SHORT THREAD: Today’s @WashingtonPost story on senior intel officials’ “mounting concern” over Trump’s resistance to their collection and analysis reminded me most of their predecessors’ reactions to Nixon’s disdain.
First, the @gregpmiller article:
(1/5)
washingtonpost.com/world/national…
First, the @gregpmiller article:
(1/5)
washingtonpost.com/world/national…
LBJ gave President-elect Nixon access to his highly restricted President’s Daily Brief.
CIA officers set up shop near his transition HQ in New York to brief him on the PDB. Nixon didn’t accept their offer to meet, so they took an envelope w/ the PDB to his office each day.
(2/5)
CIA officers set up shop near his transition HQ in New York to brief him on the PDB. Nixon didn’t accept their offer to meet, so they took an envelope w/ the PDB to his office each day.
(2/5)
“Richard Nixon was not especially trusting in what the Agency would give him,” his foreign policy adviser Dick Allen told me. “He didn’t place a whole lot of inspiration and faith into Agency interpretations.”
The CIA outpost failed to get even a single meeting with Nixon.
(3/5)
The CIA outpost failed to get even a single meeting with Nixon.
(3/5)
As the transition ended, their suspicions about Nixon’s lack of interest in the PDB and their analysis were confirmed, in the form of a delivery to them from his office: a towering stack of the previous two months’ PDB envelopes—all of them still unopened.
(4/5)
(4/5)
A dejected senior CIA officer captured his colleagues’ feelings, calling the innovative outreach to the president-elect “an impressive performance, but to what end?”
Sure enough, Nixon as president avoided PDB briefings and may not have even read the written product.
(5/5)
Sure enough, Nixon as president avoided PDB briefings and may not have even read the written product.
(5/5)
