Some years ago now Susan Katz Keating, the editor of Soldier of Fortune, at that time an independent journalist, interviewed me at length for a book she was writing about a project with which I was involved. The book she was writing didn't come off, which in a way is a shame because it would have exposed some serious problems with US intelligence in Afghanistan. Given how Afghanistan ultimately turned out, it might have been nice to know sooner. I asked her about it a year or so ago, and she told me that the laptop she had her notes on had crashed and burned, and she was left with nothing useful.
All the same, I found her to be an insightful and committed independent journalist of the old fashion. It's nice to see her considered opinion on the potential for violence in our current moment:
Not long after their meeting, Donald Trump was wounded on the ear in an assassination attempt. Keating provided an update on her violence forecast: she had become surprisingly sanguine.“There have not been any follow-on attacks or counterattacks, which I think would have happened by now if this had been an Archduke Ferdinand moment,” she said. “I see the hit on Trump as another iteration of the school-shooter, mall-shooter phenomenon, and not as a political flash point. We are not headed for a civil war.”
“Of course," she added, "I could be wrong.”
"...she told me that the laptop she had her notes on had crashed and burned, and she was left with nothing useful."
ReplyDeleteSheryl Atkinson'ed??
Heh. Possibly, although she didn't allege any malice on anyone's part, just that it died hard and she lost everything she'd written including her notes.
Delete