Gary Hart, Lynne Cheney, and War with China
James Fallows
Atlantic online
05 Jul 2007 08:54 am
I mentioned this yesterday in the (somewhat-insiderish) realm of the Atlantic's "Aspen Ideas Festival" blog, but the point seemed worth repeating in this marginally more public venue. The item appears after the jump, or at this link. It concerns the war that some public officials tried to prevent, and the war that at least one official tried to foment:
I have a lot of time for Gary Hart, long-time senator from Colorado and for a while a possible president of the United States. By which I mean, I have a lot of respect for his persistence and prescience on the national security front. The first time I ever heard of the "military reform movement" -- and of the very influential military thinker John Boyd, and of the insightful Pentagon budget analyst Chuck Spinney -- was when I visited Hart's ofice in the Senate in 1979 and talked with his eccentric-but-brilliant staff assistant Bill Lind. Actually, eccentric-but-brilliant would apply to Spinney and Boyd as well; but Lind was the only one of the three to have posters of Mussolini on his office wall while working at the U.S. Capitol.
I don't know any other major political figure who has been as right about as many national-security matters, as consistently, and as early, as Gary Hart has been. I'm thinking about his role in creating and leading the Congressional "military reform caucus" in the 1980s. But I know that the most famous illustration in most people's minds is his role as co-chair of the "U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century," aka the Hart-Rudman Commission.
(The rest is here.)
Atlantic online
05 Jul 2007 08:54 am
I mentioned this yesterday in the (somewhat-insiderish) realm of the Atlantic's "Aspen Ideas Festival" blog, but the point seemed worth repeating in this marginally more public venue. The item appears after the jump, or at this link. It concerns the war that some public officials tried to prevent, and the war that at least one official tried to foment:
I have a lot of time for Gary Hart, long-time senator from Colorado and for a while a possible president of the United States. By which I mean, I have a lot of respect for his persistence and prescience on the national security front. The first time I ever heard of the "military reform movement" -- and of the very influential military thinker John Boyd, and of the insightful Pentagon budget analyst Chuck Spinney -- was when I visited Hart's ofice in the Senate in 1979 and talked with his eccentric-but-brilliant staff assistant Bill Lind. Actually, eccentric-but-brilliant would apply to Spinney and Boyd as well; but Lind was the only one of the three to have posters of Mussolini on his office wall while working at the U.S. Capitol.
I don't know any other major political figure who has been as right about as many national-security matters, as consistently, and as early, as Gary Hart has been. I'm thinking about his role in creating and leading the Congressional "military reform caucus" in the 1980s. But I know that the most famous illustration in most people's minds is his role as co-chair of the "U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century," aka the Hart-Rudman Commission.
(The rest is here.)
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