Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Narrated by Rachel Maddow
Rachel MaddowUnabridged — 7 hours, 32 minutes
Narrated by Rachel Maddow
Rachel MaddowUnabridged — 7 hours, 32 minutes
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Maddow's critique, the product of robust and eclectic research, is consistently and carefully respectful of the men and women in the armed services. Yet Maddow evinces an inherent skepticism about the projection of U.S. military power, which in her narrative occurs too frequently and too permissively…Maddow's distinctive voice in Drift is highly intelligent, often incredulous and intermittently and humorously profane.
—Gordon M. Goldstein
Some readers will come to Rachel Maddow's first book expecting an entertaining left-wing screed against the military. They may be surprised to discover instead a lively but serious argument about American history…Maddow's thesis crosses ideological lines. Like the Tea Partiers, she believes that the United States must return to the lost principles of the nation's founders—in this case a suspicion of standing armies and a deep reluctance to go to war…The book is a reminder that before Maddow became a face on nighttime television, she was a Rhodes scholar who earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford. But Drift is not heavy reading, and her cheerfully snarky voice is instantly recognizable.
—Scott Shane
A book by the host of a political talk show is often an ancillary product or marketing tool. But Drift, by Rachel Maddow…is much more. It is an argument—a sustained, lucid case in which points are made logically and backed by evidence and reason. What's more, it follows one main idea through nearly a half-century.
—Janet Maslin
Rachel Maddow provides a discomforting exploration of U.S. military power over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting how various disconnected elements have conspired to create a nation of people with little understanding about the true costs of war.With her experience as a television show host, Maddow is a very capable narrator. Her delivery is clear and her pacing steady.She also skillfully uses emphasis and tone to highlight moments of humor or importance. However, in making her arguments, Maddow may alienate some listeners, particularly when she mocks political figures with whom she disagrees. Though this is clearly an aspect of Maddow’s style, it can be off-putting and works to undercut her ability to reach all but her most loyal fans. A Crown hardcover. (Mar.)
A bloated, secretive, lawless national security state is pilloried in this scathing but shallow critique of America’s post-Vietnam defense policies. MSNBC talk-show host Maddow recaps milestones in a decadeslong process of giving presidents dangerously convenient and unaccountable war-making powers: the Reagan administration’s gigantic military buildup, Iran-Contra illegalities, and assertions of executive privilege; the supplanting of soldiers with private contractors under Clinton and Bush fils; the growth of the CIA’s secret drone air force; the many invasions, from Grenada to Iraq, launched by commanders-in-chief without constitutional authority. The author presents sharp, well-supported analyses of these episodes, spicing them with a caustic wit that skewers everything from Army recruitment ads to the Air Force’s habit of accidentally dropping or misplacing its nuclear warheads. She’s less cogent in blaming America’s adventurism on the neglect of the Constitution’s requirement that Congress declare war (many inane conflicts, like the Spanish-American War, passed that hurdle) and the lapse of the tradition of calling up the citizen-soldiers of the Reserves and National Guard, which she believes puts a brake on war-mongering (although the Iraq War call-up, she allows, had no such effect). Maddow’s incisive look at the follies of militarism needs a deeper understanding of why America has so often embraced it. Agent: Laurie Liss, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Apr.)
