Letter in the March 8th London Review of Books
82nd Airborne
Michael Byers (LRB, 8 February) quotes George W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as saying that 'we don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.' This much-cited quotation appears to refer exclusively to the role of the US Forces in places like Kosovo. But in fact the 82nd Airborne was the division sent in by the Federal Government in 1957 to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, against the wishes of the state authority. As an Afro-American beneficiary of this intervention, Rice presumably knows this. The right of states to resist Federal power has of course been invoked in order to preserve racial segregation. If her remark is not an instance but an analogy, how far back do these people plan to turn the clock?
David Edgar Birmingham