President Biden's State of the Union: Strong on Form Weak on Substance

Very reminiscent of Harry Truman's "give'em hell" 1948 campaign, President Biden came out swinging against his nameless predecessor and the Republican House of Representatives in his state of union address. ( See: Shulmaven: New Yorker Follows Shulmaven on Biden Election Strategy. ) He was confident, strong, and relaxed and at least for the time being silenced the "bedwetters" in the Democratic Party concerned about his re-election prospects. Further I wouldn't be surprised to see a meaningful bounce in his poll numbers in the coming week.

In terms of substance there was much to be desired. He opened his speech citing Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 state of the union (see below):

" In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. He said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.” Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. 

Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either."

President Roosevelt's speech which has become to be known as his "Four Freedoms Speech" was delivered on January 6, 1941. Only a week before Roosevelt gave fireside chat where he declared the United States to be "an arsenal of democracy." The difference today is that President Biden is nowhere near declaring America as an arsenal of democracy. Indeed his proposed defense budget will show a meager 1% increase. Given the tone of his speech and the prewar environment we are now living in, he should have called for a massive increase in defense spending. (See: Shulmaven: Shulmaven Anticipates Hal Brands Foreign Affairs Article on Pre-WW II and Today) Thus his rhetoric is way ahead of his actions.

The other troubling parts of his speech is that he revived all of the old Democratic Party tropes about taxing the rich, going after big Pharma, and spending program upon spending program. He fails to understand that middle-of-the-road voters in 2020 thought they were voting for a Bill Clinton and instead got a Lyndon Johnson. This could come back to haunt Biden as his rhetoric could very well scare away the Nikki Haley voters he will need in November.

My Amazon Review of Hal Brands' Ed. "The New Makers of Modern Strategy...."

Thinking Strategically

 

Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands has updated Peter Paret’s 1986 “Makers of Modern Strategy,” which in turn updated Edward Mead Earle’s 1943 version. It is a very long book consisting of 45 separate essays by different authors that runs 1168 pages. In my opinion this is way too long for the average educated lay reader. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned and I will highlight below a few of the essays that caught my attention.

 

Walter Russell Mead’s discussion of Thucydides is on the mark because it deals with the timeless question that the fear of a rising power (Athens) engenders in an established power (Sparta). I wish he spent more time on Graham Allison’s parallel thoughts on the U.S. vis-à-vis China. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Graham Allison's "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap" ) Matthew Kroenig’s essay on Machiavelli’s realism is spot on. Further he understands that despite Machiavelli’s bad rap, he was a republican at heart seeking to unify Italy. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Philip Bobbitt's "The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World that he Made")

 

I was disappointed in Hew Strachan’s essay on Clausewitz. To be sure he emphasizes that war is the extension of politics by other means, but he is all to brief on friction, the fog of war and the center of gravity of the enemy. He does, however, mentions Col. Harry Summers’ Clausewitzian critique of U.S. military policy in Vietnam.

 

The essay by Charles Edel on John Quincy Adams’ realism hits the mark. Understanding the U.S. was not ready for the global stage, Adams utilizes the implicit support of the British navy to establish the Monroe Doctrine and further avoids direct U.S. involvement in the Latin American and Greek revolutions. At the time the U.S. could rightly only offer moral support.

 

I didn’t realize how influential Alfred Taylor Mahan’s treatise in sea power until I read John Maurer’s essay. Mahan’s influence extended well beyond the United States to Germany and Japan with global consequences. Robert Kagan’s essay on Woodrow Wilson casts him, not Theodore Roosevelt, as the architect of American global strategy for the 20^th Century. Wilson comes off far more realistic than I expected as he protected U.S. interests at Versailles.

 

Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling’s theories of nuclear deterrence and flexible response are examined by Eric Edelman. Schelling’s theories were in contradiction to the Eisenhower Administration’s massive retaliation response to potential Soviet aggression. One of the problems, as Edelman notes, is that sometimes the message you want to send is misinterpreted by the enemy, which is what occurred during the Cuban missile crisis. The Russians thought the embargo was a far bigger deal than how the Kennedy Administration viewed it.

