Once More Unto The Breach, With Eliot Cohen

>> Andrew Roberts: Elliot Cohen is a political scientist and author, and presently dean of the Paul Nietzsche School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He was a counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. Anyway, so you've written or edited over a dozen books, and the latest is The Hollow Crown, Shakespeare, and How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall.

This is, of course, coming out with the, I think it's pronounced catacentenary of the first folio of William Shakespeare. So it couldn't be better timed. What gave you the idea of writing this book?

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, of course, it's a bit out of my lane, as we would say.

By the way, it's great to be with you, Andrew.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you.

>> Eliot Cohen: As you know, I'm mainly a military historian. Somebody who writes about foreign policy and things such as that. But I've lived in Washington for quite a while, and I've served in the United States government, and I've been a dean.

And the opening line of the book is, it's all very well to see Richard II, Goneril, and Iago on the stage. I've actually had to work with some of those people.

>> Eliot Cohen: That's really the conceit of the book. The trigger, I will tell you, was seeing a performance of Henry VIII.

We have actually two Shakespeare theaters in Washington, which is a delight. Henry VIII, as you know, some people were not initially sure that Shakespeare himself had written it, it was probably a collaboration. But there is a great scene when Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's chancellor, is deposed, and he gives a wonderful speech which begins, Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.

And then at one point, he describes how he's feeling full of confidence, and when he thinks, good, easy, man, full, surely his greatness is a ripening, it nips his root, and then he falls, as I do. I have ventured like little wanton boys that swim on bladders these many summers in the sea of glory, but far beyond my depth.

My high blown pride at length broke under me, and now has left me weary and old with service to the mercy of a rude stream that must forever hide me. And as I listened to that, I said, I know that guy. I mean, that is a familiar figure in Washington.

And one thing led to another. I ended up teaching a course on Shakespeare at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to students who were, as you would say, postgraduate. Many of them headed for careers in government, many with already having very interesting life experiences behind them. It turned into a book, and then, it turned into a course, rather, and then that turned into a book.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: When you mention Henry VIII, he's often equated nowadays, at least to Stalin, because of the arbitrary nature of his paranoia and so on, and obviously kills. Can you see that? Is there an analogy there, would you think?

>> Eliot Cohen: Yeah, I think one of the things that's so interesting about Henry VIII is, unlike a lot of Shakespeare's other kings, his character is not particularly clear.

Now, this may have been because it's a little bit too close for comfort, given that he was living in the reign of Elizabeth and then of James I.

>> Andrew Roberts: Of course.

>> Eliot Cohen: But I think he deliberately makes him an ambiguous figure who is hard to figure out. Most of Shakespeare's characters, I think, are shown with just remarkable clarity.

And then others, he likes to leave a mystery. So Iago is like that in Othello. We're never quite sure, why does he decide to do in Othello? There's some hints, but they don't add up to a picture. And at the end, he's being carried off to be tortured, and you somehow know he's not gonna tell anybody why he did that.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: The phrase you quoted about wanton boys, the ones floating down the river on bladders, is reminiscent of that line about, and I think it's Hamlet, isn't it? So, as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.

>> Eliot Cohen: That's Lear.

>> Andrew Roberts: Lear, of course it is.

Do you see any King Lears in modern-day American politics, specifically, should we say, in presidential politics?

>> Eliot Cohen: Yeah, the problem is, of course, in a way, it's a book about the analogies and metaphors that Shakespeare gives us to understand political people. The thing about Lear that I find interesting is that he wants to have it all.

He wants to leave power and yet still have all the trappings of power and the deference and respect. I talk a little bit in the book about other people I've seen who've left power. And the way the book works for the benefit of the listeners is I don't go play by play.

I go through what's essentially three phases, how leaders rise, how they rule, and then how they fall. And I have seen people who've left power and who, like Lear, don't know who they are after they've left power and suddenly find it intolerable that the kind of deference and treatment that they used to get, they no longer get.

And Lear finally recovers his humanity, of course, but at a terribly high price. And I have seen a few who have, and I'm afraid I think I've seen more who don't.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, we find that with former prime ministers. They absolutely hate their post prime ministerial life. There are very few of them that have managed to segue into their post prime ministerial life successfully.

