Rachel Maddow - Drift

For Reagan’s Fum-Poo experience, Rear Gunner and Winning Your Wings , among others, are watchable via YouTube.

The text of President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 speech “Crisis of Confidence” is available at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

The text quoted from “A Soldier’s Faith” is found in An Address by Oliver Wendell Holmes Delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895 , at a Meeting Called by the Graduating Class of Harvard University (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1895). Louis Menand’s insightful book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America was of great help in understanding Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the way he was shaped by his experiences in the Civil War.

The John Travolta Army recruiting ad is available on YouTube, as are the “Be All That You Can Be” commercials—putting them side by side makes for a dissonant but interesting comparison. The U.S. Army’s Transition to the All-Volunteer Force, 1968–1974 , by Robert K. Griffith Jr.; I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force , by Bernard Rostker; and “The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force” ( Journal of American History 4, vol. 1, June 2007) by Beth Bailey provided good color on recruiting and advertising.

Edmund Morris and Lou Cannon were again helpful in understanding Reagan’s first presidential term, as was Steven F. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989 . I am indebted to Richard Reeves, especially, for his book President Reagan: Triumph of Imagination . His reporting provided much detail on Martin Treptow, David Stockman, and Alexander Haig, among others. David Sirota’s book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything is a great reference for anybody who wants to understand that strange time.

If you have a few days to spare, you can view the entirety of Ronald Reagan’s testimony in the John Poindexter criminal trial via YouTube. Nicholas Goncharoff testified about Lenin to the United States Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws on July 15, 1954.

For information and analysis of Team B, I relied on its own words in Intelligence Community Experiment in Competitive Analysis. Soviet Strategic Objectives: An Alternative View. Report of Team “B” (US Central Intelligence Agency, 1976). I was also informed by Anne Hessing Cahn’s Killing Détente and her 1993 article (with John Prado) “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; as well as former CIA analyst Willard C. Matthias’s candid book America’s Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National Security, 1936–1991 .

The 1980s-era editions of Soviet Military Power make for sometimes terrifying and sometimes humorous reading, but read them with a counterpoint guide at hand: Tom Gervasi’s Soviet Military Power: The Pentagon’s Propaganda Document, Annotated and Corrected .

More than you’d guess has been written about the very quick and very jumbled combat operations in Grenada. For the soldiers’ views of both the planning and the execution of the invasion I was aided by the memoirs of Capt. Robert Gormly, Col. John T. Carney, and command master CPO Dennis Chalker; journalistic accounts from Orr Kelly, as well as a richly detailed section of Rick Atkinson’s The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966; and by The Rucksack War , something of an official history—great for timeline—by Edgar F. Raines Jr. Raines also wrote “The Interagency Process and the Decision to Intervene in Grenada,” which is more compelling reading than the title might suggest.

US-Grenada Relations: Revolution and Intervention in the Backyard , by Gary Williams, was helpful in seeing the wider story. Also a worthwhile read is Eastern Caribbean Regional Security Policy (NSC-NSDD-105), National Security Decision Directives, Reagan Administration, available online or from the Ronald Reagan Library.

The domestic political scene was well covered by major newspapers and magazines at the time, and I benefited from that coverage, but I was also aided by Tip O’Neill’s autobiography, Man of the House , and Reagan’s own autobiography, as well as his White House diaries, which are available in the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library archives as well as in the book The Reagan Diaries .

Goldwater’s dust-up with the Reagan administration—and Casey in particular—was well documented in newspapers of the day.

To understand Ronald Reagan’s thinking during the Iran-Contra operation (and its aftermath) I relied on his own words, gleaning what I could from his White House diaries, his testimony in the Poindexter trial, notes from internal White House meetings, and texts of his contemporaneous speeches and press conferences. The “Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair” (including Representative Dick Cheney’s minority report) provided much detail on the affair, but the “Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters,” authored by prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, is the definitive source. Walsh also wrote a pretty good book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up .

I was able to access the minutes from the June 25, 1984, National Security Planning Group meeting at the National Security Archive website at George Washington University. The National Security Archive is a wonderful resource in general—dogged, aggressive, fair, and with mad organizational skills that would please even the most persnickety Virgo.

Aside from the aforementioned books about Reagan, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 , by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus, and Robert Timberg’s The Nightingale’s Song were great sources.

On the question of Ed Meese and executive power, it’s worth anybody’s time to read Charlie Savage’s landmark book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy . And thanks to the New York Times for publishing verbatim the remarkable exchange between Attorney General Ed Meese and Sen. Daniel Inouye I’ve excerpted in this chapter.

I relied as much as I could on the contemporaneous notes and diaries and the memories of the key players in the run-up to the First Gulf War. All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings , along with A World Transformed , which the former president wrote with Brent Scowcroft, provided the backbone of the chapter. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf each wrote autobiographies. And Karen DeYoung’s biography Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell is helpful for anyone who wants to understand the general’s thinking. There was a lot of good DC-based journalism around that time, but R. W. Apple’s reporting on Washington on the verge of war was particularly sharp and uncompromising. Michael R. Gordon was already doing great work covering military matters.

C-SPAN has the video of the Ron Dellums press conference on the occasion of announcing his lawsuit. The PBS series Frontline has a useful reference website on the First Gulf War.