Secretary Of War Quotes

Back in Washington, alone in the late afternoon of December 7, a chastened Franklin Roosevelt considered the situation.  He may have wondered how things had gone so terribly wrong.  But what might have been was now hindsight—the United States was at war and was in it to win. He spoke quietly to his secretary, Grace Tully. “Sit down, Grace. I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.” 

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

Unfortunately, much of the important information Ambassador Grew sent to Washington was largely overlooked or ignored, and dialogue between Washington and Tokyo was strained. This state of affairs is indicated by Grew’s cable on July 10, 1941, in which he pointed out that he had to go to the British ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, to find out about discussions between the State Department and the Japanese ambassador in Washington. This occurred because the State Department kept the British ambassador in Washington abreast of events, who promptly informed the foreign secretary in London, who in turn informed their ambassador in Tokyo. Sir Robert then kindly passed the information to Ambassador Grew.

What is patriotism? Let us begin with what patriotism is not. It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families. It is not patriotic to discriminate against active-duty members of the armed forces in one’s companies, or to campaign to keep disabled veterans away from one’s property. It is not patriotic to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with the military service in Vietnam that one has dodged. It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay. It is not patriotic to ask those working, taxpaying American families to finance one’s own presidential campaign, and then to spend their contributions in one’s own companies. It is not patriotic to admire foreign dictators. It is not patriotic to cultivate a relationship with Muammar Gaddafi; or to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders. It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election. It is not patriotic to cite Russian propaganda at rallies. It is not patriotic to share an adviser with Russian oligarchs. It is not patriotic to solicit foreign policy advice from someone who owns shares in a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to read a foreign policy speech written by someone on the payroll of a Russian energy company. It is not patriotic to appoint a national security adviser who has taken money from a Russian propaganda organ. It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin. The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country. The

In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.

What I know concerns me. What I don’t know concerns me even more. What people aren’t telling me worries me the most.

The miracle of life is given by One greater than ourselves, but once given, each life is ours to nurture and preserve, to foster, not only for today's world but for a better one to come. There is no purpose more noble than for us to sustain and celebrate life in a turbulent world, and that is what we must do now. We have no higher duty, no greater cause as humans. Life and the preservation of freedom to live it in dignity is what we are on this Earth to do. Everything we work to achieve must seek that end so that some day our prime ministers, our premiers, our presidents, and our general secretaries will talk not of war and peace, but only of peace.

Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus.… Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—“I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.

Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation Delivered on December 8, 1941 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate, and of the House of Representatives: Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night, the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.

I know that if everyone is a hero, then no one truly is. I concede the term is thrown around far too casually.

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: We're not going to have a supreme court that will overturn Roe versus Wade. There will be no more Antonio Scalias and Samuel Aleatos added to this court. We're not going to repeal health reform. Nobody is going to kill medicare and make old people in this generation or any other generation fight it out on the open market to try to get health insurance. We are not going to do that. We are not going to give a 20% tax cut to millionaires and billionaires and expect programs like food stamps and kid's insurance to cover the cost of that tax cut. We'll not make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control under the insurance plan that you're on. We are not going to redefine rape. We are not going to amend the United States constitution to stop gay people from getting married. We are not going to double Guantanamo. We are not eliminating the Department of Energy or the Department of Education or Housing at the federal level. We are not going to spend $2 trillion on the military that the military does not want. We are not scaling back on student loans because the country's new plan is that you should borrow money from your parents. We are not vetoing the Dream Act. We are not self-deporting. We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt. We are not starting a trade war with China on Inauguration Day in January. We are not going to have, as a president, a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared, gay kid, to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help and there was no apology, not ever. We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton. We are not bringing Dick Cheney back. We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with architects of the Iraq War. We are not going to do it. We had the chance to do that if we wanted to do that, as a country. and we said no, last night, loudly.

The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die.

when both can’t be true. In 1946, in the days after World War II, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch said, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.” Variations have been uttered by U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. Today this seemingly indisputable truth no longer holds. Propaganda is indistinguishable from fact and we find ourselves living in the frightening pages of a George Orwell novel.

Whether or not the United States has saved the world, it did save France a time or two. When the American Expeditionary Forces commanded by General John J. Pershing came to the aid of France during World War I, they marched into Paris on July 4, 1917, heading straight for Picpus Cemetery. Colonel Charles E. Stanton, whose uncle had been Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, addressed the French people while standing before Lafayette’s tomb. “America has joined forces with the Allied Powers,” he said, “and what we have of blood and treasure are yours. Therefore it is that with loving pride we drape the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen of your great republic. And here and now, in the presence of the illustrious dead, we pledge our hearts and our honor in carrying this war to a successful issue. Lafayette, we are here.” •

Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.

Those years [as the war progressed] would show, in the American system, how when a question of the use of force arose in government, the advocates of force were always better organized, seemed more numerous and seemed to have both logic and fear on their side, and that in fending them off in his own government, a President would need all the help he possibly could get, not the least of which should be a powerful Secretary of State.

One of the most startling phenomena I ever witnessed occured in the South after the Arab- israelei Six-day war. I doubt if the world has ever seen such a rapid ceasefire in anti-semetism. I heard one Southern man after another say in tones that i can only describe as gleeful: 'by dern, those Jew boys sure can fight!' One man seriously recommended that Congress pass a special act making Moshe Dayan an American citizen so that he could become Secretary of Defense. He had obviously found a new hero;'as he put it 'That one-eyed bastid would wipe out anybody offin the map whut gave us any trouble.

Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn't need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn't matter if you're a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even if only in principle-there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it. That can be a good thing, to help you stay oriented in avery confusing world. If you don't know where you feet are planted, you've got no way to know here you're heading when you start taking steps. It can be a bad thing, when you run into something so different from home that it scares you and makes you angry. That's also part of being human. But there's a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal. It's where you eat the best food because other predators can't take it from you very easily there. It's where you can your mate are the most intimate. Its where your raise your children, safe against a world that can be horrible things to them. It's where you sleep, safe. It's where you relax. It's where you dream. Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future. It's where the books are. And more than anything else, it's where you build the world that you want.

