Barry Werth (author of "31 Days") on Fresh Air w/Terry Gross today

[Chiyo-chichi]

31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5339588

It's about the period between Nixon's resignation and pardon. It was a very interesting interview. Try & catch it if it hasn't already aired in your area.

Here's a bit from the NYT book review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/books/11kaku.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Another Ford administration effort to appease hardliners involved the appointment of a "Team B" (a group that included Paul Wolfowitz, who would go on to become deputy secretary of defense in the administration of George W. Bush) to second-guess C.I.A. analyses of intelligence on the Soviet Union. Though many of Team B's conclusions, which depicted the U.S.S.R. as an expansionist monster, were later discredited as hyperbole, Mr. Werth writes that its report "became the rallying point for opposition to détente and arms control": "Rumsfeld and Cheney drove the SALT II negotiations into the sand at the Pentagon and the White House," and "the vaunted Nixon-Kissinger realism in foreign affairs was at last stalled, if not defeated."

Two and a half decades later, another Team B-like group was set up at Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon to sift through raw intelligence. It focused on evidence that might link Iraq to Al Qaeda and make the case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And its findings would be used to challenge conventional intelligence estimates and help make the case for war against Iraq.