DePauw Discourse – Bret Baier, Lee Hamilton and Madeleine Albright
One of the advantages of living in a college town is the opportunity of go to a talk by a distinguished or famous personality. More often than not, these talks and invited speakers are from a very left part of the spectrum, but it is nonetheless interesting to find out what these people have to say. If nothing else, it's good to know what your enemies are thinking. This past week I went to a couple of talks that were part of DePauw Discourse. The two talks that I had attended were by Lee Hamilton and Madeleine Albright. Madam Albright, a former secretary of state under President Clinton, was probably the highlight of the series, and sure enough she did not disappoint. Energetic and witty, it is easy to see why she would be a popular guest on college lecture series around the country. It is also easy to see that taking a class with her would indubitably be a lot of fun. I personally will always be grateful to her for the role she played in bringing down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and the work she did in resolving the issues in former Yugoslavia. However, her talk somehow confirmed my previous impression of her, and that is that she is more of an intellectual-academic type than a technocratic pragmatist. Most of her statements were very broad and I did not gain any more insight into the workings of a top-level diplomat than I would have from just following the news every day.
The pleasant surprise was Lee Hamilton. A '52 DePauw grad, he is probably one of the distinguished alumni that DePauw likes to flaunt around. However, he came across as anything but a bleeding heart liberal. Knowledgeable and pragmatic, it was very hard to argue against some of the points he made. One off-kilter MoveOn-type member of the audience asked him about prosecuting President Bush for the war crimes, and he would absolutely have nothing with that idea. In general, both Albright and Hamilton came across as much more moderate and reasonable than the predominantly liberal audience and some of the interviewers and presenters.
Lee Hamilton was interviewed by Bret Baier, another distinguished DePauw alum. Bret is a White House correspondent for Fox News. Bret works for Brit Hume, probably the most informative and incisive political analyst on TV these days. In his conduct and demeanor Bret came across as extremely professional and level-headed. Now that is the kind of alum that any school can rightly be proud of.