One of the Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction for 2012
One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of 2012
“Thank Ms. Maddow for picking this and every other fight that Drift provokes. It will be a smarter public debate than the kinds we're used to.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times
“A biting, bracing tour of the rise of American military bloat...Her fix-it ideas aren't facile or smiley-faced. They are a coda to the serious project she's taken on—a project that both plays to her persona and gives it new gravitas...Rachel, if you can get those ideas a serious hearing, you will be much more than TV's funniest wonk.” —Emily Bazelon, Slate.com
“Maddow’s distinctive voice in Drift is highly intelligent, often incredulous and intermittently and humorously profane...Her thesis, which is passionately and effectively articulated, remind[s] us of how far we have drifted from linking the sacrifices of our armed forces around the world to the citizens at home they so selflessly serve… Maddow…[has] provided readers with a timely and perhaps necessary provocation to examine the far-reaching consequences of the American way of war.” —Gordon M. Goldstein, Washington Post
“Crosses partisan lines and deals with issues that deserve a healthy debate...A compelling, intelligent read filled with Maddow's trademark wit.” —Mary Houlihan, Chicago Sun-Times
“Even though she's an ideological broadcaster, Maddow doesn't resort to demonization and hyperbole. It makes her case much stronger.” —Conor Friedersdorf, TheAtlantic.com
“Lively but serious...This book is a reminder that before Maddow became a face on nighttime television, she was a Rhodes scholar who earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford. But Drift is not heavy reading, and her cheerfully snarky voice is instantly recognizable...A thought-provoking and timely book.” —Scott Shane, New York Times Book Review
“Full of head-smacking stories about America's military meddling and muddling...Maddow sounds an alarm this country needs to hear more than almost any other.” —Catherine Lutz, San Francisco ChronicleRhodes Scholar Maddow makes her debut with this work on U.S. politics, war, military, and all the players in between. From start to finish, Maddow provides facts and statistics ranging from the personal beliefs of our Founding Fathers to the $8 trillion spent on nuclear weapons that could destroy the world countless times over. Maddow's scholarly approach reduces bias, but it may be too dense for many listeners. Print readers who could revisit passages may be better able to appreciate her complex message that the United States should be a "deliberately peaceable nation." VERDICT Maddow's narration helps capture her wit, emotion, and passion, but the work often has a textbook-like feel. Best for politics and history buffs. ["Maddow can be sassy, but she's deadly serious…[and] she ends with a to-do list for finding our way back to a reasonable national security state. Highly recommended to all readers engaged in the world today and with how we got here," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Crown hc, LJ 3/15/12.—Ed.]—Sean Kennedy, Cleveland Marshall Coll. Law Lib.
On her MSNBC show, Maddow delights in reminding viewers that she's an infrastructure geek. Now, regarding two manifestations of U.S. infrastructure—the Constitution and our underlying methods, post-JFK, of supporting U.S. military incursions—she shows how we have drifted away from established templates outlining how this country goes to war. She begins with LBJ in Vietnam (he used only active duty servicemen—thus the draft—to avoid Guards and Reserves bringing the war home around the country). From President Carter she segues to President Reagan, studying aspects of his military (mis)deeds in four core chapters. After an analysis of George H.W. Bush and Desert Shield comes her look at "Doing More with Less (Hassle)," a particularly horrifying study of what our outsourcing of military "quality of life services" has wrought. Maddow wears her expertise lightly, counterbalancing hard details with phrases (e.g., "the lemons-into-lemonade-moment" or "the sliding-off-the-aircraft-carrier-thing") that keep her narrative invigorating even as she offers the occasional periodic sentence that would make Gibbon proud. VERDICT Maddow can be sassy, but she's deadly serious. Having noted our executive branch's growing disregard for "the disincentives to war deliberately built into our American system of government," she ends with a to-do list for finding our way back to a reasonable national security state. Highly recommended to all readers engaged in the world today and with how we got here.—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal
According to the Constitution, the power to declare war should belong to Congress, not to the president alone. But these days? Not so much. With energy and humor, Maddow tracks how the inflation of executive power and the shrinkage of congressional involvement—from Vietnam to Afghanistan—has mired our nation in a state of perpetual war. Maddow’s robust delivery is reminiscent of her MSNBC show’s tone but not so close as to sound like a rehash. The production bears the authenticity of a meticulously researched political analysis, liberally mixed with Maddow’s scathing wit. Her understanding of the material makes her breakneck pace enjoyable, and her deep criticism of the Reagan administration just wouldn’t sound the same coming from anyone else. A.H.A. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
In her hard-hitting debut, popular MSNBC host Maddow examines how the country has lost control of its national-security policy. The author holds Dick Cheney, to whom the book is dedicated ("Oh please let me interview you"), responsible for much that has gone wrong, associating the former vice president with the presidential prerogative of war-making powers. Cheney, writes Maddow, had been nursing these ideas since his days as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, and he elaborated on them in his minority report on congressional investigation into the Iran-Contra affair. American forces are now accompanied by an equal or greater number of private contractors who perform functions that used to be reserved to the military, without either accountability or military control. The author shows how Bill Clinton used contractors extensively in Bosnia to avoid political fallout. These contractors, writes Maddow, typify the way in which the bonds that used to unite the military to the rest of society have been systematically severed, weakening political discussion and control. During the Vietnam War, Gen. Creighton Abrams and others reformed the structure of the military to make going to war without calling up the reserves and the National Guard--thereby guaranteeing national debate--very difficult, but these checks and balances have broken down. Maddow documents how the budgetary element has also gone out of control and raises important questions about the safety of the nuclear arsenal. She grounds her argument in the Founding Fathers' debates about going to war, and how difficult they intended to make the process--a state of affairs that is opposite to what is represented now. With humor and verve, Maddow lays a solid basis for that hoped-for interview with Cheney (fingers crossed).
