I'm fairly sure the first time I ever heard of Elie Wiesel was when he appeared as the designated philosopher among a bunch of political and strategic experts on the ABC News panel discussion that followed the 1983 TV movie The Day After. You can count Carl Sagan as the other humanist in the group, which also included Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Brent Scowcroft, and William F Buckley. I was a college sophomore with a head full of Kurt Vonnegut and a dread that Reagan would get us all killed. I instantly fell in love with Wiesel, because where everybody else wanted to talk policy and deterrence and arms control, Wiesel's first commentary was on such a purely human level, especially after Kissinger pooh-poohed the film for presenting "a very simple-minded notion of the nuclear problem" because it merely dramatized what everybody already knew: A nuclear war would be very bad. Wiesel brought the conversation back to that "simple" point, because it really was the point.
A One Hundred Percent Trumpless Appreciation Of Elie Wiesel, RIP
A One Hundred Percent Trumpless Appreciation…
A One Hundred Percent Trumpless Appreciation Of Elie Wiesel, RIP
I'm fairly sure the first time I ever heard of Elie Wiesel was when he appeared as the designated philosopher among a bunch of political and strategic experts on the ABC News panel discussion that followed the 1983 TV movie The Day After. You can count Carl Sagan as the other humanist in the group, which also included Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Brent Scowcroft, and William F Buckley. I was a college sophomore with a head full of Kurt Vonnegut and a dread that Reagan would get us all killed. I instantly fell in love with Wiesel, because where everybody else wanted to talk policy and deterrence and arms control, Wiesel's first commentary was on such a purely human level, especially after Kissinger pooh-poohed the film for presenting "a very simple-minded notion of the nuclear problem" because it merely dramatized what everybody already knew: A nuclear war would be very bad. Wiesel brought the conversation back to that "simple" point, because it really was the point.