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   from the issue of August 26, 2004

     
 
Halberstam kicks off Thompson lectures

Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and experts in American foreign policy will speak as part of the 2004-2005 E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues series.

 

 

The lectures for this series, titled "The United States in a Divided World," will be presented in the Lied Center for Performing Arts. Each lecture will be accompanied by a public pre-lecture talk in the Lied Center's Steinhart Room beginning one-half hour before the lecture. All are free and open to the public.

The schedule of 2004-05 Thompson Forum lectures:

• 8 p.m. Sept. 9, journalist, author and historian David Halberstam, "War and the Modern Presidency";

• 3:30 p.m. Oct. 12, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, "Power and Virtue: American Foreign Policy in the Middle East after Sept. 11";

• 3:30 p.m. Nov. 8, Roy Gutman, a Jennings Randolph senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a Washington-based correspondent for Newsweek, "Afghanistan and Lessons Learned";

• 3:30 p.m. March 25, Samantha Power, a founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, "The Age of Genocide";

• 3:30 p.m. April 7, John Gerard Ruggie, Kirkpatrick professor of international affairs and Weil director, Center for Business and Government at Harvard's Kennedy School, "American Exceptionalism, Exemptionalism and Global Governance."

All lectures will be broadcast live on the UNL Web site, www.unl.edu, UNL radio station KRNU (90.3 FM) and Channel 21 on Time Warner Cable television in Lincoln.

Halberstam won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam War for The New York Times. Author of 19 books and a prolific writer of magazine articles, Halberstam first came to national prominence in the early 1960s as part of a small group of American reporters who refused to accept the U.S. government's optimism about Vietnam and reported that the war was being lost. Halberstam's trilogy of books on power in America, The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be and The Reckoning, helped define the latter part of the 20th century and won Halberstam many awards and critical acclaim. His lecture is the ninth annual Governor's Lecture in the Humanities and is presented by the Nebraska Humanities Council, the Thompson Forum and University of Nebraska Central Administration.

Wieseltier has been a literary editor of the New Republic since 1983. After three years as a graduate student in Jewish history at Harvard University, Wieseltier became a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard from 1979 to 1982. He also attended Columbia University and Oxford University. Wieseltier is the author of Nuclear War Nuclear Peace, Against Identity and Kaddish. The last book, concerning Wieseltier's father's death, was lauded by the New York Times Book Review as "an astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignancy and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile." Wieseltier's lecture is the Kripke Lecture, a collaboration between the Thompson Forum and UNL's Norman and Bernice Harris Center for Judaic Studies.

Gutman won the Pulitzer Prize for A Witness to Genocide, a compilation of his reporting in Bosnia, and is author of Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua 1981-1987. In his coverage of the 1993 war in Bosnia, he provided the first documented reports of concentration camps. Gutman's assignments have included postings as Newsday's European bureau chief and as Reuters' Belgrade bureau chief and State Department correspondent. He has been a Washington-based national security reporter for Newsday and reported for Reuters from Bonn, Vienna, London and Washington.

Power moved to the United States from her native Ireland in 1979 and attended Yale University and Harvard Law School. She was a journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist, for whom she covered the war in Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996. In 1996 she joined the International Crisis Group as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia. Power is the author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

The Lewis E. Harris Lecture on Public Policy and the Thompson Forum will present Ruggie's lecture. From 1997 to 2001, Ruggie was United Nations assistant secretary-general and chief adviser for strategic planning to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He has published six books, including Winning the Peace: America and the World Order in the New Era and Constructing World Polity.

In 1988, E.N. "Jack" Thompson, then head of the philanthropic Cooper Foundation, conceived of a public lecture series that would bring prominent individuals to UNL to speak on important international issues. The series, a cooperative project of the Cooper Foundation, the Lied Center and UNL, promotes better understanding of world events and issues to all Nebraskans. In 1990, the name of the series was changed in honor of Thompson (1913-2002), a 1933 graduate of the University of Nebraska who served as president of the Cooper Foundation from 1964 to 1990 and as its chairman from 1990 until his death.


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