| BN ID: | 2940169291919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 03/27/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,075,691 |
Chapter 1
G.I. Joe, Ho Chi Minh, and the American Art of Fighting About Fighting
thomas jefferson was a lifelong and habitual fretter. He was wary of animal foods, spirituous liquors, state religion, national debt, abolitionists, embittered slaves, unelected federal judges, Yankee politicians, Yankee professors, and Yankees in general. But his predominant and animating worry was the centralization and consolidation of power—in large banks, in closed and secret societies, and, most of all, in governments: the enemy within. “There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors, that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot, but in well-defined cases,” Jefferson wrote as the Constitution of the United States was being debated. “Such an instrument is a standing army.”
His feelings didn’t much change with time. In 1792 he wrote, “One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier.” In 1799 he wrote to a political friend that he was “not for a standing army in a time of peace, which may overwhelm public sentiment.”
Classicist that he was, Jefferson was apt to bolster his arguments with well-polished (if not strictly accurate) examples of early Western history: “The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves.... Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.”
That’s at best a loose military history of Greece and Rome—they did rely at times on standing armies. But you see where he’s going with this. Jefferson acted on his pet “unnecessary soldier” idea when he became president in 1801. He cut the standing army by a third and left the defense against foreign invasion largely to a “well-regulated militia” under the control of the various states and localities. And he remained unmoved by what he viewed as alarmist and cynical calls for a large nationalized active military. “Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible in our horizon,” he warned Congress in his sixth annual presidential message, “we never should have been without them. Our resources would have been exhausted on dangers which never happened, instead of being reserved for what is really to take place.”
Jeffersonian prudence held sway in this country for a century and a half. The professional military was an institution of limited reach and power; in times of peace we kept the regulars busy building defense works and ports and bridges. Whenever we went to war in a big way, we went to war with citizen-soldiers; the small nucleus of an active-duty army swelled with militiamen, reservists, National Guardsmen, enlisted persons, and draftees. When the United States went to war, the entire United States went to war. And no nation’s military demobilized with such verve and velocity when the fighting was over. Hell, volunteers on the battlefields were legally separating themselves from the US Army while the Mexican War still raged in 1847. The War of 1812, the Creek War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, they were all the same: the clarion call to duty, the citizens’ eager answer, the victory parades (having picked our fights judiciously, we were, by the mid-twentieth century, something like 9–0), and the return to home and hearth. Within eighteen months of the conclusion of World War I, Congress had completely dismantled the American Expeditionary Forces and reduced the active-duty military from four million soldiers back to the prewar number of less than three hundred thousand. The effect of tossing more than three million suddenly unemployed men back into an ailing job market did not have an altogether sanguinary effect on the national economy, or on the national mood...but hey, nobody ever said war was supposed to be a jobs program.
