Gates Comes Of Age
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 12th, 2008 5:28 am by HL
Gates Comes Of Age
WASHINGTON — With President U.S. Grant’s long, narrow desk behind him, he works at Gen. John Pershing’s spacious partners desk, and converses with guests at a round table used by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, part of the reassuring furniture of government for most of 42 years, will soon serve his eighth president in a career that began in 1966 when Gates joined the CIA, of which he became director 25 years later. On Nov. 1, 1979, he was note-taker when Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security adviser, met in Algiers with representatives of Iran’s radical Islamic regime that had just overthrown the shah, who had fled to the West. Brzezinski assured the Iranians that America would recognize their revolution, sell them weapons the shah had wanted and embrace normal relations. They demanded the shah. Brzezinski rejected that as dishonorable. Three days later, U.S. diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran.
Good Old-Fashioned Graft?
The response of Kathryn Jean Lopez (National Review Online) to the arrest of Rod Blagojevich was priceless. “Finally, a political scandal you can talk to your children about. No room at the Mayflower. No myspace page. No Gay-American announcement. Just good and evil and money and power corrupting.” Rod Blagojevich is part of a storied American tradition. By selling government posts, shaking down businesses that had dealings with the state, and maneuvering to get lucrative jobs for his wife and himself, Blagojevich was practicing “honest graft.”
