Recent Books204 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬Johnson’s, excluding purely private
behavior or actions that the authors judged
to be merely partisan or ideological. Their
work has now been reissued with added
reviews o eight more administrations
(Nixon’s through Barack Obama’s). The
new volume was spearheaded by Banner, a
member o the original team, who de-
scribes it as an exercise o “historians’ civic
oce.” The result is a fascinating glimpse
into a largely unstudied aspect o U.S.
political history and a look at the disap-
pointing, i not depressing, weaknesses o
the political, legal, and constitutional
remedies available to deter or punish
presidential malfeasance. Particularly
rewarding are overviews written by
Woodward and Banner, which include the
sort o judgments that the authors o the
individual reviews were directed to avoid.Kissinger on Kissinger: Reections on
Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership
BY WINSTON LORD. All Points
Books, 2019, 176 pp.Henry Kissinger has written about his
time in government in lengthy books that
often go into excruciating detail. This
little volume, his only foray into oral
history, does the opposite: it distills—and
therein lies its attraction. As one man’s
view o events, it does not pretend to be a
balanced history. But Kissinger’s accounts
o the strategies that he and U.S. Presi-
dent Richard Nixon pursued in a series
o crucial events—the opening to China,
the 1972 summit with Soviet leader
Leonid Brezhnev, the Ärst arms control
negotiations with the Soviets—make for
fascinating reading and serve as a timely
reminder o what serious, farsighted
diplomacy looks like. Participants must
from the outset be able to answer thefocuses on the pivotal role o privateers
in the struggles for control o the sea
and the spread o European empires.
Moss highlights the legal and political
issues raised by privateering, including
the right o privateers to defend
themselves, the ownership o the booty
they seized, and their relationship to
the states that gave them licences.
Privateers remain active today, just in
dierent forms. The private sector has
expanded to Äll in gaps left when
all-volunteer armies handle the complex
demands o counterinsurgency. Con-
tractors have joined the Äghting in Iraq,
for instance, often to detrimental eect.
Moss brings the book right up to the
present with a discussion o the private
sector’s participation in cyberconÁict.The United States
Jessica T. Mathews
Presidential Misconduct: From George
Washington to Today
EDITED BY JAMES M. BANNER, JR.
New Press, 2019, 528 pp.I
n 1974, John Doar, special counsel to
the House committee handling
impeachment proceedings against
U.S. President Richard Nixon, decided
that the committee’s work would beneÄt
from expert analysis that would compare
Nixon’s wrongdoing to that o past
presidents. In an astonishing eight weeks,
a team o 15 scholars, recruited and led by
the historian C. Vann Woodward, pro-
duced a volume o brief, factual reviews o
misconduct by every administration from
George Washington’s through Lyndon