Book of the Week; TO SEE THE ARCHIVES ON YOUR PHONE: Click on a category under any given post and keep scrolling all the way down until the search bar appears. Scroll down below that.
The Book of the Week is “The Reckoning, Death and Intrigue in the Promised Land, a True Detective Story” by Patrick Bishop, published in 2014.
Born in 1907 in Poland near the Lithuanian border, Avraham Stern grew up to become an agent of the Irgun (one of the intelligence services in Palestine), coordinating the purchase of weaponry from Italian and Polish sources, to be smuggled into Palestine to help the Jews fight for an independent state, plus spreading propaganda about offensives in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky was a prominent Zionist in the same underground group, who gathered intelligence and launched military offensives in pursuit of Jewish statehood.
Stern, however, was a more radically violent sort, whose spinoff group (called Betar, or Revisionists) committed acts of terrorism against Arabs, even civilians, and later, the British. His group received funding from wealthy Jews who believed in the cause of helping oppressed Jews live freely in a land of their own.
In May 1939, Great Britain issued a White Paper– a follow-up document to the 1917 Balfour Declaration– stating that since there was then a significant Jewish population (450,000) in Palestine, only an additional 75,000 would be let in in the next five years, and those arriving later than that, would require Arab consent.
A governance arrangement would have to be made in the next ten years between the Arabs and the Jews. Of course, no one could know the untoward historical events soon to occur, let alone the number of Jewish refugees who would ultimately be seeking to reside in Palestine.
By 1940, Great Britain was in trouble militarily. In August, Jabotinsky unexpectedly died of a heart attack. Stern, who took the opportunity to occupy the resulting power vacuum, argued that the Zionists should ally with Germany because although anti-Semitic, the Germans might let the Jews emigrate to Palestine.
In desperate need of money, Stern plotted a successful bank robbery in September 1940 that was executed by his henchmen. He himself was an armchair warrior, only the mastermind behind the group’s activities.
Afterwards, Stern went underground, but got friendly with the anti-British Italians through his spy network, so if the Italians were to march into Palestine, they would be benign colonialists, rather than oppressive imperialists. Early 1941 saw Stern solicit the friendship of the German diplomatic corps, too. His overtures later proved to be a waste of time.
In 1941 and 1942, Stern went all out with planning violence because he knew his days were numbered. His group committed a robbery and launched an attack that resulted in the deaths of innocent people, including British cops. He became public enemy number one. A major historical event that might either discredit or make truthfulness more likely in connection with various historical accounts is: the Wannsee Conference held in late January 1942, at which Hitler discussed his plot to create a master race and eliminate all Jews. Thereafter, parties privy to such knowledge began to change their behavior.
Stern and his cohorts hated the British government because the British knew the Jews were seeking refuge from Hitler’s death camps, but they prevented them from reaching the shores of Palestine via boats, anyway. It was inexcusable not to save their lives. Two of Israel’s future politicians, Irgun members (Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin) fought with the ideologically dogmatic Zionists, newly renamed “Lehi.”
Read the book to learn of the way the British intelligence community treated Stern’s terrorist cell as an organized-crime gang– resorting to frontier justice out of fury when law enforcement officers were killed in attacks; the ensuing propaganda war between the Brits and Jews on a specific incident involving Stern; the fate of the head of British intelligence; and the activities of the British and Zionists from 1944 onward.
The Book of the Week is “Whittaker Chambers” by Sam Tanenhaus, published in 1997. This large volume described a situation that lends itself to the hypothetical board game “Survival Roulette: Alleged Commie Edition” (See “Blind Ambition” post).
Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers were just two of thousands of people starting in the late 1940’s who were losers of this game. The winners actually won only temporarily: Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon and other bullies.
The board’s spaces could describe wiretapped conversations of such evil Commie fronts as the Boy Scouts, and dossiers acquired through the Freedom of Information Act in which every word of every page has been redacted (blacked out) except the names of the 205 guilty State Department officials.
Of course, there could be spaces such as “Go to the Electric Chair” and “IRS Audit.” A “Commie Chest” (rather than Community Chest) card, for instance, could say “Collect $1 in a libel suit while your attorneys collect $50,000.” By the way, any player wearing a red necktie is a Commie.
Chambers, born in 1901 in Brooklyn, was accepted to Columbia University in 1920 through, at that time, simply passing an intelligence test rather than taking entrance examinations. He was fluent in several languages and was a skilled writer. As a commuter from Lynbrook in Long Island, New York, he paid only the school’s annual tuition of $256. The following year, living on campus, he also paid room and board of $400.
As a sophomore and rebellious intellectual, Chambers penned an offensive, blasphemous piece for one of a few campus publications for which he wrote. Fierce critics forced him to take a leave of absence from the school.
In the next several years, he traveled around Europe, came home, held short-term odd jobs he obtained through friends, returned to school, rode the rails out West, etc. in an effort to find himself; also in an attempt to escape his dysfunctional family. According to the author, Chambers suppressed his homosexual urges by having affairs with women.
In the course of his voracious reading– a lifelong passion– Chambers discovered a speech of Vladimir Lenin called The Soviets at Work. In it, Lenin advocated violent authoritarianism. Curious factoid: a line in the speech is reminiscent of a line in the Elton John song “Yellow Brick Road” paraphrased: “… where the dogs of society howl… I’m going back to my plow…”
Anyway, in February 1925, Chambers joined the Workers Party of America, a then-illegal political party that espoused Communist ideals. Its American members numbered about sixteen thousand. He also joined the International Workers of the World.
In the spring of 1927, Chambers was found to have stolen tens of books from Columbia University’s libraries and various other libraries. He was proud rather than ashamed. He wrote articles for The Daily Worker and other Communist publications, got a short story published in The New Masses, that was turned into a play performed internationally.
Some Americans became Communists because they felt that capitalism was the cause of the Great Depression— with its breadlines, labor unrest, suicides, protests, etc. In spring 1932, Chambers joined the OGPU– the Soviet agency that eliminated anyone who expressed the least negative thoughts about Comrade Stalin or his ilk.
