This week we have a special foreign affairs edition of the Masters in Business radio podcast, speaking with Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Gelb also worked for the Defense Department and the New York Times.
The conversation ranged far and wide, and looked at (among other things) the decline of Europe as a great power and some of the errors he acknowledged making while helping to shape U.S. foreign policy. He said he initially supported both the Vietnam War and the 2003 Iraq invasion. The key difference was he said it took him a decade to see that Vietnam was a mistake, versus three months for Iraq.
Gelb was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for covering Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars. He also directed the project that created the Pentagon Papers, a Defense Department history of the Vietnam War.
Only three months? ;)