0:00

All right, welcome listeners to episode 84

0:02

of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman,

0:04

your podcast co-host, and I'm here, as

0:06

always, with my great friend, Sam Ethelbell.

0:08

Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. I'm so excited

0:10

for this episode. I know we say

0:12

that all the time, but the combination

0:14

of guest and topic and text really...

0:17

It was one I had so

0:19

much fun preparing for and then

0:21

actually having the conversation. Yeah,

0:23

it turned out really great. Yes,

0:26

and we explained a lot at

0:28

the start of the episode, but

0:30

really since this summer with the

0:32

discourse over the Oppenheimer film and

0:35

also the death of Daniel Ellsberg. Yeah.

0:37

Daniel Ellsberg was the person who leaked

0:40

the Pentagon Papers and was a kind

0:42

of activist against nuclear weapons because he

0:44

had been a nuclear planner in the

0:47

Defense Department. That combination

0:49

of events, we just

0:51

started cooking up something to do with maybe

0:54

nuclear weapons, and we

0:56

lit upon both the

0:58

best answer and the most know-your-enemy answer,

1:01

which is we decided to take as

1:03

our text, Gary Wills' really

1:05

incredible 2010 book called

1:08

Bomb Power, the modern presidency in

1:10

the national security state, which really

1:13

traces kind of how the

1:15

development of the atom bomb, the processes around

1:17

it, the secrecy and so on, totally

1:20

transformed our system of government to

1:22

make it almost a kind of permanent

1:25

presidential dictatorship because the power

1:27

to deploy the atom bomb

1:29

was solely lodged in one

1:31

man's hands. And we had a

1:33

great guest, and that was Eric Baker.

1:35

That's right. He actually went to

1:38

the same parish in Chicago as Gary Wills. Yeah.

1:41

So Eric was Wills-pilled before any of us, at

1:43

least me and Sam, and he

1:45

really, you can tell just the thoughtfulness

1:47

and sensitivity he brings to working through

1:49

Gary's ideas and arguments was really remarkable.

1:51

And he's just one of my favorite

1:54

writers and thinkers. Great writer. And from

1:56

afar, just a lovely human being. He

1:58

is lovely. It's

4:00

been a great year with those boys

4:02

and with you our listeners and with all of

4:04

our guests and with all of our guests It

4:07

really is true. Sometimes I do feel

4:09

almost guilty how generous so many of our

4:12

guests have been They give up a few

4:14

hours of their afternoon. We always record for

4:16

at least two hours I know we really

4:18

do now before it's all said and done.

4:20

So our guests are just very generous with

4:22

their time and expertise and Hope

4:25

again, everyone has a restful holiday

4:27

break. Yeah, Merry Christmas. I'll say

4:29

it Thank you

4:33

Alright, alright, shall we get to it? Let's

4:35

do it. Here's our episode with Eric Baker

4:37

about Gary Wills's incredible 2010 book Enjoy

4:53

You All

4:58

right, let's get started Eric Baker welcome

5:00

to know your enemy Thanks guys. Happy

5:03

15 year anniversary of the time

5:05

guy through a shoe at George W. Bush

5:08

Well, that is sort of appropriate for what we're talking about

5:10

today 100% yeah as

5:13

well as the demise of former Secretary

5:15

of State Henry Kissinger Yeah,

5:18

I was thinking about that This is a

5:20

great episode for approaching the end of 2023

5:22

because it has Gary Wills who has accompanied

5:24

the podcast quite a lot this Year, it's

5:27

got the nuclear bomb hearkening back

5:29

to the great Oppenheimer Barbenheimer

5:32

era of 2023 and

5:34

it's got plenty of Henry Kissinger, too so

5:37

all of our favorite characters and Themes

5:40

of this year will be addressed in this

5:42

great book. Yes. Oh, we should get to

5:44

what that book is Sam

5:46

as you mentioned once again, we're going back

5:48

to Gary Wills. It's been a Wills year

5:50

for the podcast and This

5:53

is a conversation. We've been really eager

5:55

to have especially with you Eric and

5:57

it's about Wills is probably not

6:00

one of his most famous books, you

6:02

know, compared to Nick's Naganistas or Lincoln

6:04

at Gettysburg. It's called Bomb

6:06

Power, the Modern Presidency in the

6:08

National Security State. It was published

6:10

in January 2010 when Wills would

6:12

have been in his mid-70s. So

6:15

right in the middle of Obama's first term,

6:18

thus importantly, really not long at all

6:20

after George W. Bush's administration, which kind

6:22

of looms over this book in certain

6:24

ways. And we're going to talk

6:27

all about this book. But before we do, Eric,

6:29

Sam and I have already regaled listeners with

6:31

how we got into Gary Wills. I

6:33

know this book is one that's meant a lot to you

6:36

and that you've written about

6:38

and kind of has informed your views. How

6:40

did you first get into Gary Wills? Well,

6:42

I discovered Gary Wills work for the first

6:45

time when I was deliberating whether or not

6:47

to be confirmed into the Catholic Church. Here

6:50

we go. And my confirmation

6:52

sponsor, I had told him

6:55

a lot of my concerns,

6:57

my outrage at

6:59

the many awful things

7:02

in which the church had been implicated

7:04

throughout history. And I said that

7:06

I wasn't sure if I could be a Catholic despite

7:08

all of that. And my confirmation

7:10

sponsor said, you know, there's a guy who

7:12

goes to church here who wrote

7:14

an interesting book about this. And

7:17

he gave me this book called Why

7:19

I Am a Catholic by Gary Wills,

7:21

professor of history at Northwestern and fellow

7:24

parishioner at the church that my family attended

7:26

on the North side of Chicago. And

7:29

that book is the title is kind

7:31

of a joke because the

7:33

vast majority of this book is

7:35

just a really brutal history of

7:38

everything awful that the church and

7:40

especially popes have done. And

7:43

it concludes with this kind of set of

7:45

personal reflections on why Wills

7:48

has remained a Catholic. So

7:50

that was my first encounter with Gary

7:52

and his work. And then a

7:55

few years after that, I remember very

7:57

clearly when this book came out, there

7:59

was some kind of event at the church and

8:01

my parents came home with a copy

8:03

signed from him. A copy of Bomb

8:05

Power? A copy of Bomb Power, yeah.

8:08

Yeah, I started reading it and my mind

8:11

was just totally blown. I was very

8:13

staunchly anti-war, anti-Bush at

8:15

that time, starting

8:18

to be disillusioned, disappointed with

8:20

the limits of Obama's presidency,

8:22

how little he had seemed

8:24

to fulfill his promises on

8:26

the national security side. Exactly,

8:28

yeah, imperial presidency, stuff like that.

8:31

It seemed like this book, it actually explained

8:33

it. All the other

8:35

explanations, it was a weakness of

8:37

will or Obama was just lying

8:40

about his beliefs and there are,

8:42

I'm sure, many factors that explain

8:44

Obama's myriad failures on this front.

8:47

But this book took a different tack granted in

8:49

history. So this book really was one of the

8:51

first books that I read that made me think,

8:53

maybe this is what I want to do with

8:55

my life. To that respect,

8:57

it is a very important book, one

8:59

that I've returned to again and one that

9:02

I've also been thinking about pretty much constantly this

9:04

year. Did you meet Gary?

9:06

Oh yeah, yeah. Again, we went to

9:08

church every week together. After

9:11

this book was released, we were at his

9:13

house for dinner and he was regaling his

9:15

group of guests and someone asked him what

9:17

he was working on and he said,

9:20

well, I'm working on an exegesis

9:22

of the Epistles, the Hebrews, but

9:25

I think to be provocative, I'm going to

9:27

title it, Why Priests? Yes,

9:30

I remember that book. Yes,

9:32

he produced this book, a kind

9:35

of argument that the Hebrews

9:37

has been systematically misrepresented by the

9:39

church to justify its untenable theological

9:42

claims about the priesthood. And yet

9:44

again, still a Catholic. So what

9:46

you're saying, Eric, is all the

9:49

best American leftist Catholics are

9:51

from Chicago, apparently, you, Gary Wills

9:53

and John Cusack. Exactly.

9:56

Yes. Well, Eric, I did want to say too

9:58

that that's such a... the appropriate kind

10:01

of introduction to this book, meeting

10:04

Gary through the context of your parish

10:06

in Chicago. Because did either of you

10:08

notice what the dedication of the book

10:10

is? Blessed are

10:12

the peacemakers. Oh, wow.

10:15

I mean, Gary's anti-war

10:17

convictions, outrage, many

10:19

of the events that are narrated

10:22

in a historical mode in this

10:24

book really helped to catalyze Gary's

10:26

initial sort of political

10:28

transformation. And especially his

10:31

shift to a more oppositional stance

10:33

towards the church hierarchy. He was

10:35

a great defender of the Baragans

10:38

during the Vietnam era. Opposition

10:41

to war has been, I think,

10:43

a real bedrock principle of this

10:45

thinking. I think one thing to

10:47

do right now is to just read the first

10:50

paragraph of the book to give listeners

10:52

a sense of what it's about. And then

10:54

we'll talk a little more about the context of this

10:56

book, how it fits into both his

10:58

many books over the years and his preoccupations.

11:01

But also, the context in which this book

11:03

was published and kind of the significance of

11:05

that for how Wills wrote it. But before

11:07

we go any farther, I'm

11:10

gonna read this bracing first paragraph from the

11:12

book. It's from the introduction titled

11:14

War in Peace. This book

11:16

has a basic thesis that the bomb,

11:19

capital B, altered our

11:21

subsequent history down to its

11:23

deepest constitutional roots. It

11:25

redefined the presidency, as

11:27

in all respects, America's commander in chief,

11:30

a term that took on a new and

11:32

unconstitutional meaning in this period. It

11:34

fostered an anxiety of continuing crisis

11:37

so that society was pervasively

11:39

militarized. It redefined the

11:41

government as a national security state with

11:44

an apparatus of secrecy and executive

11:46

control. It redefined Congress

11:48

as an executor of the executive,

11:51

and it redefined the Supreme Court as a

11:53

follower of the follower of the executive. Only

11:56

one part of the government had the

11:58

supreme power, the bomb. and all

12:00

else must defer to it for the good of

12:03

the nation, for the good of the world, for

12:05

the custody of the future in

12:07

a world of perpetual

12:09

emergency superseding ordinary constitutional

12:11

restrictions. How

12:14

a way to start the book. A cold

12:17

shot in the morning, a slap in the

12:19

face. It's a brisk arresting introduction to this

12:21

book. I'll just say quickly it feels like

12:23

Wills' aim in this book, which he really

12:25

succeeded at from my perspective, was to defamiliarize

12:28

the national security state for the reader.

12:30

This thing that's built up in the

12:33

form of the CIA, the

12:35

NSA, the NSC, this sort of permanent security

12:37

footing that people of our generation are just

12:39

completely used to because it's been the water

12:42

that we swim in. There's obviously been some

12:44

moments of resistance toward it. There's

12:46

been some pushback against the

12:48

level of secrecy and classification that's involved

12:51

with it, but in most sense it's

12:53

only been a ratcheting up of the

12:55

sort of power, authority, moral

12:57

and legal of the national security

12:59

state in our lifetimes. That's

13:02

kind of what he does, sort of

13:04

give you a history of how

13:06

that national security state came to be.

