Americans prefer to isolate villains who despoil a preexisting innocence, rather than admit that there might not have been any innocence there in the first place. In this case, the villain became the man chasing around New Hampshire talking incessantly of “another Pearl Harbor” unless we commissioned new nuclear bombers, distributed tactical nuclear weapons to our allies, and returned to John Foster Dulles’s “brinkmanship” policy. The man, in other words, who did what ordinary politicians avoided wherever possible: reminded America that it coexisted with the power to destroy itself. For the
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