Why Cap Is Wrong

FOR MOST of our history we have been able to count on public figures to contribute to our political maturation through memoirs dealing with their stewardship in office. Such records are necessarily biased, for they describe events from one person’s perspective. Yet, because most of our statesmen have been just that, and honest as well, such modest exaggerations and even errors as their testaments may include are forgivable. Paul Nitze’s recently published memoir of the cold war is an especially praiseworthy example of the genre. It provides a rich and instructive tableau of the evolution of both policy and process in our government during the past fifty years. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger made equally valuable contributions of serious scholarship. Not so for former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

The decade of the Eighties, during which Mr. Weinberger served, encompassed the most sweeping ideological change since the Russian Revolution, as well as countless lesser events deserving treatment by those involved. There is much to learn from Cabinetlevel perspectives on the collapse of Communism and the spread of democracy in the Eighties, or even from such ignominious episodes as the Iran-Contra affair. The latter event is treated in an excerpt from the secretary’s memoir, Fighting for Peace, in the May 14 issue of national review. The article is an astonishing, anti-intellectual, ad hominem tract; a mean-spirited assemblage of distortions and falsities, of which I am the chief though not the only target.

RM

About the Author

Robert McFarlane

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FOR MOST of our history we have been able to count on public figures to contribute to our political maturation through memoirs dealing with their stewardship in office. Such records are necessarily biased, for they describe events from one person’s perspective. Yet, because most of our statesmen have been just that, and honest as well, such modest exaggerations and even errors as their testaments may include are forgivable. Paul Nitze’s recently published memoir of the cold war is an especially praiseworthy example of the genre. It provides a rich and instructive tableau of the evolution of both policy and process in our government during the past fifty years. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger made equally valuable contributions of serious scholarship. Not so for former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

The decade of the Eighties, during which Mr. Weinberger served, encompassed the most sweeping ideological change since the Russian Revolution, as well as countless lesser events deserving treatment by those involved. There is much to learn from Cabinetlevel perspectives on the collapse of Communism and the spread of democracy in the Eighties, or even from such ignominious episodes as the Iran-Contra affair. The latter event is treated in an excerpt from the secretary’s memoir, Fighting for Peace, in the May 14 issue of national review. The article is an astonishing, anti-intellectual, ad hominem tract; a mean-spirited assemblage of distortions and falsities, of which I am the chief though not the only target.