Comments on Richard Whalen's article?

[Martin]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061016/whalen

 

R. J. Whalen used to be on Richard Nixon's staff circa 1966-1968.

Has been a senior editor at Time and at Fortune magazine. I don't know much more than that about him. Seems to be an insider.

 

anything surprising here? anything worth comment. I rely on those SFN members who watch current events closer than I do.

 

in case there's interest, I'll get some sample quotes.

 

Here's a personal note he includes about his background. It is not directly relevant to the main story but interesting all the same:

 

===quote from Whalen===

Let me interject a personal note. At the height of the Vietnam War, between 1966 and 1968, I was a conservative Republican in my early 30s on the campaign staff of the likely next President, Richard Nixon. What I heard from junior officers returning from Vietnam convinced me that US military involvement there should give way to diplomacy. We no longer had a coherent political objective, and were fighting only to avoid admitting defeat. I wrote Nixon's secret plan for "ending the war and winning the peace," a rhetorical screen for striking a summit deal with the Soviet Union, followed by a historic opening to China that would allow us to extricate ourselves from what we belatedly recognized was an anti-Chinese Indochina.

 

After I left Nixon's staff in August 1968, I helped end the draft. In 1969-70, I co-wrote and edited the Report of the President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force. Our blockbuster proposal to end the draft combined political expediency and libertarian idealism. Our staff's numbers crunchers calculated that if we raised enlisted men's pay scales, retention rates among the sons of lower- to middle-income families would stay high enough to create a de facto all-volunteer Army. So why not take credit for acting on principle? Nixon's domestic adviser Martin Anderson pushed it, the private computers of consultant Alan Greenspan (who would go on to become chair of the Federal Reserve System) confirmed it and I delivered the text that the commission accepted. Nixon, for once, enjoyed the media's acclaim. The draft was swiftly abolished.

===endquote===