Mr. Vistica's Navy

...If one can navigate by his subtitle, he believes that the navy, which he graciously admits was not in tip-top shape when it was passed to a Republican administration, was "sunk" by the Republicans, particularly John Lehman...

...And it will sell books...

...The Nanuchkas pass the Dianne Feinstein test, which is to say they look absolutely deadly, and, for the sake of making an otherwise unsupportable argument, Mr...

...The following example involves former navy secretary John Lehman, the villain of the book...

...In fact, the International Institute for Strategic Studies's 1982-1983 Military Balance lists 1,793 Soviet combatants, excluding supply ships, tenders, and auxiliaries...

...The author has chosen to limit his interpretation of the Soviet fleet to major vessels only, while counting all types for the U.S...

...Vistica's Democrats, but not his Republicans, who are branded and rated: as merely Republicans or as conservatives, staunch conservatives, or ultraconservatives...

...He believes that it was entirely defensive and that it was far smaller than anyone thought, because "a cabal of officers...

...He rolled right over the admirals, "manipulated" Secretary of Defense Weinberger, played the press like a piper, lied to Congress, and "manipulated" the president as well...

...But when it suits his convenience, he simply comes about...

...And who was he...

...This is what Gregory L. Vistica has failed to perceive...

...Vistica- "He reached over her shoulders with his arms and put his hands under her bra, squeezing her bare breasts"-refrain from using these tools to assess the navy when they have become the means by which the United States Senate probes the judicial philosophy of Supreme Court nominees...

...An avid reader of footnotes may turn to Mr...

...One of the primary vessels built expressly for this purpose was the Soviets' Oscar-class submarine, which could fire its twenty-four nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at a carrier from three hundred miles away...

...So with most of Mr...

...He would murder his own family...

...He was a man who, we are told, literally almost foamed at the mouth as he spoke in obscenities: "'What the fuck is going on...

...Not having done his homework, he says that Soviet "reconnaissance planes did not have the range to reach out and find an American battle group," but on October 10, 1977, two Soviet maritime patrol planes flew over the U.S.S...

...What is remarkable, indeed extraordinary, is that its author maintains that the navy lied to Congress to portray the Soviet navy as strong, while simultaneously lying to Congress to portray the Soviet navy as weak...

...While Soviet operational capabilities never lagged as far behind as Mr...

...they require a massive societal effort sanctioned by a relatively fragile consensus all too easily disrupted with mass media opinions and accusations...

...for years had lied to Congress...

...For example, it is critical of the secretary of the navy because he "sought to bring the navy under civilian control...

...In the decade before the American naval buildup, Soviet fleets proved time and again that they could swarm all over the world...

...All his life he had hated orphans, and this was his big chance...

...He would war against God...

...All of which is to say nothing about surface deployments and the construction of facilities around the globe to support power projection-or the prospect of blocking Western power projection-in the Third World...

...Or, in other words: "'The road runner was carrying napalm and nuclear weapons when he came around the bend in the Arizona desert, heading rapidly toward the orphanage that he was secretly obsessed with destroying...

...Vistica (a Newsweek correspondent) has produced in book form an artifact of the television culture...

...A close reading of its 447 pages cannot fail to call forth parody: Chunky raunchy Duke Buzutkis was sitting in his office chomping a five-foot-long celery stick that his mess steward had sculpted into the shape of a rhinoceros penis...

...Vistica should be embarrassed by his claim that the navy "concealed the true story about the Soviet fleet and purposefully embellished its size," using a "grossly misleading figure of 1,700 for testimonies before Congress," which was "about three times the actual number...

...By the same token, he is much exercised by Reagan-era naval excursions in the Black Sea, but has failed either to communicate or know about the previous decade's 20 Soviet naval task force cruises in the Caribbean...

...The phone rang...

...It might have been useful, by the way, had the Knights of Malta informed Mr...

...They need carrier task forces, naval air stations, and zucchini-shaped underwater ships as big as the Seagram Building that can hide beneath the North Pole and turn Moscow into a glass paperweight as easily as Hillary Rodham Clinton can behead a travel office slave...

...His judgment that Soviet naval strategy was purely defensive is contradicted by the fact that the Soviets maintained a vast patrol submarine force for the aggressive purpose of closing North Atlantic sea lanes...

