82nd Airborne

[Brad DeLong]

>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

Nicely put...