You mentioned Iago earlier. And what if Iago doesn't actually have a driving reason? Some people have put forward sexual ones, haven't they? And others the time that mistreated him in the past, and so on. But have you come across people in politics in Washington who are just plain unpleasant?

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Who just are motivated to do betrayals because they enjoy them?

>> Eliot Cohen: I think that's characteristic English understatement at work. There's a wonderful one-hour show by Patrick Page, who's a terrific shakespearean actor in the United States, about Shakespeare's villainous. And he has a very interesting riff on Iago at the very end.

Where he says that, among other things, Shakespeare does periodically give you figures who are sociopaths. And I've dealt with a few sociopaths, and not just seeing them in charge, but you see them sometimes hovering around. And that does describe Iago. In a way he's very different from the Richard III figure, who is kind of a tormented, twisted, horrible guy.

Although he completely takes us in, as frankly some sociopaths do. But Shakespeare gives us more of a window into his soul than into Iago's. And again, that squares with my experience. There are people that you encounter in government and in academe, let me say, who You can understand their motivations.

And even if you think that they're kinda loathsome as human beings, you can figure them out. And then there are others who just seem to act on a kind of whimsical malice. And that's real life, too.

>> Andrew Roberts: Your mention of Richard III makes Vladimir Putin spring to mind.

Do you think there might be a connection there?

>> Eliot Cohen: Absolutely, so, one of the things I mention in the book, and I try to tie, to some extent, personal experience, to some extent, some historical reflections in. And I mentioned the following episode. I was attending the Munich security conference just before the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

And what struck me is most of the Europeans, I would say fewer of the Americans, but most of the Europeans present, all people, vast experience and knowledge, said, well, Putin will not. He won't try to take the whole country, he may try to take a small piece. This may be a very cunning bluff, and so forth.

And I have to say I doubted that. And the reason had nothing to do with my knowledge of Vladimir Putin or Russia, had everything to do with rereading the Richard III for about the 9th time. What struck me in the rereading Washington throughout the first three acts of Richard III, he's cunning, he's indirect, he's clever, he's doing terrible things.

He's having his brother killed, among other things.

>> Eliot Cohen: But in act four, he commits the big crime, murdering his nephews in the tower. And what's striking to me about that is, he no longer thinks he has to conceal anything. His loyal subordinate Buckingham kinda, gives him a funny look.

He says, I want the bastards dead and wish it done suddenly, do you understand? Answer me quickly. And furthermore, he gets very interested in the details of the killing of two children, and he begins talking in ways which really kind of reference rape. Well, if you look at Putin, I had just feeling something similar had happened.

This guy had been clever, he'd been indirect, he'd been cunning. If you look at the way they took Crimea, if you look at Georgia, if you look at the initial seizure of Donbas in 2014 and 2015, and then it's clear that he no longer felt he needed to do that.

And like Richard III, he begins to invoke the metaphor of rape. Remember this one chilling speech? Or, it may have been an off the cuff remark where he's sort of addressing Ukraine specifically, Zelenskyy, and saying, like it or not, my beauty, you'll have to accept it.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: So, echoes of Richard III there.

>> Andrew Roberts: And Prigozhin, actually, you must be the first person ever to imply that Prigozhin has anything in common with the princes in the tower.

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, Prigozhin is, some of the murderers, who have had, and you see this in both Macbeth, Ed, and Richard III, who, I forget which play.

Now, they say-

>> Andrew Roberts: They have the blooded hands, don't they?

>> And Lady Macbeth has them done in.

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, those are the ones he has done in. But I think maybe then it's Richard III where they say, we're people have been so bruised by life that we just don't care.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah.

>> Eliot Cohen: And in a way, that's probably the precognition story, too. I mean, a guy who spent nine years in Russian prisons, who, that was one of the things that struck me during his ill-fated uprising. That this is a guy who has seen horrors and committed horrors, and the result is he's kind of a warped personality.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: He's been dehumanized-

>> Eliot Cohen: Yes.

>> Andrew Roberts: Essentially by now. Now, you speak in this wonderful book, by the way, I haven't praised it enough, it's a fantastic book.

