Robert Scheer: Speaking Ill of ‘the Best and the Brightest’
[Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig.]
One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility.
Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the surrounding areas.
Holbrooke was later so successful in the infamous CIA Phoenix program to kill Vietnamese civilians thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong that at the age of 24 he was brought back to Washington to work under the head of that program, R.W. Komer, on a top-level White House command to save Vietnam from the Vietnamese....
Read entire article at Truthdig
One of “the best and the brightest” died last week, and in Richard Holbrooke we had a perfect example of the dark mischief to which David Halberstam referred when he authored that ironic label. Holbrooke’s life marks the propensity of our elite institutions to turn out alpha leaders with simplistic world-ordering ambitions unrestrained by moral conscience or intellectual humility.
Fresh from Brown University, Holbrooke marched off as a foreign service officer to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, who were not buying it. He quickly became involved with the pacification program that herded peasants off their land into barbed-wire encampments while we bombed the surrounding areas.
Holbrooke was later so successful in the infamous CIA Phoenix program to kill Vietnamese civilians thought to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong that at the age of 24 he was brought back to Washington to work under the head of that program, R.W. Komer, on a top-level White House command to save Vietnam from the Vietnamese....