Chambers was a valuable addition, as he had experience in bureaucracy, was fluent in German and Russian and literate in the Classics. The American chapter of the Party forced him to become a secret agent man.
But it was fun to play adolescent-boy spy games. And the pay was really good. He played well with others. He and his comrades got secret messages in invisible ink and microfilm from the Germans in their safe house on Gay Street in Greenwich Village. They spied on businesses and the military. He helped steal blueprints for weapons to be built by military contractors, and sent them to the Soviets.
In summer 1934, Chambers was relocated by the Soviets to Washington, D.C. to become a New-Deal advocate for sharecroppers and tenant farmers, who were opposing landowners and big growers in the agricultural industry.
Then Chambers started assisting with generating false passports to be used by his comrades. The initial step was to comprehensively extract information (such as birth dates and names) from the archives of obituaries of babies, in the research branch of the New York Public Library (yes, the one with the lion statues in front).
A birth certificate was then the only proof of citizenship that was required to obtain an American passport, which allowed the easiest travel. The above information (reflecting the then-age and gender of the agent who traveled internationally) would be used to apply for a fraudulent birth certificate, which could then be used to obtain a fraudulent passport.
The Party headquarters was in the U.S.S.R., though, and was the ultimate boss. It could shut down a cell if it saw little productivity. For example, an agent was reassigned to Riga (equivalent to Siberia). But before the transfer, the agent did win the handball championship at a YMCA in the closed Tokyo cell.
Across the United States, there were plenty of organizations posing as Communist fronts, such as a literary agency in San Francisco, the Unemployed Council in Queens county in New York State, and the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians. Chambers used a series of aliases for himself, his wife and daughter with each new assignment.
Changes were always afoot. In the mid-1930’s, the OGPU became the NKVD. Chambers’ boss was purged by Stalin. His highly-strung new boss reflected the Soviet mentality of proactively engaging in an act of generosity to butter up his new office in Washington, D.C. He therefore gave it a large cash gift that was used to purchase Oriental rugs to be given to the top operatives there.
In December 1936, the Soviets considered Germany, Italy and Japan their fascist enemies. The United States, France and England were passively standing on the sidelines. Chambers’ new mission was to, with the help of comrades, procure stolen original State Department documents, take photos of them, and return them, turn the photos into microfilm, and send it to Moscow. Although the documents usually didn’t contain anything world-shaking.
Nevertheless, circumstances were getting dangerous for Chambers. He was considering withdrawing from the Party, but then he and his family would have to disappear. He didn’t want to end up like Ignace Reiss, a “…well dressed corpse, perforated with bullet holes.” In spring 1938, he took the plunge and went into hiding. About a year later, he was able to get a job through a friend at Time, Inc.
Chambers knew the NKVD could kill him or harm his family at any time. Besides that, he could be convicted and imprisoned for treason, and he couldn’t afford to flee. So in September 1939, he turned state’s evidence instead. He named names of Treasury Department and State Department members and discussed the U.S. military’s Communist spy ring.
Into the 1940’s, Chambers continued to work around the clock at Time, Inc., where he received an obscenely high salary for his new rabidly anti-Communist editorial bent. His intuitions were correct, however. He knew that the Soviets had designs on world domination.
In August 1948, Chambers was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Reputable officials and journalists were angry that in a public hearing, Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a high-level State Department official had been a Communist in the 1930’s. Hiss’s integrity had been irreproachable up to that point. The then-freshman Congressman Richard Nixon (R., CA) was the only member of the Committee who insisted on continuing the case against Hiss.
Initially, Chambers couldn’t name anything Hiss had done that was illegal. For, Party membership hadn’t been illegal in the previous decade. Neither had paying Party dues, nor meeting with other Communists.
However, with circumstantial evidence that Chambers produced in his own sweet time, he was able to convince the authorities that Hiss had lied under oath. Another crime that Hiss might have been punished for, was espionage. Fortunately for Hiss and Chambers, the three year statute of limitations on that had expired.
Political accusers always seem to scream about risks to national security!!! But it has become a cliche that more often than not, documents have been labeled top-secret, not to become declassified for decades– in order to cover up government’s bad, embarrassing behavior, NOT because American lives are at risk.
For approximately the last seventy years, on and off, vicious political vengeance has been the norm– best interests of the country be damned. However, the punishments haven’t fit the crimes. The most guilty and least punished perpetrators have acted in ways that have resulted in needless deaths and ruined lives.
Who knows what else Hiss did– making love to an intern in the Old Executive Office Building? He did get caught lying under oath.
Based on lies, the most guilty perpetrators have led the United States to attack other countries and smeared their political opponents for their own selfish political and financial ends. At least they didn’t get caught lying under oath.
Anyway, as is common with these kinds of situations, different government agencies are fighting to grab glory for bringing the perpetrators to justice. In the Hiss case, it was the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and HUAC.
Individuals such as Nixon and Robert Stripling, the chief investigator of HUAC, were also jockeying for power and bragging rights. Then-Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter testified on behalf of Hiss, an unprecedented move, and possible conflict.
Read the book to learn why Chambers wasn’t also tried for lying under oath, even though he was the biggest liar in the world; every ugly detail of the Hiss case, and much more about Chambers’ life.
The Book of the Week is “Blind Ambition, The White House Years” by John Dean, published in 1976.
Investigations of politicians accused of wrongdoing at the highest level of the U.S. government, are complicated, because officials must at least make a pretense of complying with due process.
There is document gathering and analysis, subpoenas that compel witnesses to testify, endless debates on various interpretations of various sources of laws pertaining to the federal government, etc.; not to mention the most important aspect of the whole kit and caboodle: public relations! Plus, nowadays, the media and social media keep the constant barrage of inane comments coming.
In fact, there ought to be a board game, “Survival Roulette” that tests players’ ability to weasel out of legal trouble through shaping public opinion using claques, flacks, sycophants and attorneys.