13:08

The distinctive thing about his argument, and

13:10

I'd love to hear Eric lay this

13:12

out a little bit more, is that

13:14

he locates the origin, the

13:17

original sin with the creation of the

13:19

atomic bomb and the circumstances in which

13:21

it was made, and it's really the

13:24

necessities of having a nuclear

13:26

arsenal for the president to be

13:28

prepared to respond to nuclear war,

13:31

which is this kind of corrosive

13:34

force in our government that makes

13:36

democratic governance imperiled

13:38

if not impossible. He says at some

13:41

point, lodging, quote-unquote, the fate of the

13:43

world in one man with no constitutional

13:45

check on his actions caused

13:47

a violent break in our whole

13:49

governmental system. I think that's exactly

13:51

right, and I think the other

13:54

important preoccupation of this book that

13:56

he again locates its origins in

13:58

the possession of the Capitol. B

14:00

bomb is the idea of

14:02

kind of perpetual warfare. I

14:04

mean, it's a strong claim of this

14:06

book that despite kind of protestations or

14:09

obfuscation to the contrary, the United

14:11

States has in a very deep

14:14

sense been at war without ceasing

14:16

since the atomic bomb has been dropped. And

14:19

that in some sense, it could not have been otherwise.

14:21

I mean, the threat of total

14:24

annihilation that the bomb entails sort

14:26

of leads to this kind of

14:28

heightened sense of permanent war and

14:31

the orientation of the entire

14:33

apparatus of American government around

14:35

that purpose of war. And

14:38

that's where I think you can see the connections

14:40

with the broader preoccupations of his work. And

14:42

I mean, because of my background, I have

14:44

a very hard time thinking of Gary

14:47

as anything other than a fundamentally

14:50

religious thinker. And I see the

14:52

traces in this book of his long

14:54

standing engagement with the thought

14:56

of St. Augustine. In fact, I

14:59

believe that his previous publishing

15:01

project before this book was

15:03

his Penguin Classics translation of

15:05

Augustine's Confessions, which kind of

15:07

shows the breadth of his thought. He goes from translating

15:10

the Confessions to writing this book. But

15:13

there's a real sense in this book that the

15:15

bomb has sort of mythologized

15:17

politics. It sort of gives

15:19

a charge to everything. There's

15:22

this apocalyptic eschatological valence

15:26

to governance in the era of the

15:28

bomb. And I think that the Augustinian

15:31

and Wills sees this as a

15:34

really fundamental perversion, a

15:36

kind of mixing of registers that should

15:38

not be mixed. And that's

15:41

something that runs throughout his writing on

15:43

war through his entire career. Definitely. I

15:45

think it was our last main episode

15:47

when we talked about Wills' book, The

15:49

Kennedy Imprisonment. I mentioned that came out

15:51

in the early 80s. And

15:53

so it was kind of like right in the

15:55

middle of Gary's career, kind of like him at

15:57

the height of his powers, kind of a prison.

16:00

approaching middle age, but this book is kind

16:02

of late wills. Bomb Power comes out in

16:04

2010, and I feel like

16:06

Late Wills is marked by relatively

16:09

slim religious books like What Jesus

16:11

Meant and What Paul Meant. Both

16:14

of those were published in 2006. It was

16:16

in 2005. He published his

16:18

little book on praying the Rosary. It

16:20

was in 2007. He published

16:22

a book called Head and Heart,

16:24

American Christianities. So this

16:27

kind of period of Wills that the Bomb

16:29

Power book emerges from, it really

16:31

is, I think, a pretty religious phase of

16:34

Wills' career as a writer. He's

16:36

never not a religious writer, but just the

16:39

kind of number of titles in this period

16:41

that take up explicitly religious themes

16:44

is notable. And I

16:46

would also say something we haven't talked about

16:48

as much. It does come through in the

16:50

Kennedy episode, and it will make

16:52

sense in light of Nixon Agonistos too.

16:55

He really is a student of leadership.

16:58

He published one of the stranger books, or

17:00

more idiosyncratic ones, back in 1994

17:02

called Certain Trumpets,

17:04

The Call of Leaders. He

17:07

wrote a book on Lincoln, on Nixon,

17:09

on Kennedy, on George Washington, his book

17:11

called Cincinnatus. And of course,

17:13

you can't forget this comes after almost a

17:16

decade spent engaging in a very real way

17:18

with the history of the papacy. Yes. Papelson

17:21

is a major theme again of I am

17:23

a Catholic. Yes. So that

17:25

theme of leadership, especially his fascination with the

17:27

presidency, I think this book in some ways,

17:30

it's a very interesting addition to that part

17:32

of Wills' thought and work

17:35

because I don't mean this as

17:37

a criticism of him, but I admit I'm influenced

17:39

by his choice of photos for

17:41

his dust jackets on his books. He always

17:43

kind of looks a bit like a fuddy-duddy.

17:46

His big glasses, dressed very

17:48

conservatively, kind of looks like a nerd.

17:51

Sometimes he has his dog there with him. There

17:53

was something a bit old-fashioned, right? He

17:55

does political and intellectual history. He's

17:58

concerned with leaders. Another major thing. major

18:00

topic of his, of course, was the

18:02

American founding. He wrote a book on

18:04

Jefferson's Declaration on the Federalist Papers. He

18:06

might not put it this way, but great men,

18:09

you know. And this book is interesting and corrective

18:11

because it's so focused on structures

18:13

and decisions to structure

18:15

things a certain way then unfold

18:18

over time. There's a logic that

18:20

comes out of it in a

18:22

way that's kind of beyond the

18:24

capacity of any single human being

18:26

to lead or guide or resist

18:28

possibly even. Yeah. It's interesting to hear

18:30

you saying that. I hadn't really put that together. You're

18:32

sort of saying that the logic of bomb power generates

18:36

this concentration of, to use Eric's

18:38

term, sort of mythic power in

18:41

the person of the president, which

18:43

is totally incompatible

18:45

with small-r Republican

18:47

democratic governance. And

18:49

so if he has a great amount

18:51

of interest in the sort of singular

18:54

contributions of singular men at certain times,

18:56

whether they're for ill or for good,

18:58

in this book, he's sort of saying how a

19:00

structure and a sort of like sequence

19:03

of events in history that are unleashed

19:05

by this particularly weird

19:07

moment, this thing that happens with

19:09

the bomb, that that can

19:11

sort of dangerously invest

19:14

so much greatness

19:16

and terribleness in the president, that that's

19:18

a great danger. I think

19:20

that's exactly spot on. And I think

19:22

that it speaks to what

19:24

I see as one of the striking features of

19:27

this book. And what to me is, to be

19:29

honest, to some extent, I think a political limitation

19:31

of the approach, which is that throughout

19:34

the book, the emphasis is

19:36

strongly on the unconstitutionality of

19:38

the regime of bomb power.

19:40

And Gary really deploys all of

19:42

his psychological talents

19:45

to explicating exactly

19:48

the ways in which the

19:51

defenders, the ideologues of bomb

19:53

power have tortured the

19:55

meeting of the Constitution in order

19:57

to pretend that this apparatus that they've

20:00

created is unconstitutional. But

20:02

Gary comes across very strongly in this

20:04

book as a great believer in constitutionalism,

20:07

especially the idea of checks

20:09

and balances, the power

20:12

of the legislature, and to some extent,

20:14

the Supreme Court to constrain the presidency,

20:16

which I think is one of the

20:18

most dated parts of this book. And

20:20

I think that Gary would be unapologetic

20:23

about the relatively old-fashioned nature

20:25

of that inclination. I remember

20:27

one conversation, someone mentioned casually

20:30

in passing something about him no longer being a

20:32

conservative anymore. And he actually took Umbridge at that

20:34

and said that, of course, in many

20:37

substantive ways on a whole range of

20:39

issues, his political

20:41

positions were left wing,

20:43

but he still identified himself

20:45

in many ways as a

20:47

conservative person, someone with a

20:49

conservative sensibility. And I do

20:52

think that that crumbs across in this book,

20:54

both for better and for worse. Well, it's

20:56

in the afterword, speaking of this sort of

20:58

constitutionality or constitutionalism of his thought at this

21:00

period, it's in one of the very last

21:02

paragraphs of the afterword where he says, on

21:04

January 25th, 2002, White House counsel, Alberto

21:07

Gonzalez, signed a memo written by

21:09

David Addington that called the Geneva

21:12

Conventions, quote, quaint and quote obsolete.

21:15

Perhaps in the nuclear era, the

21:17

Constitution has become quaint and obsolete.

21:19

Few people even consider anymore

21:21

Madison's lapidary pronouncement, quote,

21:24

in Republican government, the legislative authority

21:26

necessarily predominates from Federalist 51. You

21:29

know, I'm just thinking of when Matt

21:31

starts looking at the pictures of Gary

21:33

and seeing him sort of fuddy-duddy and

21:35

conservative and disposition and dress, calling his

21:37

preoccupation with the Constitution potentially quaint and

21:39

obsolete, you know, out of touch. That's

21:42

a place where that kind of texture comes

21:44

through in the very end of the book.

21:46

Like, so what if it's quaint to believe

21:48

in these guardrails? I still do. I was

21:51

thinking too, we don't really have much concern

21:53

at this point in the podcast to, you

21:55

know, shoehorn our topics into a framework where

21:57

we say this is what it means for

22:00

understanding the right in conservatism. I

22:02

think this book, the

22:04

power of its argument and kind of

22:06

the radicalness of it will make its

22:08

relevance to all kinds of questions we're

22:10

still grappling with very clear, but I

22:12

was thinking that it's interesting that a

22:15

major kind of theme of

22:17

mid-century conservatism, I'm thinking

22:20

of people like James Burnham and

22:22

Wilmore Kendall, was their advocacy for

22:24

the legislature, for Congress, against

22:27

the kind of overweening presidency.

22:30

And the administrative state. And the administrative state,

22:32

which I think they viewed as kind of

22:34

like the handmaiden of progressivism. And

22:36

the executive branch, yeah. And so

22:39

you see James Burnham writing a

22:41

book like Congress in the American

22:43

tradition, Wilmore Kendall's emphasis on deliberation,

22:45

which clearly happens in legislatures, maybe

22:48

not only there, but preeminently there. And

22:50

it was interesting to me that Wills kind

22:53

of shows, he doesn't make

22:55

this reference explicit, but all

22:57

those mid-century Cold Warrior

22:59

conservatives who also were

23:02

advocating for return to something like

23:04

Congress's pride of place in our

23:06

constitutional system, that was never gonna

23:08

work. Right,

23:10

like the Cold War part of it,

23:12

meaning the bomb power part of it,

23:15

they hadn't adequately, I think, reckoned with

23:17

what it might've meant for our political

23:19

system, specifically in light of that question

23:21

of the relative balance between the executive

23:23

and the legislature. And I

23:25

think there's an even more devastating kind of

23:27

imminent critique of that position

23:30

in this book, which is that

23:32

he really shows the way that

23:34

bomb power, unconstrained executive

23:37

authority has been

23:39

deployed, especially since Reagan,

23:41

but even earlier, to

23:43

dismantle Congress's attempts to

23:45

expand the regulatory state.

