Word: laird
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Screenplay by Robin Moore and Laird Koenig...
...Kissinger was obsessed with undermining the influence of Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers by denigrating them behind their backs and excluding them from major policy matters. "Cutting out Mel Laird is what we did for a living," says former Kissinger Staffer Laurence Lynn. Hersh says that Laird was bypassed in the decision to bomb Cambodia...
From Macchiavelli to Melvin Laird, which is a not inconsequential span of experience, the historical record suggests that survival is easier for those leaders who stay out of the way of political steamrollers. Indeed, the successful statesman is usually one who is agile enough to dance ahead of great surges of human feeling and direct them to his own purposes...
Machiavelli defined his ideal prince as a head of state with a "flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate." Melvin Laird, the consummate congressional pol who served Richard Nixon as Secretary of Defense, lived by the rule that a wise man never says no to the inevitable and rarely encounters a situation that cannot be turned in some way to his advantage. In 1970, for example, a helicopter-borne rescue team penetrated North Viet Nam's air defenses but found that its quarry-U.S. P.O.W.s held at the Son Tay prison camp-had been moved to parts...
...Nixon was convinced that he owed nothing to Jewish votes and that he could not increase his Jewish support regardless of what he did. Deep down, he wanted to impose a comprehensive Middle East settlement. In October 1972, I forwarded to Nixon a memorandum from Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird urging secret contacts with Egypt to take advantage of Sadat's expulsion of the Soviets and to move closer to the Arab position. Nixon sent me the memo with a note: "K-I lean to Laird's view. The conduct of the American Jewish community on the Soviet...