The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] down mentioned it at every opportunity as proof of the Sandinistas’ immorality. “High level officials” of both Nicaragua and Cuba “have been personally implicated” in drug smuggling, Reagan said during the 1985 debates over contra aid (Reagan 1987:673–76). The State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which managed the administration’s public-relations campaign against the Sandinistas, […]

View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the 1980s via the Mena airstrip, when Bill Clinton was governor and controlled the state police. But the story goes further. Mena was the hub for the Reagan administration’s secret operation to supply Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which interested me because I had spent four years covering the Sandinista Revolution and the guerrilla insurgencies […]

Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump by Jonathan Marshall

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: Dark Quadrant Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump Jonathan Marshall New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021, $29.95/£22.95, h/b Robin Ramsay In 1958, the US attorney for the southern district of New York told an audience of his peers: ‘In this country today, we have a […]

View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] significant on first reading but amounts to little. Pieczenik is willing to swear that X said that Y said . . . . Honegger is a former Reagan era Washington insider, best known for revealing the existence of the so-called ‘October Surprise’, the deal between the Reagan election campaign and the Iranians to prevent […]

The Lost Peace by Richard Sakwa

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] the New Deal and its successor programmes – Truman’s Fair Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society. This historic moment ended with the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House, with the backing of banks and corporations concerned about falling profitability, ‘big government’ and (what they saw as) high taxation and over […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] the President would refer to him as ‘Bandar Bush’. Bandar has been a friend of the Bush family ever since working with George HW Bush during the Reagan administration, when Bandar ended up as the middle-man in paying the Nicaraguan contras. Prince Bandar has in fact been in and out of the shadows around […]

Everybody Knows: Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] living through a new era of corruption, and this has become absolutely central to the working of the system. The conditions for this were created during the Reagan years when the unions were defeated, union power was rolled back, and there was the beginning of a massive shift in the balance of wealth and […]

Nixon’s Nuclear Specter by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] the nuclear issue and issued no nuclear threats during his presidency. President Carter raised the possibility of a nuclear attack on Iran during the hostage crisis. President Reagan presided over a massive nuclear build-up which came close to accidental thermonuclear war during the misinterpreted Able Archer alert. President Clinton discussed using B61-11 tactical nuclear […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] on Sunday of 1 September 2013 Yasmin Alibhai Brown wrote the following in a piece called ‘The special relationship is over. At long last!’ ‘When Thatcher and Reagan were locked in their long embrace, I 50 The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 37, No. 1, September 14, 2013, available at . 51 22 Scott […]

The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] democracy, the Shah. Jimmy Carter took the blame for that, and America launched itself into twenty years of living in a fairy tale world narrated by Ronald Reagan, followed by ten years of fear happily stoked by the very people who’d sold America the fairy-tale Kool-Aid in the first place. 1 Officially the United […]

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