” Fitzgerald is an Irish doorman’s son who attended a Jesuit high school, then Amherst College — where he was a Phi Beta Kappa mathematics and economics major — and Harvard.
He registered to vote in New York as an independent. When he discovered that Independent was a political party, he re-registered with no affiliation. Illinois citizens know him for pursuing Republicans and Democrats with equal fervor. Former governor George Ryan (R) is on trial on corruption charges, and a growing number of aides to Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) face influence-peddling charges.”A witness in the case said of Fitzgerald – “As White House staffers, ..you had generals and Cabinet secretaries being deferential to you. He didn’t care what you’d done or how well you knew the president.” Washpost
Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including PBS’s Newshour, and most recently on MSNBC’s Hardball and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
His CV and blog are linked below the fold.
This man is a politician’s worst nightmare. He doesn’t “care what you’d done or how well you knew the president.”
He reminds me of the portrait of Robert Kennedy in Richard Mahoney‘s book, “Sons and Brothers.” Relentless, dogged, thorough, a workaholic who goes home to Chicago on the weekends. He has priorities and they are not all about his career.
Men like this are not driven by self-interest so much as they are by an internal demand for justice and virtue in the world.
He is unimpressed by the argument that “we have always done it that way.” Graft, character assasination as political “business as usual,” influence peddling? Men like this are outraged by such things.
Norah O’Donnell of NBC news said last week that she had been told by someone interrogated by Fitzgerald that he could best be described as “pious.” That strikes me as apt.
Piety can be religious or it can be civic as the Romans would have understood this virtue, as Marcus Aurelius would have understood it. In either case, Fitzgerald’s piety is “bad news” for a number of people.
He will do what he is going to do, and partisan hand-wringing will not affect him.
Get ready.
– Pat Lang
Personal Blog: Sic Semper Tyrannis 2005 || Bio || CV
Recommended Books || More BooTrib <a href="Posts
Novel: The Butcher’s Cleaver (download free by chapter, PDF format)
“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2