Mobilization for World War II was even larger, and the postwar drawdown nearly as dramatic. In 1945 there were twelve million people on active duty in the US Armed Forces; five years later, that number had dropped 88 percent, to just one and a half million. But that stunning demobilization had few concomitant dislocations. Call it the War-and-Peace Dividend or the World’s Greatest Stimulus Package. A country that left a Great Depression at home to confront the Axis powers overseas converted the massive government spending of the war effort into an unprecedented civilian economic boom when that war was won. Factories that had been making jeeps and warplanes and submarine engines and ammunition were now turning out new Chevrolet Bel Airs, Allis-Chalmers tractors, Cessna 170 airplanes, and Frigidaire iceboxes. It didn’t hurt our standing in the world economy that about one in five able-bodied young men in Germany and the Soviet Union had been killed in the war, and at least one in ten in Japan. And it didn’t hurt that the industrial cities of Japan and Germany (and much of Western Europe, for that matter) were smoking holes; of the 10.5 million cars manufactured worldwide in 1950, the United States made more than 8 million of them, and sold ’em all over the world.
We were a country that could afford to be generous to our returning veterans, and more than sixty years later we’re still reaping the benefits of that generosity. The post–World War II GI Bill assured returning vets a year’s worth of wages whether they worked or not, and paid college tuition and a living stipend, too. Nearly half of the male students on college campuses in 1948 had been to war. The bill also offered low-interest government-guaranteed loans for buying a home. Housing construction and manufacturing boomed. The curve of GNP, household income, and personal spending trended up, up, and up.
The United States of America was a robust nation—a nation of means—and we rebuilt and reconfigured our institutions after World War II in a way that reflected this. Yes, the military demobilization after the war was massive and fast, but even the dramatically shrunk-down US military of 1950 was three times the size it had been before World War II—and with a big footprint. The US soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, right alongside all those consumer goods, were already leading exports. We had 150,000 troops in the Far East, 125,000 in Western Europe, and a smattering in such diverse and far-flung locations as Panama, Cuba, Guatemala, Morocco, Eritrea, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Samoa, and Indochina. Wary as never before of the Communist threat—now a constant “speck of war visible in our horizon”—America had come to see Jefferson’s preoccupation with standing armies and threats from inside our own power structure as a bit moldy. We were, after all, the only country still capable of keeping the planet safe for democracy.
Through the fifteen years that followed World War II, we trusted our commanders in chief—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, they’d all served!—to project our military power in measured and meaningful ways. We ratcheted up our extraordinary nuclear program, broke a Soviet blockade of Berlin with a dramatic airlift, beat the Commies back in Formosa and Thailand, fought them to a standstill in Korea, and stared down Khrushchev when our spy planes caught him red-handed putting missiles in Cuba. When President Kennedy decided to engage the Soviets in the space race, the nation’s finest military pilots were the chosen first team.
The United States military was an institution of unsurpassed public esteem, top to bottom. You could measure that regard in a hundred different ways. Take, for instance, the plaything metric. In 1964 one of the hottest new toys on the market was a doll, for boys: G.I. Joe.
There was not a whiff of peacetime, soon-to-be civilian in this toy; these were not Ken dolls in dress uniforms at the debutante ball. G.I. Joe was olive drab, M1 rifle, canned Spam, scar-faced, down-and-dirty. The hard-plastic soldiers (petroleum-based all the way) were built to take a pounding. In the spring of 1965, in GI Bill–built suburbs from Levittown, New York, to Castro Valley, California, ten-year-old boys were digging miniature foxholes and jerry-rigging Dad’s old handkerchiefs to make paratroopers out of their new dolls. Hasbro had an instant hit; G.I. Joe did close to $20 million in sales that first year. Early indications pointed to steady growth.
But sales reports later in the ’60s made for unhappy reading in the Hasbro boardroom, and by the early 1970s the toy company found itself leaning on gimmicks to sell G.I. Joe. These included fuzzy flocked hair (they called it “realistic”), a nonregulation beard, colorful new uniform choices, swiveling “Eagle-Eyes,” and a fighting hand formed into a “Kung Fu Grip” (Bruce Lee had taken off by then). Hasbro folded G.I. Joe into “The Adventure Team...ready to go wherever adventure leads.” The company was at pains to minimize the militaryness of its military doll.
You can’t blame the Hasbro marketers and their sell-side analysts for having been optimistic in those first heady months of 1964. They were sure they were riding the long wave of good feeling for US soldierdom. How could they have known that the ground under G.I. Joe was beginning to shift, even in the happy springtime of his advent?