Be very careful what you recommend to the president because he will do what you say.

I had learned at Defense, a firm deadline was necessary to move the bureaucracy.

This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades. —by Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam

Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War.

According to Japanese scholar Yuki Tanaka, the United States firebombed over a hundred Japanese cities. Destruction reached 99.5 percent in the city of Toyama, driving Secretary of War Henry Stimson to tell Truman he "did not want to have the US get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities," though Stimson did almost nothing to halt the slaughter. He had managed to delude himself into believing Arnold's promise that he would limit "damage to civilians." Future Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was on LeMay's staff in 1945, agreed with his boss's comment that of the United States lost the war, they'd all be tried as war criminals and deserved to be convicted. Hatred towards the Japanese ran so deep that almost no one objected to the mass slaughter of civilians.

The lingering effects of war can inspire callousness even after the guns have fallen silent. Many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, declared that the price of half a million dead children as a result of the sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s had been “worth it.

called that view what it was: poppycock. As his secretary of war, Elihu Root, told TR: “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”65

Let's look at this rationally...We've got a doctor who may kill him, an Attorney General who wants to declare him bananas, and a Defense Secretary who wants me to start World War III...First, we ruled out starting World War III. We were down to killing the President or having him carted off by the men in white coats...

had never heard a president explicitly frame a decision as a direct order. With the American military, it is completely unnecessary. As secretary of defense, I had never issued an “order” to get something done; nor had I heard any commander do so. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, in his book It Worked for Me, writes, “In my thirty-five years of service, I don’t ever recall telling anyone, ‘That’s an order.’ And now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever heard anyone else say it.” Obama’s “order,” at Biden’s urging, demonstrated, in my view, the complete unfamiliarity of both men with the American military culture. That order

As he shook hands with Grant’s military secretary Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian, Lee stared a moment at Parker’s dark features and said, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Parker responded, “We are all Americans.”39

Of the estimated forty million men and women who have served in the armed forces since the Civil War, fewer than 3,500 have received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor the United States can bestow, some 60 percent posthumously.

Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned.

What have I done, Obie?" Obie flung his hand in the air, the gesture encompassing all the rotten things that had occur under Archie's command, at Archie's direction. The ruined kids, the capsized hopes. Renault last fall and poor Tubs Casper and all the others including even the faculty. Like Brother Eugene. "You know what you've done, Archie. I don't need to draw up a list-" "You blame me for everything, right, Obie? You and Carter and all the others. Archie Costello, the bad guy. The villain. Archie, the bastard. Trinity would be such a beautiful place without Archie Costello. Right, Obie? But it's not me, Obie, it's not me...." "Not you?" Obie cried, fury gathering in his throat, his chest, his guts. "What the hell do you mean, not you? This could have been a beautiful place to be, Archie. A beautiful time for all of us. Christ, who else, if not you?" "Do you really want to know who?" "Okay, who then?" Impatient with his crap, the old Archie crap. "It's you, Obie. You and Carter and Bunting and Leon and everybody. But especially you, Obie. Nobody forced you to do anything, buddy. Nobody made you join the Vigils. Nobody twisted your arm to make you secretary of the Vigils. Nobody pain you to keep a notebook with all that crap about the students, all their weaknesses, soft points. The notebook made your job easier, didn't it, Obie? And what was your job? Finding the victims. You found them, Obie. You found Renault and Tubs Casper and Gendreau-the first one, remember, when we were sophomores?-how you loved it all, didn't you Obie?" Archie flicked a finger against the metal of the car, and the ping was like a verbal exclamation mark. "Know what, Obie? You could have said no anytime, anytime at all. But you didn't...." Archie's voice was filled with contempt, and he pronounced Obie's name as if it were something to be flushed down a toilet. "Oh, I'm an easy scapegoat, Obie. For you and everybody else at Trinity. Always have been. But you had free choice, buddy. Just like Brother Andrew always says in Religion. Free choice, Obie, and you did the choosing....

Even though he received the order to stand down—likely from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who may have been receiving his orders from Valerie Jarrett21—Ham went ahead with his rapid response plan. In order to stop him, one source says that the administration had the commanding general apprehended. Ham was informed that he was relieved of his command, which stopped his attempt to save American lives.

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

Many of Trump's former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president MIke Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, former chief of staff John Kelley; former chief of staf Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

The operations of General Hancock," Black Whiskers Sanborn informed the Secretary of the Interior, "have been so disastrous to the public interests, and at the same time seem to me to be so inhuman, that I deem it proper to communicate my views to you on the subject…For a mighty nation like us to be carrying on a war with a few straggling nomads, under such circumstances, is a spectacle most humiliating, an injustice unparalleled, a national crime most revolting, that must, sooner or later, bring down upon us or our posterity the judgment of Heaven.

I always thought Obama was "presidential." He treated the office of the presidency with respect. I rarely saw him in the Oval Office with a coat and tie, and he always conducted himself with dignity. He was a man of personal integrity, and in his personal behavior - at least to the extent I could observe it - he was an excellent role model...I thought Obama was first-rate in both intellect and temperament." Page 300

Uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, often putting self (and reelection) before country—this was my view of the majority of the United States Congress.

In 1915, Japanese prime minister Okuma Shigenobu used his country’s newfound leverage to levy “Twenty-One Demands” against the Republic of China for greater Japanese economic and territorial authority over the Asia-Pacific. These demands posed a deep challenge not only to China but also to the regional order established by America’s Open Door policy of 1899. Secretary of State Henry Stimson worried that Japan’s claims threatened this order and the American way of life that depended on it.140 In pursuit of a “New Order in East Asia,” Japan launched an unprovoked campaign to seize Manchuria in 1931. This campaign extended into the heart of China, reaching its ruthless climax in the 1937 Rape of Nanking. Though the US viewed Japan’s aggression against an American ally with consternation, President Franklin Roosevelt initially refrained from acting, even as Japan bombed a US ship seeking to rescue Americans near Nanking.

Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country—Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan—signal the same intent.

As for the Cherokees, they faced a set of laws passed by Georgia: their lands were taken, their government abolished, all meetings prohibited. Cherokees advising others not to migrate were to be imprisoned. Cherokees could not testify in court against any white. Cherokees could not dig for the gold recently discovered on their land. A delegation of them, protesting to the federal government, received this reply from Jackson’s new Secretary of War, Eaton: “If you will go to the setting sun there you will be happy; there you can remain in peace and quietness; so long as the waters run and the oaks grow that country shall be guaranteed to you and no white man shall be permitted to settle near you.

The difficulty is not winning the war,’ he told his secretary Marian Holmes on 7 October, ‘it is in persuading people to let you win it – persuading fools.

When it comes to predicting future conflicts, what kind of fights they will be, and what will be needed, we need a lot more humility.

Doctors, teachers, secretaries: here were jobs ideally suited to Greeks.

I remember sitting at the witness table listening to this litany of woe and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? I have walked right into the middle of a category-five shitstorm.

I'm done doing this!' Obama said, finally erupting. 'We've all agreed on a plan. And we're all going to stick to that plan. I haven't agreed to anything beyond that.' The 30,000 was a 'hard cap,' he said forcefully. 'I don't want enablers to be used as wiggle room. The easy thing for me to do - politically - would actually be to say no' to the 30,000. Then he gestured out the Oval Office windows, across the Potomac, in the direction of the Pentagon. Referring to Gates and the uniformed military, he said. 'They think it's the opposite. I'd be perfectly happy -' He stopped mid-sentence. 'Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.' There was some subdued laughter. 'Rahm would tell me it'd be much easier to do what I want to do by saying no,' the president said. He could then focus on the domestic agenda that he wanted to be the heart of his presidency. The military did not understand. 'Politically, what these guys don't get is it'd be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we're going to get out of there.

There were small changes stirring in American policy as Clinton entered his second term. Hillary Clinton had visited India in 1995 and became determined to push her husband toward greater involvement in the region. Madeleine Albright, who arrived as secretary of state, was more sharply attuned to human rights violators such as the Taliban than Warren Christopher had been.

The Department of Defense is the largest, most complex organization on the planet: three million people, civilian and military, with a budget, the last year I was there, of over $700 billion.

There’s an interesting story about Abraham Lincoln. During the American Civil War he signed an order transferring certain regiments, but Secretary of War Edwin Stanton refused to execute it, calling the president a fool. When Lincoln heard he replied, ‘If Stanton said I’m a fool then I must be, for he’s nearly always right, and he says what he thinks. I’ll step over and see for myself.’ He did, and when Stanton convinced him the order was in error, Lincoln quietly withdrew it. Part of Lincoln’s greatness lay in his ability to rise above pettiness, ego, and sensitivity to other people’s opinions. He wasn’t easily offended. He welcomed criticism, and in doing so demonstrated one of the strengths of a truly great person: humility. So, have you been criticised? Make it a time to learn, not lose.

It wasn’t just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers—and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings—of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prüfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?

She huddled next to Daniel in the Meadow, basking in the warmth of a burgeoning love that was pure and sustaining, as Daniel’s name rang out across the Meadow. He had been called. He rose above the riot of angelic light and said with calm self-possession, “With respect, I will not do this. I will not choose Lucifer’s side, nor will I choose the side of Heaven.” A roar went up from the vast camps of angels, from those who stood beside the Throne, from Lucifer most of all. Lucinda had been stunned. “Instead, I choose love,” Daniel went on. “I choose love and leave you to your war. You’re wrong to bring this upon us,” Daniel said to Lucifer. Then, to the Throne: “All that is good in Heaven and on Earth is made of love. Maybe that wasn’t your plan when you created the universe-maybe love was just one aspect of a complicated and brutal world. But love was the best thing you made, and it has become the only thing worth saving. This war is not just. This war is not good. Love is the only thing worth fighting for.” The Meadow fell silent after Daniel’s words. Most of the angels looked dumbfounded, as if they did not understand what Daniel meant. It had not been Lucinda’s turn. The angels’ names were called by the celestial secretaries according to their rank, and Lucinda was one of a handful of angels higher than Daniel. It didn’t matter. They were a team. She rose to his side in the Meadow. “There should never have to be a choice between love and You,” Lucinda declared to the Throne. “Maybe one day You will find a way to reconcile adoration and the true love You have made us capable of. But if forced to choose, I must stand beside my love. I choose Daniel and will choose him forevermore.

I suppose I should have known better going in, but I was constantly amazed and infuriated at the hypocrisy of those who most stridently attacked the Defense Department for being inefficient and wasteful but would fight tooth and nail to prevent any reduction in defense activities in their home state or district no matter how inefficient or wasteful. However, behavior that was simply frustrating to me in 2009–10 will seriously impair our national security in the years ahead as the defense budget shrinks: failure to cut or close unneeded programs and facilities will drain precious dollars from the troops and our war-fighting capabilities.

In 1561, Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, carried out an investigation into the international law of the Atlantic, and firmly told the Spanish ambassador that the pope had had no authority for his award. In any case there had long been a tradition, tenaciously held by French Huguenot seamen, who dismissed Catholic claims on principle, that the normal rules of peace and war were suspended beyond a certain imaginary line running down the mid-Atlantic. This line was even more vague than the pope’s original award, and no one knew exactly where it was. But the theory, and indeed the practice, of ‘No Peace Beyond the Line’ was a 16th-century fact of life.12 It is very significant indeed that, almost from its origins, the New World was widely regarded as a hemisphere where the rule of law did not apply and where violence was to be expected.

