Friday, December 28, 2012

Interesting tidbit.

About Stormin' Norman's father.
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:

Batocchio said...

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.