From praising dictators to alienating allies, Trump made chaos his calling card. But four years into his administration, had his strategy caused more problems than it solved? Richard Nixon tried it first. Hoping to make communist bloc countries uneasy and thus unstable, Nixon let them think he was just crazy enough to nuke them. He called this “the madman theory.” Nearly half a century later, President Trump employed his own “madman theory,” sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Trump praised Kim Jong-un and their “love notes,” admired and flattered Vladimir Putin, and gave a greenlight to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to invade Syria. Meanwhile, he attacked US institutions and officials, ignored his own advisors, and turned his back on US allies from Canada and Mexico to NATO to Ukraine to the Kurds at war with ISIS. Trump was willing to make the nation’s most sensitive and consequential decisions while often ignoring the best information and intelligence available to him. He continually caught the world off guard, but did it work? In The Madman Theory, Jim Sciutto showed how Trump's supporters assumed he had a strategy for long-term success – that he somehow played three-dimensional chess. Four years into Trump's presidency, it was clear his unpredictable focus on short-term headlines did in fact lead to predictably mediocre results in the short and long run. Trump’s foreign policy undermined American values and national security interests, while hurting allies who had been on our side for decades, leaving them isolated and vulnerable without American support. Meanwhile, Trump had comforted and emboldened our enemies. The White House’s revolving door of staff demonstrated that Trump had no real plan; all serious policymakers—and those who would be a check on his most destructive impulses—were exiled or jumped ship. Sciutto interviewed a wide swath of then-current and former administration officials to assemble the first comprehensive portrait of the impact of Trump’s erratic foreign policy. Smart, authoritative, and compelling, The Madman Theory is the definitive take on Trump’s calamitous legacy around the globe, showing how his proclivity for chaos was creating a world which was more unstable, violent, and impoverished than it had been before.

* It is 1962 and there are children at play in the White House for the first time since the presidency of William Howard Taft. Richard Nixon, the vigorous 49-year-old president, has been in office less than two years, having won election by a razor-thin margin over Senator John Kennedy. In Moscow, the wildly unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev is looking forward to visiting his cherished revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro. Just 90 miles from American shores, Khrushchev will announce an audacious and dangerous nuclear stunt to abruptly shift the balance of power a secretly-built network of missiles across Cuba that put American cities in the atomic crosshairs. But President Nixon has his own announcement planned. A U.S. spy plane has discovered the missiles being set up in Cuba and Nixon will soon address the nation to announce his response. Meanwhile, First Lady Pat Nixon is in California to look at a San Clemente house the first couple may purchase. Seeing shoppers crowd around a store-window television, Pat gets her first inkling of trouble. Dick has always insisted she not listen to the news and she is happy, for now, to return to her correspondence.In the coming days, the confrontation between the U.S. and its nuclear foe will escalate. The president will weigh his determination to overthrow Castro against the risk of all-out war as Pat struggles to reconcile her proper role as a wife with her estrangement from the man who thrust her into a public life she despises.

In their initial effort to end the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger attempted to lever concessions from Hanoi at the negotiating table with military force and coercive diplomacy. They were not seeking military victory, which they did not believe was feasible. Instead, they backed up their diplomacy toward North Vietnam and the Soviet Union with the Madman Theory of threatening excessive force, which included the specter of nuclear force. They began with verbal threats then bombed North Vietnamese and Viet Cong base areas in Cambodia, signaling that there was more to come. As the bombing expanded, they launched a previously unknown mining ruse against Haiphong, stepped-up their warnings to Hanoi and Moscow, and initiated planning for a massive shock-and-awe military operation referred to within the White House inner circle as DUCK HOOK. Beyond the mining of North Vietnamese ports and selective bombing in and around Hanoi, the initial DUCK HOOK concept included proposals for “tactical” nuclear strikes against logistics targets and U.S. and South Vietnamese ground incursions into the North. In early October 1969, however, Nixon aborted planning for the long-contemplated operation. He had been influenced by Hanoi's defiance in the face of his dire threats and concerned about U.S. public reaction, antiwar protests, and internal administration dissent. In place of DUCK HOOK, Nixon and Kissinger launched a secret global nuclear alert in hopes that it would lend credibility to their prior warnings and perhaps even persuade Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi. It was to be a “special reminder” of how far President Nixon might go. The risky gambit failed to move the Soviets, but it marked a turning point in the administration's strategy for exiting Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger became increasingly resigned to a “long-route” policy of providing Saigon with a “decent chance” of survival for a “decent interval” after a negotiated settlement and U.S. forces left Indochina. Burr and Kimball draw upon extensive research in participant interviews and declassified documents to unravel this intricate story of the October 1969 nuclear alert. They place it in the context of nuclear threat making and coercive diplomacy since 1945, the culture of the Bomb, intra-governmental dissent, domestic political pressures, the international “nuclear taboo,” and Vietnamese and Soviet actions and policies. It is a history that holds important lessons for the present and future about the risks and uncertainties of nuclear threat making.

The signing of the Paris Agreement in 1973 ended not only America's Vietnam War but also Richard Nixon's best laid plans. After years of secret negotiations, threats of massive bombing and secret diplomacy designed to shatter strained Communist alliances, the president had to settle for a peace that fell far short of his original aims.

Inspector Omar Collins tracks a mad killer through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in this classic novel from the legendary mystery author. A party of backpackers hikes along the silver strand of the river, in awe of the overwhelming beauty of King’s Canyon. They are amateur hikers, coworkers at a chemical lab who came from Fresno to heed the call of the wild. They have endured blisters, bug bites, and sunburn, but no discomfort can prepare them for what comes next. The peaceful silence of nature is shattered by a shotgun blast. When the echoes fade, there is a dead man in the canyon. There are no roads into the park, so Inspector Omar Collins flies in via helicopter. Tracking a killer on 3,000 square miles of parkland is impossible, but what if he’s closer than Collins realizes? The murderer could be a madman or a genius. Either way, his bloody work isn’t done. . . .

Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers presents a simple, economic framework for understanding the systematic causes of political change. Wayne A. Leighton and Edward J. López take up three interrelated questions: Why do democracies generate policies that impose net costs on society? Why do such policies persist over long periods of time, even if they are known to be socially wasteful and better alternatives exist? And, why do certain wasteful policies eventually get repealed, while others endure? The authors examine these questions through familiar policies in contemporary American politics, but also draw on examples from around the world and throughout history. Assuming that incentives drive people's decisions, the book matches up three key ingredients—ideas, rules, and incentives—with the characters who make political waves: madmen in authority (such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher), intellectuals (like Jon Stewart and George Will), and academic scribblers (in the vein of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes). Political change happens when these characters notice holes in the structure of ideas, institutions, and incentives, and then act as entrepreneurs to shake up the status quo.

"The new evidence uncovers a number of behind-the-scenes plays - such as Nixon's secret nuclear alert of October 1969 - and sheds more light on Nixon's goals in Vietnam and his and Kissinger's strategies of Vietnamization, the "China card," and "triangular diplomacy." The excerpted documents also reveal significant new information about the purposes of the linebacker bombings, Nixon's manipulation of the pow issue, and the conduct of the secret negotiations in Paris - as well as other key topics, events, and issues. All of these are effectively framed by Kimball, whose introductions to each document provide historical context."