 

Mark Moyar’s essay on U.S. strategy in Vietnam accuses the Johnson Administration of refusing to listen to its military advisors who wanted to go all-in at the start of the war. Simply put, gradual escalation failed. However, it is not clear that Johnson would have had the political support for what his advisors advocated. Nevertheless, this debate echoes to this day with the Biden policy with respect to Ukraine. Biden has been a gradualist, but ultimately, he is doing far more than what he thought practical at the start of the war.

 

I am glad that Dmitry Adamsky has given credit to Andrew Marshall, the long-time Pentagon guru of the net assessment project. If any one person has been the architect of U.S. military strategy in a networked age, it is Marshall. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Andrew Krepinevich's and Barry Watts' "The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy")

 

The book ends with a summation essay by Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis. It is a well thought out summary, but where he errs is that he gives too much credit to Franklin Roosevelt’s recognition of the Soviet Union as a strategic decision that would play out in World War II. To me, it is an ex-post rationalization where Roosevelt’s motivation had more to do with the hope of near-term trade deals.

 

I know I have only scratched the surface of Brands’ book, but if the reader puts in the effort there is much to be learned here.

For the full Amazon URL see: Thinking Strategically (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Amity Shlaes "Great Society: A New History"

The Cost of Good Intentions

Revisionist conservative historian Amity Shlaes has written what purports to be a history of the Great Society. True it is a history, but it is far from complete. Nevertheless her book offers a host of easy to read vignettes surrounding the milieu of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. She highlights the important role UAW leader Walter Reuther played in bringing about the civil rights revolution and the role of socialist Michael Harrington in supplying much of the intellectual heft to the ideas Lyndon Johnson promoted. She surprisingly offers a sympathetic portrait of the emergence of the New Left and she is especially sympathetic to the activist role played by Casey Hayden, Tom Hayden’s first wife.

In my opinion she spends way too much time on the role of the Office of Economic Opportunity in promoting far left community groups under the rubric of “maximum feasible participation.” This front of the war on poverty ended in defeat as America’s cities exploded in racial violence. It was the unrest at home and the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War that led to a Republican revival in 1966, an election she does not mention.

However she is especially acute in her discussion of OEO’s Legal Services Corporation which unleashed a brigade of activist lawyers that rewrote housing, welfare and health law and spawned the notion of the public interest law firm. She also devotes far too much effort in discussing Nixon’s failed Family Assistance Plan while leaving out such Nixon accomplishments of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Thus it was Nixon, not Johnson who created the enlarged administrative state of today.

She also doesn’t really focus on Medicare and Medicaid. It is these two entitlement programs that both improved the health of American and are driving huge increases in federal spending today. As was to be expected the all-in cost of these two programs has far exceeded their initial estimates.

Shlaes offers great insight in highlighting the importance of a now forgotten filibuster in the Senate led by Everett Dirksen. At the height of LBJ’s power in the fall of 1965 organized labor made a big push to eliminate Section 14B of the Taft-Hartley Act. That section allows states to ban union shops and thus offering the option of becoming a “right to work” state. That effort failed and the way was open to industrializing the South and to the diminution of union power in the North.

To sum up Shlaes has written an interesting and enjoyable history of the Great Society, but just remember it will not be remembered as the definitive history of the era.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2GMST6VS3F9NR/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Douglas Brinkley's "American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race"

 Space: Kennedy’s New Frontier

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley has written a terrific book about America’s race to the moon and John Kennedy’s crucial role in it. The book is part history of the American space program and its antecedents and part biography of President Kennedy. I lived much of that history while growing up. As a teenager I was one of the thousands who wrote letters to rocket scientist Wernher von Braun offering up my plan for combining liquid and solid fuel stages in missile development. Later I stood and cheered John Glenn in his 1962 ticker tape parade up Broadway after his successful Mercury mission. And I can never forget showing up I my orderly room at Fort Bragg after returning from leave to watch Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on grainy portable black and white TV set. Brinkley evocatively brought back all of those memories.

