The Shadow Cabinet Read Online Free PDF

said.
    â€œSo have I,” Wilson added, “and that’s why we’re sitting here chewing the fat, the Monday night losers. If you really wanted to get serious, you wouldn’t screw around with Bob Combs. Combs is nothing, just flat beer like they used to have down at Fort Bragg. In a couple of years no one is going to remember Combs any better than Wayne Morse, Dirksen, or the Dixiecrats. If you want to burn someone, go after Reagan—he’s the man you want. It’s easy. I mean, he’s a natural nitwit, a puddinghead, a stand-up comedian. You want to do something, show him up for the idiot he is? I’ll tell you how to do it.”
    He had their attention now. Even Nick Straus sat forward.
    â€œYou get him to go on television, right out in the open, say a televised press conference. All one-liners, like the Johnny Carson show. So you get him to go on a national TV hookup and say something stupid—I mean something so dismally stupid that eighty million mom and pop Americans just sit there in their living rooms looking at each other like their ears just fell off. Just get him to go on television and say something like that, say a message to Brezhnev delivered over the CBS or NBC hot line, something like a kindergarten nursery rhyme, something like ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, stay out of El Salvador, Poland too.’ That’s all it takes. Just get him to do that and see what happens.”
    He stood up to pull on his raincoat.
    â€œBut he already said that,” Fuzzy pointed out.
    â€œYeah, I heard that one too,” Buster Foreman remembered.
    â€œSo you see what the problem is, don’t you?” Wilson asked. “When you’ve got the answer to that, give me a call. Come on, Nick, I’ll give you a lift.”
    The rain had slackened, the subdued rush dulled by the sounds of conversation in the front bar. A busboy was noisily stacking crates of beer bottles in the storage room.
    â€œTurn back to the goddamned football game,” Wilson heard Fuzzy say as he and Nick went out.
    â€œYeah, like always. Shove it,” Buster said.
    The two men drove out of the parking lot in Wilson’s twelve-year-old station wagon, trailing a pall of exhaust fumes over the damp pavement from worn piston rings and a leaky muffler.
    â€œThey get a little carried away sometimes,” said Nick Straus. “I’d always heard Foreman and Larson were full of eccentric ideas. I never had much contact with them. Frustrated, I suppose, like all of us.”
    â€œThey’re bored, just blowing off steam. What about you? How’s the Pentagon watch these days?”
    Nick Straus gave the question a moment’s thought. “Just as bad—idiotic, like the talk tonight. High-tech fixes, idiot gadgetry, technological determinism to explain Soviet intent—the same old Pentagon mythology.”
    In the late sixties and early seventies, when Wilson had moved to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Nick Straus had been his mentor, helping him better understand deterrent strategies, nuclear targeting policy, SALT, and the theodicy of the nuclear arms strategists.
    â€œYou mean if the Soviets get a new military technology, it means they’re going to use it,” Wilson said. “Capability equals intent.”
    â€œTo gain the advantage, that’s right. All the political or historical constraints go out the window. The same primitive fears, the same primitive mythology. But now it’s more dangerous. All this new Pentagon budget means is that they’re reviving the old containment strategy, containment everywhere. It’s lunacy.”
    Wilson eased the station wagon to a stop at an intersection. A fat, middle-aged jogger in nylon raingear lumbered slowly through the headlights, his feet barely lifted from the asphalt.
    â€œHe’s foolish,” Nick said softly, watching him disappear through the rain-ticked windshield.