Did Woodward and Bernstein Get Nixon Wrong?

Consider this passage by Historian Evan Thomas:

"In Woodward and Bernstein’s book, The Final Days, Nixon was portrayed as sobbing and beating the carpet, crying out, “What have I done? What has happened?”In his memoir Kissinger said he did not remember this. Like the image of Nixon talking to portraits, the truth, whatever it was, has long since blurred into myth. "

Monster: The Real Henry VIII and His Magnitude

Let no one persuade you that England's King Henry VIII was anything but a monster. He may not have started off that way in his long reign of thirty-eight years (1509-1547) but he sure arrived there by the crucial decades of his historical significance. Hollywood films and HBO-type shows do an adequate job of displaying his moral depravity, but by focusing narrowly on his marital relations they never zoom out enough to capture the big picture of his heavy tyranny.

Some despots like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong at least brought geo-political power and glory to their countries on the world stage. The same cannot be said for Henry VIII. He inherited from his father a treasury with a surplus and a stable society and throne. (His daddy, Henry VII, put an end to the endemic Wars of the Roses and founded the Tudor dynasty). In the early years of Henry VIII, the surplus vanished due to his lavish spending on his gluttonous lifestyle and pointless wars in France.

Henry began looking for creative ways to shake down England's nobles and commoners for ever more cash long before he contemplated breaking from the Roman Catholic church and confiscating its many treasures in England - following the travails of his first divorce drama he did precisely that in epic fashion. The church's many monasteries were closed in waves of suppression including threats, executions, blackmail, and plunder. There was no welfare state in sixteenth-century England. The church was the only safety net for the needy. Henry added ten of thousands to the needy by displacing multitudes of monks, nuns, and others who had made the church their livelihood. Gold and countless art treasures were packed into chests and carted off to be sold or melted down to become just more money to be greedily spent by the king on things that were of zero benefit to the country.

Henry treacherously turned on his chief subordinates and beheaded them whenever political strategy suited it in an endless process that reminds one of Stalin's purges in the 1930's. (Not just Anne Boleyn, but all his top ministers over the years including Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, etc. went to the chopping block.)

By making himself head of the newly formed Church of England (after the break from the pope  in Rome) and failing to establish a doctrinal formula to base it on, Henry ensured that it would become a seesaw between succeeding monarchs who would yank the country back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism leaving oceans of bloodshed in their wake. Henry VIII's legacy is one of ruin and debauchery but he can arguably be called the most consequential monarch in all of England's history.

Consider this passage from Historian J.M. Roberts:

Yet neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism provoked the first rejection of papal authority by a nation-state. In England a unique religious change arose almost by accident. A new dynasty originating in Wales, the Tudors, had established itself at the end of the fifteenth century and the second king of this line, Henry VIII, became entangled with the papacy over his wish to dissolve what would turn out to be the first of his six marriages in order to remarry and get an heir, an understandable preoccupation. This led to a quarrel and one of the most remarkable assertions of lay [meaning secular] authority in the whole sixteenth century; it was also one fraught with significance for England’s future.



G.J Meyer has written an invaluable history of the Tudor dynasty that sets the record straight on a great many misconceptions surrounding Henry and his heirs:

How Was Nazism Distinct From Fascism?

This passage from "To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (The Penguin History of Europe)" by Ian Kershaw lays it out:

"For all the parallels, however, the regimes were inherently more distinctive than similar. That the Nazi regime was more radical, more dynamic, more aggressive, more ideologically driven in all it undertook reflected crucial structures of the German dictatorship that bore only superficial similarity to Italian Fascism. The exceptionality of the Nazi regime hinged in no small measure upon the ideological hopes, expectations and opportunities that were embodied in Hitler’s supreme and unchallengeable position as Germany’s leader. The cult that invested ‘heroic’, almost superhuman, qualities in Hitler, turning the one-time beer-hall demagogue into the object of almost deified veneration, was, of course, fabricated, just like the Duce cult in Italy, the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union, and leadership cults elsewhere. However, Hitler did not have to transcend an earlier source of ideological legitimacy, as Stalin had to do in his nominal allegiance to the legacy of Lenin and the tenets of Marxism. Nor did Hitler have to build his leadership cult only years after taking power, as did Mussolini."


This passage further clarifies the difference but it also drills down to the heart of why the Nazis simultaneously hated Jews and wanted to conquer an empire:


"For Hitler and many of his ardent followers the Jews amounted to an all-pervasive danger that threatened Germany’s existence. Internally they were seen as poisoning its culture, undermining its values and corrupting its racial purity. Externally, they were viewed as a malign international power through their presumed domination of both plutocratic capitalism and of Bolshevism. The elimination of all imagined Jewish power and influence was, therefore, the very pivot of the utopian vision of national renewal built on racial purity."

Mao Zedong Not As Bad As Hitler Or Stalin?

