Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton—and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush by Robert Scheer

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton—and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush by Robert Scheer

Well-written, greatly insightful, and very timely. This compendium of historical political leaders that shaped world history is a must read for all.

I loved it!

Excerpts:

Truman, guided by that brilliant lawyer Dean Acheson, was quite aware that by 1940 the world Depression of the early ’30s had returned. The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt had largely failed. What was to be done? FDR took a crash course in Keynesian economics. As a result, he invested $8 billion into re-arming the United States, in order to hold our own against the Fascist axis of Germany, Japan, Italy. To the astonishment of Roosevelt’s conservative political enemies, the U.S. suddenly had full employment for the work force and a military machine of the first rank with which we were able to defeat Fascism, and just about anyone else who defied us. Truman and friends learned and never forgot an important lesson:

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” and in the time of Jefferson, that group included much of the electorate.


Nixon “did a number of undeniably good things that have been forgotten. He negotiated the first and only strategic arms limitation treaty, the opening to China. He ended the war, ended the draft; the eighteen-year-old vote came under his presidency. He did a lot of good things and they all got swept away by Watergate.”

Nixon’s foreign policy achievements are the focus of the current reappraisal, though some commentators also praise aspects of his domestic policy, especially his establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and his efforts to reform the welfare system.


Ironically, when I had asked Carter during our 1976 Playboy interview what would prevent his leading the U.S. into a Vietnam-type quagmire, he stated that he wouldn’t “lie,” as Lyndon Johnson had. At the time, I thought this was the most truly controversial statement in the interview—not the “lust” quote that was so widely publicized. Johnson’s widow, Lady Bird, felt the same way, and she initially refused to meet with Carter when he landed in Dallas soon after the interview was published. Sadly, Carter went on to commit the same lie of inventing a national security threat—with dire consequences.


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