George Ball

And we, in other words, completely agree and take forward your analysis The lobby's effect on compromising and damaging U.S. foreign policy interests, that's, we can both well agree, is not an absolutely new argument.

People have been making that argument for a while, including George Ball.

But so we just took that up.

The Iran war is a crime.

Now he worked for the USSBS.

His colleague, George Ball, was a lawyer who had served in Washington on various government projects.

For the next 10 days, the USSBS would subject Speer to a detailed and forensic interrogation.

and Speer was soon singing like a canary.

He even told the Americans where they could find the records of what he had done during the war, including his personal reports to Hitler, which were stored in a safe in Munich.

He gave them the keys and combination to the safe, enabling Nitze to dispatch someone immediately.

George Ball found Speer to be astonishingly open and helpful.

His knowledge, said Ball, was absolutely astounding.

There's a similar episode that happened under President Carter.

President Carter, during his transition period, was considering under Secretary of State George Ball to become Secretary of State.

George Ball was served under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and he became known as the devil's advocate.

He was the guy within the highest councils of government who warned both Kennedy and Johnson against escalation in Vietnam.

Carter, to his everlasting discredit, refused to put Ball up for Secretary of State because he was afraid of the Israel lobby.

Let's go back to thinking what we always thought.

And that was sort of the role I think George Ball may have played during the Vietnam.

Yeah, I think that's the most famous example in U.S. history.

And then there are other things which I do think are more systemic, some of which are psychological, the way in which we tend to anchor ourselves in particular events.

We're not the first to notice that Washington had anticipated the outsized influence and the dangerous influence of the Israel lobby.

George Ball and his son, when they wrote their book, named it The Passionate Attachment.

which was also a critique of Israel's influence on American foreign policy.

Our book goes beyond this argument, beyond the Walt and Mearsheimer argument, because we're focusing not just on the threat the lobbies has posed and does pose to American foreign policy, but to American liberties at home, to American democracy, because of the need the lobby has realized it has to try to suppress rather than engage in debate on this issue.