doesn’t explain the growing Israeli-Saudi rapprochement.

3   3)    Solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue will lead to a transformation of the Middle East.  This myth obviously fails because settling that issue has nothing to do with the ongoing Sunni-Shia split.

Ross presents us with a clear-eyed view of U.S. –Israeli relations since 1948 as he thoughtfully reviews the policies of all of the presidents from Truman to Obama. Ross had a ringside seat in the formation of policy from Carter to Obama and he worked for all of the presidents since Carter with the exception of George W. Bush in various Pentagon, State and National Security Council capacities where he was for the most part up to his eyeballs in U.S. – Israeli relations. Of special note for me was that he worked for the legendary Andrew Marshall in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and he was Director of Policy Planning in the State Department. He is especially good when he was “inside the room” where the decisions were actually made.

He characterizes the various administrations as having policies of either cooperation or competition with Israel and those policies typically alternated. For example Truman was cooperative while Eisenhower was competitive; both Kennedy and Johnson were cooperative while Nixon initially was competitive. However when Nixon saw the potential of Soviet arms winning the 1973 war, he tilted dramatically in favor of Israel. Thus objectively he was cooperative. On the other hand, in Ross’ view, Carter was outright hostile to Israel. Ross theorizes that Carter felt so guilty about not fully supporting the civil rights revolution in his home state of Georgia; he tilted U.S. policy towards the Palestinians.  In contrast Reagan had a deep affinity towards Israel establishing a strategic cooperation arrangement. However that did not stop him in pushing through the AWACS deal over Israeli opposition and in censuring Israel for its invasion of Lebanon.

Although President George H.W. Bush moved the relationship back towards a more competitive one and was extremely unpopular with American Jewry, he continued the strategic cooperation agreement and worked a diplomatic miracle in keeping Israel out of the Iraq War all the while Israel was under rocket attack. Ross has extraordinarily kind words for the first President Bush.

President Clinton also had a deep affinity for Israel and thought of Israeli President Rabin as the father he didn’t have. He was crushed when Rabin was assassinated. He also learned not to trust the Palestinians after a series of Camp David meetings.

President George W. Bush continued the cooperative relationship with Israel while President Obama continued the high degree of cooperation on the military side; he was far from cooperative on the diplomatic side. On his first trip to the Middle East for his Cairo speech, he intentionally avoided going to Israel. Ross’ book ends before the U.S. abstention on the Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its settlement policy.

Two thoughts come through loud and clear from Ross’ important book. First the Israeli’s live up to their biblical forebears by being a “stiff-necked people.” It is hard to make a deal giving up tangible land for an intangible peace. In contrast the Palestinians come across a duplicitous. They say the right words, but when it comes down to it, they won’t make a deal. For them it remains “from the river to the sea.” They just can’t accept Israel as a Jewish State.

Ross has written an important book that should be read by all serious students of the Middle East. I highly recommend it.

The full amazon URL appears at:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R38N0PQ2QT5257/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Niall Ferguson's "Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist"

The Rise of Henry Kissinger

Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography ends with Henry Kissinger’s appointment as national security advisor to Richard Nixon in late 1968. Given the controversy that followed it is hard to believe today that his appointment was nearly universally acclaimed by both the Left and the Right. That appointment was a dramatic move up for an Orthodox Jewish kid from Furth, Germany, whose family fled Nazi oppression in 1938.

Kissinger’s family established their household in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Something must have been in the water because out of that neighborhood came Allan Greenspan and my ex-boss at Salomon Brothers, Henry Kaufman. Had not World War II intervened, Kissinger was on his way to becoming an accountant.

The army changes him. He sees combat at the Battle of the Bulge, witnesses first- hand the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and as a sergeant in the counter intelligence corps he works after the war to round up Nazis that have gone to ground. Along the way he leaves his orthodox faith. My guess is that is seeing the violence of the front in World War II enabled him 20 years later to risk is life visiting the war zones of 1965 Vietnam. Not much has been written about his physical courage. Further during his first visit he realized that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and a negotiated settlement was required.

Through some lucky breaks and an active mentor Kissinger ends up in Harvard and it is in undergraduate years he becomes an idealist in the Kantian sense. He truly believes in democracy and human choice. He goes on to his Ph.D. and writes a very remarkable dissertation on the Congress of Vienna and its aftermath which is later published as “A World Restored.” Although not as famous as Keynes’s “Economic Consequences…” about Versailles, he offers a unique insight into the geopolitics of 1815 Europe and the key roles of Metternich and Castlereagh. One can certainly argue that this book offered a window into Kissinger’s later thinking the 1970s with respect to U.S. policy concerning Russia and China. Where he appears to lose his idealism is in seeing up close how policy is really made and the machinations of De Gaulle and the North Vietnamese. He begins to merge Castlereagh with Bismarck to form the foundations of the “realpolitik” that he would become known for.

Kissinger becomes a public figure in 1957 with his publication of “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” which places him in the center of the post-Sputnik foreign policy debate. From there it on to both Kennedy’s National Security Council and the Rockefeller Brothers think tank.  Ferguson demonstrates Kissinger’s adroitness in balancing his loyalties to both the Democrat Kennedy and the Republican Rockefeller. After leaving the administration he works as Rockefeller’s leading foreign policy wonk writing most of his speeches. He is horrified by the 1964 Republican Convention which brought back memories of 1930s Furth and goes on to vote for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.

Ferguson highlights the importance of history to the making of foreign policy. Too many practitioners are unaware of the path dependence of the irrevocable decisions they make. He also rightly believes that Kissinger is correct that in analyzing policy it is important to look at the counter factuals. For example had Britain and France stopped Hitler in the Rhineland they likely would have avoided World War II, but they could very well have been blamed for whatever events transpired later. Statesmen have to act with incomplete information, because when you have full information it is too late.

We also see Kissinger as a man with his relationships with his parents, his less than happy marriage and his dog Smokey. In my opinion Ferguson has set the stage for his next volume, where we will see the Kissinger that most of us know, become quite a bit more controversial, to say the least.  

For the full Amazon URL see:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3GQQGDLB7W08O/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00SI0B94K