>> Andrew Roberts: Congratulations on it. About performative politics, about, how you say, theater suffuses all of politics, which, of course, is true.

Tell us a little bit more about that.

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, when I talk to people about what, why should you be studying Shakespeare if you wanna understand politics as it is? I say one reason is because of his ability to dissect character in a way that nobody else can.

One has to do with his metaphor of, it's not a metaphor, his study of courts. And I think all human organizations have courts, at the top of them. But then it's also his very powerful metaphor, which he continually explores, of politics as a kind of theater, and it is.

And the thing is, these days we tend to be mistrustful, understandably so, of performative politics and the kind of shenanigans. That, unfortunately, we see in the House of Representatives in my country. But there's also a very powerful theater of politics. If you look at Zelensky, immediately changing from a business suit into this kind of quasi military garb.

If you look at just the Shakespearean or Churchillian cadences of the speeches he gives, if you look at that first night, when Ukraine is under attack. And there he is in this sort of green military Ish garb, and he's got his team around him, and he says, I am here, the chief of staff is here, chief of defense, and it's the streets of Kyiv, it was under attack.

It was a very powerful piece of theater. And, of course, the contrast. And I bet Zelenskyy was thinking about this, because he is an actor. The contrast, of course, is with Putin having all of his terrified subordinates 30 or 40ft away from him in this gigantic kind of over the top, gilt smeared palace.

Its very, very powerful. And I think it was very effective and I think it was critical. I mean, look, Churchill, I talk a little bit about some of the politicians who love Shakespeare, Churchill being one of them. Churchill unquestionably mastered the theater of politics.

>> Andrew Roberts: And actually there is a line, isn't there, of Zelensky's in that we will defend our independence speech, where he goes, that is how it will go.

And it's so reminiscent of Churchill in June 1940, saying, at any rate, that is what we are going to try to do.

>> Eliot Cohen: Yes, and it's a brilliant little rhetorical thing cuz you go from the soaring eloquence, to this sort of statement of determination by the continually repeating the same phrases.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: And then the conversational at the end, that is what we are going to try to do.

>> Eliot Cohen: It's conversational, and I'm a human being just like you.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, and you mentioned costuming and the JFK and so on, American politicians. Obviously, Winston church was a huge figure when it came to the props and his hat and his v sign and his cigar and bowtie, and all of those kind of things.

That's a theatrical aspect of politics that Shakespeare would immediately have understood, isn't it?

>> Eliot Cohen: Absolutely, and I think they don't have to read Shakespeare, it helps, probably. But I think most successful politicians, understand something of the theater now, the ones who attempt it and get it wrong get into deep trouble.

I remember when Michael Dukakis, who was a Very decent governor of Massachusetts was running against George HW Bush. And, of course, Bush was a World War II veteran and they kept on running. He goes for a ride in a tank and they have a picture of him and it's just miscasting.

He doesn't look like the kinda guy who's comfortable sitting in the turret of an M1 tank, hurtling around at 50 or 60- Miles an hour. And it's one of the great perils the politicians face.

>> Andrew Roberts: Absolutely, well, we had the famous photograph of Margaret Thatcher in a tank and she looked absolutely at home.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: I bet.

>> Andrew Roberts: She'd have done 70 miles an hour if she'd been able to.

>> Eliot Cohen: I bet some politicians can pull it off and some can't.

>> Andrew Roberts: Brutus and Mark Anthony, that absolutely key moment immediately after the assassination of Julius Caesar, you focus in on that as a brilliant of explaining how oratory can fail and also how it can succeed.

Tell us a bit about that.

>> Eliot Cohen: So what I do is I draw the contrast between Brutus's speech, where he really manages to get everything wrong. I mean, Brutus is a pretty decent guy, although actually he has some traits in common with Julius Caesar, which I think, if you read the play carefully, you see they're not quite as different as you might think.

I mean, they both insist on being number one, that's why Brutus doesn't want Cicero in on the plot. But any case, so they kill Caesar. Brutus, of course, wants to have it both ways. When Cassius, who's a lot smarter about politics, says, we've got to kill Mark Anthony, too, Brutus refuses.

