Not all statesmen refuse to learn. Holbrooke:
"[In 1995, McGeorge] Bundy began writing tortured notes to himself, often in the margins of his old memos a sort of private dialogue with the man he had been 30 years earlier something out of a Pirandello play. Bundy would scribble notes: “the doves were right”; “a war we should not have fought”; “I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution.” “What are my worst mistakes?” For those of us who had known the self-confident, arrogant Brahmin from Harvard, these astonishing, even touching, efforts to understand his own mistakes are far more persuasive than the shallow analysis McNamara offers in his own memoir, “In Retrospect”…
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/11/-the-doves-were-right/208021/
