Histories and biographies teach us life lessons. Please allow me to share with you some excerpts from recent reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think New Orleans is one of America\u2019s most fascinating cities. It\u2019s also one of the most violent, and that\u2019s nothing new. \u201cIn 1907, reformer Carrie Nation described New Orleans as \u2018too tough a place for me to tackle.\u2019 She concluded, \u2018It is a very, very bad place.\u2019\u201d \u2013 From \u201cRace Crime and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920-1945<\/a>\u201d by Brandon T. Jett, Louisiana State University Press, 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Harry Truman, my favorite Democrat President, ordered the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three years before I was born. The Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, succeeded Truman in the White House and at the time, had misgivings about the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. But later, as President, \u201c\u2026Eisenhower\u2019s contradictory determination to rely increasingly on nuclear weapons indicates that he had thought the issue, that it was less a matter of dollars saved than a new way of looking at deterrence, one first suggested by Bernard Brodie and now amplified by the H-bomb into an entirely new proposition: \u2018Therefore let him who desires peace, make war entirely too horrible to fight.\u2019\u201d \u2013 From \u201cTeam America: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the world they forged<\/a>,\u201d by Robert L. O\u2019Connell, Harper-Collins, 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n