““In his memoir White House Years, he discusses a classic bureaucratic trick that was played on President Richard Nixon, who was considering what policy to adopt on a particular issue in Europe. The State Department presented a memo to Nixon with three “options.” Kissinger noted that two options were obvious losers, leaving only one plausible choice: Here was the standard bureaucratic device of leaving the decision-maker with only one real option, which for easy identification is placed in the middle. The classic case, I joked, would be to confront the policymaker with the choices of nuclear war, present policy, or surrender.””
