This AP story discusses one application of what Richard Nixon called his “Madman Theory” of international relations. He wanted to convince certain members of the international community that he was psychologically unstable and might respond with extreme violence unpredictably. I’ll try to find some more links about his theory; it’s something Symour Hersh discussed in his book about Kissinger. He frequently told Kissinger to “confide” to North Vietnamese negotiators that Nixon was something pf a ticking time bomb.
How widely this impression was to be spread is something I have no knowledge about. I think if Nixon told our allies that he was runnning a game on the Russians, the Russians would soon know about it. So was he also trying to convince the whole of the international community that he was dangerously unstable?
Was it truly mad? Is it a legitimate strategy of international negotiation in a situation where both sides have ICBMs?
The Russians either saw through it, didn’t notice the ramp-up of the U.S. nuclear alert, or didn’t have as much sway with the North Vietnamese as the Nixon administration believed.
I would have loved to have heard Dick and Henry cooking this one up.
“OK, I’ll act all crazy and shit and you tell them they better do as we say, because you can’t be responsible for what might happen.”
cornflakes said the magic word “poker”. Nixon made a lot of money in the Navy playing poker. His success at the game led him to view a lot of politcal interactions as just another game of poker. (But he really did have deep psychological problems.)
Dick was a Fascist by another name. Watergate proved that: He was so arrogant, so goddamned certain he was above the law, he okayed a burglary, then denied the whole damned thing once the major botch was discovered. Sociopathic, frankly: That’s the only way you can be damned good at lying and completely arrogant.