Brinkley starts his history by discussing the role of America’s first rocketeer Robert Goddard whose experiments in the 1920s inspired many into thinking that going to the moon was not a pipe dream. He spends much time on the German rocket program during World War II where von Braun was a leading scientist in developing the V-1 and V-2 rockets. It is also clear that he was a war criminal in using slave labor to build those rockets. Von Braun gets picked up by the U.S. Army in Operation paper clip and with Cold War tensions rising he is expunged of his past sins and becomes America’s leading rocketeer.

In the late 1950s Kennedy was a politician on the make. The Cold War was heating up and America was shocked by Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. His leading issue was the missile gap, which later was proved to be non-existent, but it elects him president. In 1961 with Russian moves on Berlin, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Russian success in manned orbital flight, Kennedy makes a decision for America to go to the moon by the end of the decade and thus was born the Apollo program. The space program became a critical asset in America’s fighting the Cold War.

Kennedy owns the space program and he befriends America’s new heroes, the astronauts where the names of Glen, Grissom, Shephard and others would become household words. The glamour of the astronauts and Kennedy’s personal magnetism gave form to the new frontier in space and supports his poll numbers. With his strong political support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) formed by Eisenhower is flooded with money which by the mid-1960s accounts for 5% of all federal spending. However, at the outset, Kennedy didn’t fully realize what a herculean systems engineering task that would lie ahead and required a great deal of luck as well.

Brinkley recounts the role of NASA administrator James Webb in organizing the moon effort. Webb with both government and industry experience molds the agency to do his bidding in a very efficient manner. Because he previously worked for Kerr-McGee Oil, He knows Senator Robert Kerr well and as a consequence Kerr becomes a leading supporter of the space program. Kerr along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a big supporter from Day 1) and Houston Congressman Albert Thomas make the appropriations flow and they also bring the space program headquarters to Houston. Brinkley also highlights the role of private contractors in making the moon landing a success. North American Aviation built the rocket engines, Boeing the airframe, McDonnell Aircraft the space module and Grumman Aviation the lunar lander.

Of course the moon program was not without its critics. From the Right came howls that it was too costly and if the money were to be spent it should be spent on military applications and from the Left came criticism that the money should have been spent on poverty programs. Despite the criticism the moon program continued as tribute to the martyred president.

My one quibble with the book is that Brinkley only has one mention in passing on Theodore von Karman who founded Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and rocket engine maker Aerojet-General. Von Karman was a true pioneer in space flight. Nevertheless Brinkley shows that the America of the 1960s had the ability to come together to do great things. Would that be true today? I would humbly suggest that instead of an amorphous Green New Deal we have a focused Green Moonshot modeled after the space program.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R363LCWKUWOTX1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels"

Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty

As I write this review Jon Meacham’s  “The Soul of America” is Number One on the New York Times Bestseller List and deservedly so. This book should be required reading for every Republican member of Congress who is afraid to stand up to Donald Trump. After reading “The Soul of America” they will realize that standing up to him would put them on the side of the greats of American history. Further radical leftists who seem to hate everything about America should read “Soul…” because they will learn that America is a work in progress towards a more perfect union. They will learn that when the chips were down such dead white guys as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and yes Ronald Reagan did a pretty good job in moving our country forward. Hopefully they will also realize that the multi-cultural America of today brought us Donald Trump.

Meacham tells great stories as to when and how America was going off track, the better angels of our nature took command. For example when slavery divided our land, Lincoln unified it. When a few year later the KKK was running wild, Grant crushed them. I wish Meacham would have done a “might have been” had James Garfield survived his assassination and reinstituted reconstruction. Segregation might have died in its crib in the 1880s instead of waiting until 1954.

Meacham gives credit to both Harding and Coolidge in their defusing the 1920s revival of the KKK. This bit of history is not generally taught. Where Meacham is most acute is his discussion of Huey Long’s challenge to Roosevelt in the 1930s. Here was a politician who understood media and would say practically anything to get attention. Sound familiar. Similarly when much of the country was terrorized by the very media savvy Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith stood up to him and his henchman, Roy Cohn. Although Eisenhower did not act quickly his wait him out strategy worked as McCarthy burned himself out. The link to today is Roy Cohn who mentored Trump in the dark arts in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Meacham also intertwines the stories of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King in their bringing on the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. He also rightly notes that much of the progress achieved by our leaders were brought about by very active citizen movements giving backbone to our better angels.

