The HRC Poll: Which books should be on Hillary’s reading list?
It’s time again for Madam Secretary’s Hillary Poll. This week, we asked our panel of experts which book they think Hillary should read this weekend to bone up on the issues she’ll be tackling at Foggy Bottom. Paul Begala: Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. My favorite moment is when Milo Minderbinder says, “Frankly I’d like to see the ...
It's time again for Madam Secretary's Hillary Poll. This week, we asked our panel of experts which book they think Hillary should read this weekend to bone up on the issues she'll be tackling at Foggy Bottom.
It’s time again for Madam Secretary’s Hillary Poll. This week, we asked our panel of experts which book they think Hillary should read this weekend to bone up on the issues she’ll be tackling at Foggy Bottom.
Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. My favorite moment is when Milo Minderbinder says, “Frankly I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.” Heller meant it as dark humor; Dick Cheney and George W. Bush made it government policy. Pres. Obama and Sec. Clinton need to put
Given her crushing schedule, I recommend my own forthcoming book entitled Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy. Why, you ask? Because it will show her that power isn’t smart or dumb or hard or soft. Power is power — that is, pressure and coercion. Only leaders can be hard or soft or smart or dumb.
I would strongly recommend that she read Mark Bowden’s Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in
should get an advance copy of Les Gelb’s new book on power. And George Eliot’s Middlemarch is good for any weekend.
I’d recommend Richard Neustadt and Ernest May’s Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers. Secretary Clinton will inevitably face an array of difficult policy choices, and both her aides and her adversaries will employ historical precedents, analogies, and arguments to try to sway her decisions. May and Neustadt can help her think more critically about the ways that history and its interpretation shapes our attitudes and decisions, and make her less likely to give future historians a juicy example of “what not to do.”
And if she can’t fit a whole book into a busy weekend, she could start with the concluding chapter of my own Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy. She might even agree with it!
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