“Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft: His Guiding Principles of Leadership and Negotiation”, by James C. Humes

192 pages, Scribner, ISBN-13: 978-0684837956

Alright, you, stop giggling: 37^th President of the United States Richard Milhous Nixon did in fact have principles, you commie pinko bleeding heart piece of…okay, I’ve calmed down. I shall now start my review of James C. Humes’ Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft: His Guiding Principles of Leadership and Negotiation forthwith. Nixon never lost sight of his major goal to be remembered as the one who “turned the era of confrontation into the era of negotiation”. His work for détente with Russia, his leadership to guide negotiations to open up China and his successful negotiation of anti-ballistic missile treaties are just a sampling the prowess of one who many might regard as one of the premier statesman of our time. Yeah, I said it. Ten Commandments outline his guiding principles as a statesman, and James Hume, a former Nixon Presidential speech writer, noted that Nixon kept these commandments in his center desk drawer in the Oval Office on a laminated sheet of paper; with these commandments readily available, he daily reviewed and reflected on the various issues of his day using these principles to guide him in his measured responses to the vicissitudes of leadership. So, then, what are these Ten Commandments? I knew you’d ask:

Always be prepared to negotiate, but never negotiate without being prepared: Nixon’s view was that preparation was always essential, as “fact finding is the mother’s milk of negotiation”.

Never be belligerent, but always be firm: Nixon, who was raised as a Quaker, recalled the teaching in Proverbs: “A soft answer turneth away wrath”, but he also understood that “weakness often invites belligerency from exploitative aggressors, while firmness deters them”. As Humes says, “Nixon knew the difference between being firm and belligerent, and in his negotiations he manifested resolve and avoided empty threats of retaliation”.

Always remember that covenants should be openly agreed to but privately negotiated: Negotiation and getting things done is often a process of sending out a series of calibrated hints, gestures and signals to which China could publicly respond; such “flirting”, Nixon discovered, is often necessary to create the necessary groundwork for trust, openness, and negotiation. “Public tactics tend to harden the opposition. Successful diplomatic or business negotiators resist the temptation to grandstand or make public demands that can be interpreted as threats”.

Never seek publicity that would destroy the ability to get results: Nixon noted that “publicity is a double-edged sword”; it can be used to mobilize support yet, if done prematurely, it may alert adversaries and jeopardize a plan’s success.

Never give up unilaterally what could be used as a bargaining chip: Make your adversaries give something for everything they get, or as Nixon said. Expanding on Franklin: “Give something for every concession. Don’t think you have to give tit-for-tat. Don’t feel you have to split fifty-fifty. If he gives sixty, give him forty”.

Never let your adversary underestimate what you would do in response to a challenge: Never tell Him what you would not do; Nixon called an opponent’s “unpredictability” their “unvoiced threat”, and in response to the USSR’s unvoiced threats, Nixon responded in kind. The threat was effective, Nixon noted, as long as the power to carry it out is readily apparent. “Such a weapon in statecraft should not be forsworn without a compensatory concessions from the adversary”.

Always leave your adversary a face-saving line of retreat: Magnanimity, Nixon believed, was not just a gesture: it’s a virtue. How do you deal with your enemies? Can you be magnanimous, even when you win? In victory, can you build them a “golden bridge of escape”, or like this other Nixon maxim: “those whose self-respect is destroyed will, given a chance, retaliate”.

Always carefully distinguish between friends who provide some human rights and enemies who deny all human rights: Every leader must distinguish between those who are friendly, but in disagreement, and those who are really the opposition. Punishing our friends because of legalistic perfectionistic demands for conformity to our ways never pays dividends. When we so punish our friends, the result is a loss of influence that our own prestige and influence. Nixon said, “To take a magnifying glass to the faults of our friends and turn a blind eye to the record of our foes is not only wrong but stupid”; or, perhaps better: “I know he's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch”.

Always do at least a much for our friends as our adversaries do for our enemies: Leaders can’t afford to diminished credibility with their allies and supporters; they must know they can trust and rely on you, even when others don't support them (or you). “The reputation of loyalty, whether to a political ally, a friend, or a business client, is credit in the bank. The failure to sustain that loyalty diminishes the credibility of [a leader], a country or a company”.

Never lose faith.  In just cause faith can move mountains. Faith without strength is futile; but strength without faith is sterile: In Nixon's dealings with the USSR, he always believed that “it was not enough for America to be just anti-Communist. He believed that America had to prove the superiority of its democratic ideal”. Nixon believed the reason the USSR crumbled was because of the sterility of its faith. No matter how strong a people might be, if their faith is sterile, they will collapse.

Plus Two...

