Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1934, in Trenton, one of three children of the man whose name he shared and the former Ruth Bowman. At 18, he dropped the Jr. and his first name but kept the initial. His father, New Jersey’s first state police superintendent, investigated the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping; he was also a West Point graduate, fought in World Wars I and II, became a major general and trained Iran’s national police in the 1940s.Busy man!
The rest of the NYT's obit is worth a read. And it appears Stormin' Norman was a believer in the "dirty hippies and the liberal media lost the Vietnam War" theory.
He came home dismayed at the Army’s leadership and convinced that the peace movement and the news media were prolonging the war. One of his sisters, Ms. Barenbaum, had become a peace activist, and for years they did not speak. He later concluded that politicians had lost the war, and the failure, at a cost of 58,000 American lives, left him devastated. For a time, he considered resigning his commission.Obviously, we failed to achieve victory in Iraq and Afghanistan for exactly the same reasons.
1 comment:
Sadly, the idea that "the media" lost Vietnam, despite being completely insane, was widespread in the military after the war ended, and they vowed never to let it happen again. The Pentagon successfully shackled the media in the first Gulf War and largely sanitized that conflict to the public. Media manipulation techniques have only gotten worse since with Iraq and Afghanistan.
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