...Though I have read many a work on naval history and strategy, none has had quite as many references to breasts, balls, dildos, crotches, labia, nipples, penises, and pubic hair as this one...

...How convenient, for these are 200-ft.-long, long-range craft that can carry as many as 12 surface-to-surface missiles armed with nuclear warheads, a twin Mach 2.5 SAM launcher with 18 reloads, a 3" gun that fires a 35 lb...

...Vistica's 40 pages of documentation to discover how he knows the not-particularly-honorable thoughts, feelings, motives, and intentions of a number of people he clearly does not like...

...The admiral's ship had come in...

...What Lehman really wanted to do," Mr...

...He believes the Soviet navy to have been so badly constructed and maintained that it was hardly operational...

...The Soviet task was not to patrol the sea lanes but to close them, their operational pattern sudden bursts of activity rather than patiently standing the watch...

...Then, directing the reader, without a page reference, to Lehman's own book, Mr...

...Vistica declares that "for twenty years the navy had misled Congress about the Soviet fleet," which, by his interpretation, was rusty, toothless, purely defensive, and hardly able to put to sea...

...Case dismissed...

...Vistica simply ignores them...

...Vistica's informants are "knowledgeable sources," those who provide information to his b?te noire are "Lehman's spies, the Knights of Malta, and conservative Republicans...

...In 1985, 750,000 sailors and marines were going about their business and doing their duty...

...The Satanic Lehman "would bend and circumvent the rules if need be and use every political means available to become the undisputed chief of the entire navy" (emphasis mine...

...He owes his outlook, his historiography, and his ethos not to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Samuel Eliot Morison but to Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael...

...Though Mr...

...But they did not need to...

...His book is faulted not merely by carelessness, inaccurate analysis, and patent bias, but, in the main, by his champion lack of perspective...

...Rest easy, not the pope himself...

...He had to be stopped.' See footnote 14...

...Buzutkis wanted a 600-ship navy and would do anything to get it...

...Everything else is, at best, secondary, and sex is irrelevant...

...pivots on antecedents so that the person quoted seems to be commenting on a specific formulation of which he may have no awareness, and attributes statements to people who clearly did not utter them...

...Vistica supplies the following quotation: "That you...

...Its purpose is to maintain an almost invulnerable nuclear deterrent beneath the world's oceans, to keep the sea lanes open and clear in all circumstances, even and most importantly in war, to be able to project American military power into any corner within striking distance of the sea, and to ensure that it can do this by perpetually holding an edge in air, sea, and undersea combat...

...Vistica writes, "was have them all shot or hung [sic...

...You didn't know that John Lehman was in charge of the nation as it marched overwhelmingly toward militarism in the Reagan years...

...In April 1975, for example, 220 Soviet vessels took part in "Exercise Okean," coordinating 10 days of intense activity in the Barents, Norwegian, and Mediterranean seas, the Sea of Japan, the Atlantic, and the Pacific...

...What in the hell are you doing?' John Lehman was almost foaming at the mouth, screaming into the telephone...

...Navy (Simon and Schuster, $27.50), the ABC television program Prime Time Live addressed the world-shaking subject of sexual mores in the navy...

...And he had no bones about saying it publicly...

...Vistica quotes without quotation marks (Caspar Weinberger at the White House supposedly uttering the courtly phrase, What the fuck are you doing here...

...A burly albino in his mid-fifties whose eyelids had been shot off during an unauthorized raid he led on Haiphong harbor at the behest of John Lehman, then an aide to Adolf Hitler, he had made admiral partly because the uncle of his husband's wife was on Kissinger's staff...

...Mark Helprin, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal, is the author of A Soldier of the Great War...

...That the Soviets would use SSMs with nuclear warheads against carrier task forces was as much a secret as the fact that Paris is the capital of France, but what is remarkable about the statement is not its inaccuracy...

...He holds, therefore, that Lehman and his fellow champions of "Reagan's new militarism" aimed for a 600-ship U.S...

...Sam Donaldson, looking, as ever, as if he had just stepped from a Klingon battle cruiser, employed the magic of television to present admirals literally bowing their heads to confess-"I was insensitive"-as if in a Stalinist show trial...

...If you wonder why the descendants of John Paul Jones and Oliver Hazard Perry did not tell whoever was bending them into soft pretzels of unctuous regret to go to hell, you might consider that admirals need things...