Sometimes leaders are hesitant about executing strong and controversial measures in the belief that a less than full-hearted operation mutes criticism. When you once decide, go with all your might: Don’t do anything half-heartedly; either go for it or not. To do neither is to guarantee failure (or, to quote another great man…er, creature: “Do. Or do not. There is no try”.

When saying “always” and “never”, always keep a mental reservation; never foreclose the unique exception; always leave room for maneuver. A president always has yet to be prepared for what he thought he would never do: Leaders know that there’s always the potential for an exception, a surprise, or unexpected development; and so, never say never.  Leadership is, as Nixon noted, not a predictable paint by number proposition in which one just needs to follow the lines.

“Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World”, by Stephen O’Shea

432 pages, Walker Books, ISBN-13: 978-0802715173

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet!” – so said Rudyard Kipling, an adage that has served as an able guide for many a cultural historian in both his time and ours…and yet his maxim has always left one question lingering: we know what is of the Occident, and we know what is of the Orient, but what do we make of those betwixt the two? How should we classify those kingdoms and cultures caught between both the East and the West? Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World by Stephen O’Shea is, overall, an effective work by a writer with a command of prose and storytelling. It must have been quite difficult to render such a massive time period of change in a thought-provoking manner which doesn’t lose the well-informed or inexperienced historical reader (especially interesting is his particular emphasis of periods of stable Convivencia periods such as Cordoba, Palermo/Sicily, etc.). It was a different subject that is often overlooked by other historians remarking on the period and was quite interesting to read about. Perhaps this accounts for the fragmented nature of the work, for rather than reading like an over-arching history of the Christian/Muslim feud, Sea of Faith reads as a series of vignettes that exist on their own without an overarching theme, which is not, I think, what O’Shea was gunning for.

This is, however, the least of the author’s problems, for it feels that O’Shea subtly takes sides in order to push an agenda of historical revisionism, concentrating on these multi-religious periods and completely disregarding the relative nature of other dramatic changes brought on by Islamic and Christian expansion. He easily discards the impact of faith/religious zeal and can’t seem to understand the effect on people, always pointing towards economic, politics or any number of secular rationales behind all acts versus faith. While certainly these reasons partially characterized the age, it’s very out of balance. It was very challenging to read through without being battered by venom/disgust Mr. O’Shea shows toward religion – specifically in regards to Christianity while letting Islam mostly off the hook. Furthermore, I am at a loss why O’Shea ends his history with Malta when the battle raged on for centuries afterwards (almost immediately after Malta the first of the never-ending Russo-Turkish Wars started, and then soon the terrific thumping at Lepanto). He leaves the story half-finished with no adequate explanation. The jump to Jerusalem today with the troubles there was hardly satisfying; it is much deeper today than the writer suspects (i.e., the border between Armenia and Turkey is still patrolled by the Russian army a hundred years after WW1 keeping the two people apart, or the current terrorist campaigns with al-Qaeda and the neverending conflict in Cyprus between the Turkey and the Greeks). Not a bad book, but incomplete and, despite its premise, lacking a theme.

“The Lives of the Great Composers”, by Harold C. Schonberg

653 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0393013023

Harold C. Schonberg was the senior New York Times music critic for twenty years and was the first in his field to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in 1971. Before passing away in 2003, he was the author of many articles and eight books, including The Lives of the Great Composers from 1970, although the copy I reviewed was extensively revised in 1997. There are any number of books aimed at the general audience that chronicle the lives of the great composers of Western music, and the 21^st Century reader who peruses this book will get some engaging takes on composers of the common practice period. He will also get a glimpse into some outmoded attitudes towards music, for even with its updates since the first edition of 1970 the book shows biases and blind spots common to Schonberg’s generation. These biases can be reduced to two factors: a blindness to early music, and a repertoire-centered mindset.

Can one imagine a history of Western painting that begins with, say, Rembrandt and ignores everything that came before? This is similar to what Schonberg does as his view of music history is centered on the 19^th Century; the pre-Bach period is only lightly sketched in, while he devotes pages upon pages to all manner of romantic composers. This would have been fine if the title of this book was The Lives of the Great Romantic Composers, but seeing that this is supposed to be more inclusive than that, it falls rather short of its principle. To be sure, Schonberg attempts to justify his non-inclusion of earlier composers thus:

Their work is simply not heard, by and large, in concert halls around the world...audiences tend to find the music archaic, or lacking in personality, or just plain dull.

