I’ve been wrestling with how to put in context Joe Biden’s recent decision, amid bad polling numbers and his current disastrous involvements in Ukraine and Gaza, to go all out in a naval war against the determined Houthis of Yemen and the dhows—sailing vessels common in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea for millennia—that supply them.

It’s not a simple matter. But modern American history is full of presidents who made disastrous decisions when confronted with what they saw as challenges posed by Moscow. The Soviet Union had been America’s most important ally in the Second World War, but even before the war ended the emerging superpowers entered into a deadly new rivalry. Though the Cold War seemed to have come to an end three decades ago, that rivalry has been revived, and Russia, though no longer communist, has come back to haunt the Biden administration. It’s a rivalry that shapes America’s entanglements, friendly or hostile, with China, Ukraine, Israel, and now the Houthis of Yemen. This is an account of some of the bad decisions, made by presidents urged on by their political insecurities and those of their close advisers. One constant has been a lack of good intelligence about their opponents, as with the Houthis who continue to fire missiles despite repeated American attacks. Critical Mass: How Naz... Hydrick, Carter Plymton Best Price: $12.62 Buy New $16.00 (as of 10:17 UTC - Details)

Our new president in the days after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in April, 1945, was Harry S. Truman, the haberdasher from Missouri who was the third politician to serve as vice president to FDR. It was a role that was famously described by John Nance Garner, who spent eight years as FDR’s first vice president, as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”

Truman was way over his head, to put it mildly, when it came to foreign policy. He was easily manipulated by the hawks in his Cabinet and at the State Department. (See Another Such Victory, by the historian Arnold Offner, a devastating account of Truman’s fecklessness published in 2002 by the Stanford University Press.) They were eager to go after the Soviets, and they convince Truman not merely to demonstrate the power of America’s nuclear bomb with an explosion somewhere in the South Pacific, as was initially planned, but instead to drop two bombs on Japanese cities that had nothing to do with the war effort there, while knowingly mislabeling both cities for the media as centers of war activity.

Truman continued to be supine under pressure from the hawks in the early postwar years as America and its allies embarked on a worldwide drive to keep communism at bay, especially in Europe and Southeast Asia. The Central Intelligence Agency was organized in 1947 as the heir to the wartime Office of Strategic Services for this purpose.

President Dwight Eisenhower, the WWII Army general who came to office as a Republican in 1953, gave the Dulles brothers, John Foster at the State Department and Allen at the CIA, authority to support the French, with much more arms and funding than was publicly known, in their losing war with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, among other fronts in the fight against communism. At the end of his two terms in office, however, Eisenhower had the wherewithal to warn presciently against the ascendant military industrial complex.

In those last months, Eisenhower nonetheless agreed to a CIA plot to assassinate by poison Patrice Lumumba, the first independent prime minister of Congo. The details of his involvement became officially known during the famed Church Committee hearings of 1975 and 1976 on the covert operations of the CIA—hearings triggered by a series of articles I wrote for the New York Times about the domestic spying activities of the CIA during the Vietnam War. It was the involvement of Eisenhower that led Republicans on the committee to threaten to go public with what had been learned about similar CIA activities authorized by President John F. Kennedy. Domestic Imperialism: ... Knight, Keith Buy New $14.00 (as of 12:52 UTC - Details)

Senator Frank Church, a Democrat of Idaho, was running for president and needed the help of Senator Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy family to do so. He agreed to a negotiated statement in the committee’s final report on CIA assassination attempts that merely said that no definite assessment of Eisenhower’s and Jack Kennedy’s involvement of assassination activities could be made. I had moved to New York before the hearings began, and, though I was still at the Times, the newspaper’s management, clearly worried about my ability to cause chaos, decided I no longer needed to be involved in the domestic spying story and its aftermath. (I was beginning to realize then that the mainstream media itself, when it came to certain high-impact stories, wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.)

Back in 1955, Eisenhower warmly supported the American decision—it remains unclear whether it was his or that of the two hawkish Dulles brothers in his administration—Secretary of State John and CIA Director Allen—to install an anti-communist Catholic named Ngo Dinh Diem as president of predominantly Buddhist South Vietnam. Those who share my continuing horror about the war that followed know what happened next.

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