No one wants to be told that there was another, darker side to Allied victory, or that the camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. To admit that by sending thousands of Russians to their deaths by forcibly repatriating them after the war, or by consigning millions of people to Soviet rule at Yalta, the Western Allies might have helped others commit crimes against humanity would undermine the moral clarity of our memories of that era. No one wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another. No one wants to remember how well that mass murderer got on with Western statesmen. “I have a real liking for Stalin,” the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told a friend, “he has never broken his word.”16 There are many, many photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt all together, all smiling.

Truman’s interactions with scientists were never elevated. The president struck many of them as a small-minded man who was in way over his head. “He was not a man of imagination,” said Isidor Rabi. And scientists were hardly alone in this view. Even a seasoned Wall Street lawyer like John J. McCloy, who served Truman briefly as assistant secretary of war, wrote in his diary that the president was “a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively, perhaps too quickly—a thorough American.” This was not a great president, “not distinguished at all . . . not Lincolnesque, but an instinctive, common, hearty-natured man.” Men as different as McCloy, Rabi and Oppenheimer all thought Truman’s instincts, particularly in the field of atomic diplomacy, were neither measured nor sound—and sadly, certainly were not up to the challenge the country and the world now faced.

It is hard to realize today that “government” during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln’s Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not “executives” and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt’s time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.

The worst of these comments came in mid-April from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who said in a press conference, “This war is lost” and “The surge is not accomplishing anything.” I was furious and shared privately with some of my staff a quote from Abraham Lincoln I had written down long before: “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.

Grant notified the president that he had vacated the office and no longer functioned as war secretary. Faced with this fait accompli, Johnson was furious, believing Grant should have resigned his post and allowed him to name a successor.

Then there was an exchange that’s been seared into my memory. Joe Biden said he had argued for a different approach and was ready to move forward, but the military “should consider the president’s decision as an order.” “I am giving an order,” Obama

On August 5, he sent Stanton a one-sentence letter: “Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.”5 Johnson knew that if Stanton resigned, instead of being sacked, the troublesome legislation would be a dead issue. That same day, in a tart response, Stanton lectured Johnson that “public considerations of a high character . . . constrain me not to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.

On May 25, Szilard and two colleagues—Walter Bartky of the University of Chicago and Harold Urey of Columbia University—appeared at the White House, only to be told that Truman had referred them to James F. Byrnes, soon to be designated secretary of state. Dutifully, they traveled to Byrnes’ home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for a meeting that concluded, to say the least, unproductively. When Szilard explained that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan risked turning the Soviet Union into an atomic power, Byrnes interrupted, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.” No, Szilard replied, the Soviet Union has plenty of uranium. Byrnes then suggested that the use of the atomic bomb on Japan would help persuade Russia to withdraw its troops from Eastern Europe after the war. Szilard was “flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable.” “Well,” Byrnes said, “you come from Hungary—you would not want Russia to stay in Hungary indefinitely.

Progress in America historically has come from thinkers and ideologues on both the left and the right, but the best of those ideas have been enacted into law through compromise. Now moderation is equated with lacking principles, and compromise with “selling out.

There have been vast changes in the composition and role of the news media over the decades, and that is a cause for concern as well. When I first entered government nearly forty-eight years ago, three television networks and a handful of newspapers dominated coverage and, to a considerable degree, filtered the most extreme or vitriolic points of view. Today, with hundreds of cable channels, blogs, and other electronic media, too often the professional integrity and long-established standards and practices of journalists are diluted or ignored. Every point of view—including the most extreme—has a ready vehicle for rapid dissemination. And it seems the more vitriolic the opinion, the more attention it gets. This system is clearly more democratic and open, but I believe it has also fueled the coarsening and dumbing down of our national political dialogue.

One time, over half of my warlords refused to attend a summit because I had failed to properly address them by the decorative titles my father had doled out like candy after the war: Minister of Horses, Master of Archery, Commissioner of Arts. Titles that had no weight in the council, because to be part of the council one actually needed to do some work. The warlords didn’t even have the decency to inform me they felt slighted. If I had known they would throw such massive sulks beforehand, I would’ve gone and made up extra titles just to please them. I’ve always wanted to use Secretary of the Dung Heap.

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

We are told that in the course of this interview Stephens, seeing Lincoln not willing to grant the terms he asked, urged that even Charles I made certain concessions. To this...Lincoln answered: "I am not strong history; I depend mainly on Secretary Seward for that. All I remember of Charles is that he lost his head.

Various types of targets and the effects to be produced” were discussed, and then Secretary Stimson summarized what seemed to be a general agreement: “. . . that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb.

LOST is often lauded as one of the best fantasy dramas in television history, as well as one of the most cryptic and - occasionally – maddening. But confirmation of just how important it is came with an almost unbelievable communiqué from the White House last week. President Obama’s office reassured Lost fans that the commander in chief wouldn’t move his yearly state of the union address from late January to a date that would coincide with the premiere episode of the show’s sixth and final season. That’s right. Obama might have had vital information to impart upon the American people about health care, the war in Afghanistan, the financial crisis – things that, you know, might affect real lives. But the most important thing was that his address didn’t clash with a series in which a polar bear appears on a tropical island. After extensive lobbying by the ABC network, the White House surrendered. Obama’s press secretary promised: “I don’t foresee a scenario in which millions of people who hope to finally get some conclusion with Lost are pre-empted by the president.

