So now it comes out that Richard Nixon was sometimes drunk when all that was happening.
Those Kissinger transcripts that have been made public (just days ago) tell us that Nixon was too "loaded" to take an urgent phone call from British Prime Minister Edward Heath on October 11, 1973, right in the middle of the Arab-Israeli War. Nixon was also incapacitated, or "rather in a sour mood," during a span that encompassed Vietnam, Watergate, the impeachment hearings, and 10,000 Soviet missiles just waiting for a sign to take off.
All that wouldn't be so bad, except that Nixon was President of the United States at the time.
There must be a God, otherwise we'd be vaporized if our affairs were left solely in the hands of unsteady men. Soviet leaders were also known to swizzle, particularly vodka. So with their guy and our guy staggering from room to room here in the White House and there in the Kremlin, and bumping into all the furniture, only by divine intercession are we here to talk about all this.
We, the little people, operate on the trust that the big people who run our lives (dictating our fortunes among life, death and taxes) do so sober as a judge, though I have known a few judges extravagant with Jack Daniels. But sober -- that's how we imagine our business is being conducted at the highest levels.
But it ain't necessarily so.
Inebriated, according to my definition, doesn't always mean under the influence of alcohol, as much as under the influence of anything that keeps you from being tip-top. I have always suspected, for instance, that Yitzchak Rabin wasn't quite "there" when he was there on the White House lawn shaking hands with Yasser Arafat.
My guess was, and is, that something like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey was going on back there in 1993. They blindfolded him, placed a pen in his hand, kept spinning him around like a dreidle, and finally, when he was out of his mind from dizziness, they said, "Sign here, Mr. Rabin." He did, and voila, Oslo.
If you remember that tipsy ("what-am-I-doing?") smile from Rabin as he was shaking Arafat's hand, then you know what I'm talking about. The Oslo Accords, as we recall, handed Arafat a gift that decent Palestinian Arabs themselves didn't want; a welcome-home-to-Gaza, plus Judea and Samaria, for Arafat and his murderers, who'd been idling in Tunisia and waiting for someone to carte blanche their terrorism. Rabin gave them guns. No person does this unless he is under the influence of something.
Ariel Sharon's personal legal problems - to what extent do they blur his vision of national issues? Israel's well-being is at the whim of a prime minister gone wobbly. Over here, a man who would be president, John Kerry, answers yes and no to the same question. Not by the grace of men do we endure from one sunset to the next.
Tyrants of oil-producing nations rule their people, and our economies, by the wine of religious intoxication, or just plain intoxication. Saddam once defined Johnnie Walker Black Label as Iraq's national drink. "He drank me under the table," remembers writer Adel Darwish, as quoted in the UK's Small World Media. A former mistress testifies that Saddam worshipped The Godfather, was stoned on Viagra - and, as we saw for ourselves, ran his empire like the Corleones versus the Barzinis.
But even good men are imperfect.
History is mostly a record of mistakes, misunderstandings and misfortunes, the result of men performing beneath their prime. We blunder our way through the ages. Kingdoms and continents come and go when men in power arrive at destiny agitated by high blood pressure or a toothache or a bad back.
FDR, great as he was, was not in the best of shape at Yalta. Maybe that's why, in 1945, that other half of Europe was signed over to Stalin.
JFK, glorious JFK, was in severe pain throughout his presidency, so who knows what condition he was in during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962? Yet, there was no exchange of bombs, thanks, I'd say, to a cooler head from up above. Khrushchev kept threatening to "bury" us. Was it Smirnoff that kept us on edge throughout the Cold War? (Ask me later why we built bomb shelters and kept being drilled to hide under our school desks.)
That we haven't come to nuclear blows over these past decades is not a political question, but a religious question.
Seems that whenever private papers are made public (as are Kissinger's about Nixon, that go on for some 20,000 pages), we learn that men who run our world are often so very ordinary, and sometimes out of their minds by booze or some other debilitation that dims their faculties. This is troubling. I want my presidents, and those other leaders around the world, to be as alert as the pizza delivery guy counting his tip.
We need leaders who can, at the very least, walk a straight line and pass a routine breathalyzer test.
Works the other way, I will admit, when it comes to artists who are tanked from alcohol or some other affliction. Beethoven was deaf. Would his music have been better or worse if he were okay? Maybe he was so sublime because of his deafness. Hemingway boozed, yet look what he produced. Fitzgerald always had a bottle nearby, and yet today we rank him among our finest.
On reading Fitzgerald's manuscripts, Hemingway claimed that that he could tell at just what moment, the exact sentence, when F. Scott had taken one nip too many.
But these guys only write about war and peace. The trouble comes with people who do war and peace. Right now I'm a bit queasy about Putin (he keeps being shown doing Judo? hmmm?) and we know the French love wine and the Germans love beer, so who knows what's going on with Chirac and Schroeder? That guy running North Korea, I wouldn't trust him with a Frisbee, never mind enriched uranium.
So anyway, according to these newly released National Archives, Nixon was in a "sour mood" at the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict and was near to starting all-out war. Around that same period he had joked "darkly" about bombing Congress (I kid you not), and had ordered White House aide Alexander Haig to fetch the "football", the inside term for the briefcase that contained the codes to unleash nuclear weapons.
Haig told Kissinger that Nixon was "just unwinding" and not to take him "too seriously."
For all that, "In God We Trust" is no mere slogan, but a prayer.
