Remembering Richard Holbrooke from High School and College

by Richard Kostelanetz (June 2012)

Be respectful of the dead unless they were important enough to warrant criticism, which then implicitly becomes posthumous flattery.

written down (and thus could quote now), but we were both buck naked at the time. Stupid me to be a writer so unprepared.

However, that was a dead end job, as American military intervention in both those unfortunate countries was doomed to fail. (Soon after 9/11, when I resided two miles away from the World Trade Center, I wrote in the monthly Liberty that the best revenge against Afghanistan would be the decriminalization of heroin in the West. That would have sabotaged its economy. Can we agree that such a nonmilitary move would have saved a lot of American money and, yes, lives?)

Richard Kostelanetz survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

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