Meeting Chalmers Johnson

In September 1998, I was handed
a submission for a proposed book by Chalmers Johnson. I was then (as
I am now) consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. 9/11 was three years
away, the Bush administration still an unimaginable nightmare, and though
the prospective book's prospective title had "American Empire"
in it, the American
Empire Project I
now co-run with my friend and TomDispatch
regular Steve Fraser
was still almost four years from crossing either of our minds.

I remembered Johnson, however.
As a young man, I had read his book on peasant nationalism in north
China where, during the 1930s, Japanese invaders were conducting "kill-all,
burn-all, loot-all" operations. Its vision of how a revolution could
gain strength from a foreign occupation stayed with me. I had undoubtedly
also read some of Johnson's well-respected work on contemporary Japan
and I knew, even then, that in the Vietnam War era he had been a fierce
opponent of the antiwar movement I took part in. If I didn't already
know it, the proposal made no bones about the fact that he had also,
in that era, consulted for the CIA.

I certainly turned to his submission
-- a prologue, a single chapter, and an outline of the rest of a book
-- with a dubious eye, but was promptly blasted away by a passage in
the prologue in which he referred to himself as having been a "spear-carrier
for empire" and, some pages in, by this passage as well:

"I was sufficiently aware
of Mao Zedong's attempts to export 'people's war' to believe
that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that,
too, I was distinctly a man of my times. It proved to be a disastrously
wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international
Communist movement and not enough about the United States government
and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by
campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as
sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the
history of communism in East Asia]... As it turned out, however, they
understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara,
a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential
about the nature of America's imperial role in the world that I had
failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar
protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right
and American policy wrong."

I was little short of thunderstruck.
I knew then -- and I think it still holds today -- that no one of prominence
with Johnson's position on the war and in his age range had ever written
such a set of sentences. At that moment, knowing nothing else, I made
the decision to publish his book. It was possibly the single most impulsive,
even irrational, and thoroughly satisfying decision I've made in my
30-odd years as an editor in, or at the fringes of, mainstream publishing.

Though I didn't have expectations
for the book then, the rest is, quite literally, history. After all,
its title would be Blowback, a term of CIA tradecraft that neither
I nor just about any other American had ever heard of, and which, thanks
to Johnson, has now become part of our language (along with the accompanying
catch phrase "unintended consequences"). On its publication in 2000,
the book was widely ignored. In the wake of the attacks of September
11, 2001, however, it seemed nothing short of prophetic, and so, in
paperback, stormed those 9/11 tables at the front of bookstores, and
soared to bestsellerdom.

That I ever edited Blowback or
Johnson's subsequent books was little short of a fluke, one of the
luckiest of my life. It led as well to a relationship with a man of
remarkable empathy and insight, who was then on a no less remarkable
journey (on which I could tag along). Now, a new book of his, Dismantling the
Empire: America's Last Best Hope, has
arrived, focused on the many subjects -- from our empire of bases
to the way the Pentagon budget, the weapons industries, and military
Keynesianism may one day help send us into great power bankruptcy --
that have obsessed him in recent years. It's not to be missed.