Of course, Survival Roulette could be tailored to the Nixon White House; it could be the Politician Edition. The game could be structured like Monopoly, with players rolling dice and moving pieces onto spaces that describe financial crimes, illegal-surveillance crimes and damage-control speeches. The most famous space could be “Go To Jail” and there could also be “Cash In Political Favors.” The ultimate winner could be Rich Little.
In the Tabloid Celebrity Edition, the object of the game is to become the ultimate winner, Marc Rich. Other players (the losers) end up as other notorious figures who face different punishment scenarios: Jimmy Hoffa, Jeffrey Epstein, O.J., Bernie Madoff, Bill Cosby and Martha Stewart. The board spaces could describe financial crimes, sex crimes, violent crimes, and social media postings.
The Teenage Edition could feature more recent celebrities– simply spreading vicious rumors about them, rather than confirmed offenses– like in the case of Dakota Fanning.
In Survival Roulette: Politician Edition, John Dean could be one of the worse losers. He was one of various attorneys and consultants who: a) aided and abetted President Richard Nixon’s nefarious attempts to wreak vengeance on his political enemies (whom Nixon believed were revolutionaries and anarchists who used dirty tricks on him in the 1968 presidential election) and b) help Nixon keep his job as president (which Nixon believed was to play God).
In the summer of 1970, Dean’s career took a leap from the Justice Department up to the President’s side, as one of his legal advisors. He thought of his new department as a law firm, so he solicited legal work in all practice areas to make it grow; it did, to five people.
Dean quickly began to feel uneasy about his new position, even though it carried luxurious perks. The White House was fraught with politically incorrect goings-on. There was friction with various federal agencies, such as the FBI.
The FBI was dominated by J. Edgar Hoover, whom it was thought, possessed the means to blackmail the administration. He supposedly had evidence that the president had ordered the secret wiretapping of both the media and leakers on his staff.
As became well known, such wiretapping turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Nixon recorded himself— every conversation he ever had in the White House! He had listening devices planted to spy on protestors against the Vietnam War, and his other political enemies, which appeared to be almost infinite in number.
Nowadays, the equivalent would be a “loose cannon” with hubris syndrome, addicted to: Tweeting / posting on Facebook but keeping a private profile / texting and emailing, who didn’t destroy his electronic devices.
In July 1971, Dean encountered his first major ethical conflict. He felt obligated to appeal to presidential aide John Ehrlichman to restrain Special Counsel Chuck Colson from orchestrating a break-in to steal Pentagon-Papers documents at the offices of the Brookings Institution. Nonetheless, Dean did sic the IRS on Brookings, and suggested that its contracts with the Nixon administration be cancelled.
Dean got so caught up in the excitement of helping the president get reelected in 1972 that he proposed expanding the collection of intelligence, which was already sizable. Yet he was also disturbed by reelection-committee director G. Gordon Liddy’s crazy plots to steal the 1972 election via burglary, spying, kidnapping, etc.
Dean attempted to remain willfully ignorant of Liddy’s actions thereafter so that he would have the defense of plausible denial in the future. However, after the Watergate break-in June 1972, he rationalized that he was protected by the attorney-client relationship and executive privilege.
One meta-illegality of the coverup of the administration’s various, serious crimes involved the distribution of hush money to hundreds of people who knew too much. By the late summer of 1972, seven individuals were found to have committed the Watergate break-in. Nixon basically said in his communications to the world that those perpetrators were the only ones responsible for that incident, which he claimed was an isolated one. Of course it wasn’t.
The president’s men held their breaths and crossed their fingers counting down to re-election day, as the White House was still the target of inquiries, and a party to legal skirmishes with the FBI, Department of Justice, Congress, the General Accounting Office and journalists. Immediately after election day, Nixon ordered a Stalin-style purge (merely job termination, actually) of all sub-Cabinet officers he had previously appointed.
As the palace intrigue continued into late 1972, Dean, through his own research, learned that he himself could be criminally liable for obstruction of justice. He would inevitably be forced to choose between betraying his colleagues (who hadn’t been all that friendly to him) or perjuring himself to save others insofar as it helped save his own hide.
A true “prisoner’s dilemma” existed among the several indicted bad actors. No one would receive immunity for tattling on the others, but no one knew of any deals made with prosecutors except their own.
Dean wrote of early spring of 1973: “He [Nixon] is posturing himself, I thought– always placing his own role in an innocuous perspective and seeking my agreement… The White House was taking advantage of its power, and betting that millions of people did not wish to believe a man who called the president a liar.”
The Bonus Book of the Week is “In My Time” by Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, published in 2011.
Born in January 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheney and his family moved to Wyoming when he was twelve. He learned fishing at a young age. In high school: he was co-captain of the football team, was senior class president, and met his future wife.
Cheney got a scholarship (work/study program) to Yale. “… I continued to accumulate bad grades and disciplinary notices. In the spring of 1962, Yale and I finally parted ways.”
Cheney claimed that by 1967, he had aged out of the Vietnam draft through obtaining deferments for being a student and father. He got into politics, and was elected as a Republican from Wyoming, to the U.S. House of Representatives for six terms, beginning in 1978.
Interesting factoid (apropos of the way the U.S. government can behave badly): “The tobacco companies supplied free cartons of cigarettes to the Nixon and Ford White Houses…”
In October 1995, Cheney became CEO, as the previous one retired– of the international monster-sized oil-services / construction / military contracting company, Halliburton. He therefore moved to Texas. He rambled on a few pages about his quail-hunting there, and global fly-fishing trips. He explained how his February 2006 hunting accident happened.
Karl Rove opposed naming Cheney as George W. Bush’s running mate. According to Cheney, Bush was the only one who was desperate to have Cheney be his vice president. It took months of discussions before Cheney reluctantly agreed.
Even then, the two candidates were both from Texas, which meant the electoral college could vote for only one of them. Cheney had to hurry up and register in Wyoming before the deadline, to exploit the loophole in election law that allowed him to run from a different state. To be fair, in late July 2000, when Cheney’s candidacy was announced, “… the Democrats were waiting in the wings, ready to attack.”