...Vistica's scope...

...In addition, it gathers intelligence, sustains an amphibious army almost 200,000 strong, runs a large university system, does advanced research, and fights terrorists...

...Skeleton" is not identified as a Democrat, but merely as a member of Congress...

...He believes that the Soviets merely wanted to keep their missile submarines in a cold-water bastion to protect a second-strike potential, but dispersal into the open oceans affords a far more likely path to survival...

...But why should Mr...

...What will the militarists think of next...

...Navy without any plausible justification other than making possible the so-called maritime strategy, which, in his view, "sent ships into Soviet waters looking to pick a fight...

...Especially when its prurience is by no means the chief failing of a work in which the ratio of static to substance is so high that a reviewer's responsibility to the reader becomes somewhat like that of a public health official who cordons off Ebola Fever sites...

...Most of the time the reader will discover a citation that says only "Gordon interview" or "Pope interview...

...They simultaneously emasculated the admiralty while giving it what it wanted, and did so by colluding with the admirals in the big lie that the Soviet navy was worthy of counterbalance...

...Whereas Mr...

...This school of thought, where you say whatever it takes to get you through, is what I call "The Tobacco Institute...

...That he is not a master of consistency is clear, but what is his thesis...

...His case against John Lehman is so vile, witless, obsessive, and exaggerated that it impeaches itself...

...But the Vistica operational definition of a navy that has been sunk seems almost in its entirety a portrait of the sea service in terms of its most eccentric and distasteful sexual mores...

...and that afterwards your head be severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters...

...This is a work of broad accusation that employs no more scholarly apparatus than the citing of undetailed unquoted hearsay from bitter enemies in bureaucratic wars...

...Vistica has presented perhaps two dozen examples of abhorrent or criminal sexual behavior to make his case that the navy endured three consecutive Republican administrations only to flounder, it is probably a safe bet that the navy's record in this regard is better than that of a comparable sample of the general population...

...The author's main charge-that Lehman's management of the navy led it inexorably to the sexual malfeasance of the 1990s-is unquantified, purely anecdotal, repetitious, and immaterial...

...Dear God, civilian control of the military...

...On the one hand, Mr...

...You can't just make these...

...Footnote 14: Coyote interview...

...Without explanation he has simply excluded vast numbers of potent Soviet ships, like the 22 Nanuchka class corvettes in 1982, of which 31 exist at present...

...The United States Navy is a huge organization built around several immense fleets...

...But his politics are far overshadowed by his book's errors and internal contradictions...

...be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, but that you be taken down again, and whilst you are yet alive, your bowels be taken out and burnt before your face...

...Vistica suggests, they did not match those of Western navies...

...In a thrust against the aircraft carriers Lehman sought so tirelessly, he writes that the navy secretary "and his admirals kept secret the navy's intelligence reports that revealed the Soviets' probable weapons in a war against the carriers were nuclear...

...Vistica's nearly one-half-thousand-page indictment would fit on the edge of a postcard...

...As much a master of unsupported (and, indeed, often unsupportable) opinions and accusations as Oliver Stone, Mr...

...If necessary, he told Skip Blutis, his Gypsy-American public affairs officer who had grown up in the Everglades and played water polo for the ultraconservative Hoover Institution, he would kill every man, woman, and child in the United States...

...It was John Lehman...

...high-explosive projectile 4.5 miles at 120 rounds per minute, a 3,000 round per minute 30-millimeter cannon accurate to 1.5 miles, and appropriate search radars, fire control, and countermea-sures...

...The author's political bias is confirmed in this summation of the eighties: "The country's march toward militarism was so overwhelming that its foes in the establishment press and on Capitol Hill were helpless to stop it...

...Spruance 300 miles from Boston, and two months later a similar incident occurred 150 miles east of Savannah...

...Vistica and his checkers that no matter how many times you call him Ike "Skeleton," the man in question is really Representative Ike Skelton...

...He would even mislead Congress...

...Stripped of sex, sensationalism, and long explorations attributable to lack of comprehension, Mr...

...Fall From, Glory is so riddled with illogic and inconsistencies that reading it is like watching ants on a burning log...

...He thought the sentence for treason should be like the ones given [sic] in the nineteenth century...

...Beginning with the launch of a reconnaissance satellite and ending with a simulated strategic strike, this exercise apparently did not register on Mr...