My son looked up from the newspaper the other day and asked me to explain the indictment of the Vice President’s chief of staff. As I narrated the connection between the war in Iraq, Joseph Wilson, and the Bush Administration, I couldn’t help but conclude that I was reciting a version of Jonathan Schell’s classic account of Vietnam and Watergate, A Time of Illusion, which linked the Nixon Administration’s paranoia in the face of domestic political opposition to its belief that the American position in the Cold War depended on the illusion of American strength in Vietnam.