Cheney asked Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan about the extent of 9/11’s economic impact on the United States, just after the attacks. Greenspan couldn’t say, because the “million equation model” (factors too numerous to account for) applied to such an event.
If that was the case, then the economic conditions of one president’s administration CANNOT be compared– apples to apples– to any other’s, no matter how indicators or numbers are quantified or adjusted. Each one faces challenges or advantages unique to his administration– as well as increasing globalization– as time goes on.
However, the economy’s tanking under Bush’s administration, was hardly due to 9/11. In October 2008, Bush signed a $700 billion bailout plan for failing financial institutions, the largest in United States history. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the economy contracted 8.4%. In sum, Obama inherited a national deficit of $6.369 trillion from his (blankety-blank) predecessor, thanks to tax cuts, mad military spending and a hog-wild mortgage crisis– the one that required that bailout– among other factors.
Bill Clinton happened to get reelected at the dawn of a once-a-century technological innovation that lifted all boats. It’s impossible to say how much his actions directly contributed to that.
So the line– uttered emphatically during any particular president’s administration (especially at odd times; i.e., whenever there’s a news lull)– “The economy is booming with president A, but in the same time period it sucked with president B!!” is meaningless. Sadly, this reckless kind of propaganda that targets the ignorant, works.
Anyway, roughly the last third of Cheney’s narrative consisted of infuriating, depressing and sickening myth-making, and credit-grabbing of feats that were arguably dubious distinctions. Excuse the cliche, but he rewrote history.
For one thing, Cheney was rather vague on the time frame in which he created a charitable trust to contain the after-tax profits of the stock options he still had yet to redeem with the aforementioned Halliburton; this, instead of putting his assets in a blind trust so as to reduce conflicts of interest upon becoming a (sorry excuse for a) public servant who was involved in numerous, highly suspicious circumstances. Curiously, one of the trust charities, Capital Partners for Education, has yet to be rated as of this writing by Charity Navigator, though it was founded in 1993.
The reader wonders whether Cheney would have acted completely unethically had there not been a firestorm from the media that followed his every move from the get-go. He is one of those people who, unless he gets caught, having a crack public relations team, will keep doing what he will.
Cheney wrote that Bush conferred with him in making major administration decisions. If true, Obama got elected due to the outrageous nature of the acts ordered by Cheney as much as by Bush, that sullied the Republican party’s reputation: Unethical opportunism. Unconscionable greed. Unmitigated hubris.
Cheney and Bush favored money over human lives by starting two needless wars launched on false pretenses in order to profit in many ways. ZERO of the 9/11 terrorists were from Afghanistan. ZERO of the the 9/11 terrorists were from Iraq. Yet retaliation was directed at only those two countries for harboring terrorists. The United States can’t be the world’s police officer. Clearly, it’s expensive and results in needless deaths and damage to America’s reputation.
Nevertheless, read the book to learn of Cheney’s version of events.
The Book of the Week is “George F. Kennan, An American Life” by John Lewis Gaddis, published in 2011. This is the biography of an emotionally troubled American diplomat, an expert in Russian– the language and mentality– who became known for his historical writings on the Cold War power struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union; the struggles arose from the the two rivals’ weaponry and opposing ideologies.
Born in February 1904 in Milwaukee, Kennan was raised by his three older sisters and other relatives after his mother died in spring 1904. His father was 52 years old.
In 1910, Milwaukee elected a Socialist mayor. The city was a melting pot of Western, Eastern and Northern European immigrants. Kennan graduated from a military school, then from Princeton University. The Foreign Service had recently become a civil service job, comprised of Northeastern elitists.
After passing its two exams, starting in 1927, Kennan was posted to Geneva, then Hamburg, then on to Estonia to learn Russian. He met his 21-year old wife in Norway. They eventually had four children. After stints in Riga in Latvia, and Prague, he spent most of the rest of his career in Berlin, Moscow, Washington, D.C. and New Jersey.
In 1944, as WWII was winding down, Kennan tried to convince President Franklin Roosevelt to sternly warn the USSR not to expand geographically. Roosevelt, in a tough position, argued that the Allies couldn’t win the war without the USSR’s military assistance, so he had to tread lightly with Stalin; Harry Truman, too. The president had to deal with one issue at a time. Those men in Los Alamos couldn’t say how soon the atomic bomb would be ready. That was the kicker.
Stalin tried a divide and conquer strategy– to drive a wedge between the United Kingdom and the United States so they would fight. Nevertheless, after the war, they became best friends.
For the second time, and it wouldn’t be the last, Kennan submitted a letter of resignation, as he perceived that his counsel and advice were being ignored. Nevertheless, he was convinced to stay on at the Foreign Service. He read the classic novels and plays of Tolstoy, Chekhov and others to understand the Soviets’ behavior.
In February 1946, Kennan sent a telegram which later became famous, urging the United States to take a hard line with the Soviets. But it was already too late. Six months later, he “…saw how Soviet ambitions, American complacency, and British weakness might combine to upset the balance of power in Europe.”
According to the author, Kennan’s input for the Marshall Plan– whose purpose was to financially aid the then-needy, war-ravaged European nations (with the true goal of warding off a Communist takeover)– was to suggest to offer such aid to the Soviets knowing Stalin would reject it. Stalin also told the Soviet satellites to reject the aid. The Americans then knew which countries needed help (in countering Communism).
In summer 1947, Kennan recommended that the sixteen countries split up the aid themselves rather than let the United States decide, so that way, the USSR couldn’t claim the United States was acting imperialistically. The recipients could spend the funds on food, arms– whatever they wanted.
Around that time, the US established the CIA. Kennan agreed that the organization should conduct covert operations to keep up with the KGB. He later regretted agreeing on that issue.
The US couldn’t afford to politically, militarily and financially help all nations vulnerable to Soviet domination, but Kennan advised President Truman on which regions were most at risk, and where America’s resources should be deployed. He told him to cease assisting Chinese Nationalist Party leader Chiang Kai Shek because Stalin had already staked out strategic military locations within striking distance of China, and China posed a minor threat to the US, having a shaky economy anyway.
