![\"\"](\"http:\/\/radio.rumormillnews.com\/podcast\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/40yearswar.gif\" "\\"40yearswar\\"")
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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.<\/p>\n
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 prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Henry Kissinger, became Nixon\u2019s chief foreign policy advisor and chose as his deputy Alexander Haig, another Kraemer prot\u00e9g\u00e9. Kraemer\u2019s theory of the need to prevent \u201cprovocative weakness\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
A 40-year war has been fought between pragmatists who agreed with Nixon\u2019s \u201cd\u00e9tente\u201d with Communist enemies and \u201cideologues\u201d who agreed with Kraemer\u2019s tenets of anti-Communism and distaste for diplomacy.<\/p>\n
The book reveals in stunning detail the previously hidden role of the right-wing and the military in Nixon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n