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Reflecting on Jimmy Carter
When the 2007 Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-telling awarded its Courage Prize to President Jimmy Carter, we were honored that a president of the United States had agreed to accept it. Carter had just published Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. Previous winners of the Courage Prize had been Daniel Ellsberg, Seymour Hirsh, and Gloria Steinem.
The Prizes memorialize my friend Ron Ridenhour, noted whistleblower and George Polk Award winning investigative reporter who died suddenly in 1998. Like Ron Ridenhour, Carter was a truth-teller.
Villains and Heroes
America lost a villain last week, Lieutenant William Calley, the only soldier convicted for the worse known atrocity in the Viet Nam war, the massacre at My Lai (pronounced mee LYE; the Vietnamese call the village Sơn Mỹ).
Yet for some he was a hero. For many in a divided America, he was the hero celebrated in the 1971 spoken word recording, “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.”