In short, Kennan believed in particularism– a practice of selectivity in taking action against the Soviets. The newly formed United Nations believed in universalism– all nations should share and share alike, regardless of cultures and ideologies.
In early 1948, the Soviets took over the Czechoslovakian government. In the spring, in a lesser wrong, America meddled in Italy’s election– threatening to cut off Marshall Plan aid to the government if people voted for the Communist party instead of the Social Democrats. Additionally, Italian Americans wrote lots of letters to the Vatican, which told Italian voters for whom not to vote.
In January 1957, pursuant to the Suez Canal Crisis, President Eisenhower signed legislation based on the doctrine that the United States would financially and militarily assist any Middle Eastern nations vulnerable to Communist influence.
In 1978, Kennan became a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Due to his prolific writing and prominence, he got special treatment– continued to be treated like a full-time professor. Private donors such as the Rockefeller family, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and Warren Buffett funded his continued tenure.
Read the book to learn why Kennan was expelled from the US embassy in Moscow, of a proposal that would result in German reunification in the 1950’s, of one step Eisenhower took in deciding the Soviet question, of Kennan’s activities after his Foreign Service career, of America’s relationship with Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito, and much more.
The Book of the Week is “The Most Wanted Man in China, My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State” by Fang Lizhi, translated by Perry Link, published in 2016. Despite its sensationalist title, this volume aptly described the unusual personal account of a Chinese dissident who was fortunate to receive minimal (but still emotionally wrenching) punishment for his “crimes” in an oppressive regime. Under that regime, there were millions of deaths due to famine and suicides.
Born in Beijing, China in 1936, Fang was the second-oldest of six siblings. As a business owner, Fang’s grandfather exploited his employees, according to the Marxist doctrine forced down the throats of the Chinese people. Therefore, when Fang joined the Communist Party for the first time in June 1955, he was compelled to denounce his late grandfather.
At university, Fang began to rebel against the robotic, rote-learning curriculum. Having developed a passion for tinkering with electronics and studying science at an early age, he asked why there wasn’t independent thinking. The authorities answered that only several sources of ideology (Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Engels and the Communist Party) had already discovered the absolute best way to think for the people, so no one need waste any more time on thinking for themselves.
Mao maintained that socialism was the best economic system, but admitted that there were three imperfections with it: “subjectivism, bureaucratism and factionalism.” Mao encountered a big problem when university students started to search for why. By using reason, logic, science and independent thinking, followers of a leader cannot help but question the leader. As an absolute ruler, Mao could not abide that.
Mao thus used four techniques of Communist dictators to maintain his power. The first was to label only 5% of the people as “rightists” and dangerous enemies. This way, the majority of Chinese people would feel threatened, so he could crush everyone like bugs through fear and force. The second was to falsely accuse them of being anti-Party and anti-socialist. [In the United States, a dictatorial president might label people “unpatriotic”].
Thirdly, Mao had his minions behave like tattletales in publicly criticizing the small groups (pairs, even) of closet rightists. Finally, the authorities organized self-criticism groups to foster group-think and herd-mentality to denounce everyone’s every transgression. Because– people feel more comfortable engaging in group-bullying than individually attacking others.
Fang became a teaching assistant at the University of Peking, until December 1957, when he was reassigned to do farm work– hard manual labor– in a rural area. He was forced to live far away from his girlfriend and later, wife and kids, over the course of about twenty years.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s, Fang was alternately exiled to rural areas, and returned to resume his primary career at a university, engaging in both teaching and research in nuclear physics, and later, materials science and laser physics. Ironically, Fang acquired a variety of physical skills and valuable experience in all different kinds of workplaces, such as a railroad, coalmine, pig farm, water-well, steel mill, vinyl and brick factories, tunnels, etc.
Mao ordered dissidents to be geographically separated from their loved ones, so as to: impose psychological trauma on the people, make it difficult for them to form alliances with the like-minded, and band together to fight his oppressive regime. Fang was in a special category because he possessed rare expertise in academia. So for a few months in mid-1969, he was detained with other scientists and was pumped with Mao’s ideology for hours every day.
But prior to that, in his twenties, even Fang had been ideologically brainwashed. In 1965, he thought he wanted to study in the Soviet Union because he liked its brand of socialism. He was impressed that the Soviets were ahead of the Americans in the space race.
Until he started traveling internationally, even Fang, a well-educated physicist, lived in an insular society that limited his knowledge of the rest of the world. He read scientific journals from other countries, but had no real understanding of political ideologies or cultures other than his own.
Fang lost respect for the Chinese authorities beginning in 1967, when he heard rumors that Mao’s closest political associates were just a bunch of mean, petty, vengeful people jockeying for power. Currently, in the United States, such people who are also super-wealthy, might adopt a litigious lifestyle, which is extremely expensive, but effective in intimidating and vanquishing enemies.
Mao launched a new nationwide political campaign every time the old one started to backfire on him. For example, in the mid-1970’s, “Denunciations of the wrong kind of astronomy topped the agendas, but in order to do that, someone had to read the texts of the papers that were going to be denounced. So real astronomy spread.” At least the Chinese backed up their denunciations with evidence.
In 21st century America, attention whoredom has reached new heights. For, few media commentators actually read the book, see the movie or know much about the report or study they denounce. They simply play a game of “telephone” and the tabloid-believing public eats it up. Oftentimes, it’s just a non-story, hysterically reported.
The commentators are so desperate for attention or to put their two cents in with no independent thinking that they even shamelessly admit to their own laziness or ignorance in not doing their homework.
Their audience is seeking confirmation of what it already believes, so no convincing is necessary. Further, when evidence is presented, the data are cherry-picked with weaselly language in oversimplified apples-to-oranges comparisons. So it’s as though the media have already done the thinking for the American masses.
So why are Americans so politically dogmatic on one side or the other? How are the media imposing this thought-control? It’s not through fear or force (!)