23:48

Congress passes legislation that creates

23:50

new institutions and the executive

23:52

branch are supposed to have

23:55

a regulatory function, and then the president,

23:58

A certain kind of unlimited authority.

24:00

the over everything, but you know,

24:02

especially over the Executive Branch it

24:04

carries view functionally nullifies those pieces

24:06

of legislation by dismantling to be

24:08

a for example. So this idea

24:10

that if Congress versus the regulatory

24:12

state for Gary, that's exactly wrong.

24:14

It's the Imperial Presidency vs. Congress

24:16

and the regulatory institutions that Congress

24:18

create. Maybe just to give the

24:20

listener another good summary of what

24:22

Gary Wells is up to in

24:24

this, but I'm in a read

24:26

from a piece that I hope

24:28

we get back to later, which

24:30

Eric you wrote in The Bachelor

24:32

on occasion of Daniel Ellsberg staff

24:34

this year, who of course, a

24:36

famous whistle leaked the Pentagon Papers.

24:38

What we can talk about Ellsbury

24:40

more think he's really interesting figure

24:42

in this book, but also in

24:44

the kind of Gary Wills cosmos

24:46

surface. He's a senior who has

24:48

led a qualities that are, I

24:50

think are admirable in the kind

24:52

of ethical world that Gary Wills

24:54

operates in as well. But here's

24:57

that this is a summary of

24:59

the book, but you offer in

25:01

this piece on Ellsberg you say

25:03

Ellsberg had a particularly acute grasp

25:05

of what the historian Gary Wills

25:07

has called bomb power. The way

25:09

that the very existence of the

25:11

United States nuclear arsenal fundamentally constrains

25:13

the possibility of exercising democratic oversight

25:15

of the nation's military. The power

25:17

to annihilate all human civilization cannot

25:19

same li be disposed of by

25:21

popular vote, The bomb is a

25:23

weapon suited only to have a

25:25

never went dictator. and that is

25:27

how the United States came to

25:29

envision the presidency in the nuclear

25:31

age, culturally, politically and even legally.

25:33

Autocracy of course was easier to

25:35

produce them. Benevolence. The bombed and

25:37

and secrecy. Secrecy demands line, and

25:39

lying demands lawlessness. Yeah, I think

25:41

that that exactly sums it up.

25:43

And I think that that's to

25:45

go back to earlier point that

25:47

talking about this book and deletions

25:49

summers curious clear admiration for. A

25:52

kind of classical idealists should as noble

25:54

leadership and been he. He really wants

25:57

to say that that's on par, makes

25:59

that. Impossible to exercise. I

26:01

think that this is so essential

26:03

to think about in relation to

26:05

the completion of of this this

26:07

book and and in some ways

26:09

I think that the animus for

26:11

reading this book in the the

26:13

disappointment so thoroughly Obama administration again

26:15

this momentous like to to some

26:17

extent the moral qualities of the

26:19

individual occupying the presidency do not

26:22

matter because they will be inevitably

26:24

corrupted crown Town by the force

26:26

of this almost kind of demonic

26:28

power that has been erected around.

26:30

A nuclear bomb? Yes, I think that's so

26:32

key, eric. But I also think it's a

26:34

very interesting. Perhaps. Critique of

26:36

the way a lot of people

26:38

understood the George W. Bush Administration

26:41

right were so many things that

26:43

went wrong that the Iraq War,

26:45

the Financial crisis. but in this

26:47

context, especially buses foreign policy. A

26:49

So much of that was attributed

26:51

to his personal qualities. Right is

26:53

a even joke. Who doesn't believe

26:55

in science? He prayed to God

26:57

before he invaded Iraq that Hold

27:00

Bush is a failure. It's and

27:02

incompetent kind of fail Sons, You

27:04

know, his family and fortune. End

27:06

the wicked Advisors yet around him like

27:08

Karl Rove. You know that was the

27:10

problem of the Bush Years. That's why

27:12

things went so wrong. That's why we

27:14

made his disastrous were policy decisions. And

27:17

in some ways you know this book

27:19

is same. Really it was Dick Cheney

27:21

and David Addington. Really, it was Str.

27:23

I mean that that's that's that's what

27:25

So astonishing every day which was Rebel

27:27

a Tory to me as a young

27:29

person reading this I had spent years

27:31

record stating that over you know that

27:34

the institution of the Presidency Bush's. To

27:36

credited so much that it's a

27:38

kind anticipation of a lot of

27:40

with American liberals said about about

27:42

Donald Trump. but there's a sense

27:44

we used to be governed by

27:46

these noble statesmen you know who

27:48

did so much to transfer a

27:50

country where real governors and now

27:52

Bush's is just kind of evil

27:54

moron who has destroyed all fetzer

27:56

to be able to say no.

27:58

actually there are no exceptions. There

28:00

that know postwar presidents who has

28:02

even made a dent in this

28:05

edifice. It's is universal complicity and

28:07

you cannot imagine a better kind

28:09

of image of what you were

28:12

just describing Eric's Then the passing

28:14

from George W. Bush to Brock

28:16

Obama meeting two men who were

28:19

so different in so many ways.

28:21

You know, the brilliant intellectual savvy

28:23

Obama with his charisma, intelligence and

28:26

talents vs. Ws, the damn evangelical

28:28

from Texas s and. Those two

28:30

men, despite being so different, the move

28:33

from one to the other only put

28:35

the barest of dense. If we could

28:37

say that in the way or country

28:39

operates as a national security states and

28:42

side of just the way it's all

28:44

these structures in the commitments they entail

28:46

around the world among other things to

28:48

overwhelm any particular individual who sense the

28:51

presidency, whether it's George W, Bush or

28:53

Obama Will let me make one point

28:55

about what's distinctive about the George W

28:57

era. I mean I think Will is

29:00

very. Angry about George W. Bush

29:02

the absolute total disregard for certainly

29:04

like humanitarian ethics by also toward

29:06

him as he sex at of

29:09

constitutionality as it had been understood.

29:11

He repeats this La Jolla several

29:13

times, which I think liberals of

29:16

that era would be very familiar

29:18

with. About what did George W.

29:20

Bush presidency rots your squat? The

29:23

faulty legal justification for military tribunals,

29:25

suspended Habeas corpus, Extraordinary Rendition secret

29:27

prisons around the world, warrantless surveillance.

29:30

of citizens at home to abrogation of

29:32

the geneva conventions unilateral dispensation from treaties

29:34

and enhanced interrogation methods like waterboarding of

29:36

course which he calls torture elsewhere in

29:39

the book because that is what it

29:41

is these things that were characteristic of

29:43

the response to nine eleven the war

29:45

on terror i do think you could

29:48

see how the effects of bomb power

29:50

makes impossible in a very specific way

29:52

which is that most of these things

29:54

are being done in secret based on

29:57

legal justification that are also secret you

29:59

know Well, the contest within the administration,

30:01

whenever there was, between John Yoo in

30:03

the Justice

30:06

Department, Office of Legal Counsel, and John

30:08

Ashcroft, who was sometimes a little bit

30:10

not on board with every single thing

30:12

that the Bush administration wanted to do,

30:14

these contests were just completely behind the

30:16

scenes, different lawyers arguing with each other

30:19

about what they could do in secret.

30:22

Secret legal justifications for secret actions

30:24

that unleashed evil on the world.

30:26

But the idea that these things ought to

30:28

be and can be kept secret, not

30:31

just from the public but from Congress, that

30:33

is the legacy of bomb power. The necessity

30:35

for the executive branch, the people around the

30:37

president to be on a permanent security

30:40

and war footing and be

30:42

able at all times to use nuclear power in the

30:44

worst case scenario, it creates the

30:47

justification for secrecy. Yeah, I think secrecy

30:49

is such an important theme. The layers

30:51

of deception and the assertion of secrecy

30:53

is almost a kind of moral right

30:56

of the executive. I mean, there are

30:58

so many examples that Jerry provides in

31:00

this book that are so striking. He

31:02

writes at some point, quote, secrecy emanated

31:05

from the Manhattan Project like a giant

31:07

radiation emission. Anything connected to

31:09

the bomb, its development, scientific advisors,

31:12

protection, deployment, possible use was,

31:14

as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

31:16

said, born secret. It was

31:18

self-classifying. And then

31:20

he writes, and the power of secrecy

31:22

that enveloped the bomb became a model

31:24

for the planning or execution of, and

31:26

this is in capital letters, anything important,

31:29

as guarded by, capital I, important capital

31:31

P, people, because the government was the

31:33

keeper of the great secret. It began

31:35

specializing in secret keeping. Yes. He

31:38

believed that it contained the seeds of kind

31:40

of everything else that followed. He

31:42

called the Manhattan Project a poisonous

31:44

admixture of government and secrecy, and

31:47

he writes, the secrecy that had enveloped

31:49

Los Alamos would steal quietly across the

31:52

entire American landscape in the years to

31:54

come. Yeah, and Eric, you said you

31:56

thought, based on your perception of objects,

31:58

that the Manhattan Oppenheimer that Christopher Nolan

32:01

must have read this book when he was working

32:03

on it. Yeah, that's my strong hunch at least.

32:05

This theme is so central to that movie

32:08

and I think it's one thing that the

32:10

movie really does quite well. I mean, I

32:12

think Nolan kind of dramatizes this

32:14

argument of Gary's that a lot

32:16

of the kind of apparatus of

32:18

security and surveillance and persecution and

32:21

paranoia that we associate with the

32:23

McCarthy period in the 1950s actually

32:26

was created around the Manhattan

32:29

Project and the kind of cutting

32:31

back and forth between Los Alamos, the development of

32:33

the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer's own

32:35

persecution at the hands of the

32:38

National Security State, which Gary

32:40

devotes a fair bit of time to in

32:42

this book. The parallels are so

32:44

striking. I remember in the book,

32:47

he describes how clearance, the privilege

32:49

to read classified information which you

32:51

get from being a part of

32:53

the National Security State is a

32:55

form of initiation, a mark of

32:58

prestige. You're part of the elect

33:00

once you have a classification. And so

33:02

when Oppenheimer, when they're trying to deprive

33:04

him of that during the McCarthy era

33:06

because of his relationship to accused

33:09

communists, when he's losing his security clearance, he's

33:11

unmanned by it. It's almost like one of

33:13

the things that's weird about the movie Oppenheimer,

33:16

which is that the bomb goes off two

33:18

thirds of the way through and then there's a

33:20

whole other third of the movie that's just about

33:23

whether this guy's going to get to keep his

33:25

clearance decades later. And it just seems like how

33:27

can you possibly keep the stakes high because we

33:29

saw the fucking nuclear bomb go off. But

33:32

when you think about it in Gary's terms,

33:34

they are completely connected. This is what

33:37

happens when the Manhattan Project has run

33:39

the way that it is, that it

33:41

may eat its own and that actually

33:43

bomb power operates by

33:45

threatening to deprive people like

33:47

Oppenheimer of their access

33:50

to the Clerisey, their special

33:52

initiation right. I mean, the

33:54

very particular word Wills uses

33:56

to describe Oppenheimer being denied

33:58

a security clearance. He says

34:01

unfrocking, and defrocked. And

34:03

then, Sam, as you were getting at Will's rights

34:05

about this, his defrocking, meaning

34:08

Oppenheimers, was accomplished by denying

34:10

him access to secrets. Secrecy

34:13

had become a way of punishing,

34:15

not protecting. Such a

34:17

great line. But that's also how the Catholic Church operates,

34:19

right? Yes. The idea of

34:22

unfrocking or defrocking, especially in the

34:24

Catholic context, it is like the

34:26

removal of faculties to

34:28

be a part of this elite class

34:31

that governs and perpetuates the

34:33

institution. And that's especially interesting in light

34:35

of the fact that, again, at exactly

34:37

the time this book is being published,

34:39

Gary is beginning work on the book

34:41

that will later be published as

34:44

Y-Priest. He's turning

34:46

very strongly against the

34:48

very institution of the priesthood in the

34:50

modern Catholic Church. So there's

34:52

the sense that it's punishment, but it's

34:55

a mode of punishment that sort of reveals

34:57

its absurdity, the absurdity of the whole institution.

