November 12 — Andrei Cherny discusses his book, “The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour”
An amazing story about the U.S. Cold War era pilots who participated in an airlift (including candy for the kids) to help the blockaded West Germans survive after coming under Soviet control. Author Andrei Cherny was the youngest person ever to be a White House speechwriter.
When: Wednesday, November 12, 7 pm
Where: Arthur M. Glick JCC, 6701 Hoover Road, Indianapolis, IN 46260
A synopsis of Cherny’s book, The Candy Bombers: the Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour:
The masterfully told story of the unlikely men who came together to make the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history. On the sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, Andrei Cherny tells a remarkable story with profound implications for the world today. In the tradition of the best narrative storytellers, he brings together newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews to tell the story of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and second-stringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat but changed how the world viewed the United States, and set in motion the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and to America’s victory in the Cold War.
On June 24, 1948, intent on furthering its domination of Europe, the Soviet Union cut off all access to West Berlin, prepared to starve the city into submission unless the Americans abandoned it. Soviet forces hugely outnumbered the Allies’, and most of America’s top officials considered the situation hopeless. But not all of them. Harry Truman, an accidental president, derided by his own party; Lucius Clay, a frustrated general, denied a combat command and relegated to the home front; Bill Tunner, a logistics expert downsized to a desk job in a corner of the Pentagon; James Forrestal, a secretary of defense beginning to mentally unravel; Hal Halvorsen, a lovesick pilot who had served far from the conflict, flying transport missions in the backwater of a global war—together these unlikely men improvised and stumbled their way into a uniquely Americancombination of military and moral force unprecedented in its time. This is the forgotten foundation tale of America in the modern world, the story of when Americans learned, for the first time, how to act at the summit of world power—a masterful and exciting work of historical narrative, and one with strong resonance for our time.
Why does Provocate think you should attend this event?
The book sounds all right, but Cherny is more interesting:
- Cherny is co-founder and co-editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, a very good quarterly journal of serious thought that seeks to spur new ideas on the big challenges of the 21st century.
- He has been a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
- From February 2003 through the spring of 2004, Cherny served as a senior advisor for John Kerry’s Presidential campaign.
- Cherny is the author of The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age, one of the top-selling political books of 2001, which examined the roles technological and generational change have played over the course of American history and laid out a progressive vision for government and community life in the 21st century.
- A former Senior Speechwriter and advisor to Vice President Al Gore, Cherny was the youngest White House Speechwriter in American history.
If you think this sounds interesting, be sure to check out …
Cherney is looking at what might be thought of as the beginning of the American Empire. Join a discussion of the possible end of that Empire on October 15. Not everyone thinks military actions like the Berlin Airlift were right. You might meet some of them when founder of Peace Studies Johan Galtung comes to Indy October 7.