Then he leads everybody and says, I have an idea. So we'll go in and we'll dip our hands up to the elbows in blood. And he then gives a speech, which is all in the first person, it's all about him and then he decides to leave the stage to Anthony.

Well, it's the biggest. And by the way, he speaks in prose. He doesn't speak in iambic pentameter, so he blows it thoroughly. Whereas Mark Anthony, of course, in that very famous speech that I think everybody reads and hopefully memorizes in school, if they still memorize great speeches, as I hope they do over there, I don't know.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: They don't over here, I can assure you, that's unfortunate.

>> Eliot Cohen: The world is going to hell. What's so interesting about that is, I think, two things. One is he kinda brings a the mob along. He uses the body as a prop. He rearranges the crowd. There's a point where he tells them to come in closer.

He appeals to different emotions. But the other thing that is fascinating is Mark Anthony, and this is, I believe, characteristic of some great demagogues. Some of his emotions are quite sincere. You have the feeling that he is genuinely grief stricken about Caesar. And on the other hand, he's a completely calculating, deceptive guy at exactly the same time.

So after the mob goes off to murder and loot, he's happy. Let mischief do what it will.

>> Andrew Roberts: And he's repeated several times that Brutus is an honourable man. And each time he repeats it, you can feel the crowd thinking, no, he isn't. We're going to burn down his house.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: This is something that I think demagogues do have, is the ability to read the average person and to respond in an almost feral way to their weaknesses. Somebody who we tend to think of as a hero, Henry the V is a genius at that.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, I was about to come on.

You call him Shakespeare's most brilliant political creation despite his seductions, lies, and self-pity. He is not the villain of the play. But actually, in a sense, he is, isn't he?

>> Eliot Cohen: Yeah, I mean, my view is he's a real stinker. I mean, he's an awful guy. You think about it, he betrays his best friend, Falstaff, he has another friend executed.

He sets things up so that there'll be this war, which is an unjust war, but it'll be somebody else's fault. With Henry, it's always somebody else's fault. There's that wonderful scene towards the end before Agincourt, a touch of Harry in the night, that's what the chorus says, at least.

And he's trying to engage his soldiers as equals. He then gives a soliloquy, where he calls them peasants and fools who don't really understand what it's like to be king. And then the next moment, we see him giving the St Christmas Day speech. We're a band of brothers.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Where we follow him, don't we? I mean, the charisma is such that by Lawrence Olivier on a rearing horse just before D-Day. We follow him, don't we?

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, that's, I think, part of the brilliance of Shakespeare is it's not just that somebody like Henry V can fool the people in the play, as it were.

He can fool us, and that's even though Shakespeare has given us all the evidence out there to know what he's really like. And again, I think this is something that's very true of political life. People sometimes think that there are big secrets which, if you only knew them, the scales would fall from your eyes.

No, actually, the basic data is always out there. But so often in politics, we see what we want to see.

>> Andrew Roberts: So is this charisma? Is this Shakespeare essentially writing about charisma even before the sort of modern concept of charisma?

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, I think in the case of Henry V it is, but I would say it's more manipulation.

It's self-conscious. I mean, there's a certain kind of charisma that leaders sometimes have. Actually, Thatcher, who you probably knew better than I did, but I met her a few times. There was a certain charisma where you just said, my goodness, I'm in the room with a presence of some kind.

It's, by the way, how Kissinger describes being in the same room as Charles de Gaulle. In the first volume of his memoirs, he says, you just had the sense that if de Gaulle moved over to the window, the whole room would kind of suddenly tilt and we'd all fall out.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: That is charisma where it's not self-consciously orchestrated. I mean, Henry V undoubtedly had some of that, or Shakespeare's Henry V, that is. But I think what Shakespeare shows is how much is also artifice.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, and you get that also a lot in Hamlet, don't you?

>> Eliot Cohen: Yes, yes.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: So tell us a bit about the politics of Hamlet in particular, or at least how leaders rising, falling and ruling, can learn from that play.

>> Eliot Cohen: I deliberately did not write about Hamlet in the book. And the reason why is if I began tackling that monster of a play.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: I would never be able to finish it. I think for me, the most interesting character, and this may be an evasion of your question, is Polonius, the counselor. Who is, on the one hand, a blowhard, but actually, there's wisdom there. And you run across that kind of character periodically who you are tempted to dismiss because they talk too much, they don't listen.

