No sooner than the mourning for Christina-Tayloir Green had been put behind Tucson than we in Los Angeles were jolted by another incomparable episode of gun madness. The scene occurred on the grounds of Gardena High School, southwest of the central city. Police helicopters flew overhead. Detectives swarmed onto the school grounds, Several kids were [...]
On Guns, MLK and Tucson
January 20th, 2011 No Comments
Tags: Gabrielle Giffords · guns · Jared Loughner · lausd · Los Angeles · Martin Luther King · tucson · vietnam
Guns, Blood and Truth
January 12th, 2011 No Comments
I have seen too much human blood spilled in my lifetime — of people I did not know — mostly in wartime. I was trained to use a rifle and a handgun at Fort Ord. California before shipping overseas as a GI. In self-defense, I killed Chinese soldiers in Korea. In Vietnam, I had to [...]
Tags: Fox News · Gabrielle Giffords · gun control · guns · Jared Loughner · media · vietnam
And That’s the Way it Was…
July 21st, 2009 No Comments
I had dinner with Walter Cronkite the first night he arrived in Saigon on what was his personal fact finding trip “into country” after the Communists’ 1968 Tet Offensive. He was a hawk, a supporter of the conflict in Vietnam like so many Americans of his generation. Walter clearly was troubled by the visual images [...]
Tags: CBS Evening News · cbs news · Ernie Leiser · Peter Kalisher · vietnam · Walter Cronkite
A Postscript on McNamara’s Death
July 12th, 2009 1 Comment
It has taken me nearly a week to reflect on how figures like Robert McNamara contributed to the erosion of the American people’s trust in so many of their institutions. It was his arrogance and self-confidence that so diminished whatever he had to say about Vietnam from the time the war began. McNamara was so [...]
Tags: Dean Rusk · Errol Morris · John F. Kennedy · Lyndon Johnson · Richard Nixon · Robert McNamara · vietnam
