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Title: In the Arena: A Memoir of the 20th Century by Caspar W. Weinberger, Gretchen Roberts ISBN: 0-89526-166-9 Publisher: Regnery Publishing Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Required Reading!
Comment: Upon the recent passing of one of our greatest Presidents, it makes sense to hear from perhaps the best Secretary of Defense (War) in our nation's history. Without boring the reader to death with details, suffice it to say that Caspar W. Weinberger took over our nation's defenses at the weakest they had been since 1939, transformed them into a world-class military power and probably prevented a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union as a consequence.
This autobiography is fascinating and understated, as Secretary Weinberger walks us through his career of public service beginning as an intelligence officer for General Douglas MacArthur to his 8 years of outstanding leadership as the boss over at the Pentagon. Reagan had a gift for picking the right people at the right time and Caspar Weinberger was at the head of his class.
You may be alive today, because of him.
Rating: 2
Summary: Don't Be Played For A Fool
Comment: Pity poor Cap Weinberger. Once a Renaissance Man, steeped in art, literature and music, he now spends his twilight years rewriting his legacy. "In The Arena" is a carefully crafted and minutely calculated piece of revisionist history written by a thoroughly corrupt politician beyond redemption. Even if you don't know the facts, Weinberger's prose gives him away, filled as it is with qualifiers, deliberate misstatements and classic Weinberger Distancing Maneuvers. An expert dissembler, Cap has scattered misleading scenarios and outright falsehoods all through the manuscript; it becomes tiresome. Are his memoirs worth reading? If you like being an armchair detective, absolutely. This book challenges discerning and informed readers to unravel a fascinating web of deceit and half-truths. It also contains interesting anecdotes from a simpler time and a glimpse into an honorable world that no longer exists. It's too bad Weinberger hasn't appropriated the values of that world into his own life.
Rating: 4
Summary: Fine memoir of an exemplary public servant
Comment: Caspar Weinberger is one the most intelligent man to have served in government in the past 20 years. He has written an interesting and at times moving account of his life at the centre of American public policy - but it lacks meat in his discussion of his government service, and therefore does not entirely do justice to the quality of his thinking. A further frustration with the book is that Weinberger clearly feels he has some debts of friendship to discharge, with the result that he has hardly a harsh word to say about anyone (save the zealous independent counsel and the feckless President Clinton). This is taken to extreme lengths with the long passages detailing the merits of his colleagues: perhaps they were all as good as Weinberger claims, but the editor's pencil should have gone through much of this.
Most readers will turn immediately to the chapters concerning Weinberger's office under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, but the earlier chapters recounting his active service in the Pacific and his early legislative career in Californian politics are well-written and engaging, and it would be a pity to miss them. He also has an excoriating chapter later in the book that recounts the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, in which he argues - convincingly, in my judgement - that an 'overzealous independent counsel' demeaned his office and damaged the American polity. Weinberger recounts, with greater pleasure, the award to him of an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth, primarily - and deservedly - for the assistance given to this country when we were liberating the Falkland Islands from Argentine imperialism in 1982.
Weinberger's account of his service as a budget-cutter and framer of social policy under Nixon, and as Defence Secretary under Reagan, makes up, ironically perhaps, the least satisfactory part of the book. There were conflicts within these administrations that Weinberger must have been central to, yet he gives no hint of them. Nixon was an activist President in domestic policy with a legislative programme that was far removed from the principles of fiscal conservatism that Reagan later espoused, yet the book gives no indication of what Weinberger thought of this. Weinberger praises Reagan's prosecution of the Cold War, yet his portrayal of Reagan's policies overstates their consistency. There were indeed two Reagans: the staunch anti-Communist, who with remarkable foresight predicted the end of Communism in Europe; and the idealist who openly favoured the abolition of nuclear weapons. In his book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger comments at length on this seeming contradiction, and some members of the Reagan administration (e.g. Kenneth Adelman) have also referred sceptically to Reagan's passionate belief in nuclear disarmament, yet Weinberger does not go deeply into the vicissitudes of Reagan's thinking at all. This is a shame. It seems almost certain that Weinberger was far more in accord with the views of Margaret Thatcher, who - rightly, in my view - maintained that nuclear disarmament would entail a highly unstable global order, than he was to Reagan's notion that missile defence would render nuclear weapons obsolete. (The tension in Reagan's policy is also well-discussed in Beth A.Fischer's 1997 book, The Reagan Reversal. I have never seen a comment on this thesis by a member of the administration, but it is clear that Reagan shifted his emphasis after about 1983, when he concentrated more on the risks of nuclear war.)
I have no doubt, however, of the highlight of the book. Weinberger recounts a debate he took part in at the Oxford Union in 1984 with the Marxist historian E.P.Thompson, then a leading figure in the British and European anti-nuclear movement. Weinberger gives a nice vignette of the debate - in which Thompson proposed the motion that there was no moral difference between the foreign policies of the United States and the Soviet Union - and quotes his own speech at length on the fundamental difference between an open society and a totalitarian one. Weinberger remarks accurately and with incontrovertible logic, "[Y]ou can't have a moral foreign policy if the people cannot control it."
I attended this debate and recall Weinberger's speech well. He was outstanding; to the surprise of many, and against the advice of the US Embassy not to take part, he won the debate. I was Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club at the time, when the Labour Party was far to the Left of where it stands now and was formally committed to removing American nuclear bases from British soil. I am relieved to recount that, having already made my break with the Marxist and anti-American Left, I had just enough grasp on reality to vote on Weinberger's side that evening. But never before had I heard so plausible and articulate a defence of western defence and foreign policy, and so principled a grounding of collective security in the very notion of political liberty. It is this aspect of Weinberger - his willingness to take on the intellectual arguments of his opponents, wherever they may be, and defeat them with cool rationality - that is a particularly attractive feature of the man. (Famously, Weinberger did the same with the historian Theodore Draper - a far more formidable critic of US defence policy than Thompson - in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where he presented a cogent and effective refutation of the many misconceptions Draper had been labouring under.)
This is, in summary, an interesting memoir by a good man and an immensely effective politician. But if you are looking for novel insights into the foreign and defence policies of the Reagan administration, you may be disappointed.
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Title: Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State by George P. Shultz ISBN: 0684193256 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 April, 1993 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon by Caspar W. Weinberger ISBN: 0446514810 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy by Alexander M. Haig ISBN: 0025473700 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Peter Schweizer ISBN: 0871136333 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Inner Circles: How America Changed the World : A Memoir by Alexander M., Jr. Haig ISBN: 044651571X Publisher: Warner Books Inc Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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