Best & Brightest: From Vietnam to Palestine, George Ball Got It Right (Diplomacy) (Remembering George Wildman Ball‪)‬

WHEN THE CENTENNIAL of George Wildman Ball's birth passed in December, there were no journalistic remembrances, no retrospectives, no essay collections published in his honor. Ball is mostly forgotten, recalled only by a few surviving colleagues from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and players of Trivial Pursuit. Yet Ball, who died in 1994, deserves to be remembered. He was a remarkably farsighted diplomat, who was right when almost everyone else was wrong about Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, America's relationship with Israel, the Lebanese civil war, and the Iranian Shah. If President Obama truly wants to craft a foreign policy based on what Walter Russell Mead has called "High Jeffersonianism"--engaging with the world while avoiding military entanglements--he should turn to advisers like George Ball.