I have few criticisms of the book. He rightly notes how Truman’s victory over the segregationist Strom Thurmond in 1948 led to the desegregating of the military. However, had the Republican Tom Dewey won, it probably would have happened anyway. Dewey as governor of New York led the fight for path breaking civil rights legislation. Also although he gives some credit to Lyndon Johnson in his role in passing the 1957 civil rights act, much of the credit should go to Attorney General Herbert Brownell who authored the initial bill that was watered down by Johnson. The lesson here is that there are more than a few better angels among us and they can come from very unexpected places.

So let us hope there are angels in place to lead us away from a president who lies when he is moving his lips and divides us by appealing to our most base instincts. It’s time to get to work as we are called to defend liberty.

The complete Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1QF2ABV7S5MMU/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Craig Shirley's "Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980"

The Return of the Gipper

Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has written a hagiographic account of how Ronald Reagan rebounded from his defeat at the Republican convention in 1976 to his nomination four years later. Shirley has written a breezy telling of what happened with lots of inside baseball. Reagan, of course is the hero and the villain of the piece is John Sears his campaign manager who deliberately kept Reagan out of the limelight in 1979. That gave rise to serious opposition, especially from George H.W. Bush. The unsung hero of the Republican return to power is party chairman Bill Brock who picked up the pieces after the narrow defeat of 1976 to Jimmy Carter and an across the board loss in the congressional elections of that year.

My problem with Shirley’s account is that there are too many errors in the book. Among those errors is his view that the economy was weak in 1978. To the contrary, the economy was in an all-out boom. That is the reason the Republicans made only marginal gains in the House and Senate races. He pays lip service to the roll of California’s Proposition 13 which set off a wave of tax cutting in the states and it help legitimize the Kemp-Roth tax cut the Republican were advancing. Without Proposition 13 there would be no Kemp-Roth. He also omits the Steiger Amendment which lowered the capital gains tax in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress in 1978. Change was in the air and Reagan knew it.

Shirley also misstates Lyndon Johnson record on civil rights. To be sure Johnson was slow to civil rights, but it was through his efforts that the first civil rights legislation since reconstruction passed in 1957 and 1959.

Shirley spends a great deal of time on Reagan’s opposition to the Panama Canal Treaties which became a cause celeb among the Republican right. The treaties passed and now 40 years later nothing really bad has happened. He should have noted that it was a political gimmick from the beginning. But it worked.

Finally although breezy reads well, the book needed much better editing and fact checking. Thus I can only rate it a modest three stars. 

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2WTP65BRHZDPT/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Michael A. Cohen's "American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division"

America on the Brink of a Nervous Breakdown

Boston Globe columnist Michael A. Cohen has written a very engaging history of the 1968 presidential race and why it matters today. To me it is very personal as I remember voting for Bobby Kennedy in the California Democratic primary via absentee ballot while in the U.S. Army and my wife to (unknown to me at the time) was a student volunteer for him during the Indiana primary. America was under siege facing an unwinnable war in Vietnam with casualties mounting, the cities ablaze as a consequence of the assassination of Martin Luther King and ongoing campus demonstrations against the war which were extended to the riots at the Democratic Convention.  America was truly on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Into this milieu comes the presidential campaign which is set afire by the unexpected withdrawal from the race by President Lyndon Johnson. Cohen’s dramatis personae are on the Democratic side Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace (running as an independent) and Hubert Humphrey and on the Republican side Richard Nixon, George Romney, Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. Although Cohen is a liberal and is dismayed by some of the failures of Johnson’s Great Society which were apparent as early as 1966, he by and large treats his subject even handedly. In fact of all of the candidates the careful and calculating Richard Nixon comes off the best. He quotes at length Nixon’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention which if given today would be viewed as a breath of fresh air in a much polluted political environment. Further the 1968 convention was another stop on the road to the demise of what was once called liberal Republicanism.