This quote from "The Second World War" by Antony Beevor says it all:

"The Americans, in a doomed attempt to make both sides co-operate, demanded the right to send a fact-finding group to Mao Tse-tung’s headquarters in Yenan. The ‘Dixie Mission’arrived in July and was favourably impressed, as Mao intended them to be. Severely limited in what they could see and whom they could speak to freely, they had no idea of Mao’s determination to destroy the Nationalists completely, nor of the savage purges, ‘rooting out traitors within the [Chinese Communist Party] and enforcing Maoist ideology throughout the party ranks’. A reign of terror was established by mass rallies where suspects were denounced, with slogans and insults screamed at them. Confessions were extracted through physical and psychological torture and brainwashing. Mao’s regime, with its obsessive use of thought control and ‘self-criticism’, proved even more totalitarian than Stalinism. Mao did not use a secret police. Ordinary citizens were compelled to take part in the witch-hunts, torture and murder of alleged traitors. And Mao’s personality cult exceeded that of Stalin."

Did Watergate Prevent National Healthcare?

Consider this quote from Evan Thomas:

"On May 13, the president made a national radio address proposing comprehensive national health insurance. His proposal, with its federal mandates, was not significantly different from the one that Barack Obama finally pushed through Congress nearly four decades later. 9 But in May 1974, such a massive piece of social welfare legislation had no chance of passage. Nixon had been surprisingly effective on Capitol Hill, given that the Democrats controlled both chambers, but the game was over."

Vietnam If JFK Had Lived

Vietnam - the exception that proves the rule that says America doesn't lose wars. Despite all the difficulties, tragedies, missed opportunities, and sheer folly that has studded the long course of the never-ending wars on terrorism, no military failure has yet replaced Vietnam for sheer drama, scope, and humiliation in the minds of the most stalwart patriots. The images of those helicopters, the desperate people clinging to them as they frantically lifted off the airstrip, abandoning Saigon as it fell to Communist forces once and for all - seared itself into the pride of a people long accustomed to winning.

Was the defeat a foregone conclusion? Was the outcome inevitable? Did every president from Kennedy to Ford pursue the same course leading inexorably to both the escalation of the war and the defeat which followed? The evidence suggests no to all these questions but this post is concerned with what Kennedy would have done. This is particularly tantalizing because Kennedy was the last president who was in a position to prevent the American commitment in South Vietnam from escalating into a full-scale American war. We can not help then but to see the Kennedy assassination as a pivotal event that changed the course of world history. Thurston Clarke's JFK's Last Hundred Days demonstrates, convincingly, that it was.

Clarke compiles overwhelming evidence to show that President Kennedy would have extricated America from the Vietnam conflict by 1965. Following his election in 1960, President Kennedy had to walk a fine line on his administration's Vietnam policy. No less than today, Democrats in Kennedy's day were vulnerable on foreign policy. The Democratic Truman administration and Congressional Democrats took a beating in the elections after China fell to Communism in 1949. After that, Democrats were vulnerable to the charge of being weak on Communist aggression abroad. That was a major factor in Truman's decision to intervene in Korea. It was the same impetus behind Kennedy's need to send advisers to Vietnam and to prop-up Diem's regime. All the while Kennedy played lip service to a steadfast commitment in Vietnam, he simultaneously worked on a plan of withdrawal.

So it came to be that Kennedy sent the first 16,300 military advisors to Vietnam. These advisors undoubtedly found themselves in combat situations and some of them died, but in all the years of the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies combined, only 78 servicemen had been killed in Vietnam. These figures hardly qualify as those representing a full-scale military committment requiring the victory demanded by the sacrifices already paid. That dynamic came later, and under a different president.

The evidence is clear in the declassified oval office tapes and in testimony from former administration officials that the full-blown Vietnam war would not have happened under JFK.

Here are some fascinating revelations from Thurston Clarke:

On November 22 [the day Kennedy was killed in 1963] there had been 16,300 advisers in Vietnam, but no combat units. During the U.S. involvement in the conflict under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, 78 U.S. servicemen had been killed in action. After Johnson had been in office for a year there were more than 23,300 advisers in the country and 225 had been killed. By December 1965, after Johnson had escalated the war and sent U.S. combat units into battle, there were 185,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and almost 1,600 American dead. By the end of 1967, U.S. forces numbered 485,000 with almost 16,000 killed.

Clark Clifford had advised both Kennedy and Johnson and served as Johnson’s secretary of defense during his last year in office. He later wrote, “On the basis of personal intuition and a knowledge of both men, I believe that because of profound differences in personality and style, Kennedy would have taken a different path [on Vietnam] in his second term.” Elaborating on what this path would have been, he added, “I believe Kennedy would have initiated a search for either a negotiated settlement or a phased withdrawal.”

