Melvin Goodman

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism, and Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider’s Account of the Politics of Intelligence.  His forthcoming book is American Carnage: Donald Trump’s War on Intelligence.  Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Trump and Bolton Take a Page From Richard Nixon and the Mad Man Theory

The madman theory of policy is a debatable subject, but the thought of having actual madmen in positions of power is frightening.

Melvin Goodman
By Melvin Goodman
President Nixon meets Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office of the White House on Oct. 9, 1973. Days before the 1972 election, Kissinger declared that peace was "at hand" in Vietnam. (AP/Harvey George)

Early in Richard Nixon’s presidency, he told his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, that his secret strategy for ending the Vietnam War was to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.  Nixon opined that President Eisenhower’s nuclear threats in 1953 brought a quick end to the Korean War, and that he planned to use the same principle of threatening maximum

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