Polonius is not a listener, he has many limitations as a counselor. But actually, periodically, there's wisdom. And I think to understand politics, you sometimes have to be able to listen carefully to people who you think, 85% of the time, they're just jerks.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, and he comes to an unnaturally sticky end, doesn't he?

For no particular reason. I can't see the need for the death of Polonius in there.

>> Eliot Cohen: I think that's the point, it's random, it's not what Hamlet intended. And that happens, too. I mean, I think it's a mistake to view politics as people sometimes do, as a kind of morality play where good gets rewarded and evil gets punished.

I mean, sometimes things just work out really badly. I mentioned that in another play, Cymbeline, which of course it produced a lot less often. Belarius, this counselor who's kind of kidnapped two princes and is educating them somewhere in the woods, is trying to explain to the princes that's the way that it works.

And he has actually, if I could just give you a couple of lines. He said, the kids want him to tell them what is it like being in the court. And he says, how you speak? But know the city's usuries and felt them knowingly. The art of the court, as hard to leave as keep, whose top to climb is certain falling or so slippery that the fear is as bad as falling.

And he goes on and on. And how often doth ill deserve by doing well, you end up getting punished for having done the right thing. And the great thing about it for me as an old teacher at this point, is the students go, his princess, namely his students go, yeah, yeah, we get that.

But we wanna be in the room where the decisions are made.

>> Andrew Roberts: And as you said earlier in this podcast, he said all human organizations have courts at the top of them.

>> Eliot Cohen: Yes.

>> Andrew Roberts: And that, of course, is right. And it's particularly true at number ten and in the White House, isn't it?

Now, this is a question, obviously I'm posing to somebody who hasn't stood for elective office. And has been appointed in your case by Condi Rice to the State Department as an advisor, a counselor. So you're giving your advice on counsel, but you don't have to face the electorate at any stage any more than Condi Rice did.

To what extent should the councillors of elected politicians, like presidents and prime ministers, also be responsible? Or is it fine to have the systems that we have in democracies whereby the people giving advice don't actually ever have to? I mean, they're courtiers in a sense, much more than actors in their own right.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: That's a really interesting question. I think on the one hand, at least from my own observation and at least of democratic politics in our time. The kind of person who has what it takes to get elected is going to have a very, very different set of aptitudes and sort of knowledge base and character than the people advising them.

And the kinds of people who, for example, have very sophisticated understanding of international politics or defense policy or you name it, are just not going to be the kinds of people to run for office. I think it's right to have the people who do run for office and get buffeted around that way to be the ones who call the shots.

On the other hand, I think it's a very bad idea to have counselors who are too young to have counselors who haven't had some sort of serious life experience. I once, perhaps unkindly, but I think accurately said I would feel better about the staff around President Biden or before him, President Obama if they had at least been in a couple of bar fights.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: So that they would know some elemental things about the nature of conflict, including about the nature of war. So I think there's also, just to give you, I'm sure you'll be able to quote the whole passage from memory. There's a great passage in Churchill. I think it may be in the world crisis, where he goes off on a riff about how generals are treated in life and how politicians are treated.

And it's about how, and I absolutely see this, the more and more senior you are in the military, as you pin on in our system, one star after another, you get treated with a lot of deference. Certainly by the people all around you in the military, but even by the civilian politicians for the most part, not always.

And Churchill's point is, the higher up you go in politics, the more people you have who are telling you you're a complete idiot.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, I can't quote the exact thing, but you're quite right, it is in world crisis. And he is essentially saying that the more eminent a general becomes, the fewer people say no to him.

The fewer people ridicule him, the fewer people try to sort of cross him. Whereas the exact opposite is the case in politics, and that makes perfect sense.

>> Eliot Cohen: De Gaulle, by the way, said something similar. Charles de Gaulle in the late twenties, I think, wrote a fascinating little book which people should read, called the Edge of the sword, which is about civil military relations.

It's very French kind of ideal type of the politician and the general. And why they will never really be comfortable with each other because they have to be such different people.