Robert McNamara wrote in his memoirs that Kennedy’s comments to Huntley and Brinkley on September 9, 1963, had been an aberration and that “the great preponderance of President Kennedy’s remarks—both before and after this interview, in public and in private—was that, in the end, the South Vietnamese must carry the war themselves; the United States could not do it for them.”

Walter Cronkite, whose interview had elicited one of these public remarks, wrote, “I have always believed that had he [Kennedy] lived, he would have withdrawn those advisors from Vietnam.”

Senator Wayne Morse, who frequently butted heads with Kennedy over Vietnam, said, “He’d seen the error of his ways. I’m satisfied that if he’d lived another year we’d have been out of Vietnam.”

In his 1970 oral history, the former deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric said, “Based on my exposure to the President’s views over that nearly three-year period, I felt he was looking for an opportunity to pull back, and it would have been very hard to persuade him to reverse course.” He admitted that it was impossible to know for sure what Kennedy would have done, but said, “my view is consistent with everything he did do and said before his death,” adding, “he would have been very reluctant to involve ourselves to the extent that the country did after Johnson took over.”

John Connally wrote in his autobiography, “My guess is that Jack Kennedy would have withdrawn American troops from Vietnam shortly into his second term. . . . He was less charmed by the generals than Johnson and less susceptible to their pressures. I believe he had already concluded that the war was unwinnable.”

Walt Rostow served in both administrations, first as an adviser to Kennedy in the White House, then in the State Department, and finally as Johnson’s national security adviser. He was an unwavering hawk on Vietnam who had pushed for a more robust American commitment to both presidents. While riding a ski lift in Aspen with Marie Ridder, he said, “I’m doing better with Johnson because Kennedy wouldn’t listen to me about Vietnam.”

McGeorge Bundy served as Johnson’s national security adviser for two years and supported his escalation of the war. In an oral history archived in the LBJ Library, he said that he believed Kennedy “would have been freer to cut loose” from Vietnam after the 1964 election because he would not have had to face the electorate again, whereas until March 1968, Johnson had been planning to seek a second term. He said about Kennedy, “I don’t think he would ever have wanted to have the ground war become our war,” dismissed as “total baloney” the argument that Kennedy and Johnson would have pursued the same policy in Vietnam because they were both advised by himself, Rusk, and McNamara, and said the three of them understood they were working for different presidents, who were making their own decisions.

In 1993, Schlesinger wrote in his diary that Bundy had told him that “on reflection he did not think that JFK would ever have sent U.S. ground forces into the Vietnam War.” Bundy believed that Johnson’s decision to escalate the war was grounded in his character. He pointed out that Johnson had also been more hawkish than Kennedy during the Berlin and Cuban missile crises, calling him “temperamentally sort of always more ‘one more regiment’ than Kennedy.”

-The italicized passages are excerpted from

Democratic Double Standard During Watergate?

Consider this passage from Evan Thomas:

"Nixon correctly, but futilely, complained to his family and his aides about a double standard. Pat Nixon began collecting examples from earlier administrations, including a quotation from Franklin Roosevelt’s son John, who told a newspaper columnist, “Hell, my father just about invented bugging. He had them spread all over, and thought nothing about it.” William Sullivan, a former high-level FBI official close to Nixon, provided the Senate Watergate Committee with a memo detailing widespread political bugging and wiretapping by the FBI under earlier Democratic administrations. But the report was buried by the Democratic staff as unproven, too personal, or irrelevant."

For All Who Try To Minimize Columbus' "Discovery"

Consider these quotes from "Columbus: the Accidental Hero (Kindle Single)" by Kevin Jackson -

"An obscure, impoverished Genoese freelancer became the first European to sail to any part of the Americas since the Vikings had reached ‘Vinland’ five centuries earlier. He was certainly the first European to reach South America. He never fulfilled his dreams of travelling to India and China, or meeting the Khan, or becoming fabulously wealthy. He never saw any of the lands which later became the United States of America. No matter. The consequences of his discovery changed the world to a degree unrivalled by any admiral, general, warrior or king."

"...by crossing the Atlantic, Columbus became the only man in history to dramatically change the ecology of our planet. Land masses that had been torn asunder some 30 million years ago, when the proto-continent of Pangea split into isolated fragments, were now put in biological contact again."

Demolishing Tudor Dynasty Myths

Consider this quote from "The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty" by G.J. Meyer -8

"The Tudors ruled England for only three generations, an almost pathetically brief span of time in comparison with other dynasties before and since. During the 118 years of Tudor rule, England was a less weighty factor in European politics than it had been earlier, and nothing like the world power it would later become. Of the five Tudors who occupied the throne—three kings, followed by the first two women ever to be queens of England by right of inheritance rather than marriage—one was an epically tragic figure in the fullest Aristotelian sense, two reigned only briefly and came to miserable ends, and the last and longest-lived devoted her life and her reign and the resources of her kingdom to no loftier objective than her own survival. Theirs was, by most measures, a melancholy story. It is impossible not to suspect that even the founder of the dynasty, the only Tudor whose reign was both long and mostly peaceful and did not divide the people of England against themselves (all of which helps to explain why he is forgotten today), would have been appalled to see where his descendants took his kingdom and how their story ended."

