My Review of Tom Arnold-Forster's "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography"

 The Evolution of Walter Lippmann from Socialist to Conservative-Liberal

 

I previously reviewed Craufurd Goodwin’s book on Walter Lippman as an economist. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/11/my-amazon-review-of-craufurd-goodwins.html ) Here we have Tom Arnold-Forster’s work as a complete intellectual biography of Lippmann’s thought. Lippmann, born in 1889 from a wealthy Jewish family, would over the next seven decades would become one of America’s great pundits. He would ignore his Jewish heritage throughout his life.

 

Lippmann advised presidents, worked on Wilson’s 14 Points, was present at the Versailles Conference and with his 1922 “Public Opinion” became a leading political scientist. To Lippmann social psychology was the driving force behind the formation of public opinion.

 

After graduating from Harvard Lippmann hung out in the socialist milieu of the Greenwich Village and the New Republic crowd of the 1910’s. He became good buddies with the soon to be communist, John Reed. However, he never lived there and retreated to his upper-eastside family home.

 

From his perch as a syndicated columnist, first with the New York World and then with the Herald Tribune, through his "Today and Tomorrow" column he became widely known and very influential. He fully supported the urban liberalism of Al Smith. He was extraordinarily prescient in 1931 about the enormity of the crisis caused by the Great Depression and again in 1938 he fully understood Hitler’s motives to conquer Europe.

 

However, once the immediate emergency of the depression was over, Lippmann moved to the Right. So much so that a group of European conservative economists, including Hayek, sponsored a 1938 colloquium in his honor. Simply put Lippmann’s opposition to state planning put him in good stead with that group and it was there he coined the term “neo-liberal.”

 

He went all out to support the U.S. military build-up from 1939-41 and after the war he became an advocate of military-Keynesianism. Early on he understood the danger coming from the Soviet Union and he popularized the term, “Cold War.” His Eurocentricity made him a critic of the Vietnam war.

 

Lippmann was a great believer in the role of newspapers in forming public opinion. Afterall, he wrote “Public Opinion” just prior to the advent of radio. I wonder what he would think now of the collapse of newspapers and panoply of information sources that the public now has available?

 

My concern about the book is that Arnold-Forster largely presents criticisms of Lippmann from the Left about his economics and his belief in a strong America. Criticism from the Right comes very late in the book and is minimal. My guess is that the author unfortunately sides with the Left.

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 Matthew Continetti's : The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism"

 

Triumph and Tragedy

 

As I write this Liz Cheney, the scion of Reagan Republicanism and what used to be the heartbeat of American conservatism, lost her primary battle to a Trump acolyte in Wyoming. Simply out, the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party, but rather a cult of personality populist party. This is the end point of Matthew Continetti’s hundred-year history of American conservatism. Continetti, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been a writer/activist on the conservative scene for two decades and is the son-in-law of William Kristol, a leading neoconservative and one of the foremost anti-Trumpers on the Right.

 

Continetti begins his history in the 1920’s when the conservative Republican Party stood for protectionism, anti-immigration and more or less and isolationist foreign policy. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. However, there is a major difference from today that Continetti doesn’t mention. That is in the 1920’s conservatives were an optimistic bunch believing in the new technologies of automobiles, electrification, radio, aircraft, and talking pictures that was underpinning an economic boom. Thus, when the Great Depression came, it was truly a shock turning optimism into pessimism about the future of the country under the New Deal.  

 

As a result, conservatives stayed in the political wilderness for years as the Democratic Party and liberal Republicans dominated the scene. However, beneath the surface a disparate group of conservatives rallied around anticommunism and the leadership of William Buckley and his National Review. Elitist to the core Buckley and crew became the backbone of conservative revival, but beneath the surface their remained vestiges of racism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism. Those would resurface many years later.

 

When liberalism cracked up under the strains of the Vietnam War and the stagflation of the 1970’s, conservatives were ready to seize the mantle of power. Instead of the dour conservatism of say, 1940’s Bob Taft, conservatives were led by the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan who offered economic growth at home and the defeat of communism abroad. Reagan united social, economic, and foreign policy conservatives under one banner. However, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and with that the unity of the conservative movement fell.

 

In fact, one year later, in a forerunner to Trump, Pat Buchanan mounted a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush and soon Ruch Limbaugh would dominate the airwaves of talk radio.  For a time, the conservative establishment held these forces in check, but failures in the Iraq War and the Great Financial Crisis destroyed its legitimacy. All the while a populist revolt was brewing against trade, immigration, and foreign wars that Continetti and his intellectual buddies in the think tanks and K-Street were oblivious to. They were too busy talking to each other rather than going out into the country to visit the dive bars and fast-food joints of the Midwest and the South. They soon would have discovered that there was a revolt brewing against the know-it-all coastal elites of both parties who in the words of Hillary Clinton, called them “deplorables.”  I hate to break it to Continetti, but all too many conservatives felt the same way.

 

Continetti’s goal is to blend historical conservatism to the new populism. My guess is that train has passed the station, at least for now. When CPAC features Hungarian autocrat Victor Orban as a speaker, you know the world has changed. Thus, it looks like that conservatives will once again be spending long years in the wilderness. If it is to recover it will have to come with an optimistic vision similar to what happened in the 1920’s and the 1980’s.