Oh…alright, then; we cannot talk about earlier composers if their work is simply not heard or if it is just plain dull; God forbid that an historian should educate his audience to composers and their works in the interest of enlightenment. Perhaps sensing how limiting his work was, Schonberg added a chapter on Monteverdi for the 1996 edition, but there is still no accounting for the hundred-year gap between Monteverdi and Bach – there no great creators, no strong personalities, in that period, I suppose. As a result of this unconscionable neglect, the reader gets no sense of Bach’s roots in the German baroque tradition of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Dieterich Buxtehude or Heinrich Schütz, to name but a few; indeed, to read Chapter Two, “The Transfiguration of the Baroque”, one would think that Bach’s achievements sprang from the very soil. In addition to this time gap, there are examples of clumsy editing where Schonberg simply cut and pasted in some new text for the revised edition but the new text does not make sense with the older text around it (for example, the ending of the chapter on Handel). And don’t get me started on Schonberg’s one-sided (and inaccurate) account of the equal temperament system of tuning, just another example of the outmoded attitudes found in this book.

Another problem with the book is that it has a concert-hall, repertoire-centered view of music: whether a composer is-or-is-not in the active repertoire is, for Schonberg, an inordinately important yardstick and he uses it as an excuse to dismiss an important 20^th Century creator such as Arthur Honegger in a few curt sentences: “[O]n the whole Honegger has slid from his once-high position, and his music is vanishing fast from the concert halls” (meanwhile, in a transparent gesture of Politically Correct virtue signaling, the peripheral Dame Ethel Smyth merits two rather detailed paragraphs and even a photo; seriously, outside of your typical college Feminist Study department, who gives a shit about Dame Ethel?)

Added to all of that is Schonberg’s conceit that that words can convey musical ideas: opinions about musical beauty are about as useless as opinions about beauty of any kind and cannot be described, much less rationally explained. Schonberg, however, obviously believes that he knows what people will find beautiful, if not now, then sometime in the future when they will, presumably, come to their senses and agree with him. Schonberg, as you can see, has this colossal ego, backed up by a not-so-impressive ability to predict or explain taste; if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be so constantly surprised at how certain composer he had figuratively buried have amazingly, and unpredictably, come back to life (he also shows a nasty streak of claiming expertise is most every field, believing, for example, that Freud made the study of the human mind into science, proving Schonberg’s science to be time-warped circa the 1920’s).

In his musical opinions, Schonberg is irritatingly back and forth, one minute pointing to lack of popular appeal as proof of something that later he claims to be irrelevant. The book contains far more of Schonberg’s personal opinions than disembodied facts. It’s obvious that Schonberg considered himself as some kinda Freudian hipster-doofus with a downbeat, analyzing the doings of composers in a 1920’s style of phony-baloney psychoanalysis. That really wasn’t what I thought I was getting myself into. For some reason Schonberg doesn’t seem to comprehend that individual human differences exist and have always existed and always will, making predictions of the type he is making, not only impossible, but often invalid and pointless. And THAT is the basis for Schonberg’s failure: he’s confused about human nature and can’t fathom, as but one example, why most people always have and always will reject dissonant music (answer: it sucks).

Ultimately there is too much Schonberg and too little great composers. I could really care less about the man’s opinions, his Pulitzer Prize for Criticism be damned. Furthermore, I don’t think the whole “lives of the great composers” approach is a good way to learn about music history as it forces you to focus on personalities instead of the whole richness of musical development.

“The Ambassador Chronicles”, by Graham McNeill

416 pages, Games Workshop, ISBN-13: 978-1844161997

The Ambassador Chronicles is a two-part omnibus that contains the novels The Ambassador and Ursun’s Teeth, both set in the cold, eastern land of Kislev, full of intrigue, scheming, blackmail and, of course, battles…well, maybe I should just let Mr. McNeill speak for himself:

In the icy Northern Wastes, a mighty army of darkness prepares to sweep southward and lay waste to the civilized lands of the Empire. In this dangerous time, retired Imperial general Kaspar von Velten is sent to Kislev as ambassador to the court of Tsarina Katarin. Unused to the power struggles and politics at court, Kaspar is forced to use all the skills and resources at his command in order to survive in this cold and hostile land. As winter draws in, can Kaspar re-forge the fragile alliance between the Empire and Kislev and prepare its troops for war before the hordes of Chaos are unleashed on the land?

Good stuff, no? What was remarkable about this book is that, unlike other Warhammer books that attempt to detail areas outside of the Empire but which fail to portray the subtle and obvious cultural differences between areas, this book really convinces the reader that they are experiencing life in Kislev. These books deal more with intrigue and politics than some other books by the Black Library (or rather Games Workshop, at the time), and offer a range of excellent and well-developed characters to build the story around. The protagonist is compelling, and the whole book has a gritty realism which I was sucked into. This is amongst my favorite Warhammer books.