By nature people are lazy. Nowadays, they’ll get information from the most accessible sources–TV, radio or their electronic toy (phone). Those sources convey information concocted by attention whores or entertainers or profit-seekers with a political agenda. Not scholars who seek out original sources and comprehensively present both sides of an issue. This has almost always been the case in the most recent century, but the difference today is in the quality of the information presented.
The information is mostly opinions and when it isn’t, the audience can’t tell whether it’s propaganda. For, journalism verification standards have been eliminated. There used to be fact-checking departments and ethics guidelines to avoid conflicts of interest– at reputable publications and broadcasting and cable communications companies. No more.
Further, many media commentators who have no law degrees express their opinions on legal issues. But practicing lawyers are more likely to know what they’re talking about when explaining the issues. Sadly, it appears that this ignorant state of affairs isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Fang’s life and work (from the “horse’s mouth”), and whether much changed in China with Mao’s successor.
American politics has boiled down to the worst traits of human nature. Here are two books that put them in a nutshell.
The First Book of the Week is “how to rig an election (sic), Confessions of a Republican Operative” by Allen Raymond with Ian Spiegelman, published in 2008.
The author, originally from New Jersey, started his political career in the early 1990’s. He worked on a Republican campaign there in which “… we smeared them [the opposing candidates] as Trenton insiders who fired people, screwed you out of your money, and gave kickback deals to people who donated to their campaign.” Creativity in committing evil is an essential trait for a political operative. This author had it in spades.
For, the smearing part was outrageous lies in the form of attack ads. And they were cleverly timed, spread far and wide and believed by voters so that the victims couldn’t defend themselves or strike back easily. This is now what American campaigning is all about.
By 1995, the author had done his sleazy job so well, he was named chief of staff of a freshman New Jersey Congressman. He was one of the youngest of his kind, with blank-check security clearance in the Capitol. His boss was assigned to the Transportation Committee. Members of that Committee preside over an industry with big-money political donors who pay to play.
Raymond dodged a bullet when he wasn’t convicted for launching a robocall campaign that misled voters with slurs that completely misrepresented the candidates opposing his client, at a politically sensitive time period.
The author’s philosophy, when he was caught committing what was considered a crime by the Justice Department, was this: Everyone in politics can behave (or misbehave) as they please, as long as they don’t get caught breaking the law. The author didn’t (!) consider himself unethical when he “… obstructed a political party’s ability to contact voters.”
More specifically, during an election, his political-telemarketing business jammed phone lines of Democratic candidates. To his credit, beforehand, he checked with an attorney to learn whether that act was legal, and was initially told that it wasn’t illegal.
Read the book to learn the details (hint– Raymond didn’t pass Go, and he didn’t collect $200).
The Second Book of the Week is “Team of Vipers, My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House” by Cliff Sims, Former Special Assistant to the President, published in 2019.
Sims was born in Alabama. His father was a Baptist pastor. He started as a blogger writing on politics. In 2016, his influential “Yellowhammer” was instrumental in ousting Alabama’s governor for having an affair.
The author founded a media company before going to work for the Trump administration. In August 2015, Sims hosted a radio interview with the future president. This was two months after the candidate had thrown his hat into the ring.
Sims asked tough questions such as what had led Trump to change his views, since “He [Trump] had come under scrutiny for his many contributions to Democratic candidates over the years– including the Clintons…” And his utterances had been on the liberal side of the political spectrum. Trump waffled in answering that question, and in a downright cringeworthy way when asked about abortion.
Nevertheless, Sims’ communication skills and contacts led him to be tapped to become a close aide to Trump prior to election day. In October 2016, with the surfacing of a horribly embarrassing 2005 video clip featuring a Trump who was shamelessly, crudely expressing his sexist views– his election chances were suddenly judged to be almost nil. Sims proved to be particularly loyal to the candidate, anyway.
Sims described his West Wing workplace as easy in one way. Trump had a hands-off management style because he trusted his minions’ judgement to take action pursuant to his agenda. They could do so without having to get approval from a hierarchy of bureaucracy.
But its internal politics were like a chaotic corporate ladder– not unlike Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice”– a bunch of mean-spirited, petty, vengeful people jockeying for power, who spread vicious rumors, and publicly dressed each other down for their own selfish ends.
The root of the problem was that “Roles, goals and objectives weren’t clearly defined.” The workers had titles without job descriptions. They cooperated to help their employer only insofar as they helped themselves. Trump didn’t want to hear about employees’ petty squabbles. He didn’t care whether valuable people left for nicer pastures. He just wanted to see loyal people.
Admittedly, Sims himself took part in the adolescent antics. Clearly, such an environment is unsustainable in the long run for anyone; it is psychologically exhausting.
Read the book to learn the ugly details of Sims’ West-Wing-insider experiences attempting to do the president’s bidding while trying to avoid the social manipulation of his colleagues borne of jealousy of him– due to his disproportionately high amount of face time with the big boss.
The Book of the Week is “Putin, His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash” by Richard Lourie, published in 2017. This slightly sloppily edited volume had strange capitalizations in spots. It was actually more about Russia’s history and recent fossil fuels situation in connection with its allies and enemies, than with its dictatorial leader who started his third term in May 2012.
Born in 1952, Putin grew up in a family that was friendly with Stalin. His father was a spy. He was told that the easiest way to get recruited by the KGB was to go to law school, so he did. He did stints in Leningrad and Dresden. At the tail end of the 1980’s, when the German Democratic Republic was in its last throes, almost all of KGB’s Dresden office’s records were burned. In January 1990, Putin returned to Moscow. Unemployed. Then worked on his doctoral thesis, a portion of which he acquired through plagiarism.
By August 1991, Putin saw which way the wind was blowing, and resigned from the KGB. Poland had been damn near bankrupted by a radical economic program called shock capitalism, imposed upon it by Western Ivy Leaguers. Between 1990 and 1994, in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, economist Anatoly Chubais forced the same harmful transition on Russians.
Due to rampant inflation, Russians had to sell everything they owned in order to be able to afford food. The United States sent food aid to Russia. In early 1992, a food voucher system was started.
