Direct Responsibility: Caspar Weinberger and the Reagan Defense Buildup

This dissertation explores the life of Caspar Weinberger and explains why President Reagan chose him for Secretary of Defense. Weinberger, not a defense technocrat, managed a massive defense buildup of 1.5 trillion dollars over a four year period. A biographical approach to Weinberger illuminates Reagan’s selection, for in many ways Weinberger harkens back to an earlier type of defense manager more akin to Elihu Root than Robert McNamara; more a man of letters than technocrat. And yet Weinberger, the amateur historian, worked with budgets his entire public career. Essentially, Pentagon governance is the formation of a military budget that proscribes strategy. In Weinberger’s case this meant financing a six hundred ship navy with fifteen aircraft carriers. His career began in Sacramento hammering out budgets while an assemblyman on the California State Assembly Ways and Means Committee. By 1968, Governor Reagan selected him as California State Finance Director. By 1970, Nixon appointed him Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and then Director of the Office of Management and Budget. By the time Weinberger left President Ford’s cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in 1975 he accumulated twenty-five years of budget expertise. After five years at the Bechtel Corporation, Weinberger emerged a Republican senior statesman and was well prepared for the grueling defense budget battles ahead. Eventually the political momentum for more defense dollars waned but the Secretary remained committed to larger defense budgets and the loyalty of his boss. This dissertation explores the many challenges he faced through procurement scandals, MX basing, defense reorganization, and the selling of both the defense budget and the Strategic Defense Initiative. The President entrusted his good friend gifted with rhetorical skill to oversee the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. This study concludes that in the end Weinberger, a center-right Eisenhower Republican was beholden to no one but his boss, and accommodated his instinct for fiscal conservatism to the spending requirements of the Reagan Doctrine, thus “Cap the Knife” became “Cap the Ladle.

Ancient Prophecy : Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives

Martti Nissinen, Ancient Prophecy offers the first comprehensive treatment of the ancient prophetic phenomenon as it comes to us through biblical, Near Eastern, and Greek sources. It provides a thorough overview of textual sources including the newest publications of cuneiform tablets and Greek inscriptions The book Includes comparative chapters on topics such as prophetic ecstasy; temples as venues of prophetic performances; prophets and political rulers; and the prophets' gender which can be either male, female, or non-gendered. It argues for a common category of ancient Eastern Mediterranean prophecy, even though the fragmentary and secondary nature of the sources allows only a restricted view to it.Peer reviewe