Lincoln’s liberal use of his pardoning power created the greatest tension between the two men (Lincoln and Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War). Stanton felt compelled to protect military discipline by exacting proper punishment for desertions or derelictions of duty, while Lincoln looked for any “good excuse for saving a man’s life.” When he found one, he said, “I go to bed happy as I think how joyous the signing of my name will make him and his family and his friends.” Stanton would not allow himself such leniency. A clerk recalled finding Stanton one night in his office, “the mother, wife, and children of a soldier who had been condemned to be shot as a deserter, on their knees before him pleading for the life of their loved one. He listened standing, in cold and austere silence, and at the end of their heart-breaking sobs and prayers answered briefly that the man must die. The crushed and despairing little family left and Mr. Stanton turned, apparently unmoved, and walked into his private room.” The clerk thought Stanton an unfeeling tyrant, until he discovered him moments later, “leaning over a desk, his face buried in his hands and his heavy frame shaking with sobs. ‘God help me to do my duty; God help me to do my duty!’ he was repeating in a low wail of anguish.” On such occasions, when Stanton felt he could not afford to set a precedent, he must have been secretly relieved that the president had the ultimate authority.

When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The

Ted’s a Bushman with deep ties to the political and financial establishment. Ted and Heidi brag about being the first “Bush marriage”—they met as Bush staffers and that meeting ultimately led to matrimony. Ted was an adviser on legal affairs while Heidi was an adviser on economic policy and eventually director for the Western Hemisphere on the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice. Condi helped give us the phony war in Iraq. And Chad Sweet, Ted Cruz’s campaign chairman, is a former CIA officer. Michael Chertoff, George W. Bush’s former Secretary of Homeland Security, hired Sweet from Goldman Sachs to restructure and optimize the flow of information between the CIA, FBI and other members of the national security community and DHS.

Not simply wanting compensation for destroyed American vessels, he added a still more explosive demand: that Britain pay a staggering $2 billion in indirect damages for extending the war and undermining America’s merchant marine. He wanted Canada thrown in as a lagniappe and inflamed the situation further by calling for a British admission of guilt and an apology; Grant and Fish would have settled for an expression of regret. Sumner’s words stirred up fellow senators, arousing such bellicose passions that the Senate defeated the Johnson-Clarendon Convention by a huge margin. With his speech, Sumner staked his claim to leadership in foreign policy under Grant. The British were shocked by Sumner’s intemperate language. Lord Clarendon, Britain’s foreign secretary, denounced him for the “most extravagant hostility to England,

Retrospectively, American statesmen realized the rashness of their oil embargo. As the later secretary of state Dean Acheson put it, America’s misreading of Japanese intentions was not of “what the Japanese government proposed to do in Asia, not of the hostility our embargo would excite, but of the incredibly high risks General Tojo would assume to accomplish his ends. No one in Washington realized that he and his regime regarded the conquest of Asia not as the accomplishment of an ambition but as the survival of a regime. It was a life-and-death matter to them.”146 Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was a partial success in the short term, and Japan went on to enjoy great tactical victories against America and Britain, but the conflict eventually led to its almost total destruction by 1945. Its wars in East Asia cost tens of millions of lives.

On one side was Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s right-hand man since the Revolution and the architect of the hated whiskey tax. Hamilton came from humble beginnings in the Caribbean but had pulled himself up by the proverbial bootstraps to quickly gain acceptance among the elite power brokers of New York finance. During the Revolution, he was assigned to Washington’s staff and impressed the general, quickly becoming one of Washington’s most trusted advisers. After the war, he was appointed as the first treasury secretary at the age of thirty-two. From that lofty perch he championed industry and big finance and wrote the whiskey tax to promote the advancement of larger, more established distilleries on the East Coast, to the detriment of smaller frontier distilleries. His grave today rests in his adopted city of New York, in a cemetery at the top of Wall Street.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning: Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women, and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs, brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance? Sir, it is locked in them sea sands out there past the reef's moiling shelf, where the men-o'-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself. It's all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen; and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals, and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal, and that was Lamentations - that was just Lamentations, it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns, and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God as His son set, and that was the New Testament. Then came the white sisters clapping to the waves' progress, and that was Emancipation - jubilation, O jubilation - vanishing swiftly as the sea's lace dries in the sun, but that was not History, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation; then came the synod of flies, then came the secretarial heron, then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote, fireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police, and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning.

The day before I stepped down as secretary, I sent a message to every man and woman wearing the American military uniform because I knew I could not speak to or about them at my farewell ceremony without breaking down. I repeated my now-familiar words: “Your countrymen owe you their freedom and their security. They sleep safely at night and pursue their dreams during the day because you stand the watch and protect them.… You are the best America has to offer. My admiration and affection for you is without limit, and I will think about you and your families and pray for you every day for the rest of my life. God bless you.” I am eligible to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I have asked to be buried in Section 60, where so many of the fallen from Iraq and Afghanistan have been laid to rest. The greatest honor possible would be to rest among my heroes for all eternity.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited me to breakfast on the eighteenth. Five days before, she had issued a news release saying, “The president’s strategy in Iraq has failed,” and “The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president’s plan for an endless war in Iraq.” With those comments as backdrop, at the breakfast I urged her to pass the defense appropriations bill before October and to pass the War Supplemental in total, not to mete it out a few weeks or months at a time. I reminded her that the president had approved Petraeus’s recommendation for a change of mission in December and told her that Petraeus and Crocker had recommended a sustainable path forward that deserved broad bipartisan support. She politely made clear she wasn’t interested. I wasn’t surprised. After all, one wouldn’t want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?

