Know Your Enemy - Bomb Power (w/ Erik Baker)

Matt and Sam welcome historian Erik Baker onto the podcast to discuss Garry Wills's blistering critique of the national security state and unaccountable presidential power in his 2010 book, Bomb Power.

Duration: 1h 28m
Broadcast on: 19 Dec 2023
Audio Format: other

For our final main episode of 2023, we're dipping back into the Wills well to discuss Garry's under-appreciated 2010 book, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. Joining us is our great friend Erik Baker, lecturer in the History of Science Department at Harvard University and an editor at The Drift magazine.

In Bomb Power, Garry Wills elegantly demonstrates how the imperatives of secretly conceiving, building, and deploying the nuclear bomb fundamentally changed American democracy — massively empowering the presidency, disempowering Congress, and setting the nation on a permanent war footing. At the same time, secrecy and deception metastasized through the American system, enabling the rise of extra-judicial assassinations, coup plotting, domestic surveillance, torture, and clandestine war. "Secrecy emanated from the Manhattan Project like a giant radiation emission..." writes Wills, "Because the government was the keeper of the great secret, it began specializing in secret keeping.”

Also discussed: Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023), Henry Kissinger (RIP), Bush and Obama, Snowden, Ellsberg, and the ways in which Bomb Power is a profoundly Catholic book. Enjoy!

Sources:

Garry Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)

Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner (2017)

Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State (2021)

Archbishop John Wester, "Living in the Light of Christ's Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament," Jan 11, 2022

Erik Baker, "Daniel in the Lion's Den: On the Moral Courage of Daniel Ellsberg," The Baffler, June 17, 2023

John Schwenkler and Mark Souva, "False Choices: The Unjustifiable Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Commonweal, Oct 14, 2020

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 84 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here, as always, with my great friend, Sam Etherbell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. I'm so excited for this episode. I know we say that all the time, but the combination of guests and topic and text really was one I had so much fun preparing for, and then actually having the conversation. Yeah, it turned out really great. Yes. We explain a lot at the start of the episode, but really since this summer with the discourse over the Oppenheimer film, and also the death of Daniel Ellsberg, Daniel Ellsberg was the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers and was a kind of activist against nuclear weapons because he had been a nuclear planner, right, in the Defense Department. That combination of events, we just started cooking up something to do with maybe nuclear weapons and we lit upon both the best answer and the most Know Your Enemy answer, which is we decided to take as our text, Gary Wills' really incredible 2010 book called Bomb Power, the modern presidency in the national security state, which really traces kind of how the development of the atom bomb, the processes around it, the secrecy and so on, totally transformed our system of government to make it almost a kind of permanent presidential dictatorship because the power to deploy the atom bomb was solely lodged in one man's hands. And we had a great guest and that was Eric Baker. That's right. He actually went to the same parish in Chicago as Gary Wills. Yeah. So Eric was Wills' build before any of us, at least me and Sam. And he really, you can tell just the thoughtfulness and sensitivity he brings to working through Gary's ideas and arguments was really remarkable and he's just one of my favorite writers and thinkers. Great, right. And from afar, just a lovely human being. He is lovely. And he's a lecturer in the history of science department at Harvard. He has a PhD in history and he has a book coming out called Make Your Own Job, the entrepreneurial work ethic in modern America. You might have caught some of his writing, he writes for the Baffler. We mentioned a piece he wrote for the Baffler in this episode, his kind of obit for Daniel Ellsberg. He's also an associate editor at The Drift. So I'm sure a lot of our listeners have read Eric before, but if you haven't, we hope you check him out after this episode because I think he gives a taste of why we're so fond of him. Good Twitter presence too, for what it's worth. Yes. Well, I don't think we should delay. We dive right in at the start of this episode, so no more context or hand holding now. But we will give you just a few housekeeping items. This should be our last episode in front of the paywall before the holidays. So whatever holidays you celebrate, we hope you have a restful and lovely time to get some time off.

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