>> Andrew Roberts: Is it fair to say in business that the richer and more successful and more powerful somebody becomes, the fewer people say, noted.

Because they have courts as well, don't they? The CEO of the massive company has a court, just as the politician or the soldier.

>> Eliot Cohen: The same thing is true of universities, and the same thing is true of any other nonprofit. There are plenty of examples of really big nonprofits where whoever's in charge has a court, and they are probably not hearing a lot of people saying, you know what, boss?

I think that's just wrong. You mentioned I was counselor of the State Department. I give Condi Rice, with whom I was hired, to disagree, in some ways. Credit that she wanted to have at least one person around her who would be willing and private to look her in the eye and say, boss, I hate to tell you this, but I think that's wrong.

And often people don't have that.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, it's the court. Of course, isn't it? In Tudor he was allowed to say whatever he liked. You mentioned Henry Kissinger earlier, who was a guest, actually, on the secrets of statecraft earlier, and he, of course, worked for Richard Nixon, who is a shakespearean character.

Isn't he that great Shakespearean character who is part hero, part anti-hero, suffused with great qualities, a fatal flaw. He's got everything, hasn't he, for Shakespeare? William Shakespeare's Richard Nixon would have been a wonderful play, wouldn't it?

>> Eliot Cohen: It would have been and even has a kind of soliloquy.

So when Nixon leaves the White House, he gives a speech which is nominally to the assembled staff. But in many ways, it's him doing what you do in a soliloquy, which is kind of breaking the fourth wall, speaking to the audience. But also you're revealing who you are.

And yet, part of the speech was something about don't give way to hating, because when you hate, you eventually destroy yourself. And that was Nixon. Now, I think what happened is Nixon kinda closed back up within a few years after leaving power. But at that moment, one or two other moments, and there was an interview with David Frost that I remember, he let himself be exposed.

And he also, in a very Shakespearean way, is figuring it all out too late. It's what I believe the Greeks called anagnorisis, where you suddenly go, aha, that's what it is. It's Richard II going, I've wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Where you finally figure out, okay, that was the Wolsey quote at the very beginning.

He said, I just deceived myself about the nature of my own greatness. Now its too late for him to do anything about it, but at least he has that moment of awareness, as, of course, happens with lear as well.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, I mean, it's sort of darkness at noon moment, isn't it?

From Kessler, the point where self-realization comes, but far too late. You mentioned Richard II, of course, from where the hollow crown title comes. That seems to have a lot of messages, as, of course, does Henry IV parts one and two. And considering that Shakespeare was working in a very difficult political world, you said, rightly, that Henry V is a criticism of kingship.

But it wasn't easy for a playwright in Elizabethan England to criticize kingship, or indeed early Stuart England. These plays were being watched incredibly carefully, weren't they, for their overall political subtexts. It was pretty brave of Shakespeare on occasion to make references and allusions that might not have gone down well with the political establishment of the day.

 

>> Eliot Cohen: Well, and of course, he very famously has a close call when Richard II is performed at the behest of the Earl of Essex just before his attempted coup against Elizabeth. Well, this is why Shakespeare is a genius is that he's nonetheless skirting that. I wouldn't call Elizabethan England a totalitarian state, but I think there are maybe analogies with the way in which you can get some extraordinarily creative writers.

You did get some extraordinarily creative writers in Eastern Europe and even in the Soviet Union at a time when you knew the censor was looking closely at you. So you would write in a fairly clever and indirect way. Now, you can take this a little bit far. There's, of course, the German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss wrote a famous essay called Persecution and the Art of Writing, which he probably blows this up beyond what is reasonable.

But it says that a lot of writers understood that their words could get them in trouble, and so they are clever about how they deliver their messages. But having said all that, I think there was more room than we might think. What's interesting to me is that there are subset issues he doesn't touch at all, like religion.

It really doesn't appear at all. I think that was probably to mix historical metaphors, the proverbial third rail that you really didn't wanna-

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, of course, no, absolutely. It was a powder keg, a literal powder keg, of course, which took place during his lifetime. And also, of course, it's one of the reasons why some people, I am not one of them, believed that he was a secret Catholic.

