We've all heard of Eisenhower's famous warning
about the military industrial complex
(video below). Tonight, Mike and Mark speak
wtih Robert Scheer about his devastating book on the subject of militarization,
and its' effect on society.
About the Guest:
Robert
Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing
over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across
the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted
the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed
to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the
Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and
many other prominent political and cultural figures.
Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam
correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine.
From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles
Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control,
national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated
column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing
editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based
at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Scheer
can be heard on the political radio program “Left, Right and Center”
on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif. He
has written seven books, including “Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death:
Essays on the Pornography of Power”; “With Enough Shovels: Reagan,
Bush and Nuclear War” and “America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals;”
with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, “The Five Biggest
Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq.” Most recently, he wrote “Playing
President: “My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and
How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush.”
Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where
he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York.
He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow
at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate
work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well
as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was
a fellow in arms control at Stanford.
Robert
Scheer