35:00

I think the other point that he makes is

35:02

that depriving someone of security clearance is not just

35:04

a way of punishing them as

35:06

an individual, but it's a

35:08

way of rendering them irrelevant

35:10

to the debate. And

35:13

the film captures this. Oppenheimer's

35:15

crime is skepticism of

35:18

the H-bomb and the expansion of

35:20

the nuclear program to ever

35:23

greater heights of destructive capability.

35:26

And so the maneuver here, it's not to

35:29

necessarily discredit him, cause some

35:31

sort of scandal about him

35:34

or to confront his arguments head on,

35:36

God forbid. It's to

35:38

deny him security clearance because then it's always

35:41

possible to say, well, that's

35:43

a good argument, but there's classified

35:45

information that I just can't reveal, but

35:47

you don't have access to that disproves what you're

35:50

saying. It's always the Trump

35:52

card. And I think Gary has a very

35:54

strongly deliberative sense of what democracy is all

35:56

about. I think it's that maneuver, the ability

35:58

to kind of instantly. shut down debate

36:00

because not all the facts are

36:03

on the table and access to facts can

36:05

be so strongly regulated

36:07

and denied punitively that makes

36:09

bomb power such a threat

36:11

to democracy in Gary's sense.

36:14

I think it's worth giving some details

36:16

here, especially for listeners who might not

36:18

have seen Oppenheimer. In particular,

36:20

there was an episode that Wills

36:22

describes that I have to say,

36:25

my dislike of Harry Truman, this book

36:27

ratchets that up because he does

36:30

come across as kind of a

36:32

simpleton, you know, and not a

36:34

very morally serious person who seemed

36:37

to truly be grappling with the gravity

36:40

of this moment and the powers that have been placed

36:42

in his hand. In

36:44

the immortal words of Matt Crisman,

36:46

Suleim Oppenheimer depicts Truman as a

36:49

demonic hick, which

36:51

I think is in some ways also how

36:53

Truman comes across in this book. Yeah,

36:56

Wills describes Truman saying he

36:58

didn't lose any sleep over dropping the

37:00

bomb. That is so appalling

37:02

to me. Like,

37:05

just almost unimaginable. But the

37:07

point you mentioned just a

37:09

moment ago about it was

37:11

Oppenheimer's skepticism about, you

37:13

know, beyond the atom bombs dropped on

37:16

Japan, right, the kind of next generation

37:18

of, in this book it's often referred

37:20

to as like the super bomb. The

37:22

super, that's the code word. Yeah. But

37:25

so Oppenheimer's skepticism about that, Wills describes

37:27

this meeting between Truman and Oppenheimer, when

37:30

Oppenheimer says he just felt like he had

37:32

blood on his hands for his role in

37:34

developing the bomb. And when Oppenheimer left the

37:36

room then, Truman turned to Dean Atchison and

37:38

said, I don't want to see that son

37:41

of a bitch ever again in this office.

37:43

Yeah. You know? It's

37:45

a central moment in the movie, and it is really an

37:48

interesting thing. I'd be interested in what you guys think about

37:50

that kind of question of culpability, Truman

37:52

versus Oppenheimer, and maybe thinking

37:54

about it in terms that Gary Wills might think

37:56

about it. Because one thing I did notice about

37:58

this book, something that just kept coming up

38:00

is that it does seem to me

38:03

that something that really bugs wills is

38:05

when powerful men don't take responsibility for

38:07

the things that they write or advocate

38:09

for. So there's the whole

38:12

George Kennan stuff in the beginning. George

38:14

Kennan comes to wistfully regret

38:16

the high dudgeon of the rhetoric of

38:19

the long telegram in the article he

38:21

wrote in Foreign Affairs that set the

38:23

Cold War in motion. This regret after

38:25

the fact of things that you did

38:27

and said that shaped the world in

38:29

the image of those words is not

38:31

admirable to wills. Likewise Kissinger coming to

38:33

regret pushing Nixon to go hard after

38:35

Ellsberg. I mean you can't really trust

38:38

anything Kissinger says about something involving his

38:40

culpability but it's so not exonerating this

38:42

kind of rueful looking back that these

38:44

powerful men do later on. Wills is

38:46

sort of implicit position. It's like powerful

38:48

men should just be more careful about

38:51

what they advocate for, regretting it later

38:53

once it's had its effect on the

38:55

world. And the lives of the global

38:57

community is no great virtue to him.

38:59

And so I wonder if like even

39:02

Oppenheimer's hand-wringing was not particularly admirable to

39:04

wills. Well I think that that's exactly

39:06

part of what he finds so objectionable

39:08

about bomb power is the way that

39:11

it makes it so hard to take

39:14

responsibility to exercise discretion.

39:16

I mean the irony in

39:18

a really sort of perverted way it's

39:21

true that from a certain point of

39:23

view there was no decision for Truman

39:26

to regret. And

39:28

this is a theme that other

39:30

historians of that pivotal moment in

39:32

1945 has really emphasized that

39:34

there was never a decision

39:36

to drop the bomb. It

39:39

was inevitable. Everyone took it for granted.

39:41

It was like a machine moving

39:43

forward. Of course there were lots of decisions,

39:46

micro-level decisions made along the way and it

39:48

by no means removes deep

39:50

moral culpability from a whole range

39:52

of actors. But this sense of

39:54

inertia, what are we supposed to

39:56

do? Not drop the bomb? That

39:58

idea was just we

42:00

never really came back

42:02

to a peacetime footing. As he puts

42:04

it, no conversion, meaning conversion after a

42:07

war, was so continually

42:09

military as that after the

42:11

Second World War. The bomb ensured

42:14

that. This was, as I just

42:16

quoted, a piece to be based on a weapon.

42:19

We never stopped the militarism and

42:22

kind of organizing our society around

42:25

killing people, destroying other nations,

42:28

and supposedly guarding our national security.

42:31

I think that's exactly right. And I think what

42:33

the early chapters of this book do very powerfully

42:35

is to show the extent

42:37

to which, you know, he was

42:39

recently reported in Israeli media, this

42:42

conversation between Netanyahu and Biden,

42:44

where Netanyahu essentially says,

42:46

well, he can kill all these

42:48

civilians because you guys dropped the

42:50

bomb. And Biden says

42:53

something like, you know, well, yes, we

42:55

dropped the bomb, but then we set

42:57

up all these institutions in the post-war

42:59

era to ensure that the bomb would never be

43:02

used again. And Gary just

43:04

shows that that is absolutely not the

43:06

case. The actual opposite

43:08

of the truth that so

43:10

much of US geopolitics

43:12

after the war, the whole

43:15

strategic center of gravity of

43:17

American empire building in the aftermath

43:20

of the war was to actually

43:22

construct an infrastructure to

43:24

enable the sustained and

43:26

global threat of nuclear weapons,

43:28

because he really emphasizes the

43:30

immense logistical difficulties of dropping

43:32

the bomb on Japan in

43:35

the first place. And, you

43:37

know, so much of US base building

43:40

construction of a US military presence

43:43

everywhere is to ensure

43:45

that the logistical difficulties can be surmounted

43:48

in a moment's notice, that the threat

43:50

of dropping the bomb is a live

43:52

option at any given moment. I have

43:55

a passage from Ellsberg on this point

43:57

that I think is really effective. Ellsberg

43:59

said... this is in his book, The Doomsday

44:02

Machine. He says, during the 2016 presidential

44:04

campaign, Trump was reported to

44:06

have asked a foreign policy advisor about nuclear

44:08

weapons, if we have them, why can't

44:11

we use them? Correct answer,

44:13

we do. Contrary to

44:15

the cliche that no nuclear weapons have

44:17

been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, US

44:19

presidents have used our nuclear weapons

44:22

dozens of times in crises, mostly

44:24

in secret from the American public, though not

44:27

from adversaries. They have used

44:29

them in the precise way that a gun

44:31

is used when it is pointed at someone

44:33

in a confrontation whether or not

44:35

the trigger is pulled. To get

44:37

one's way without pulling the trigger is a

44:39

major purpose for owning the gun. And

44:42

I think that that's exactly the sensibility

44:45

that animates the early chapters of bomb

44:47

power, the sense that the

44:49

construction of this this vast apparatus

44:52

had nothing to do with nuclear

44:54

safety, one of the

44:56

most Orwellian, euphemisms of the Cold

44:58

War period, it was actually to

45:00

create the infrastructure of nuclear threat.

