THE MAD BOMBERS

Like the top brass at Radio Free Mike, I’m reading “Secrets,” the Pentagon Papers memoir by Daniel Ellsberg, and finding interesting echoes between that era and this.

In the “Kissinger” chapter, Ellsberg sits down with the soon-to-be secretary of state and others and gets a typical Henry Kissinger compliment, in which he summons an esoteric moment to give a sense of shared history. In this case, Ellsberg was complimented as a fine teacher not about Vietnam, but about “bargaining,” from a lecture series Ellsberg gave 11 years earlier.

“Nice,” Ellsberg writes. “Except that when I thought about it later, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The lectures I had given to his class had had to do with Hitler’s blackmail of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the late thirties that had allowed him to take over those countries just by threatening their destruction. One of the talks was titled ‘The Theory and Practice of Blackmail,’ and the other was ‘The Political Uses of Madness.’ Hitler had deliberately cultivated among his adversaries the impression of his own irrational unpredictability. He couldn’t be counted on not to carry out a threat to do something crazy, mutually destructive. It worked for him, up to a point, because he was crazy, madly aggressive, and reckless. But after a certain point it brought the world down around him. It wasn’t a tactic I was recommending for the United States, or anyone else, for that matter. For someone to imitate Hitler in this respect was to cultivate madness and court disaster.”

Ellsberg goes on to point out that news leaks about the recent invasion of Cambodia said some of the motivation was to convince the nation’s perceived enemies “that our decision making at the highest levels was unpredictable and that since we could do something so evidently erratic and crazy ... they could not count on our reasonableness or prudence in a crisis.”

So the mad bomber president is sort of a hallowed Republican tradition, from Nixon to Reagan (in addition to macho bluster and jokes about “We begin bombing [Russia] in five minutes,” Ronald Reagan was also prone to talking about the imminence of armageddon) to Bush. It’s enough to make me think that those strange vibrations in the earth are tectonic plates shifting, bringing Vietnam and Iraq just a little bit closer together ...