Bacevich in The Boston Globe on Presidential Forum

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Andrew Bacevich, Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, published a recent Op-Ed detailing his experience at the recent NBC News Commander-in-Chief Forum.

From the text of the Op-Ed:

On Wednesday evening in New York, at the invitation of NBC News, I attended the grandly-styled “Commander-in-Chief Forum.” The event, which occurred aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, was profoundly disheartening.

On air and off, NBC personnel repeatedly characterized the forum as “historic.” It was, in fact, banal and will have been deservedly forgotten by the time this article is published. Yet in a perverse way, witnessing the event was an illuminating experience, offering a close-up view of the media’s role in trivializing American politics.

For those who wisely kept their televisions tuned to another channel, the forum consisted of two 25 minute interviews with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, who appeared separately but in succession. Matt Lauer moderated, his own questions alternating with those posed by a live audience of veterans.

You can read the entire Op-Ed here.

Andrew Bacevich’s essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs,Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times, among other newspapers. In 2004, Bacevich was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. You can read more about him here.