45:03

And that threat was consciously and

45:05

deliberately deployed to a horrifying extent

45:07

again and again. He does

45:10

so much to say about this. And I

45:12

just want to impress upon listeners that what

45:14

we're describing, Wills does not present it

45:16

as kind of like, airy

45:18

theory, right, or speculation. It's a

45:21

very concrete book. In fact, it's

45:23

written almost unlike any of

45:25

his other books, it's only about 200

45:27

pages. It's an extraordinarily dense book. I

45:29

actually remember one of my

45:31

parents reading this book in

45:33

the car driving from Chicago

45:35

back to our family in Cleveland, and

45:38

saying something like, I usually like reading

45:40

Gary's writing, but this is almost

45:43

unreadable. Because the sheer density

45:45

of information and dry bureaucratic

45:48

detail that suffuses this book

45:50

is overwhelming. It's fair to

45:52

say that Gary comes with receipts, as we

45:54

say these days right in this book, you

45:57

know, lists of actions that

45:59

the executive branch took or statutes

46:01

executive orders that wars prosecuted who's

46:04

done assassination attempts there's a few

46:06

of these details I've just wanted

46:08

to kind of put out there

46:11

one of which was you can't

46:13

overstate the fact that the

46:15

development of the bomb meant

46:17

almost total reorganization especially the executive

46:20

branch but the military as well

46:23

and he describes how I thought

46:25

very fascinatingly our concept of the

46:27

president is being commander in chief

46:29

that for the first 150 years or

46:31

125 years of American history commander in

46:34

chief was not something really

46:37

played up as like a descriptor

46:39

or title of the president

46:41

the president wasn't saluted by the army

46:44

Reagan started that right points

46:46

out if I remember it really

46:48

was a term that was used

46:50

in military conflicts to refer to

46:52

someone who is designated as the

46:55

commander of a certain theater of a war

46:58

it might not be the person who's in charge of

47:00

the whole war not necessarily that the

47:02

top-ranking general it's just that in a

47:05

certain situation there's a person there who

47:07

then is in a certain position

47:09

in the command system which is

47:12

a temporary designation and not

47:14

you're in charge of the entire military the

47:16

term did not carry the

47:18

emphasis that it does now on

47:21

him being the ultimate decider about

47:23

military matters well and even beyond

47:25

military matters I mean I think

47:27

that Gary really sort of calls

47:29

bullshit on the total insanity

47:31

of the way that this term is

47:33

often deployed I mean when people say

47:35

commander in chief they often mean dictator

47:38

if he chooses to be like

47:40

not only does it refer to this sort

47:42

of absolute authority over

47:44

all military matters the ability to

47:47

initiate war even though that

47:49

power is relegated explicitly to Congress and

47:51

the Constitution but there's almost this sense

47:53

of commander in chief means for Bush

47:55

it to decide her people talk

47:57

about your commander in chief and this is

48:00

something he really goes to great lengths to

48:02

say, the president is no civilians commander in

48:04

chief. Right, exactly. He actually

48:06

describes writing that op-ed for the

48:09

New York Times where he says

48:11

that in all the hate mail he

48:13

got. How dare you disrespecting the military

48:15

and your commander in chief? Yeah, your

48:17

commander in chief. That's something

48:20

that has just entered our political

48:22

vernacular, but the idea is totally

48:24

horrifying. The president is not any

48:26

civilians commander in chief. What are you talking about?

48:28

The only way to construe that idea is

48:30

in this really creepy dictatorial way. That

48:32

actually is often to fact. At the

48:34

end of the book, Gary ties it

48:36

to the more or less wiretapping of

48:39

civilians. If you

48:41

think the president is commander in

48:43

chief over everyone, then yeah, of

48:45

course the president has the ability

48:47

to monitor civilian behavior and private

48:49

activity. The slippery slope,

48:51

he shows it's not just a

48:54

logical matter, but it's

48:56

really how materially it's played out.

48:58

Yes. I just want to impress this upon listeners.

49:01

We're in a season, right, of

49:03

primary debates and pretty soon, unbelievably,

49:06

we'll be in a presidential election year. Doesn't

49:08

seem possible. Speaking

49:10

of demonic forces. Yes, but

49:12

seriously, just listen to

49:14

the rhetoric of Trump and

49:17

Biden and at this point, anyone else who's

49:19

running for president, when they say something like,

49:22

my number one priority or my

49:24

main task as president and commander

49:26

in chief is to keep you

49:29

safe. Adopting

49:31

the most important aspect of being

49:33

president, commander in chief permanently, one

49:36

reason that goes so wrong, it

49:38

really becomes clear when Gary spells

49:41

out the ways in which the

49:44

logic of bomb power, there's no

49:47

natural end to it. It

49:49

just kind of metastasizes and

49:52

necessitates America to be a

49:54

global empire. For example, this

49:56

is early in the book in a chapter called the

49:58

care and keeping of the bomb. Great title for

50:00

a chapter. After the war,

50:02

arrangements of this sort would be multiplied

50:05

a thousand times as the

50:07

Strategic Air Command, which was started

50:09

anew after World War II to

50:12

deal specifically with our atomic weapons,

50:15

set up bases in foreign countries

50:17

for the servicing of its nuclear

50:19

cargo planes, which operated on a

50:21

24-hour basis every day. Besides

50:23

strategically located bases, a steady supply of

50:25

oil had to be secured to keep

50:27

our air empire running at peak efficiency.

50:30

Then, when the arsenal was expanded

50:32

to include tactical nuclear forces, bases

50:34

for them had to be secured

50:37

around the world. With the advent

50:39

of ICBMs, observation and guidance satellites

50:41

had to be launched in space.

50:43

All this apparatus was directly descended

50:45

from General Groves' private air force,

50:48

the first nuclear delivery system. General

50:50

Groves, one of the people involved with writing

50:53

the Manhattan Project. I

50:55

think that kind of paragraph, you

50:57

just see what kind of follows from

50:59

bomb power and the kind of insatiable,

51:02

metastasizing demands

51:04

it makes on our government. I

51:07

found this an extremely powerful account

51:09

of American empire from an angle

51:11

that I hadn't really considered

51:14

before. Speaking of insatiable, metastasizing

51:16

forces, I mean, even though

51:19

Gary himself would definitely not take this

51:21

step, I think that it's possible to

51:23

harmonize this account with a

51:25

more kind of economically materialist sort of

51:28

Marxist account of the development of American

51:30

empire in the post-war period. Because

51:33

part of what makes this pill

51:35

go down so smooth is that every

51:38

step in the process in that paragraph that

51:40

you're just reading, a lot of money is

51:42

changing hands at each stage of this, the

51:45

extraction of oil, natural resources, the

51:47

building of all these submarines, the

51:49

missiles. I mean, part of the

51:52

reason why I think it's not

51:54

even a question for American

51:57

policymakers is because it's well

51:59

understood that. Going down the

52:01

bomb-powered road making this deal with the devil there

52:03

are a lot of people who are gonna make

52:05

a lot of money from this well look at

52:07

what people like Lindsey Graham are saying about Ukraine

52:09

funding or others are saying about totally

52:12

unfettered funding for Israel even

52:14

amid this war that even

52:16

now the bite administration admits

52:19

is Awful and terrible for

52:21

civilians Lindsey Graham will literally

52:23

say basically the Ukraine funding is good

52:25

for America because a lot of people

52:27

get to Get to work building the

52:30

missiles and weapons that we're sending

52:32

over there and that logic of

52:34

the military industrial side

52:36

of our imperial Projects

52:39

is just like always baked into the

52:41

cake and every so often it's stated

52:43

much more plainly than at other times

52:45

But of course like you know the

52:47

one kind of Keynesianism that survives in

52:49

America basically is military Keynesianism I

52:51

want to read one more short passage from the

52:54

chapter on the care and keeping of the

52:56

bomb Again kind of to give listeners a

52:59

sense of the way wills argues here and

53:01

Sam you kind of mentioned part of this

53:03

quote Earlier, it's a paragraph that

53:05

begins with Lodging the quote fate

53:07

of the world in one man with no

53:10

constitutional check on his actions caused

53:12

a violent break in our whole

53:14

Governmental system. This is the

53:16

key part. I want to pick up with

53:18

Presidents now have it as part of their

53:20

permanent assignment meaning that fate of the world

53:22

in their hands This was in effect a

53:24

quiet revolution It was

53:27

accepted under the impression that technology imposed

53:29

it as a harsh necessity In

53:32

case of nuclear attack on the United States

53:34

the president would not have time to consult

53:36

Congress or instruct the public He must respond

53:39

instantly which means that he must

53:41

have the whole scientific apparatus for

53:43

response on constant alert Accountable

53:46

only to him which looms still so

53:48

large I mean, I can't be the

53:50

only one who still his nightmares about

53:52

the sort of like red phone commercial

53:56

2016 presidential election. This is not somebody who

53:58

should be handed the nuclear codes, you

54:00

have to ask yourself, do I want

54:02

a person of that temperament control the

54:05

nuclear codes? And as of now,

54:07

I have to say no. In

54:10

every presidential campaign, the rhetoric is

54:13

always you are electing the person

54:15

who, without

54:17

any, you know, accountability or checks,

54:19

has the ability to decide whether

54:21

or not to destroy the world.

54:24

And this is just acceptable. Maybe the listeners have

54:26

already picked up on this. And this isn't the

54:29

only way that the logic operates. But one way

54:31

that it does is if you are investing this

54:33

person, the president, with the power to destroy the

54:35

entire world, then why shouldn't

54:37

you invest him with the power to torture

54:40

people abroad in CIA black

54:43

sites or assassinate individuals around

54:45

the world or topple governments?

54:47

Or even something much more mundane,

54:49

like eviscerating an executive branch regulatory

54:51

agency that Congress created. Yeah, exactly.

54:53

Like if this person is vested

54:56

with the authority and supposedly the

54:58

appropriate conscience to make a decision

55:00

about whether nuclear Holocaust will be

55:02

inflicted upon the planet Earth, then

55:04

of course they have the authority

55:07

and the moral competence to decide

55:09

whether to gut the EPA. I

55:11

mean, it is striking when you

55:13

really think back how

55:16

often the case against Trump

55:18

being elected president was

55:20

kind of litigated in the terms of

55:23

we can't have the sky as our commander in chief, right?

55:25

Is this the person we want as our commander in chief?

55:27

And just listen, listen to how

55:30

often candidates describe their responsibilities as

55:32

president as being the person you

55:34

trust with the nuclear codes. The

55:36

nuclear codes, yes. Which

55:38

is true, of course. The

55:40

idea of Donald Trump being able to

55:42

destroy the world at a moment's notice

55:44

is unthinkable. I mean, it's literally incomprehensible.

55:48

But of course the obvious implication is that this

55:50

is an incredibly fucked up state of affairs that

55:52

we don't need to tolerate. And one more point

55:54

I want to make here about one of those

55:57

moments where you think, ah, makes

56:00

sense, which is the

56:02

way bomb power being lodged

56:04

in the presidency specifically, it's

56:06

encouraged rather than the constitutional

56:08

kind of order of succession

56:11

like White House chiefs

56:13

of staff. There was this moment

56:15

where Wills is describing in the

56:17

70s Rumsfeld and Cheney being

56:19

taken to kind of undisclosed

56:21

location to kind of practice

56:24

their role in war games should

56:26

some kind of nuclear exchange unfold.

56:28

And it's like, what the hell

56:30

is the chief of staff doing

56:32

with any of this? But it

56:34

gets back to the logic of

56:36

bomb power being solely lodged in

56:39

the presidency and executive branch after

56:41

9-11. Dick Cheney, he's vice president, not chief

56:43

of staff, but you know, he gave the order

56:45

to shoot down that plane. And it didn't happen

56:47

because the plane crashed before then, it was taken

56:49

down before then. But he lied

56:51

and said, actually, you know, I'd cleared that

56:53

with Bush, we know that's a lie now.

56:56

And it's kind of if you're in the

56:58

White House or kind of in the inner

57:00

circle, the executive branch, whatever the constitutional line

57:02

of succession calls for, in

57:05

practice, it's basically a kind

57:07

of small coterie in the

57:09

White House, president, possibly the vice

57:11

president, depending if it's something like Cheney or not,

57:13

the White House chief of staff, that's

57:15

just controlling our nuclear weapons now,

57:18

like whatever the Constitution says, or

57:20

how we think that should unfold,

57:22

or how we imagine the Constitution

57:24

prescribing that unfold, in practice, it's

57:26

going to be like a crony

57:28

of the president who has the

57:30

nuclear codes. And the precise details,

57:32

importantly, for Gary's argument, are secret.