Soon after the raid was over, the White House released the now-famous photo of all of us watching the video in that small conference room. Within hours, I received from a friend a Photoshopped version with each of the principals shown dressed in superhero costumes: Obama was Superman; Biden, Spiderman; Hillary, Wonder Woman; and I, for some reason, was the Green Lantern. The spoof had an important substantive effect on me. We soon faced a great hue and cry demanding that we release photos of the dead Bin Laden, photos we had all seen. I quickly realized that while the Photoshop of us was amusing, others could Photoshop the pictures of Bin Laden in disrespectful ways certain to outrage Muslims everywhere and place Americans throughout the Middle East and our troops in Afghanistan at greater risk. Everyone agreed, and the president decided the photos would not be released. All the photos that had been circulating among the principals were gathered up and placed in CIA’s custody. As of this writing, none has ever leaked.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

In the course of her letter writing, she’d learned a few things about the subtle peculiarities of the South’s power brokers. The Mississippi Sovereigns, like most other rebel groups, preferred to be addressed as Brothers; letters to Mr. Sharif, the director of Camp Patience, were exclusively read and acted upon by his secretary, but could never be addressed to his secretary; the Free Southern State government in Atlanta had a perfect record of responding to every letter, but no sooner than two years after the fact. She learned which methods of attack worked and which didn’t. Any familial relation between appellant and recipient, no matter how tenuous, was to be ruthlessly exploited; pictures of dead relatives or horrific war wounds never did any good, although the refugees in possession of such images invariably demanded they be sent anyway; a direct offer of bribery was more likely than not to elicit an insulted response, but an offer to make a donation to a cause of the recipient’s choosing got the same message across more tactfully. It was, in the end, hopeless work, the letters almost always doomed to fail. But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.

Some judicial officials began to notice the unusual frequency of deaths among the inmates of institutions and some prosecutors even considered asking the Gestapo to investigate the killings. However, none went so far as Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg who specialized in matters of wardship and adoption. A war veteran and a member of the Confessing Church, Kreyssig became suspicious when psychiatric patients who were wards of the court and therefore fell within his area of responsibility began to be transferred from their institutions and were shortly afterwards reported to have died suddenly. Kreyssig wrote Justice Minister Gortner to protest against what he described as an illegal and immoral programme of mass murder. The Justice Minister's response to this and other, similar, queries from local law officers was to try once more to draft a law giving effective immunity to the murderers, only to have it vetoed by Hitler on the grounds that the publicity would give dangerous ammunition to Allied propaganda. Late in April 1941 the Justice Ministry organized a briefing of senior judges and prosecutors by Brack and Heyde, to try to set their minds at rest. In the meantime, Kreyssig was summoned to an interview with the Ministry's top official, State Secretary Roland Freisler, who informed him that the killings were being carried out on Hitler's orders. Refusing to accept this explanation, Kreyssig wrote to the directors of psychiatric hospitals in his district informing them that transfers to killing centres were illegal, and threatening legal action should they transport any of their patients who came within his jurisdiction. It was his legal duty, he proclaimed, to protect the interests and indeed the lives of his charges. A further interview with Gortner failed to persuade him that he was wrong to do this, and he was compulsorily retired in December 1941.

He was especially fond of Svetlana, who was a promising student and very attached to her father. He began to play a little game with his daughter, calling her khoziaika (which could be translated as “housekeeper” or “the boss”) while he played the role of the sekretarishka (little secretary) who followed her orders: “Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.” Svetlana would write out orders for her father: “I order you to let me go to Zubalovo tomorrow”; “I order you to take me to the theater with you”; “I order you to let me go to the movies. Ask them to show Chapaev and an American comedy.” Stalin responded with facetious pomposity.21 Other members of Stalin’s inner circle were appointed Svetlana’s sekretarishkas, playing along with the vozhd. “Svetlana the housekeeper will be in Moscow on 27 August. She is demanding permission to leave early for Moscow so that she can check on her secretaries,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich from the south on 19 August 1935. Kaganovich replied on 31 August: “Today I reported to our boss Svetlana on our work, she seemed to deem it satisfactory.”22 Until the war began, father and daughter exchanged affectionate letters. “I give you a big hug, my little sparrow,” he wrote to her, as he had once written to his wife.23

President Nixon and Kissinger were joined for the promotion ceremony by CIA director Richard Helms and Defense Secretary Laird; all the men were in a good mood, even Nixon was smiling and laughing. They’d just pulled off one of the great nuclear scares of the Cold War—and only the Soviets had noticed, just as intended. Over the months ahead, though, it became clear the feint had done little either to move forward peace talks in Vietnam or alter the U.S. balance with the Soviet Union. The government never received a single inquiry from an allied nation, nor did any reporter ever ask about it; the feints would remain secret until the 1980s. •

Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn’t need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even if only in principle—there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it. That can be a good thing, to help you stay oriented in a very confusing world. If you don’t know where your feet are planted, you’ve got no way to know where you’re heading when you start taking steps. It can be a bad thing, when you run into something so different from home that it scares you and makes you angry. That’s also part of being human. But there’s a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal. It’s where you eat the best food because other predators can’t take it from you very easily there. It’s where you and your mate are the most intimate. It’s where you raise your children, safe against a world that can do horrible things to them. It’s where you sleep, safe. It’s where you relax. It’s where you dream. Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future. It’s where the books are. And more than anything else, it’s where you build that world that you want.

Roosevelt fought hard for the United States to host the opening session [of the United Nations]; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to eavesdrop on its guests. Coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army codebreakers. Once the signals were captured, a specially designed time-delay device activated to allow recorders to be switched on. Devices were also developed to divert a single signal to several receivers. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army codebreakers, over forty-six special secure teletype lines. By the summer of 1945 the average number of daily messages had grown to 289,802, from only 46,865 in February 1943. The same soldiers who only a few weeks earlier had been deciphering German battle plans were now unraveling the codes and ciphers wound tightly around Argentine negotiating points. During the San Francisco Conference, for example, American codebreakers were reading messages sent to and from the French delegation, which was using the Hagelin M-209, a complex six-wheel cipher machine broken by the Army Security Agency during the war. The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain its image as a major world power after the war. On April 29, for example, Fouques Duparc, the secretary general of the French delegation, complained in an encrypted note to General Charles de Gaulle in Paris that France was not chosen to be one of the "inviting powers" to the conference. "Our inclusion among the sponsoring powers," he wrote, "would have signified, in the eyes of all, our return to our traditional place in the world." In charge of the San Francisco eavesdropping and codebreaking operation was Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, the protégé of William F. Friedman. Rowlett was relieved when the conference finally ended, and he considered it a great success. "Pressure of work due to the San Francisco Conference has at last abated," he wrote, "and the 24-hour day has been shortened. The feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution." The San Francisco Conference served as an important demonstration of the usefulness of peacetime signals intelligence. Impressive was not just the volume of messages intercepted but also the wide range of countries whose secrets could be read. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as on "Russia's prejudice toward the Latin American countries." Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves: "Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once," said one. A Czechoslovakian message indicated that nation's opposition to the admission of Argentina to the UN. From the very moment of its birth, the United Nations was a microcosm of East-West spying. Just as with the founding conference, the United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and codebreakers of NSA and its predecessors.

