Laid on the Line

It is my guess that General Nathan F. Twining wrote his own book (Neither Liberty Nor Safety, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $6), and this makes it very nearly unique. You just don’t feel the sanitizing touch of the usual ghostly hand. It reads the way you would expect books by retired top echelon professional soldiers to read; though they seldom do: an item- by-item rather than organic structure; the style a combination of military estimate, bureaucratic memorandum and Officers Club talk, often stilted but blunt and sometimes imperious; a confident expertise. Since General Twining served not only as chief of the Air Force but, from 1957-60, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, his expertise covers national policy as well as all things military. General Twining lays it on the line.

What results is an informed, harshly reasoned, inside account of the cold war that—as it happens—parallels, supports and notably reinforces the account most of us who write on these matters in national review have given over the years. General Twining takes Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao and Lin seriously. He is therefore a hard anti-Com- munist, and a hard critic of the illusions of coexistence, appeasement, pacifism, disarmament and UNophilia. As a soldier within the American system he accepted the supremacy of the civil arm, and strove to adapt the military establishment to the directives laid down by the civil magistrates. But he does not hide his dissatisfaction with many of those directives, beginning with the National Security Council document (NSC- 68) of April 1950 that first articulated the policy of containment.

JB

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James Burnham

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It is my guess that General Nathan F. Twining wrote his own book (Neither Liberty Nor Safety, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $6), and this makes it very nearly unique. You just don’t feel the sanitizing touch of the usual ghostly hand. It reads the way you would expect books by retired top echelon professional soldiers to read; though they seldom do: an item- by-item rather than organic structure; the style a combination of military estimate, bureaucratic memorandum and Officers Club talk, often stilted but blunt and sometimes imperious; a confident expertise. Since General Twining served not only as chief of the Air Force but, from 1957-60, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, his expertise covers national policy as well as all things military. General Twining lays it on the line.

What results is an informed, harshly reasoned, inside account of the cold war that—as it happens—parallels, supports and notably reinforces the account most of us who write on these matters in national review have given over the years. General Twining takes Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao and Lin seriously. He is therefore a hard anti-Com- munist, and a hard critic of the illusions of coexistence, appeasement, pacifism, disarmament and UNophilia. As a soldier within the American system he accepted the supremacy of the civil arm, and strove to adapt the military establishment to the directives laid down by the civil magistrates. But he does not hide his dissatisfaction with many of those directives, beginning with the National Security Council document (NSC- 68) of April 1950 that first articulated the policy of containment.