News Archives

Here’s a clip of a radio interview yesterday with G. Gordon Liddy: http://ow.ly/D2OZ. He was very interested in the odd story I tell in my book about Kissinger and Zumwalt.

I appeared on Stephen Colbert’s marvelous show last night. He’s as smart as he is funny—and it’s the sort of interview that it’s impossible to prepare for. I appear about 15 minutes into this clip.

Here is a video of a talk I gave recently in Wisconsin. One funny moment came in the beginning when my host informed me that someone had walked out, muttering “I thought I was going to see Nietzsche’s grandson.”

Also, on Friday at 8pm, I’ll be speaking in New York City at the Doomsday Film Festival.

Fora.tv has just posted a video of a reading I did two weeks ago at Book Passage in Corte Madeira.

Very exciting news: my talk from opening night at Politics & Prose will be broadcast on CSPAN’s Book TV this coming weekend: Saturday at 2:15pm and 11pm, and Monday at 5am. My one-year old and I will be watching the Monday segment.

Here is some wonderful dialogue from an interview that Paul Nitze did with the News Hour on October 26, 1989, two weeks before the Berlin Wall came down.

MR. LEHRER: So if there was in fact a cold war, we won it, is that what you’re saying?

MR. NITZE: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And I think we won it the 15 weeks after February 1947 by the decisions that were made at that time.

MR. LEHRER: And those decisions were?

MR. NITZE: Well, first of all, inherent in the whole proposition of what we did at that time was George Kennan’s  Containment Doctrine, that if one could contain Soviet expansionism, Stalinist expansionism, for enough time, they would then begin to look inward and then they would see what was happening to their own society as a result of Stalinist expansionism. And when they looked inside, then they would begin to change their view. And the questions that George and I had at the top of our mind were two. The first one, what was necessary to contain, particularly military ventures by the Soviet side. And the second was how long would it take. On the military side, I think George and I disagreed. I thought it was going to take greater military preparation than he thought it would. And as to the length of time it would take, I think again we were somewhat different. I remember him saying 10 to 15 years and I thought it would be perhaps one or two generations. But both of us –

MR. LEHRER: Both of you were wrong.

MR. NITZE: Both of us were wrong.

MR. LEHRER: It took 40 years. Right. The Bush administration, as I’m sure you know, has been accused of being too timid in its reaction to these enormous changes that are going on in the Communist world. In fact, the President has even been accused of being nostalgic for the cold war. How do you see that?

MR. NITZE: I don’t think he is nostalgic for it. I think that’s a bad wrap that has been given the President. And I also think he’s right in being careful about what you do from here on out. I don’t think one should just dive in and just consider that Gorbachev is our hero. I really am distrustful of our choosing one person in a country and making our policy revolve entirely about that one person. I think we made a mistake in the days of Chang Kai Chek in putting all our policy on the grounds of supporting Chang Kai Chek. And I also thought we leaned far too far over toward the Shah in Iran for instance. We really put our policy in that area wholly on the Shah. And that turned very bad on us. So that I wouldn’t just say that Russia is Gorbachev. Russia is a lot of people, with a lot of cultural background and very, and a number of nationalities and that’s a great big problem that is going to be with us for a long time. It isn’t just Gorbachev.

While researching the book, I learned about Soviet efforts to create a Doomsday Machine in the 1980s. Wired has just published a story of mine about this: explaining what the Soviets built, why they did it, and why they didn’t tell the United States.

Fred Kaplan has written a lovely review in Newsweek, accompanied by a photograph of my sister, my grandfather, and me from 1980. His praise is particularly meaningful: he wrote the definitive obituary of Nitze in Slate, and he is also the author of The Wizards of Armageddon-–a terrific study of Cold War game theory that I used repeatedly in my research.

One of my absolute favorite magazines, Foreign Policy, is running an excerpt of the book, which you can read here. It mainly covers the period in which Nitze and Kennan worked together on the Policy Planning Staff.

The Daily Beast has also just published a very nice review, including The Hawk and the Dove in this week’s “Hot Reads.”

I’ve just published a short essay on the Wired Danger Room blog about the memo I found showing that Admiral Bud Zumwalt believed that he was once called by someone in Kissinger’s office who had heard the Secretary of State tell Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that “an accident” should happen to Zumwalt.

The story, and the key document, can be viewed here. This is one of the issues discussed in the very nice New York Times story that ran about the book on Saturday.