57:35

We don't actually know. And this

57:37

is another point that Ellsberg's revelations

57:40

in the 2010s, after

57:42

the publication of this book,

57:44

again, I think really corroborate

57:46

this discovery of exactly how

57:48

inscrutable and unaccountable the actual

57:51

decision making about nuclear use was. And

57:53

so again, this is from the Doomsday

57:56

Machine. As I discovered in my

57:58

command and control research in the late 50s, President

58:00

Eisenhower had secretly delegated authority

58:03

to initiate nuclear attacks to

58:05

his theater commanders under various

58:07

circumstances, including the outage of

58:09

communications with Washington, a daily

58:12

occurrence in the Pacific, or a

58:14

presidential incapacitation, which Eisenhower suffered twice.

58:17

And with his authorization, they

58:19

had in turn delegated this

58:21

initiative under comparable crisis conditions

58:23

to subordinate commanders. He

58:26

goes on to say that when Kennedy

58:28

was elected, he briefed Kennedy on how

58:30

unbelievably disastrous the system

58:32

was. And Kennedy totally

58:35

blew him off and decided to essentially continue

58:37

the same structure. So there's this kind of

58:39

like nesting doll of bomb power. The

58:42

president secretly delegates to his cronies, who

58:44

secretly delegate to their cronies, all the

58:46

way down to the point that you

58:48

have potentially a random guy

58:50

in the military who no one knows, who

58:52

through this convoluted bureaucratic series of events has

58:55

acquired the ability to initiate a nuclear strike.

58:57

I mean this is part of the animus

58:59

for Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's great

59:01

satirical film. Right. Well, I would

59:03

like to talk a little bit

59:05

more about secrecy. There's two

59:08

things that I wanted to get at

59:10

here that Wills demonstrates so well about,

59:12

you know, how bomb power necessitates secrecy,

59:14

but then also what the purpose of

59:16

secrecy really is. There's one thing that

59:18

he says a few times, which I

59:20

think is just, it's great. It's so

59:22

clear once he presents it, which is that military

59:25

secrets, you know, they are justified

59:27

by the necessity of keeping them

59:30

from our enemies, right? Like our enemies must

59:32

not know about the sources and methods we

59:35

might use on them or that we are

59:37

using on them in terms of surveillance tools

59:39

and whatnot, drones or whatever. But really the

59:41

secrecy is not about fooling the enemy, who

59:44

tends to know what's going on, especially they're

59:46

being subject to military action. It's

59:48

for fooling Congress and the American people. And

59:50

he has that great moment where he describes

59:53

the Dunesbury cartoon. Yes. He says his favorite

59:55

Dunesbury cartoon from November 10th 1973, which is

59:57

when the quote-unquote

59:59

secret bombing of Cambodia was revealed

1:00:01

and in the comic you see

1:00:03

this Cambodian couple surrounded by rubble

1:00:06

and the American guy says, oh

1:00:08

you wretched soul did this happen

1:00:10

during the secret bombing? And the

1:00:12

guy responds, secret bombings? Boy

1:00:14

there wasn't any secret about them. Everyone here

1:00:16

knew. I said, look Martha

1:00:18

here come the bombs. And

1:00:20

she says, yeah he did say that. So

1:00:23

there's that which is like reducto ad absurdum you

1:00:25

know but it's so true. They talked about this

1:00:27

with the Bay of Pigs and the various efforts

1:00:30

to assassinate Castro too that Kennedy

1:00:32

initiated or performed which is that

1:00:34

like you know they all knew

1:00:36

that they were trying to

1:00:38

kill Castro and people around him and

1:00:40

people talked and blah blah blah they

1:00:42

knew about it but the American public

1:00:45

didn't know about it and it's about

1:00:47

regenerating that lack of accountability from the

1:00:49

public and from Congress. Classification it's really

1:00:51

it's raison d'etre. The other thing I

1:00:53

wanted to say is just

1:00:55

about how Will really does preempt a lot

1:00:58

of the discussions that we were gonna have

1:01:00

when the Snowden revelations came out

1:01:02

about overclassification. Matt knows this but

1:01:05

I worked with my boss Bart

1:01:07

Gelman on his book about Snowden

1:01:10

and spent several years just very immersed

1:01:12

in that story and in some of

1:01:14

the files, a lot of the

1:01:16

files. And I mean one of the hilarious

1:01:19

things is just how absurd actually the overclassification

1:01:21

is such that like Bart would always

1:01:23

tell this story about this document that he has

1:01:25

that's marked secret classified for

1:01:27

those with a certain level of security

1:01:30

clearance only which is a manual produced

1:01:32

by the Navy about doing laundry and

1:01:34

dry cleaning. So it

1:01:37

is considered a state secret which only

1:01:40

people with a certain level of classification

1:01:42

are allowed to see how

1:01:44

it's recommended to members of the Navy how they do

1:01:46

their laundry and there's absurd examples like that all over

1:01:48

the place. You know and that's silly

1:01:50

but I do want to just point out

1:01:53

because Will sort of gestures towards this logic

1:01:55

but I think it can be drawn out

1:01:57

even more about how secrecy and sort of

1:01:59

clearance system and classification, how distinctly

1:02:02

corrosive it is to the democratic

1:02:04

system. And this is something I thought about a lot

1:02:06

when we were working on the Snowden stuff, because

1:02:08

when the uses and the practices of

1:02:10

a program, say a surveillance tool, are

1:02:12

secret, its operators, the people

1:02:14

who use it, whether in the NSA

1:02:16

or the CIA, DNI, its operators can

1:02:18

always tell Congress and the public, look,

1:02:21

this thing is saving American lives. It's

1:02:23

totally crucial to American security. But

1:02:25

also because of the logical classification,

1:02:28

they can't and shouldn't reveal how

1:02:30

or when or why the program

1:02:32

has been so indispensable. Because

1:02:35

that would reveal its quote unquote sources and

1:02:37

methods and render it unuseful in the

1:02:39

future. So even when CIA and NSA

1:02:41

officials have to testify in front of

1:02:43

Congress, in front of the intelligence committees,

1:02:45

they usually can't reveal how

1:02:48

and when and why these programs are so

1:02:50

useful. They just assert it. And

1:02:52

the assertion has to be enough. Even when

1:02:54

they show small amounts of

1:02:56

classified material to a small set of

1:02:58

cleared congressmen, people who are usually

1:03:01

on the intelligence committee, which purport to demonstrate

1:03:03

the usefulness of this or that program, then

1:03:05

it's these guys who come out and tell the public

1:03:07

and the rest of Congress, well, look, it's true. I

1:03:10

saw the program is keeping us safe. I can't tell

1:03:12

you how, but it is. And of

1:03:14

course, there are all kinds of reasons not to take their word

1:03:16

for that either. It's obviously not

1:03:18

democratic for some secret cleric person who's

1:03:20

initiated into this world to come out

1:03:22

and tell you, yes, it's keeping you

1:03:24

safe, but we're not going to debate

1:03:26

it. But also, they may not be

1:03:28

really in a position to assess the

1:03:30

information curated for them by intelligence officials.

1:03:32

That certainly happens. These guys are not

1:03:34

all the smartest guys in the world, and

1:03:36

they're not certainly not necessarily super savvy

1:03:39

about how it certainly signals

1:03:41

intelligence works because it's so complicated now.

1:03:44

But then also the members of the

1:03:46

intelligence committee oversight committees, they tend to

1:03:48

be really well connected to the intelligence

1:03:50

committee. They represent districts where CIA and

1:03:53

NSA employees work. They tend

1:03:55

to get lots of money from military and

1:03:57

surveillance industries, and they might just be sympathetic

1:03:59

to code. over activity in general, that's why

1:04:01

they wanted to be on the Intelligence Committee.

1:04:03

It's a powerful place to be, you know,

1:04:05

you're on the inside. And of

1:04:07

course, a member of Congress, depending on his or

1:04:09

her position, just really might be much

1:04:11

more likely to like give the Intelligence Community the benefit

1:04:13

of the doubt because the Intelligence Community is always going

1:04:16

to tell Congress, if we don't have this tool anymore,

1:04:18

the next attack is going to be your fault if

1:04:20

you take it away from us. And

1:04:22

you know, like the general public and maybe the

1:04:24

rest of Congress, they might

1:04:26

assess the proper balance between

1:04:28

security and liberty, you know,

1:04:31

transparency and safety in

1:04:33

a different way if given the opportunity to

1:04:36

do so, but they're not given the opportunity

1:04:38

to do so. And I think that one

1:04:40

implication that comes out of that is that

1:04:42

overclassification isn't just about trivial

1:04:45

documents that are kept classified, but

1:04:47

often the most significant outrages in

1:04:50

classification are not really

1:04:52

grave matters. Or super embarrassing things

1:04:54

too, just awful things. Dan Ellsberg

1:04:57

tells the story of being

1:04:59

handed early in the Kennedy administration,

1:05:01

a memo marked

1:05:04

top secret for the President's eyes

1:05:06

only that presented the

1:05:08

Joint Chiefs estimate of

1:05:10

the immediate death toll from

1:05:13

a US nuclear first strike

1:05:16

on the Soviet Union, which estimated

1:05:18

instantly like essentially on the first

1:05:20

day, 275 million people dead. So

1:05:25

obviously that's not like laundry routines. But

1:05:27

from my point of view, that could

1:05:29

not be more important for us to

1:05:32

know exactly. And you can't

1:05:34

have a democracy if people don't

1:05:36

know that those are the stakes.

1:05:38

You genuinely cannot have, and this

1:05:40

is the implication of Wilson's argument,

1:05:42

you cannot have democratic oversight of

1:05:44

a secret program. You just can't.

1:05:47

I mean, you can see this absurdity with the

1:05:49

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which is a FISA

1:05:51

court, which is a secret court,

1:05:54

which authorizes blanket warrants for

1:05:56

surveillance inside the US when

1:05:58

it's connected to... quote-unquote

1:06:00

foreign intelligence information foreign powers or agents

1:06:02

of foreign powers suspected of espionage or

1:06:04

terrorism So these are the warrants for

1:06:07

domestic surveillance So it's it's presumed that

1:06:09

this person has a connection to a

1:06:11

foreign power They're in communication with foreign

1:06:13

powers the warrant has to meet a

1:06:15

plausibility level. That's less than reasonable doubt

1:06:17

It's more forgiving, but also this is

1:06:19

a court that operates in secret, right?