That's one of the things put forward. There are plenty of segues from the horrors of Shakespeare and some of the most terrible things that happen, especially to children and babies in Shakespeare. And the events in Gaza at the moment in Southern Israel and Gaza. I'm not going to try and jump from one to the other, except to say that you have written about terrorism a great deal.

You've been tremendously prescient with regard to what you've written, especially on Israel's security within your book, Knives, Tanks, and Missiles back in 1998. That's 20 plus years ago. That's a quarter of a century ago. And yet the things that you were writing then have come to pass. What is your sense of the way that it's going at the moment in the IDF campaign in Gaza?

 

>> Eliot Cohen: So I'll actually be going over there shortly with a small group of national security and military experts. In a way, I'd have more to say afterwards, and from a distance. And with the fog of war, it's always very hard to tell. So a few quick bottom lines.

One, I think Hamas had catastrophic success. I don't think they expected to do as well as they did. And illicit response, which is probably a lot more than they expected. I think from a military technical point of view. The Israelis look to me to have been doing very well to go into this very dense urban environment, which the other side has been preparing for a long time.

And to be able to take terrain and get into the tunnel systems and all that, it's very impressive. What the day after is like, I do not know. I do know a couple of things, though. One is the Israeli objective is really to eliminate Hamas as a military threat and as the entity that governs the Gaza Strip.

And they will do that, I think, by trying to track down every last one and kill them. I think even more significant in the long term is what is this doing to Israel? The big issue there, and I've said this in some of my columns in the Atlantic, is in a certain way the existential question is back on the table for Israel in a way that it hasn't been since 1973.

And even if it's not, even if those of us sitting in the United States or Great Britain might say, well, it's really not an existential threat, the more important point is the existential feeling is there, and that's really what counts. The other thing is that with all the horrors, and they really are hideous, I have not had the heart to see that 47 minutes video that they're showing-

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Neither do I.

>> Eliot Cohen: But I have talked to people who have, and they just say, people run from the room, everybody is sobbing, it's hideous. What is striking to me is this is a very healthy civil society. The idea that this happens and 200,000 people go back to the country, that military reserve units are showing up at like 110, 115% strength because even people were discharged or showing up to see what they can do.

And some of the previous splits, so, for example, between the Ultra-Orthodox and the more mainstream, religious and secular even, that's diminished. You've had thousands of the Ultra-Orthodox volunteering for military service, completely unheard of, doing a lot of relief work. So it'll be a different Israel now. It could go in a number of different directions.

It could go in some pretty ugly ways. It could also go in some pretty positive ways. But for all those reasons, I think the main thing that people have to understand is it's going to be a very, very different Israel that you're dealing with now than in the past.

And so therefore, I think a lot of the analogies that people have drawn with 1982, or whatever, just don't apply. One last thing I'll say is the Israelis, who have screwed up many times in the past, I have a long tradition, which I sometimes, which I do wish the United States would emulate.

When things go really badly, you appoint a very senior state commission that is absolutely ruthless in getting at the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. And if that means that a prime minister or defense minister get fired, that's just fine. And they did that after 73, they did that after 2006.

They've done that on other occasions. Unquestionably, that's gonna happen here. And I am sure that actually after the war, most of the main phase, you'll see a lot of the senior leadership, military, and intelligence leadership resign. And whether the political leadership wants to resign or not, they're gone.

I mean, Bibi is really finished, I think.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, Churchill didn't survive the second world War either. It tends to happen like that, doesn't it? And Lloyd George didn't last for that much longer after the first World War. Tell me, what book are you reading? What history book or biography are you reading at the moment?

 

>> Eliot Cohen: So I'm always reading a bunch of things simultaneously. So I'm going through this massive three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, because my next book is about Theodore Roosevelt and the world. It's very well written. The problem with Roosevelt is he is such a loud, flamboyant, extraordinary character that it's harder to get at the very, very serious core of the man.

And that's really what I wanna do in my book. So my book will probably have fewer of the really funny stories and so on, and more of the seriousness at the heart of the man. And then on the lighter side, my wife and I just went on an eight-day walking holiday in the Cotswolds, which was great fun.

