Robert Timberg (1940–2016)
Teoksen The Nightingale's Song tekijä
Tietoja tekijästä
Robert Richard Timberg was born in Miami Beach, Florida on June 16, 1940. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1964. He served with the First Marine Division in Vietnam starting in 1966. At the age of 26, an explosion destroyed his armored personnel carrier and disfigured his face. He underwent näytä lisää 35 reconstructive operations. This experience was recounted in his memoir Blue-Eyed Boy. After his discharge from the Marines, he received a master's degree in journalism from Stanford University in 1969. He began his journalism career at The Evening Capital in Annapolis before joining The Baltimore Evening Sun in 1973. After studying at Harvard under a Nieman fellowship, he returned to cover Congress for The Sun. He retired in 2005 as deputy Washington bureau chief. He wrote several books during his lifetime including The Nightingale's Song. He died of respiratory failure on September 6, 2016 at the age of 76. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän
Tekijän teokset
Associated Works
Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas (1997) — Avustaja — 429 kappaletta
Merkitty avainsanalla
Yleistieto
- Virallinen nimi
- Timberg, Robert Richard
- Syntymäaika
- 1940-06-16
- Kuolinaika
- 2016-09-06
- Sukupuoli
- male
- Kansalaisuus
- USA
- Syntymäpaikka
- Miami Beach, Florida, USA
- Kuolinpaikka
- Annapolis, Maryland, USA
- Koulutus
- United States Naval Academy (1964)
Stanford University - Organisaatiot
- United States Marine Corps
Baltimore Sun
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Kirja-arvosteluja
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- 19
Of course, Congress didn’t always agree with the President and it expressly forbade him from financing terrorists....Ooops!...I meant to say Freedom Fighters working to upend a democratically-elected leftist regime in Central America.
The President let it slip to his uniformed advisors that he would be awfully unhappy if his Freedom Fighters failed in their mission to free the people, so his advisors took the initiative. They circumvented Congress and financed the Freedom Fighters with profits from selling arms to Iran, in those days, much like today, deadly opponents of the United States of America and under an arms embargo.
You could have expected from this episode — known widely as the Iran-Contra affair — that Congress would have taken action and impeached the President. After all, it was his employees who screwed up. The President told the people of the United States he knew nothing about the elicit arms sales or the siphoning off of profits to support the Contras.
Congress believed the President and sent his advisors...at least one of them...to prison instead.
This book is largely about the advisors, some good, some not so good, who graduated through the ranks of the Navy and Marines, part of a generation of soldiers who fought in Vietnam, a war most Americans believe they should never have fought. It argues that Ronald Reagan — a President who relied on his wife’s astrologer as well as sailors and Marines for advice — helped the Vietnam-era of soldiers recover their self-respect and that was one of the reasons his advisors got out of line. Because they saw a battle they could win and thought the boss would approve.
But one could take other lessons from this tale.
Nothing upsets the President more than pushback from Congress. There are days — more than few I would guess — when Presidents wish they had absolute power. Having soldiers work for them who are trained to take the mission to heart without questioning the motives is a sore reminder of why soldiers aren’t always the best people to have in the West Wing.
On the other hand, war is an awful thing. If you haven’t been there watching your friends being blown to smithereens by a booby-trapped ammo box or trip line, you never quite get why war should be avoided at all costs, or almost all costs. And hate is contagious. Soldiers can tell you what that means. In real time.
… (lisätietoja)