However, Putin signed contracts with food suppliers who raked in big bucks but failed to deliver the food. It is unclear whether Putin knew or cared that those suppliers were crooks, or that Russians were starving. For, rather than personally profiting, he was more interested in attracting foreign financial aid that would modernize Russia, and in collecting long-term valuable political contacts.
In October 1993, Yeltsin ordered Russian troops to fire on protestors (whom the media claimed wanted to bring back Communism) in front of Moscow’s Parliament building. There were tens of deaths.
It was actually a small number of politically astute crooks who conspired with Putin to loot the country. His career took a turn for the better in 1999, when he convinced Yeltsin via blackmail (apparently still a “thing” these days) to step down and let him become Russia’s supreme leader starting in 2000. Once in power, Putin actually kick-started the Russian economy by nationalizing oil companies, and taking control of the gas industry and television.
Read the book to learn of Russia’s aggressive stances on: the Ukraine, the Crimea, former Soviet satellites and former Republics, China, and the Arctic [hint– the extremely likely probability of a catastrophic oil spill, and decades of actual irradiation from nuclear dumping make the Arctic a less than ideal place for a land grab]; the effects of economic sanctions imposed on Russia; and the alleged role of cybercrime in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
The Book of the Week is “Nikita Khrushchev, and the Creation of a Superpower” by Sergei N. Khrushchev, published in 2000. This is the Soviet leader’s biography, written by his younger son, born in 1935.
Born in April 1894 in Kurskaya, Nikita possessed excellent survival skills as a politician until the mid-1960’s. In the 1930’s, his growing family’s living standards were almost comparable to that of the West, considering they received government-provided housing and food.
During WWII, in March 1943, Nikita’s older son’s (vulnerable Soviet) warplane (of inferior quality) was shot down and he was killed (a not uncommon occurrence). The Soviet government arrested his widow and charged her with spying for Britain or Sweden (also a not uncommon occurrence). The author’s mother (Nikita’s wife) spread propaganda for the district party committee, and cared for the author’s young cousins whose older relatives were doing war work or who had been killed in the fighting. Those who Americans would call “draft dodgers” consisted of privileged family members of government officials, who did “theatre administration” stateside.
After WWII ended, the USSR’s government featured a “…morbidly suspicious Stalin surrounded by backstabbing and cutthroat courtiers jockeying for position.” In 1950, the Khrushchev family moved from the Ukraine to Moscow. Nikita had to choose his friends carefully, even when taking a walk with a comrade outside his vacation house (dacha), as they were closely tailed by gossipy bodyguards. As a Politburo member, he rode in an armored limousine.
Nikita made various policy changes after Stalin’s death in 1953. In connection with weaponry, in order to keep up with the United States, he ordered his country to make nuclear submarines, which required less exorbitant spending than cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers. He also felt that ballistic missiles were the wave of the future.
In early 1956, a Central Committee secretary found documentation on Stalin’s purges and show trials. Like any good bureaucrat, the secretary felt obliged to draft a memo on the heinous crimes described therein. A few of the many disturbing lines included: “During 1937-1938 alone, 1,548,366 people were arrested, 681,692 of whom were shot. Top level leaders in republics, territories, and provinces were arrested; then their replacements were arrested, and so on. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Congress of the all-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 1,108 were arrested, 848 were shot, and so on.”
Soviet dissidents– victims of Stalin’s arbitrary human rights abuses but faithful to Communism– who were still alive, were soon to be released from the gulag. They could potentially present a public relations disaster for Nikita. Thus, Nikita formed a “truth and reconciliation” commission of sorts, to air their grievances, and put all the blame on Stalin for past totalitarian policies. However, no compensation was forthcoming for the victims and no punishments were imposed on the offenders.
In October 1956, just prior to the bloody suppression of protestors in Hungary, Soviet spies were led to believe that the Poles were planning to break away from the Union, and get Westernized. So the Soviets conferred with the Poles and the other Soviet satellites Romania and Czechoslovakia to keep them in the Soviet fold. Tito, the Yugoslavian leader, was still on speaking terms with the Soviets, but he had declared his territory’s independence from the USSR some time before.
In the following weeks, Nikita certainly did not want the Poles, Romanians and Czechs to copy Hungary’s rebellious action; that might lead to their defecting to the hostile, imperialist capitalists. He gave the order to send tanks to Budapest because “… the imperialists threatened to oppress the people, the workers and the peasants.” Fortunately, no violence ensued elsewhere, as Nikita struck a deal with the Poles. They would no longer receive reduced-price coal from Silesia, but their substantial debt to the USSR was canceled.
By summer 1957, political enemies of Nikita were starting to plot against him in the USSR’s two governing bodies, the Central Committee and the Politburo (Presidium). However, Nikita was able to hang on to his power in a vote that resulted in demotions and exiles of the perpetrators.
By late August 1957, the Soviets had developed an intercontinental ballistic missile that could potentially hit any place on earth. However, expensively, the army (which possessed no experience in weaponry) rather than the aviation industry, was the governmental entity producing it. Two years later, Nikita formed an entity that made only strategic missiles.
The author spent many, many pages recounting the details of the Cuban Missile Crisis. All through the summer of 1962, Nikita had actively pursued an aggressive military mission: secretly, actually shipping Soviet missiles from the Union to Cuba for the purpose of “defense.”
For, the United States had launched a (botched) clandestine military operation at the Bay of Pigs to try to destabilize Cuba. It had nuclear weapons at the ready in Turkey and Italy, that could reach the USSR; in previous months, it had been sending a few U-2 spy planes over Soviet territory– a violation of the Union’s airspace. Not that the Soviet government hadn’t launched sixteen surveillance missions over France by 1960. And installed listening devices in private homes throughout the USSR. Pox on everyone’s houses.
Anyway, the possibility of actual mutual assured destruction reared its ugly head when, in the third week of October 1962, American intelligence officials discovered that the Soviets had assembled twelve nuclear missiles and more were on the way. Shortly thereafter, the United States declared an embargo on Soviet ships heading toward Cuba because presumably, they were carrying weapons parts. The Soviets didn’t take kindly to that, but the embargo was never actually strictly enforced.
