21
" The umbrella assertion made by Team B—and the most inflammatory—was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul. "
― , Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
26
" The nuclear thing is harder to figure. The United States, according to a 1998 study by the Brookings Institution, spent nearly eight trillion in today’s dollars on nukes in the last half of the twentieth century, which represents something like a third of our total military spending in the Cold War. Just the nuke budget was more than that half-century’s federal spending on Medicare, education, social services, disaster relief, scientific research (of the non-nuclear stripe), environmental protection, food safety inspectors, highway maintenance, cops, prosecutors, judges, and prisons … combined. "
― , Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power
36
" NIXON: Accuse you of what? AGNEW: Accuse me of— NIXON: Putting the pressure on them to make contributions? AGNEW: No, he may say he gave me a kickback of some kind. Came over here and handed me $50,000. Totally ridiculous. But— NIXON: Oh, God. AGNEW: I mean, they say it. I don’t know what this guy’s liable to say. NIXON: And Ted, they’re— AGNEW: They say he gave a federal judge some money. There are all kinds of rumors. NIXON: Good God, isn’t it awful? AGNEW: But this man is— NIXON: Well, can we destroy him? "
― , Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House
39
" The efforts of Agnew, Nixon, Haldeman, Haig, George Bush, and others—they failed because Beall had an investigation to pursue, and he had independent public servants to protect and stand up for, and he never once blinked. "
― , Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House