The first chapter, ironically entitled “Unity,” is eerily prescient of the airy dismissal of the “reality-based community” that we heard about so recently:

The Nixon Administration’s apparent ability in the summer of 1969 to establish an image of itself, and even of national life as a whole, that was sharply at odds with the facts marked a new stage in the public-relations revolution that had been underway in American politics for many years.

Bush’s “ranch” and “just folks” demeanor, along with a numbing series of photo ops, one during a terrorist attack, showed that early on Bush had adopted more than just Nixon’s Southern Strategy.  Schell adds:

They all soon realized that the resources for image-making available to a President were incomparably greater than those available to a candidate….  By using the resources of government to compose scenes rather than to solve real problems could build up an illusory world that not even the most determined reporters could tear down.

Fortunately for Bush, you could drop a bomb on Washington and not harm a “determined reporter” these days, but nonetheless we were continuously bombarded with Mt. Rushmore, Lady Liberty, the codpiece, and Jackson Square, to name only the most infamous, all of which were nothing but spectacles hoping to make Americans believe the opposite of the truth.  The lawlessness of Nixon and his successors, to Schell’s mind, came down to this same curious approach to reality.

The law is concerned with facts and substance.  But the Nixon Administration was concerned with appearances-with images.  The spirit of the law is impartial.  But the Nixon men were partisans to their bones.

Here one sees the seeds of the notion that brought forth the US Attorney scandal; it was just inconceivable to these men that their hirelings owed any authority to anything other than to the Decider, law or no law.  Continuing in this vein, Schell points out how Nixon’s men, like Bushes, had in their minds inverted the definition of rights, which are granted to the people, and powers, which are granted, in specifically limited terms, to the government.

… the officers of the Nixon Administration had fallen into the habit of defending their “right” to take this or that governmental action, as though they were put-upon citizens, not powerful figures in the government.

No wonder the same minds have now conceived of the “right” of torturers not to be prosecuted, in the same breath as they extoll the wisdom of wiretapping and preventatively detaining ordinary citizens.  Later, Schell writes something that had me tearing out my hair all during the Bush years, that is the formidable power that comes from lying.

The public had grown accustomed to deception and evasion in high places, but not yet to repeated, consistent, barefaced lying at all levels.  The very boldness of the lies raised the cost of contradicting them, for to do so would be to call high officials outright liars.  Another effective White House technique was to induce semi-informed or wholly uninformed spokesmen to deny charges.

This tactic was still working well into Bush’s second term, and it was telling that a good part of the “You Lie” controversy was not about the substance of the claims and counterclaims, but about the propriety of calling someone a liar.  Nixon must have been doing a little jig in Hell.

But finally, what Schell has to say about the use of war for political purposes, really the heart of the book, is the part I find most riveting and timely today, when the military brass is now in open rebellion against its own commander in chief.  According to this mentality, now so many decades old:

….a disastrous war effort was better than no war effort, because even a disastrous war effort would demonstrate a crucial “willingness” to use force in a nuclear age, and would advance American credibility.  ”We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly.”

Those who fail to learn from history, and all that….  This book was written in 1975.