...the founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected {George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson}, not a one had professed a belief in Christianity... When the war was over and the victory over our enemies won, and the blessings and happiness of liberty and peace were secured, the Constitution was framed and God was neglected. He was not merely forgotten. He was absolutely voted out of the Constitution. The proceedings, as published by Thompson, the secretary, and the history of the day, show that the question was gravely debated whether God should be in the Constitution or not, and after a solemn debate he was deliberately voted out of it.... There is not only in the theory of our government no recognition of God's laws and sovereignty, but its practical operation, its administration, has been conformable to its theory. Those who have been called to administer the government have not been men making any public profession of Christianity... Washington was a man of valor and wisdom. He was esteemed by the whole world as a great and good man; but he was not a professing Christian... [Sermon by Reverend Bill Wilson (Episcopal) in October 1831, as published in the Albany Daily Advertiser the same month it was made]

Partly at Rubel’s urging, Secretary of Defense McNamara later compelled the Minuteman developers, against great resistance, to install the equivalent of an electronic lock on the Minuteman, such that it couldn’t be fired without the receipt of a coded message from higher headquarters. Decades later, long after McNamara’s retirement, Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman launch control officer, informed the former secretary that the Air Force had ensured that the codes in the launch control centers were all set continuously at 00000000. According to Blair, McNamara responded, “I am shocked, absolutely shocked and outraged. Who the hell authorized that?” “What he had just learned from me,” Blair continues, was that the locks had been installed,52 but everyone knew the combination. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the “locks” to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.

Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: ‘Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!’ still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion. You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant. You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names. Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was usually said in the unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: ‘That this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing abhorrence’—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts.

Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

I can hardly believe that our nation’s policy is to seek peace by going to war. It seems that President Donald J. Trump has done everything in his power to divert our attention away from the fact that the FBI is investigating his association with Russia during his campaign for office. For several weeks now he has been sabre rattling and taking an extremely controversial stance, first with Syria and Afghanistan and now with North Korea. The rhetoric has been the same, accusing others for our failed policy and threatening to take autonomous military action to attain peace in our time. This gunboat diplomacy is wrong. There is no doubt that Secretaries Kelly, Mattis, and other retired military personnel in the Trump Administration are personally tough. However, most people who have served in the military are not eager to send our young men and women to fight, if it is not necessary. Despite what may have been said to the contrary, our military leaders, active or retired, are most often the ones most respectful of international law. Although the military is the tip of the spear for our country, and the forces of civilization, it should not be the first tool to be used. Bloodshed should only be considered as a last resort and definitely never used as the first option. As the leader of the free world, we should stand our ground but be prepared to seek peace through restraint. This is not the time to exercise false pride! Unfortunately the Trump administration informed four top State Department management officials that their services were no longer needed as part of an effort to "clean house." Patrick Kennedy, served for nine years as the “Undersecretary for Management,” “Assistant Secretaries for Administration and Consular Affairs” Joyce Anne Barr and Michele Bond, as well as “Ambassador” Gentry Smith, director of the Office for Foreign Missions. Most of the United States Ambassadors to foreign countries have also been dismissed, including the ones to South Korea and Japan. This leaves the United States without the means of exercising diplomacy rapidly, when needed. These positions are political appointments, and require the President’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation. This has not happened! Moreover, diplomatically our country is severely handicapped at a time when tensions are as hot as any time since the Cold War. Without following expert advice or consent and the necessary input from the Unites States Congress, the decisions are all being made by a man who claims to know more than the generals do, yet he has only the military experience of a cadet at “New York Military Academy.” A private school he attended as a high school student, from 1959 to 1964. At that time, he received educational and medical deferments from the Vietnam War draft. Trump said that the school provided him with “more training than a lot of the guys that go into the military.” His counterpart the unhinged Kim Jong-un has played with what he considers his country’s military toys, since April 11th of 2012. To think that these are the two world leaders, protecting the planet from a nuclear holocaust….

At a crucial point of the Battle of Britain, when German warplanes were bombing London daily, every available British aircraft was in the sky to stop the planes from reaching the city. As Churchill sat in a car with his military secretary he said, “Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.” Churchill sat quietly for five minutes. He then turned to his secretary and asked him to write down a thought that would become one of the most famous quotes of World War II: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”6 Only four words in that sentence are more than one syllable and, in six words, Churchill told the entire story of British courage and what it meant to the rest of the world: so much, so many, so few. Those six words summarize stories that fill entire books. “So much” stands for freedom, democracy, and liberty—much of which would have been eliminated if Hitler had not been stopped. “So many” represents the entire population of the British empire at the time and those who lived in the countries Hitler invaded. “So few” is a reference to a small number of English pilots, many of whom were killed in the skies as they defended their homeland.

