Mad Man
The Mad Man Theory: Nixon, Trump and Bolton Mel Goodman Mar. 26, 2018 Early in Richard Nixon’s presidency, he told his chief of staff Bob Haldeman that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons. Nixon opined that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought a quick end to the Korean War, and that he planned to use the same principle of threatening maximum force. Nixon called it the “madman theory,” getting the North Vietnamese to “believe…I might do anything to stop the war.” Ironically, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, may have been responsible for introducing the theory in his lectures in 1959 to Henry Kissinger’s Harvard seminar on the conscious political use of irrational military threats. Ellsberg called the theory the “political uses of madness,” and he noted that any extreme threat would be more credible if the person making the threat were perceived as not being fully rational. Ellsberg couldn’t imagine that an American president would ever consider such a strategy, but he believed that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool. It is noteworthy that Kissinger, who became Nixon’s national security adviser ten years later, said that he “learned more from Dan Ellsberg than any other person about bargaining.” And in his book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” he advocated a “strategy...
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