The Time of Illusion

New York: Knopf, 1976. First Edition. Hardcover. Fair/poor. 22 cm, 392, covers soiled inside DJ, front DJ flap folded, corners bumped, tears and wear to DJ, adhesive residue on DJ. Jonathan Edward Schell (August 21, 1943 - March 25, 2014)[1][2] was an American author and visiting fellow at Yale University, whose work primarily dealt with campaigning against nuclear weapons. His work appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch. The Fate of the Earth received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Award. In his words; "Never has a nation unleashed so much violence with so little risk to itself. It is the government's way of waging war without the support of its own people, and involves us all in the dishonor of killing in a cause we are no longer willing to die for." From 1967 until 1987, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the principal writer of the magazine's Notes and Comment section. He was a columnist for Newsday from 1990 until 1996. He taught at many universities, including Princeton, Emory, New York University, the New School, Wesleyan University and the Yale Law School. He became a persistent advocate for disarmament and a world free of nuclear weapons. He won George Polk Awards in 1976 and also published essays on the Presidency of Richard Nixon, as well as the aftermath to the Watergate scandal, which led to the president's resignation in 1974, forming the basis to his book, The Time of Illusion. Derived from a Kirkus review: An elaborate essay on the submerged ideological context of Watergate. In the evolving post-Cold War strategy, nuclear weapons--useless as a flexible instrument of policy--were to be supplemented by limited war capabilities. Any situation which offered a pretext for symbolically affirming the national will was a test of "credibility" military strategy after Dulles became PR strategy. The "illusion" of the title is not merely the duplicities of the Nixon crew; it encompasses all the posturings that our own inconceivable weapons have thrust on us. In Schell's view the special achievement of Nixon and his cohorts (particularly Buchanan) was to have eliminated even the pretense that realities generate images, and to have made the reverse process a tool of conscious policy--courting legislative failure, for example, in order to juggle congressional "scenarios." Domestic opponents, who posed a more volatile threat than foreign adversaries to the image of authoritative presidential will, inevitably became the real "enemies." This wide-ranging thesis is nonetheless consistently and appallingly convincing. More than any of the brash psychohistorical studies of presidents we've been treated to in recent years, this discreet and distanced analysis makes clear the kinship of major national policies, over more than half a decade, with the thought processes of true psychosis.