Unlike during the previous Gaza operation in 2012, the Iron Dome supply did not run out. After Operation Pillar of Defense I had instructed the army to accelerate production of Iron Dome projectiles and batteries. We accomplished this with our own funds and with generous American financial support. I now asked the Obama administration for an additional $225 million package to continue the production line after Protective Edge. He agreed, and with the help of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor who later became Biden’s secretary of state, the funding provision sailed through both houses of Congress. I deeply appreciated this support and said so publicly. I was therefore very disappointed when the administration held back on the IDF’s request for additional Hellfire rockets for our attack helicopters. Without offensive weapons we could not bring the Gaza operation to a quick and decisive end. Furthermore, as the air war lingered, the administration issued increasingly critical statements against Israel, calling some of our actions “appalling”2 and thereby opening the moral floodgates against us. Hamas took note. As long as it believed that we couldn’t deliver more aggressive punches, and that international support was waning, it would continue to rocket our cities. Unfortunately, it was aided in this belief by an international tug-of-war. On one side: Israel and Egypt. On the other: Turkey and Qatar, which fully supported Hamas. I worked in close collaboration with Egypt’s new leader, el-Sisi, who had deposed the Islamist Morsi a few months earlier. Our common goal was to achieve an unconditional cease-fire. The last thing el-Sisi wanted was a Hamas success in Gaza that would embolden their Islamist allies in the Sinai and beyond. Hamas’s exiled leader, Khaled Mashal, who escaped the Mossad action in Jordan, was now in Qatar. Supported by his Qatari hosts and Erdogan and ensconced in his lavish villa in Doha, Mashal egged Hamas to keep on fighting. To my astonishment, Kerry urged me to accept Qatar and Turkey as mediators instead of the Egyptians, who were negotiating with Hamas representatives in Cairo for a possible cease-fire. Hamas drew much encouragement from this American position. El-Sisi and I agreed to keep the Americans out of the negotiating loop. In the meantime the IDF would have to further degrade Hamas’s fighting and crush their expectations of achieving anything in the cease-fire negotiations.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

Ultimately, more than eighty arms control specialists signed a letter defending the Iran deal as a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation efforts” and warning that “unilateral action by the United States, especially on the basis of unsupported contentions of Iranian cheating, would isolate the United States.” But that message didn’t penetrate the Trump administration, which continued to publicly excoriate Iran. The time of specialists playing a formative role in foreign policy, some career officials feared, may have passed too. Just days after assuming power, the new administration had, of course, fired its top in-house expert on nonproliferation. SO IT WAS THAT, on a cold Sunday in January 2017, Tom Countryman found himself clearing out his office at the State Department. It was the end of thirty-five years of service, but he was unsentimental. “There was so much to do,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not sure I pondered it.” On most Sundays, the Department was eerily empty. But on this one, Countryman wasn’t alone. Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, after forty-four years in the Foreign Service, was cleaning out his desk as well. The two graying diplomats took a break from their boxes of paperwork and family photos to reminisce. Kennedy had been in the thick of the Iraq War as chief of staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Countryman had been in Egypt as that country joined the Gulf War. It was an improbably quiet end to a pair of high-stakes careers: memories and empty desks, as the State Department stood still.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

In March, at HHS’s request, several large pharmaceutical companies—Novartis, Bayer, Sanofi, and others—donated their inventory, a total of 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and 2 million of chloroquine, to the Strategic National Stockpile, managed by BARDA, an agency under the DHHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.56 BARDA’s Director, Dr. Rick Bright, later claimed the chloroquine drugs were deadly, and he needed to protect the American public from them.57 Bright colluded with FDA to restrict use of the donated pills to hospitalized patients. FDA publicized the authorization using language that led most physicians to believe that prescribing the drug for any purpose was off-limits. But at the beginning of June, based on clinical trials that intentionally gave unreasonably high doses to hospitalized patients and failed to start the drug until too late, FDA took the unprecedented step of revoking HCQ’s emergency authorization,58 rendering that enormous stockpile of valuable pills off limits to Americans while conveniently indemnifying the pharmaceutical companies for their inventory losses by allowing them a tax break for the donations. After widespread use of the drug for 65 years, without warning, FDA somehow felt the need to send out an alert on June 15, 2020 that HCQ is dangerous, and that it required a level of monitoring only available at hospitals.59 In a bit of twisted logic, Federal officials continued to encourage doctors to use the suddenly-dangerous drug without restriction for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme and malaria. Just not for COVID. With the encouragement of Dr. Fauci and other HHS officials, many states simultaneously imposed restrictions on HCQ’s use.

EARLY IN 1986, I learned of a rumor that Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations secretary-general and a candidate for Austria’s presidency, had a file as a Nazi war criminal—in the United Nations no less! There were always whispers about Waldheim’s past but a UN file was something new. “Do you have such a file?” I asked the United Nations Secretariat. “We don’t know,” came the answer. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re not allowed to open the archives.” During World War II, Churchill had established a tribunal of the sixteen Allied governments (some in exile) to document Nazi war crimes for future prosecution. The tribunal’s findings were handed over to the United Nations when it was established. The files were stored in one of the UN buildings in New York. I asked once more to see them. “You can’t,” a UN official explained. “When the archives were deposited in the United Nations, it was agreed they will be opened only with the unanimous consent of all sixteen countries.” “What the…” I muttered, outraged. In the face of such obstinacy I set out on a yearlong public and diplomatic campaign to convince these sixteen governments to give their consent. In this I was greatly helped by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress. It was like peeling a diplomatic onion. One layer led to another, and then to another, until at last all the countries had agreed. We had opened the padlock. When I walked into the unlocked storeroom, I saw rows and rows of cardboard boxes containing yellowing files. Picking up a box marked with the letter W, I started going file by file. Sure enough, there was a file marked WALDHEIM KURT. It detailed acts of wanton murder that this Austrian Nazi officer’s unit carried out in the war. Declassified documents later showed that the CIA had been aware of some details of Waldheim’s wartime past since 1945. They didn’t publish the information and Waldheim was able to assume the august post of United Nations secretary-general, in which he was warmly welcomed around the world.

He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.