Neo-Conservatives and Lord Dacre
Looking arounda second-hand bookstore at Wimpole Hall In Cambridgeshire at the weekend I stumbled across a classic neo-Conservative rant from1979, 'Shall American be Defended?'. Written by a retired admiral Daniel O'Graham the book is the usual stuff -- how the USSR has millions more ships, planes, tanks and also has the will to fight a nuclear war and win it, whereas America only has the policy of MAD and no aggressive strategy. It has some brilliant discussion of the charcater of the average American and Soviet which I will bring you later.However the other thing of note is the written dedication on the first page of the book, which says 'To Hugh and Alexandre Trever-Roper with warm regards and high opes that our countries shall recover from decades of foolish policy; signed by either Man, or Nan, or Mau, or Nau or something like that.
So was Trever-Roper, the Oxford-historian famous for chronicling Hitler's last days and infamous for authenticating Hitler's forged diaries, of the view the MAD policy was foolish, or the neo-conservative policy, or what? Perhaps it's just made up -- though he did have a wife called Alexandra, though spelt like that in his Guardian obituarynot as in the dedication..
ps It appears O'Graham was a member of President Bush Snr's infamous Team B which makes sense from his ludicrous over-estimate of Soviet military capacity in the above book.
pps It appears you can still buy this book from an American second-hand published for $19. I paid £1.
posted by Matthew @ 9/09/2003 08:49:00 AM
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