True, but I won't belabor that or suggest recriminations. But I must emphasize what should be the obvious understanding, that in time of war (or Cold War for that matter) true military leadership doesn't let the civilian sensibility tell it what is and isn't acceptable military necessity.
The Commander In Chief is in charge of not just the Armed Forces, his job is not merely to issue orders to just Generals...but to make sure the necessary military and civilian-defense preparations and deployments are approved by Congress and the States...and that they actually happen. It's called management.
Once upon a time, this administration was not bashful about boasting on its managerial prowess. If this is the best that the RINOs can do, and the RATs take us even further down the incompetence slope...we are really in for it.
And if the Civilian sensibilities do get in the way of doing essential preventative actions, then the President is supposed to go "over the heads" of the miscreants, and use the bully pulpit to persuade the voters. Loudly and often. Whatever it takes. And thus steam-roll over the political obstacles to our national survival.
Ronald Reagan was always solid on Civil Defense, and believed strongly in it. He was convinced by his close intellectual associate and good friend, Laurence Beilenson*, who wrote a number of well-supported and reasoned books on it (which I read back in the 70's and 80's), here is an obituary from National Review:
Laurence W. Beilenson, RIP - obituary
National Review, August 19, 1988
by Kevin LynchLaurence W. Beilenson, RIP
Laurence Wellman Beilenson, author of The Treaty Trap, Power through Subversion, and Survival and Peace in the Nuclear Age, was born in Helena, Arkansas, in 1899, the son of a Lithuanian Jew. When his father sent him north to school, to Phillips Andover, it was with a warning about something he hadn't experienced in the South: anti-Semitism. No one really knew what caused it, his father said, but it had been around a long time. He advised his son that the best way to fight it was by example.
The young man did his best to take his father's advice, and he excelled at Harvard College and Harvard Law School, as he had at Andover, once his education was resumed after World War I. He took his new law degree west, ending up in Los Angeles just as the golden age of Hollywood was dawning.
He started advising actors on their efforts to unionize and, in 1933, became the founding attorney of the Screen Actors Guild. By the end of the 1930s, his career was soaring, and he was happily married. Then came World War II. He had some difficulty convincing the U.S. Army that it needed the services of a 42 year-old lawyer; but by war's end, he was a U.S. liaison officer with the Chinese army and had been awarded, among other medals, the Silver Star for gallantry in action.
In 1946, he was back in Los Angeles practicing law. Though he knew the brightest stars of Hollywood--his clients included Groucho Marx, John Garfield, Greta Garbo, Gregory Peck, and Ronald Reagan--and had hundreds of Hollywood stories, he never betrayed a confidence. He represented Ronald Reagan in his divorce from Jane Wyman, and the only comment I ever heard from him about it was that it was the most amicable divorce he was ever involved in.
In 1960, he ended his legal practice and applied himself to the study of history, working ten hours a day, five and often six days a week, at the UCLA library. The result, nine years later, was The Treaty Trap, a meticulously documented examination of how treaties don't prevent nations from starting wars. Among the book's many admirers is Mr. Reagan, who has quoted from it frequently.
In 1972 came Power through Subversion--an investigation of how power is seized and kept, with particular attention paid to the methods of Lenin-- and, in 1980, Survival and Peace in the Nuclear Age, which advocated the withdrawal of U.S. forces from NATO.
Not long after Survival and Peace was published, Larry was diagnosed as having lung cancer. Doctors gave him no more than a year, but he had a powerful incentive to live: his beloved wife, Gerda, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, needed him. Larry underwent chemotherapy, and he exercised, and he lived. Gerda died in 1985, with her husband at her side.
After Gerda's death, Larry immersed himself even more in his work. He continued to write articles, for this and other publications. But he would not write the book the publishers implored him to write, a memoir of his Hollywood years. He felt no need for the money or the fame.
The need he did feel was to reach more Americans with his message of how the United States could remain free. He believed this was all he had to say that was important. But for those who knew him, his life said even more.
OLD FRIENDS: Reagan, in 1949, when he was president of SAG, with Beilenson, near right, then the lawyer for the union