1:06:22

Like in practice we now know it

1:06:24

operates practically speaking as a rubber stamp

1:06:26

for these warrants Like I have some

1:06:28

statistics during the 25 years from 1979 to 2004 18,742

1:06:34

warrants were granted by the FISA court

1:06:36

only four were rejected and fewer than

1:06:39

200 requests had to be

1:06:41

modified Before they were accepted and most of

1:06:43

those happened once this started to become a

1:06:45

scandal during the Bush years I mean we

1:06:47

know that now it's not really providing scrutiny

1:06:50

But if we didn't know that if you assume maybe

1:06:52

sometimes they do reject these warrants They're not just a

1:06:54

rubber stamp The logic of

1:06:56

a secret court like it doesn't provide

1:06:59

oversight because we can't know it's a

1:07:01

black box We don't know really what

1:07:03

these warrants are for and why they're

1:07:05

justified They're being justified in secret to

1:07:08

people who'd make decisions in secret about

1:07:10

whether they're appropriate And then

1:07:12

this all extends as Will's shows from the

1:07:14

logic the original logic of the bomb You

1:07:17

know every so often something like Snowden comes along

1:07:19

and we have a big conversation about

1:07:21

this Reminded of this basic fact that

1:07:24

you can't have democratic oversight of secrets

1:07:26

But the logic of bomb power is such that as

1:07:29

you said Eric like the most Important

1:07:31

things that our government does that

1:07:34

have to do with life and death that

1:07:36

have to do with our freedom liberty Whether

1:07:38

or not our bodies and our minds

1:07:41

are being surveilled and sifted through by

1:07:43

the government These are precisely the things

1:07:45

that we are not allowed to have

1:07:48

any oversight or we're not allowed to know about and

1:07:50

we're not allowed Use our democratic

1:07:52

voice to oppose. I mean, it's just

1:07:54

this profound Hole in

1:07:56

the center of the delusion that we really

1:07:58

have about

1:10:00

America as a leading light of

1:10:03

freedom in the world, America's kind

1:10:06

of civilizational mission, all

1:10:08

of the sort of neoconservative justifications

1:10:11

for the state. I

1:10:13

mean, he just thinks that this is so unbelievably

1:10:16

hypocritical that the

1:10:18

notion that there's are any kind of higher principles

1:10:21

operating here are just absurd. And again,

1:10:23

this is a theme that runs throughout all of his writing.

1:10:25

I was recalling there's a 1975 essay that

1:10:29

he wrote in Esquire about a trip

1:10:31

that he took to Israel after the 1973 war,

1:10:34

where he says, ruefully,

1:10:38

Israel has made war glamorous again, a

1:10:40

hideous gift to bring us the new

1:10:43

chivalry. And I think that

1:10:45

that's, again, from this Augustinian perspective, the

1:10:47

idea that there's anything kind of divine

1:10:50

and moral elevated about

1:10:53

the operation of war. He

1:10:55

thinks that that is just an incredibly,

1:10:57

incredibly dangerous idea. And

1:11:00

I think he's right about that. I mean, again, the Augustinian

1:11:02

tradition has a just war theory

1:11:05

often, even if a war is

1:11:07

justifiable or inevitable in

1:11:10

some sense, investing it with a

1:11:12

kind of higher sense of righteousness, planes

1:11:14

have been crossed. There's

1:11:17

sort of two distinct levels of

1:11:19

reality that have been fused

1:11:22

in that investment of state power

1:11:24

and military force with this kind

1:11:27

of moral valence. And I think that's

1:11:29

very close to the heart of

1:11:31

Gary's spiritual and religious worldview. And

1:11:33

to me, it's admirable that he's

1:11:35

willing to draw those, I think,

1:11:37

clear political implications of those principles

1:11:40

for analyzing the post-war American state.

1:11:42

I kind of want to get

1:11:44

at something that might not be

1:11:46

Augustinian in particular, but I

1:11:48

think it is a part of the

1:11:50

kind of Catholic intellectual milieu

1:11:53

that Wills was engaged with. When

1:11:56

we were talking about his book

1:11:58

on the Kennedys, the Kennedy and

1:12:00

Prison. And I did bring up

1:12:02

a couple times this book of

1:12:04

his called, Baroon Choirs, written in

1:12:06

the 70s about radical religion, prophecy,

1:12:08

secularization, all that. And

1:12:10

I didn't really realize this, or I'm not sure

1:12:12

I would have picked up on maybe the importance

1:12:15

of this milieu for Wills's

1:12:17

thinking if I hadn't been an editor

1:12:19

at Commonweal. And that is

1:12:21

to say, an issue that becoming

1:12:24

Catholic changed my mind about,

1:12:27

or that because I kind

1:12:29

of immersed myself in a

1:12:31

particular Catholic tradition, I became

1:12:34

convicted about is the dropping

1:12:36

of the atom bombs on

1:12:38

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I

1:12:40

don't know. It's one of those things. I don't

1:12:42

know how often I thought about it. I think

1:12:44

for a long time, especially as a young conservative,

1:12:46

I just kind of accepted, OK, Truman

1:12:49

did this to save lives. We would have

1:12:51

had to invade. And the Japanese always

1:12:54

taught you they were sharpening sticks to

1:12:56

fight off invaders to their last

1:12:58

dying breath. And so we had to nuke them. And

1:13:00

I just kind of, for many years, accepted

1:13:03

that. And it was, I think, being

1:13:05

editor at Commonweal and really rethinking

1:13:07

some of these things, I appreciated Wills's

1:13:09

book more because of that. And

1:13:11

I specifically want to mention one

1:13:14

of the great kind of antagonists

1:13:16

of Truman's dropping of the atom

1:13:18

bombs was a Catholic philosopher named

1:13:21

Elizabeth Ansco. And I don't

1:13:24

agree with all of her positions. But there was

1:13:26

a point after Truman was president in the 50s,

1:13:28

1957, when Oxford was going to give him

1:13:32

an honorary degree, President Truman, that is.

1:13:35

And Anscombe opposed that decision

1:13:37

by Oxford because she had

1:13:39

really thought through the morality of the atom

1:13:42

bomb when it meant to drop it. This

1:13:44

was not acceptable. And so Truman should not

1:13:46

be given this award. It was a bit

1:13:48

of a controversy. But a few

1:13:50

years ago, back in 2020, George Weigel, a

1:13:53

right wing kind of neocon Catholic,

1:13:56

wrote some column for some reason defending the

1:13:59

bombing. of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And we published

1:14:01

a common wheel, it's called False Choices

1:14:04

by John Schlenkler and Mark Suva, both

1:14:06

philosophers. I just wanna read one bit

1:14:09

of it because I think

1:14:11

this gets at the backdrop to where

1:14:13

wheels is coming from. In

1:14:15

this piece, the writers mentioned that

1:14:17

Answam corresponded with people who had

1:14:21

gotten atom bomb sickness after the dropping

1:14:23

of the atom bombs in Japan. This

1:14:25

one guy in particular wrote to her and

1:14:28

he says, you know, I was pretty normal until 1947. And

1:14:31

then he was hospitalized for months at a time.

1:14:34

And this is what the writers then comment

1:14:37

on that correspondence. People like this

1:14:39

man, meaning the man who wrote to

1:14:41

Elizabeth Anscombe describing how the

1:14:43

dropping of the atom bomb had destroyed his health.

1:14:46

People like this man and like those

1:14:48

whose faces we see in photographs and

1:14:50

videos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the

1:14:52

wake of what Weigel, again George Weigel

1:14:55

calls Truman's quote, terrible choice, are

1:14:57

made in the image and likeness of God. Such

1:15:00

is the teaching of our church. And

1:15:02

it is for this reason that we

1:15:04

are strictly forbidden to kill an innocent

1:15:06

human being, no matter the consequences of

1:15:08

not doing so. To

1:15:10

conduct a war by murderous means

1:15:13

is to call down God's vengeance

1:15:15

upon us. And I

1:15:17

think Gary Wills fears God. And

1:15:21

does not want God's vengeance to come

1:15:23

down upon us because of the

1:15:25

wickedness of this weapon. I would go even further.

1:15:28

I would say that in a way he thinks

1:15:30

that it has. I mean, perhaps the most Augustinian

1:15:32

part of this book actually is the extent to

1:15:34

which it's very much it's an

1:15:36

original sin narrative. It's a story of

1:15:38

original sin and of the wages of

1:15:40

sin which are death, which

1:15:42

has multiplied without end, without

1:15:44

bound, which ultimately leads, I

1:15:46

mean, Gary to a very pessimistic place.

1:15:48

I mean, you do have a sense

1:15:50

that he, like Augustine, he

1:15:52

thinks that this sin

1:15:54

is not necessarily in our

1:15:57

purely voluntary ability to atone

1:15:59

for. to expurg. I

1:16:01

mean, I think it's important, as does

1:16:03

Gary, to still fight anyways to do

1:16:05

the best that we can. But

1:16:07

I think that there is also something valuable

1:16:10

in that sense that we can never pretend

1:16:12

that the bombs weren't dropped in

1:16:14

act that morally grave has certain

1:16:17

fundamental consequences that we can't wish away.

1:16:19

And again, I think about

1:16:21

the remark of Netanyahu's that we discussed

1:16:23

earlier, the fact that the

1:16:26

United States put its moral impermeiture

1:16:28

on this act of extraordinary

1:16:31

civilian murder. That's a fact that we

1:16:33

can't pretend isn't out there. And Eric,

1:16:35

I just want to underscore and reiterate

1:16:37

your point about this book, Bomb Power,

1:16:39

kind of being in its own way

1:16:41

an original sin narrative in the sense

1:16:43

of, as we discussed

1:16:45

earlier, the very creation of

1:16:47

this weapon, the

1:16:50

origin story of it. From

1:16:52

that flowed all the

1:16:54

problems and lies and secrecy and

1:16:57

death and destruction that we've been

1:16:59

describing this entire episode, like

1:17:02

the seeds of destruction were sown in

1:17:04

the very moment the bomb was created

1:17:06

and the structures created around it to

1:17:09

produce it and allow it to be

1:17:11

used. You just see the

1:17:13

way they work themselves out over time again

1:17:15

and again in this book, kind of a

1:17:17

seed planted in the first pages of this

1:17:19

book in the Manhattan Project.

1:17:21

You see the inexorable working out

1:17:24

of them throughout this book. There

1:17:26

was a flaw from the beginning

1:17:28

that we can't paper over, we

1:17:31

can't expiate, we can't get around.

1:17:33

And because of the witness of

1:17:35

specifically Catholic thinkers like Anscombe,

1:17:38

like the Berican brothers, like

1:17:41

Gary Wills, like Dorothy Day, that

1:17:43

really influenced how I think about

1:17:45

this. And I lament that that

1:17:48

strain of Catholicism is almost

1:17:50

expired in the United States. You

1:17:52

see glimpses of it like, sorry

1:17:55

listeners, this is a little inside baseball, but

1:17:57

you might not be shocked to learn. I

1:17:59

don't love. many of the

1:18:01

bishops and archbishops and cardinals of the

1:18:03

American Church. One

1:18:05

of the people I truly,

1:18:07

truly admire is the

1:18:09

archbishop in New Mexico, John Wester,

1:18:12

who because, you know, so many of

1:18:14

the testing and research and

1:18:17

experiments around the development of the atom

1:18:19

bomb were in the Southwest. This

1:18:22

guy who's an archbishop in New Mexico,

1:18:24

he is an anti-nuclear activist.