Those Kissinger transcripts that have been made public (just days ago) tell us that Nixon was too "loaded" to take an urgent phone call from British Prime Minister Edward Heath on October 11, 1973, right in the middle of the Arab-Israeli War. Nixon was also incapacitated, or "rather in a sour mood," during a span that encompassed Vietnam, Watergate, the impeachment hearings, and 10,000 Soviet missiles just waiting for a sign to take off.
All that wouldn't be so bad, except that Nixon was President of the United States at the time.
There must be a God, otherwise we'd be vaporized if our affairs were left solely in the hands of unsteady men. Soviet leaders were also known to swizzle, particularly vodka. So with their guy and our guy staggering from room to room here in the White House and there in the Kremlin, and bumping into all the furniture, only by divine intercession are we here to talk about all this.
We, the little people, operate on the trust that the big people who run our lives (dictating our fortunes among life, death and taxes) do so sober as a judge, though I have known a few judges extravagant with Jack Daniels. But sober -- that's how we imagine our business is being conducted at the highest levels.
But it ain't necessarily so.
Inebriated, according to my definition, doesn't always mean under the influence of alcohol, as much as under the influence of anything that keeps you from being tip-top. I have always suspected, for instance, that Yitzchak Rabin wasn't quite "there" when he was there on the White House lawn shaking hands with Yasser Arafat.
My guess was, and is, that something like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey was going on back there in 1993. They blindfolded him, placed a pen in his hand, kept spinning him around like a dreidle, and finally, when he was out of his mind from dizziness, they said, "Sign here, Mr. Rabin." He did, and voila, Oslo.
If you remember that tipsy ("what-am-I-doing?") smile from Rabin as he was shaking Arafat's hand, then you know what I'm talking about. The Oslo Accords, as we recall, handed Arafat a gift that decent Palestinian Arabs themselves didn't want; a welcome-home-to-Gaza, plus Judea and Samaria, for Arafat and his murderers, who'd been idling in Tunisia and waiting for someone to carte blanche their terrorism. Rabin gave them guns. No person does this unless he is under the influence of something.
Ariel Sharon's personal legal problems - to what extent do they blur his vision of national issues? Israel's well-being is at the whim of a prime minister gone wobbly. Over here, a man who would be president, John Kerry, answers yes and no to the same question. Not by the grace of men do we endure from one sunset to the next.
Tyrants of oil-producing nations rule their people, and our economies, by the wine of religious intoxication, or just plain intoxication. Saddam once defined Johnnie Walker Black Label as Iraq's national drink. "He drank me under the table," remembers writer Adel Darwish, as quoted in the UK's Small World Media. A former mistress testifies that Saddam worshipped The Godfather, was stoned on Viagra - and, as we saw for ourselves, ran his empire like the Corleones versus the Barzinis.
But even good men are imperfect.
History is mostly a record of mistakes, misunderstandings and misfortunes, the result of men performing beneath their prime. We blunder our way through the ages. Kingdoms and continents come and go when men in power arrive at destiny agitated by high blood pressure or a toothache or a bad back.
FDR, great as he was, was not in the best of shape at Yalta. Maybe that's why, in 1945, that other half of Europe was signed over to Stalin.
JFK, glorious JFK, was in severe pain throughout his presidency, so who knows what condition he was in during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962? Yet, there was no exchange of bombs, thanks, I'd say, to a cooler head from up above. Khrushchev kept threatening to "bury" us. Was it Smirnoff that kept us on edge throughout the Cold War? (Ask me later why we built bomb shelters and kept being drilled to hide under our school desks.)
That we haven't come to nuclear blows over these past decades is not a political question, but a religious question.
Seems that whenever private papers are made public (as are Kissinger's about Nixon, that go on for some 20,000 pages), we learn that men who run our world are often so very ordinary, and sometimes out of their minds by booze or some other debilitation that dims their faculties. This is troubling. I want my presidents, and those other leaders around the world, to be as alert as the pizza delivery guy counting his tip.
We need leaders who can, at the very least, walk a straight line and pass a routine breathalyzer test.
Works the other way, I will admit, when it comes to artists who are tanked from alcohol or some other affliction. Beethoven was deaf. Would his music have been better or worse if he were okay? Maybe he was so sublime because of his deafness. Hemingway boozed, yet look what he produced. Fitzgerald always had a bottle nearby, and yet today we rank him among our finest.
On reading Fitzgerald's manuscripts, Hemingway claimed that that he could tell at just what moment, the exact sentence, when F. Scott had taken one nip too many.
But these guys only write about war and peace. The trouble comes with people who do war and peace. Right now I'm a bit queasy about Putin (he keeps being shown doing Judo? hmmm?) and we know the French love wine and the Germans love beer, so who knows what's going on with Chirac and Schroeder? That guy running North Korea, I wouldn't trust him with a Frisbee, never mind enriched uranium.
So anyway, according to these newly released National Archives, Nixon was in a "sour mood" at the height of the Arab-Israeli conflict and was near to starting all-out war. Around that same period he had joked "darkly" about bombing Congress (I kid you not), and had ordered White House aide Alexander Haig to fetch the "football", the inside term for the briefcase that contained the codes to unleash nuclear weapons.
Haig told Kissinger that Nixon was "just unwinding" and not to take him "too seriously."
For all that, "In God We Trust" is no mere slogan, but a prayer.