Len Colodny reveals the inside story about the Rise and Fall of the NeoCons

Author of Silent Coup (1991) who co-authored The Forty Years War (2009) with Tom Shachtman, Len Colodny traces the history of the NeoCons from Nixon to Obama.

The central figure in The Forty Years War is Fritz G. A. Kraemer (1908-2003), a mysterious Pentagon civilian who deliberately operated in the shadows while serving as the godfather to the neocons.

Kraemer was born in Germany and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s. He was a charismatic martinet who spoke seven languages, habitually wore a monocle, refused promotions, and preached a militarist doctrine. His influence skyrocketed when his protégé, Henry Kissinger, became Nixon’s chief foreign policy advisor and chose as his deputy Alexander Haig, another Kraemer protégé. Kraemer’s theory of the need to prevent “provocative weakness” swayed officials from Kissinger through Secretaries of Defense James Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others who would put the neocon tenets into action in the 1980s and in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A 40-year war has been fought between pragmatists who agreed with Nixon’s “détente” with Communist enemies and “ideologues” who agreed with Kraemer’s tenets of anti-Communism and distaste for diplomacy.

The book reveals in stunning detail the previously hidden role of the right-wing and the military in Nixon’s downfall as well as the ways those groups would eventually dictate and undermine the foreign policies of the Presidential administrations to follow (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama). While Watergate was the excuse for Nixon’s forced resignation, it was his foreign policy that was the real reason for his forced resignation.

The central figure in The Forty Years War is Fritz G. A. Kraemer (1908-2003), a mysterious Pentagon civilian who deliberately operated in the shadows while serving as the godfather to the neocons.

Kraemer was born in Germany and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s. He was a charismatic martinet who spoke seven languages, habitually wore a monocle, refused promotions, and preached a militarist doctrine. His influence skyrocketed when his protégé, Henry Kissinger, became Nixon’s chief foreign policy advisor and chose as his deputy Alexander Haig, another Kraemer protégé. Kraemer’s theory of the need to prevent “provocative weakness” swayed officials from Kissinger through Secretaries of Defense James Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others who would put the neocon tenets into action in the 1980s and in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A 40-year war has been fought between pragmatists who agreed with Nixon’s “détente” with Communist enemies and “ideologues” who agreed with Kraemer’s tenets of anti-Communism and distaste for diplomacy.

The book reveals in stunning detail the previously hidden role of the right-wing and the military in Nixon’s downfall as well as the ways those groups would eventually dictate and undermine the foreign policies of the Presidential administrations to follow (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama). While Watergate was the excuse for Nixon’s forced resignation, it was his foreign policy that was the real reason.