1:18:27

He's written kind of, I don't

1:18:29

know what the equivalent of an encyclical is for

1:18:32

an archbishop, but you know, like a kind of

1:18:34

pastoral letter on abolishing nuclear

1:18:36

weapons. That tradition has

1:18:38

influenced me a lot, and

1:18:40

I think this is one of those books where

1:18:43

Wills' familiarity with,

1:18:46

and sometimes even involvement with, kind of Catholic

1:18:48

thinking about these things in that era is

1:18:50

really interesting, and I think you really see

1:18:52

the imprint of it in this book. Maybe

1:18:55

as a way of closing out, we forecasted earlier

1:18:57

that we were going to talk about this piece

1:18:59

that Eric wrote on Daniel Ellsberg

1:19:01

on the occasion of his death, and

1:19:04

as you guys were talking, I was thinking

1:19:06

about how a couple paragraphs in this piece

1:19:09

really kind of reflect precisely the kind of

1:19:11

moral quandary that you guys

1:19:13

are describing that Wills is pointing to

1:19:15

about how power corrupts and how our

1:19:18

fallenness necessitates certain kinds

1:19:20

of approaches to the problem

1:19:22

of power, and this is of course

1:19:24

Ellsberg translated through Eric Baker,

1:19:27

but it makes

1:19:29

Ellsberg sound like an Augustinian. I

1:19:32

also think this is a good place to close

1:19:34

out because I think that the way that Eric

1:19:36

talks about this in this piece does speak to

1:19:38

the kinds of moral quandaries

1:19:41

that our listeners might be more likely

1:19:43

to encounter than say, if they work

1:19:45

in the Department of State. Well,

1:19:47

maybe some people who work in the

1:19:49

Department of State are listening. You're right.

1:19:51

Ellsberg's example is an enduring challenge not

1:19:53

only to the resentful complacency of the

1:19:55

silent majority, but to a left that

1:19:57

has come increasingly to tolerate middle-class career-

1:20:00

compromise in the half-country since Ellsberg's

1:20:02

prosecution. It's not our fault exactly.

1:20:04

The unions were eviscerated, the black

1:20:06

revolutionaries were killed, the war resistors

1:20:08

were jailed, academics and nonprofit executives

1:20:11

filled the vacuum. That's

1:20:13

not to say that one can't be useful to

1:20:15

the cause with a PhD, thank God. As

1:20:18

evidence, witness the life of

1:20:20

one Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, but

1:20:22

it requires an uncommon ethos

1:20:24

of self- suspicion as Ellsberg

1:20:26

understood well. Then you quote

1:20:28

Ellsberg, I've come to realize the fear

1:20:30

of being cut out from the group of people

1:20:32

you respect and whose respect you want and normally

1:20:34

expect keeps people participating in anything no matter how

1:20:36

terrible. He said that in 2009, and you write

1:20:40

few of us are immune to that

1:20:42

fear and the rationalizations it brews in

1:20:44

the professional mind. You

1:20:46

go on, we shouldn't begrudge most people for wanting

1:20:48

to find a way to sleep at night, though

1:20:51

surely some could stand a bit more tossing

1:20:53

and turning. It is

1:20:55

more problematic when those rationalizations begin

1:20:58

to infect our collective reflection on

1:21:00

matters of political principle and strategy.

1:21:02

You say Ellsberg's fundamental insight was

1:21:05

not that it is impossible in

1:21:07

theory to use the machinery of

1:21:09

the American state to affect positive

1:21:11

change, but that people, smart well-intentioned

1:21:14

people especially, underestimate the moral confusion

1:21:16

that festers in the corridors of

1:21:18

power. DC bureaus are overflowing

1:21:20

with back slappers, happy to extol

1:21:22

the bravery of the most craven

1:21:24

political decision-making. The cafeterias all serve

1:21:27

lotus flowers for lunch. Soon you

1:21:29

forget even that there is something

1:21:31

you have forgotten. Well, thanks, Em.

1:21:33

Yeah, I mean obviously I'm bringing

1:21:35

my own perspective shaped by reading

1:21:37

people like Gary at a formative

1:21:39

age, but that is very much

1:21:41

also the sense that I've always

1:21:43

gotten from engaging with

1:21:46

Ellsberg's thought and

1:21:48

life, and I think that it's an

1:21:50

important supplement, I think, to the perspective

1:21:52

that Gary provides in Bomb Power, that

1:21:54

so much of the sense of inertia that

1:21:57

he describes is greased

1:21:59

in... away by the

1:22:01

social dynamics and the personal

1:22:03

self-satisfaction that I tried to

1:22:05

describe in that passage that

1:22:07

Ellsberg talked about so frequently,

1:22:09

that one of the biggest

1:22:11

impediments to tackling and dismantling

1:22:13

bomb power is the difficulty

1:22:16

of reckoning with the

1:22:18

sheer monstrosity of what

1:22:21

we've done, of what we've constructed, of what

1:22:23

this country has become. It's not

1:22:25

easy. And Matt opened us

1:22:27

off by talking about, in a

1:22:29

sense, just how hard it is to really

1:22:32

take this book, Bomb Power, seriously,

1:22:35

to fully take on the

1:22:37

depth and the radicalness of the

1:22:39

critique that it levels, because

1:22:42

we don't want to confront the

1:22:44

possibility that we've been

1:22:46

living in a, from a

1:22:48

certain perspective, a certain kind of

1:22:51

military dictatorship for, at this point,

1:22:53

the better part of a century. But

1:22:55

being willing to look at that reality

1:22:58

squarely in the face, I think that that has to

1:23:00

be the first step. We're going to do anything about

1:23:03

it. Yeah. We must

1:23:05

all cultivate, as you write, an uncommon ethos

1:23:07

of self-suspicion. Yeah. I

1:23:09

was thinking, too, Eric, as you were speaking, in

1:23:12

our, I think, our mailbag episode,

1:23:14

Sam, we briefly kind of

1:23:16

addressed the situation in Israel

1:23:18

and Palestine. And I

1:23:20

invoked Hitchens, specifically

1:23:22

his fondness for a line of

1:23:25

George Orwell's, which is a

1:23:27

power of facing, like

1:23:29

being able to face the reality

1:23:32

of a situation. A power

1:23:34

that Christopher might have lost at the end there. Yes.

1:23:37

Yeah. Yeah. Speaking

1:23:39

of someone who perhaps lacked in ethos of self-suspicion. Yes.

1:23:42

Yeah. No doubt about that. But

1:23:44

I would just say the listeners, I mean,

1:23:46

Wilson's book is radical, radical in the truest

1:23:49

sense of like getting to the root. That's

1:23:52

what this book does. And it's both

1:23:54

convicting and revealing, but also I

1:23:56

feel like it was

1:23:58

enormously helpful to me. me to

1:24:01

have articulated by someone as intelligent

1:24:03

and perceptive as wills, the

1:24:06

way so many of the problems we're grappling

1:24:08

with now follow not just

1:24:10

from electing this person rather than

1:24:13

that person, the deficiencies or failures

1:24:15

of a particular individual

1:24:17

who holds this office of, as

1:24:20

we now say, commander in chief,

1:24:22

but the kind of structural problems,

1:24:25

the nature of the actual problem

1:24:28

being structural and it being again

1:24:30

this decades long working out

1:24:32

a bomb power which was

1:24:34

conceived in secrecy and

1:24:36

used viciously. So

1:24:38

this is a rare book in the sense

1:24:40

of how many books do you read that

1:24:42

kind of radically perhaps

1:24:45

change your understanding and view of

1:24:48

a situation. I encourage everyone to

1:24:50

read this book. It really was

1:24:52

incredibly revealing and impactful. It's

1:24:55

troubling in the sense that you

1:24:57

realize the problem is so massive

1:24:59

and extensive and so deeply entangled

1:25:02

with so many processes

1:25:04

and institutions and bureaucracies and I

1:25:07

don't know what to do with it other than

1:25:09

pray for forgiveness and dedicate

1:25:12

yourself to trying to undo

1:25:14

this monstrosity. Amen. Yeah,

1:25:17

amen. This is what to

1:25:19

me does sort of like link the discussion

1:25:21

of this book in Ellsberg because in some

1:25:23

ways, yes, it's this

1:25:26

enormous structural problem. He

1:25:28

writes about the commander in chief being

1:25:31

at this point in the book Obama as

1:25:33

a self-entangling giant, the classic

1:25:35

Will's paradox. Even at

1:25:37

some point, the president himself is

1:25:40

entangled and trapped, but at

1:25:42

the same time, the example of Ellsberg

1:25:44

who we all admire and which

1:25:46

Eric has written so eloquently about that's

1:25:49

the example of individual moral

1:25:51

witness and moral

1:25:53

fortitude does still matter. The

1:25:56

structures are the structures, but Daniel Ellsberg did what he

1:25:59

did. encouraged to

1:26:01

go along, to get along, to stay in

1:26:03

the good graces of the people that they

1:26:05

admire who hired them who seem to be

1:26:07

estimable. But every once in a while, people

1:26:09

have to do something else, and they do.

1:26:11

It happens every day. It's happening right now

1:26:13

in the American government with staffers

1:26:16

protesting for a ceasefire of

1:26:18

people quitting from the Biden

1:26:20

administration, hopefully more would, about

1:26:22

the posture towards Israel's war.

1:26:24

And maybe as just the kind of amusing,

1:26:26

but I think revealing example of the

1:26:29

ways that Gary Wills embodied that same impulse

1:26:31

that you can't always just go along to

1:26:33

get along. I'm sure you guys are both

1:26:35

familiar with this story where he was, at

1:26:38

the beginning of the Obama administration, invited along

1:26:40

with other historians to come to the White

1:26:43

House to tell Obama how to be a

1:26:45

great president. And he said, if you

1:26:47

want to be a great president, you got to get out of Afghanistan.

1:26:49

It's going to be just like Vietnam. And

1:26:52

that wasn't taken very well. And he was not

1:26:54

invited back for the second meeting. But

1:26:57

sometimes you have to say that. back

1:27:02

to the party. Well, maybe we

1:27:04

should give Gary the last word here because

1:27:06

we read the first paragraph at the start

1:27:08

of the episode, but his last line here

1:27:10

is also, I think, a great

1:27:13

summary of what we've just been saying. He ends

1:27:15

it by saying, as Cyrano

1:27:17

said, one fights not only

1:27:19

in the hope of winning. Yeah,

1:27:22

that's right. Well, that

1:27:24

was a lot of fun. Yeah, indeed. Thank

1:27:28

you so much, Eric. Thanks so much for having

1:27:30

me on. Yeah, it was great and very meaningful

1:27:32

to be able to talk about this book. For

1:27:34

me too. Thanks, you guys. Thanks,

1:27:37

listeners. Catch you next time. Bye.

1:28:01

I'm

1:28:07

just a demon, I'm a

1:28:09

fool, I'm a mind, I'm

1:28:11

a crime, I'm a god,

1:28:13

I'm a son of a

1:28:15

whore.