Nevertheless, Nikita had an ally in Fidel Castro, who allowed the weaponry to be assembled and potentially launched from his nation’s soil in Cuba.
There were indications from Nikita’s conversations with Castro that Castro was a sociopathic hawk, spoiling for a fight with the United States. Castro was almost looking forward to becoming a martyr by preemptively taking out major American cities via the weaponry. He had heard from his intelligence agents that America was going to send ground troops to his country within two days.
Five days into the crisis, when Nikita realized Castro meant what he said, Nikita told American President John F. Kennedy that he was willing to withdraw the missiles on certain conditions. The United Nations hammered out the details. Castro was furious at Nikita.
So according to this book, Castro’s saber-rattling was why Nikita reconsidered his own aggressive stance with the Americans, not because Kennedy stared him down.
The development of nuclear missiles in the USSR was not without trials and errors; many costly errors. In October 1960, there occurred a rocket-testing accident in which nearly 150 tons of fuel and oxidizer burst into flames of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, vaporizing 74 people in the vicinity. There were a lot of very important spectators at the test, so safety procedures were neglected in the rush to launch the rocket.
Read the book to learn of the power and ideological struggles among members of the Soviet government during Nikita’s reign, the serious problems suffered by East Germany, Nikita’s ouster, and much more.
This political biography, “The Netanyahu Years” by Ben Caspit, translated by Ora Cummings, published in 2017, described a speech-making, megalomaniacal Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who made a miraculous comeback, given his situation and mediocre, if not disgraceful record.
This book committed an egregious factual error in two different places: “During Bill Clinton’s first term in office in 1997…” and “His [Netanyahu’s] first meeting with Bill Clinton took place on July 9, 1996. Clinton had already been in office for six months, Netanyahu, barely one month.”
The reader is also left wondering about the following: “On November 21, 2005, Ariel Sharon announced he was leaving the Likud Party…” but in later text, “On December 18, 2004, Prime Minister Sharon suffered a minor stroke… Two weeks later… a second stroke… pushed Sharon into a coma from which he never awoke.”
Besides, this book was sloppily proofread, presented confusing timelines, was redundant and disorganized; perhaps the author believed he was building suspense. Nevertheless, the overall themes of the book’s subject’s career and personality came across as credible.
Born in 1949 in Israel, Netanyahu grew up in a political family. His father’s side believed in Jabotinsky’s brand of Zionism– at one time proposing that the Jewish homeland be located in Uganda. In the early 1940’s, his father got no action from Franklin Roosevelt on saving Europe’s Jews, so he and his Zionist political group allied with Republicans to get some.
In September 1947, the elder Netanyahu put forth a Revisionist proposal at the United Nations opposing the Jewish/Arab partition. He ruled his family by fear and force, with regular beatings. Starting when the younger Netanyahu was eight, the family moved to New York City and two or three years later, Philadelphia. But the youngster’s heart was still in Israel. He returned there every summer during his teen years.
In the late 1960’s, for five years, Netanyahu served in an elite, top secret group in the Israeli military. He was almost killed in a secret Suez Canal mission. Despite serving in the Israeli military, he was apparently able to keep his American citizenship. For, he returned to America to major in physics and chemistry first at Cornell and then graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Netanyahu became a businessman but Moshe Arens convinced him to become a politician (or diplomat/propagandist, to be more specific) on behalf of Israel beginning in the early 1980’s. He was already divorced with a daughter, whom he later very nearly disowned, not through any apparent fault of hers. He then went through a second wife. Not because he was a media whore, although he was also that.
By May 1988, Netanyahu was a high Likud (Conservative) Party official in Israel. Yet he did American-style campaigning. He paid a fortune for voter and polling data, and was a super fundraiser. Like Donald Trump, he had his claques, flacks and sycophants. He started dating another female. They broke up. However, she got pregnant during election season. For the sake of his image, he felt he needed to marry her.
During the next election, Netanyahu still felt he had to prove his sexual prowess by having an affair. His political enemies blackmailed him on this score, but he outwitted them. He went on television to honestly admit it but refused to withdraw from the race. In spring 1993, he reconciled with his wife, with the condition that she was free to behave like a “bridezilla”– not with regard to a wedding ceremony, but with regard to his political career. She owned him and his career ever after.
In 1994 and 1995, again, mimicking an American politico who practices hate-mongering, Netanyahu incited young Likud voters to whip up a frenzy of outrage to protest the peace talks among then-Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, the PLO, Jordan and Syria; such talks were moderated by American president Bill Clinton. Netanyahu tacitly supported the protestors when they gathered “… in Jerusalem’s Zion Square where huge simulated photographs of Rabin in an SS Nazi uniform were raised high. Crazed demonstrators set fire to Rabin’s picture.” Luckily for Netanyahu, the perpetrator of Rabin’s November 1995 assassination was unaffiliated with the Likud party.
In 1996, Netanyahu won his election for prime minister by a nose, partly due to election legislation he helped to enact. Like John F. Kennedy, he underwent an epic fail early in his administration, due to his youth and inexperience. Like with the Bay of Pigs incident, the prime minister authorized a sneak attack on an enemy of his– the terrorist group Hamas.
Netanyahu’s administration was a revolving door of personnel, thanks to his wife’s interference. Together, especially when campaigning, they were like other dictatorial couples– the Ceausescus, the Perons, the Marcoses… with their outsize egos, department of dirty tricks, and broken campaign promises, especially after their election victory in 2009. At his reelection, Netanyahu hogged the jobs of five ministers, plus that of prime minister.
Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu launched a hate campaign against American president Barack Obama when he realized he couldn’t get along with him. This book rambled on in a few chapters on the conversations between the Americans and the Israelis regarding the “Iran nuclear deal” but never did explain what it was. Netanyahu made Obama a scapegoat for all his troubles and derived a huge amount of political capital from doing so. The same way Trump has done.
Read the book to learn more Israeli history, and additional ways Netanyahu was bigger than Israel, given his rumored psychological problems.