An Historian Who Is Tired of JFK Conspiracies

"...it is perfectly obvious to anyone interested in facts and evidence that Oswald shot President Kennedy and that he probably acted alone in doing so. There is as much evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy as there is for the conclusion that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln or that Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austrian archduke."

-Historian James Pierson in

Video: Is America in Danger of a Fascist Takeover?

What Leads To A Fascist Takeover?

Consider this passage from Ian Kershaw:

There was no direct correlation between the Depression and the chances of success of the radical Right. The Depression crisis had, it is true, led to Hitler’s triumph. But Mussolini had come to power in Italy almost a decade before the slump, while in some countries fascism only emerged when the Depression was subsiding. Furthermore, other countries (notably Britain and, outside Europe, the USA), although suffering severely from the Depression, still did not produce any significant fascist movement. Only where the social and political tensions created by the Depression interacted with other prevailing factors – resentment about lost national territory, paranoid fear of the Left, visceral dislike of Jews and other ‘outsider’ groups, and lack of faith in the ability of fragmented party politics to begin to ‘put things right’ – did a systemic collapse occur, paving the way for fascism.. Italy and Germany turned out to be, in fact, the only countries where home-grown fascist movements became so strong that – helped into office by weak conservative elites – they could reshape the state in their image. More commonly (as in eastern Europe), fascist movements were kept in check by repressive authoritarian regimes, or (as in north-western Europe) offered a violent disturbance to public order without the capacity to threaten the authority of the state. Fascism’s triumph depended upon the complete discrediting of state authority, weak political elites who could no longer ensure that a system would operate in their interests, the fragmentation of party politics, and the freedom to build a movement that promised a radical alternative.

-Historian Ian Kershaw in

Is Fascism A Left or Right Wing Phenomenon?

Here is a passage on Mussolini from the book Modern Times:

He produced a resounding totalitarian formula, much quoted, admired and excoriated then and since: ‘Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ A whole series of ‘fascist laws’ were drawn up, some constitutional, some punitive, some positive, the last being the Leggi di riforma sociale, which purported to bring the Corporate State into existence.

-Historian Paul Johnson in


Most social commentators associate fascism with right wing politics. Right wing enthusiasts point out that fascist regimes have more in common with left wing tyrannies. The key words in yellow above are where the true emphasis lies in a fascist movement. The state is the life-blood of the nation. No institutions are free from its control. It may pursue a combination of liberal and conservative policies, but it pursues its own interests, period.

Did the Atom Bomb Prevent Russia From Conquering All of Europe?

Here's a passage from a book I read recently:

...a meeting of the Politburo in 1944 had decided to order the Stavka to plan for the invasion of France and Italy, as General Shtemenko later told Beria’s son. The Red Army offensive was to be combined with a seizure of power by the local Communist Parties. In addition, Shtemenko explained, ‘a landing in Norway was provided for, as well as the seizure of the Straits [with Denmark]. A substantial budget was allocated for the realisation of these plans. It was expected that the Americans would abandon a Europe fallen into chaos, while Britain and France would be paralysed by their colonial problems. The Soviet Union possessed 400 experienced divisions, ready to bound forward like tigers. It was calculated that the whole operation would take no more than a month…All these plans were aborted when Stalin learned from [Beria] that the Americans had the atom bomb and were putting it into mass production.’Stalin apparently told Beria ‘that if Roosevelt had still been alive, we would have succeeded’. This, it seems, was the main reason why Stalin suspected that Roosevelt had been secretly assassinated.

-Historian Antony Beevor from the book

Was Napoleon Really At Fault?

Here is a passage from a book I am currently reading:

Napoleon is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others. France and Britain were at war for nearly half the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and Waterloo, and Napoleon was only a second lieutenant when the Revolutionary Wars broke out. He launched the Peninsular War and the war against Russia in 1812 in the hope of extending the reach of his ‘Continental System,’ a misguided protectionist answer to Britain’s control of the seas, and thereby force Britain to sue for peace. It was thus Colbertian protectionism that brought him down, far more than the bloodlust and egomania of which he is so often accused.

Were Republicans Really Against Civil Rights?

Here a excerpted passage from a book I recently read on Nixon:

In an underappreciated role, Nixon was Eisenhower’s point man on civil rights. Although Lyndon Johnson has been credited with passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, it was the Eisenhower administration that pushed the bill. Earlier, Nixon had taken the lead by steering government contracts to black businesses.

-Historian Evan Thomas from the book