We dodged the reins until we got to Bath. So, we went to my favorite bookstore in London, Hatchards, before we began hiking. I'd never really read JB Priestley, and so I picked up an English journey, which is his rambles around some of the harder pressed parts of England, specifically, although he does go to the consoles as well, in the late 30s.

And I just thought it was a fascinating, charming book, and it's made me inclined to read a little bit more of him. I don't know whether he's one of your favorites or not.

>> Andrew Roberts: He's not really, no. I did read the book of his spectator articles, and I say one in three, really a great and hit home, but the other two didn't.

And so I'm afraid I'm not a massive Priestley fan. Plus, he was quite anti Churchill.

>> Eliot Cohen: In that case, he's dead to me.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell us about your what if, your counterfactual, what's the one that you enjoy?

>> Eliot Cohen: Suppose Abraham Lincoln had not sent Ward Lemon off to Richmond the day before he went to Ford's theater.

So Ward Lemon was a close friend of Churchill's. He was a huge guy. I think he was about 6 foot 3. He was a federal marshal. And he was really Lincoln's bodyguard. Escorted him into Washington. Very dangerous times when he was inaugurated, was really maintaining security on the White House grounds, and would have probably accompanied Lincoln to Ford's theater.

And if that had happened, I tend to think that he would have reacted cuz he could be a fairly violent man. He would have reacted, and maybe Lincoln wouldn't have been wounded, or more likely, I think, John Wilkes Booth would have met a sorry end earlier than he did.

And the reason why I think about that is, okay, so what would reconstruction have been like? And the thing that Lincoln was realizing at the end of his life was that in some ways, the south was really going to try to resist emancipation of the slaves. Not formal emancipation, that was a done deal, but essentially giving people, African Americans, the rights of citizenship.

And one of the things I've written about Lincoln in a different book called Supreme Command. And one of the things that strikes me about Lincoln is, for all his profound humanity, he could be absolutely ruthless. Reconstruction fails in many ways, and I think the recent historians have really brought this out.

The amount of racial violence that you saw in the south, particularly after the grant presidency, is striking. But a lot of the damage had already been done under Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln. And you have to wonder how Lincoln would have dealt with that, because I think he was very committed to ensuring that the southern states would be readmitted to the union.

But that the new dispensation was going to be that black and white Americans were all citizens and had to be treated as such. So that, I think it's a fascinating what if.

>> Andrew Roberts: That's a fantastic one, absolutely. That's one for us all to ponder. I've got one last question for you, which I was just thinking of a little earlier.

What would Shakespeare have made of Donald Trump? Is there a Trumpian figure in the, in the Shakespearean canon?

>> Eliot Cohen: There absolutely is. There absolutely is.

>> Andrew Roberts: Who is he?

>> Eliot Cohen: And let me just say, we're here now, everybody screws this one up, okay? So they did a performance of Shakespeare in the park in 2015 or 2016.

It was Julie Julius Caesar, and the guy was Trump, basically, long red tie. And other I have read the books, I think it's Macbeth, he's Richard III. No, no, he's Cloten in Cymbeline. So for those of you who are not familiar with Cymbeline, Cymbeline, it's a very weird play.

But one of the key figures is Cloten, who is the son of the king's second wife. And he lusts for the king's daughter, Imogen, by the first wife, who is married and is actually virtuous. And I think one of the most interesting heroines in Shakespeare. And he's a dummy, he's violent, he's a misogynist.

He wants to rape her, he wants to murder her husband, and he wants to humiliate her. It's fascinating. He comes to a very sticky end, which is very satisfying. But the thing that struck me about it so powerfully was the courtiers around him, because he thinks he's gonna become king.

The courtiers around him, they make fun of him, they laugh at his expense, and they do absolutely nothing to stop him.

>> Andrew Roberts: And on that bombshell, Elliot Cohen, thank you very much indeed for appearing on Secrets of Statecraft.

>> Eliot Cohen: Andrew, thank you for having me.

>> Andrew Roberts: My thanks to Elliot Cohen for appearing on Secrets of Statecraft.

My next guest is another Elliot, Elliot Abrams, who was assistant Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, deputy national security adviser under George W Bush, and the US special representative for Iran under Donald Trump.

>> Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom.

For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.