Friday, April 20, 2012

And Also

this wide ranging piece in The Baffler on what's become of The Atlantic and David Bradley's background is highly worth a read if you haven't already been pointed to it.

Military intelligence professionals, the mind-cure faith, and a changeling, domineering father—it was the sort of upbringing that suffused [David] Bradley’s young life with a sort of spooky dullness. After watching Richard Nixon’s resignation catch so many family friends financially unawares—and experiencing no small amount of personal disillusionment as a gung-ho intern in the Nixon White House—he decided to work on his war chest before going into politics, his first love. (Bradley’s latter-day interest in politics, by the way, should not be taken to mean he harbors any definite political convictions; on the contrary, one of the professed sources of his admiration for writerly “talent” is his own inability to form an opinion on most political issues: “I define the middle,” he has said.) Upon completing Swarthmore, Harvard Business School, and a Fulbright scholarship in the Philippines (devoted to researching the mindset of the colonial Marxist guerillas), David returned to Washington to enroll in law school and to help Gene found a think tank called the International Management and Development Institute. When it came time for David to found his own business in 1979, he visualized a firm with all the affectations of a Washington think tank—down to the drab name, Research Council of Washington— but structured to turn a profit. He later renamed it the Advisory Board Company, which spun off the Corporate Executive Board, and those two generated a multitude of generic-sounding subsidiary Councils, Boards, and Forums. One of Research Council’s first hires assumed from the classified ad that Bradley was operating a “front for a right-wing organization.” It’s still hard to say, at this late date, whether the joke was on that fledgling knowledge worker.
His father, btw, was, among other things, a CIA agent who worked in anti-Marxist counter-propaganda techniques. There's also an inside account of one of The Atlantic's Ideas Forums. Read it.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So now that McMegan is apparently leaving The Atlantic for Newsweek, can that be interpreted as you all finally getting her fired? (Not if it would mean this site doing dark again -- it's good to have you back, even only sporadically).

--Bettencourt

Sator Arepo said...

What he said.

Anonymous said...

wow -- of all the douchebag useless sites on the internet somehow I clicked on this one. i guess I need to throttle back on the beer...

M. Bouffant said...

Tell you what, Anonymous, let me just throttle you.

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