Suchergebnisse

The Past Is Never Dead -- A Peculiar Heritage -- The Populist from Plains -- Jimmy Who? -- Mr. Carter Goes to Washington -- White House Life -- Life Is Unfair -- Lancegate -- Depatures in Foreign Policy -- "Israel Trusts No One" -- Washington Distractions -- Troubles with Liberals -- Troubles with a Speechwriter -- Triumph at Camp David -- "A Weird Period for Liberals" -- An Ayatollah's Revolution -- Tilting Against American Exceptionalism -- "You Should Fire People" -- Foreign Policy Imbroglios -- Much Ado About Nothing -- Fateful Decisions -- An Unhappy Spring -- Whipping Kennedy's Ass -- The October Surprise -- The Defeat -- White House Twilight -- Keeping Faith

Kai Bird: The Chairman. John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment. Simon & Schuster, New York 1992. 801 S., 30,- Dollar

Grandfather was seventy-one years old when he met King Faisal. Saudi Arabia was the first foreign land he ever lived in. It happened that when grandad came to visit us in Saudi Arabia eleven years ago, Faisal had just ousted his senile brother from the throne. Grandfather managed to have himself invited to a diplomatic function honoring the new king—and there he shook the Arab monarch's hand. A world apart, no two men could have been more different, yet in some basic manner both were bred in the old, less mechanized world. Both men, the crusty and pious desert king and the retired Oregon lumberjack, had fought a harsh and unyielding land, and both carried the visible scars of their hard lives.

The American electorate has acquired an ingrained prejudice against foreign aid. The public suspects that foreign aid is something the government takes from the poor in a rich country and gives to the wealthy in a poor country. This suspicion— like many of America's populist wisdoms—is the tragic truth in one of the world's poorest nations, Bangladesh.Only a pittance of international food aid to Bangladesh feeds the starving or destitute. Even in this bumper crop year an estimated 368,000 babies and young children will die due to malnutrition or related diseases. Food aid generally does not reach the poor; 90 per cent of the 1.6 million tons of foreign food aid shipped to Bangladesh this year was used to subsidize a ration system for the middle class.

It was a warm, humid Bengal evening when a small party of resident foreigners gathered in the Dacca home of an American diplomat. Two journalists, two American diplomats, a French diplomat and the director of a private relief organization in Bangladesh spent five hours talking about the country's bleak economic and political future. The discussion was heated, and the conclusions drawn in the early morning hours ought to evoke nightmares worthy of the cheapest horror film. The evening's host, a diplomat seasoned in the conflicts of Southeast Asia, reluctantly admitted that Bangladesh's rapid decline into absolute economic chaos might be averted only by a dedicated and ruthless party of Maoists. In any case, after more than two years of independence and $2 billion of international aid, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bangladesh has nothing to expect from the West.