For the full Amazon URL see: Triumph and Tragedy (amazon.com)

 

My Amazon Review of David Paul Kuhn's "The Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution"

The Day the New Deal Coalition Died

On May 8, 1970, the 25^th anniversary of VE Day and four days after the Kent State shootings a mob of construction workers, many of whom were veterans, assaulted a large group of anti-war demonstrators in New York’s financial district. With great acuity political journalist David Paul Kuhn not only describes with fully sourced details the progression of the riot, but he also sets the stage by describing the New York City of the 1960s and the political aftershocks of the riot.

For the most part the police stood by as the construction workers assaulted the demonstrators. After all the police sympathized with them and they lived in their neighborhoods. Theirs were the neighborhoods of Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn, not the elite upper eastside of Mayor Lindsay and the suburbs of Westchester and Long Island from whence most of the students came. Simply put is was a class war. Remember the Vietnam War was fought by the children of the working class of all races, not by the children of the elite.

Interestingly the construction workers also opposed the Vietnam War, what they didn’t like is the appearance of a strain of anti-Americanism among the antiwar demonstrators. Removing American flags from flagpoles and shouting support for the Viet Cong hardly improved the situation. But perhaps far more important was the image of privileged upper-middle class college students protesting a country that had given them everything. The typical construction worker only wished that someday his children would be able to go to college.

Beneath the veneer of a construction boom in low Manhattan (i.e. the World Trade Center was under construction) New York City was falling apart. Crime was rising rapidly and the profligacy of the Lindsay Administration was undermining the fiscal health of the city. Further the workers knew that they not only would pay higher taxes to fund the fiscal profligacy of the city, they would also bear the brunt of school busing and scatter-site public housing projects.

In the White House President Nixon and his aide Pat Buchanan were watching with great interest. In the hard hat riots the saw the collapse of the New Deal coalition which at its core was the white working class. To the extent that the Republican Party could pick off these voters a political realignment of monumental proportions could take place. The fruits of which were harvested 10 years later with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and in 2016 with Trump’s surprising win. Simply put the Democratic Party became an image of Mayor John Lindsay’s coalition in New York City, upper-income liberals, minorities and young voters and that coalition haughtily looks down as white working class voters as know-nothing racists. That is certainly not the way Franklin Roosevelt viewed them.

To me Kuhn’s book was very personal. I grew up in middle-class Queens and in 1970 I was going to graduate school in Los Angeles after just getting out of the army.  While in the army I watched with my fellow soldiers the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Most of us were all for the demonstrators until they flew the Viet Cong flag and with that most of their support melted away. To me that reaction typified the hard hat reaction two years later. In 1972 I canvassed the working class neighborhoods of Los Angeles with other veterans for George McGovern and after that experience I knew McGovern was a goner.

Now 50 years later, America has changed. The white working class is a shadow of what it once was and for the most part real wages have gone nowhere so perhaps the Democrats can resurrect the Lindsay coalition in 2020. But I would warn them that with crime once again on the rise, public safety will once again become a potent political issue that will affect all races. Read this book to see how we got here.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RW7IZ05D0KKZB/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

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 Amy Chua's "Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations"

The Return of Tribalism

Yale law professor Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua has written an important book on the role of tribalism in our modern world. She demonstrates how U.S. foreign policy went awry in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Venezuela because how we completely failed to understand the tribal motive behind those conflicts. In particular she highlights the role of economically dominant minorities who breed resentment among the broader population. In particular the Vietnam War was more about deposing the economically dominant Chinese minority rather than a struggle for and against communism.

She then moves on to the U.S. where after years of promoting multi-culturalism it is not surprising to see a broad section of the white community seeing themselves as being victimized by an economically dominant coastal elite. But this is not new to the rise of Donald Trump. In the 1990’s we witnessed New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani criticizing a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that depicted Christ in a jar of urine entitled “Piss Christ.”  The exhibit stood, but what if the museum exhibited “Piss Moses” or “Piss Mohamed.” Later “The Book of Mormon,” a satire on the Mormon religion became a hit Broadway show. I doubt if Broadway would have run “The Book of the Koran.”

What I liked about Chua’s book is that she notes that tribalism through years of evolution is built into the human psyche so we shouldn’t be surprised to see it manifested in the United States. A tribe needs to include and a need to exclude. Quite a bit of this, unfortunately, is based on race.  However, for the most part, we rose above tribalism by establishing a “super group” (her words) to rise above it to become Americans. With the return of tribalism the notion of America is pushed into the background.

I also like her noting that the coastal elites have become a tribe of their own as they dominate most of our culture. On the far left the culture has become so strict that the doctrine of intersectionality, which means to be in our tribe you have to be with us on everything to be with us at all. A world where deviation is not tolerated sounds very much like the worlds of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s. Unfortunately that is where the left is today. To be sure Amy Chua is not as harsh as me, but is clear-eyed on the issue.

All told, Amy Chua has written an important book about where we are in America today. It should be read in conjunction with the works of NYU professor Jonathan Haidt.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R73L2N1MYL46U/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

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