We see in the Democratic primaries the forerunner of today’s Democratic Party which is an amalgam of the elitist liberals and students who backed Eugene McCarthy and the African American and Hispanic voters who backed Bobby Kennedy. It was the white working class, which at the time was the core of the Democratic Party, who were thrown under the bus. They would at first be become Wallace voters as a weigh station on their way to the Republican Party of Nixon and Reagan.

People tend to forget that Wallace running as an independent with a coalition of southern segregationists and white working class voters was running very strong in September 1968 garnering over 20% of the preferences as measured by the pollsters, but his nomination of General Curtis “Nuke” Lemay scared off planeloads of voters reducing his Election Day share to 13.5%. It is important to note four years later, Wallace was on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination. On the day he was shot he was the big winner in both the Maryland and Michigan primaries. In many respects he was the Donald Trump of his day with a brand of white working class populism.

Thus we see in 1968 the breakdown of the New Deal coalition of southern segregationists, urban workers and liberal intellectuals into ultimately a new party of liberal intellectuals, African Americans, Hispanics and a menagerie of identity politics interests. Although still there in name, the white working class voters have moved on. Where they were once the core of the party, they are now on the periphery.

In contrast the Republicans picked up the southern segregationists, much of the white working class and lost their liberal bloc as typified by Nelson Rockefeller. Remember the classic “limousine liberal” was the Republican mayor of New York, John Lindsay.

Cohen has very acute descriptions of the arrogance of Eugene McCarthy, the hold Johnson had over Humphrey, George Romney’s lack of depth, the ego of Nelson Rockefeller and the fact that Bobby Kennedy, the sainted liberal hero of today, ran to the right of McCarthy. In fact Cohen notes that Reagan spoke approvingly of Kennedy. Thus I view “American Maelstrom” as a very readable and important work of history. 

The full Amazon URL is:

https://www.amazon.com/review/RD743ZFUGKZK3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Evan Thomas' "Being Nixon: A Man Divided"

His Own Worst Enemy

Evan Thomas, a pillar of what you would call the “eastern liberal establishment” has written a very sympathetic biography of Richard Nixon. As someone who both hated and respected Richard Nixon, Evans helped me understand the many aspects of Richard Nixon that made him such a confounding personality.

He was an introvert in an extrovert business. He could be a strategic genius, especially with respect to China, and at the same time be narrow and vindictive. To be sure he had real enemies who hated him for his doggedness in bringing the spy, Alger Hiss, to justice. For the liberals of his day that was Nixon’s greatest sin. And Nixon was correct in believing that the press had a double standard by continually giving Kennedy free passes while continually holding his feet to the fire with even the smallest of transgressions.

Nevertheless when Nixon’s “evil” side took over when he ordered his minions to run roughshod over the Constitution in what became known as the Watergate Affair where he was rightly impeached. In this sordid episode we see him seeking into a depression induced paranoia fueled by alcohol.

Although he did not cover himself with glory in Vietnam, his policies that were highly criticized at the time can now be better understood with the passage of time. For example the bombing of Laos and the invasion of Cambodia were, given the circumstances, military necessities.

Evans covers Nixon from his humble beginnings in Whittier, California to his graduating third in his Duke University Law School class where he achieved success by working hard and always being prepared. Those traits became a hallmark of his later career including his success at poker while in the U.S. Navy.

Evans portrays Nixon as a caring father and sometimes oblivious husband to Pat, who he loved very much. We get much insight into his character from his daughter Julie. We also learn that Nixon could be kind when he sent a letter to Thomas Eagleton’s teenage son after Eagleton was dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1972. Both father and son were touched by Nixon’s humanity.

In contrast we see his dark side where he appears to have enlisted Anna Chennault to torpedo the Paris peace talks ahead of the 1968 election by offering South Vietnamese President Thieu a better deal than what Lyndon Johnson had on the table.

In sum Evans sheds a great deal of light on one of the most influential politicians of the second half of the 20^th Century and reads very well to boot.

The full Amazon URL is;

http://www.amazon.com/review/R25WVQDQO0N10Z