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and again he provided the press with a preview of his strategy. This, he told the correspondents, would be a “general offensive” to “win the war.” He repeated his October promise to the men, directing Major General John B. Coulter to tell the troops that “They will eat Christmas dinner at home.” The drive would open early on the morning of November 24, and he would fly over from Tokyo for the occasion. It was inconceivable that this final drive might fail. In a special communiqué to the U.N. he reported that the Air Force had “completely interdicted the rear areas.” His left wing, he said, would advance against “failing resistance,” while his right wing, “gallantly supported by naval air and surface action,” continued to exploit its “commanding position.” The juncture of the two “should for all practical purposes end the war.” A reporter asked him if he knew how many Chinese soldiers were in Korea. “About thirty thousand regulars,” the general fired back, “and thirty thousand volunteers.” Losses would be “extraordinarily light.” In Washington the President was bemused. Earlier in the month the general had sounded an alarm in his messages that had seemed, in Truman’s opinion, to portend impending disaster. Now, apparently, the grave danger did not exist, since the same commander was announcing victory even before the first men started marching. Indeed, the troops were celebrating it in advance; the day before the offensive was Thanksgiving, and American ingenuity saw to it that every man received a hot turkey dinner with buttered squash, Waldorf salad, cranberry sauce, mince pie, and after-dinner mints. That was on Thursday. On Friday the attack went in, and on Sunday the Chinese struck with thirty-three divisions—300,000 men.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score.4 The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science. Since there is roughly a 150-point gap between the average SAT scores of students attending the University of Maryland and Brown, the “penalty” Sacks paid by choosing a great school over a good school is that she reduced her chances of graduating with a science degree by 30 percent. Thirty percent! At a time when students with liberal arts degrees struggle to find jobs, students with STEM degrees are almost assured of good careers. Jobs for people with science and engineering degrees are plentiful and highly paid. That’s a very large risk to take for the prestige of an Ivy League school.
David and Goliath
Malcolm Gladwell
Such a preference for demonstrative over electoral politics was often reinforced by a badly flawed reading of the careers of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. They did rely on marches, sit-ins, and other forms of physical protest to put moral pressure on their opponents, who claimed to believe in the democratic principles Gandhi and King were invoking against them. And they sought to disturb the status quo so that it would be less socially disruptive for officials to accommodate them than to continue to repress them. But neither of these great leaders chose this route in preference to using the votes of their millions of followers to gain their ends. They engaged in direct action precisely because this was the only method available to them—Indians in the British Empire had no right to vote on their situation, and African Americans in the American South had that right in theory but hardly in practice. Once they gained full access to the ballot box, they sensibly made that their main focus. When LGBT leaders cited Gandhi and King, I offered my own counterexample—the National Rifle Association’s great success in dominating the policy debates about gun control, despite being in a minority on the issue in every national poll I have ever seen. As I enjoyed pointing out, especially to those LGBT activists who decried my lack of “militancy,” I have never seen an NRA public demonstration. They do not have marches. There have been no NRA mock shoot-ins to rival the die-ins staged by AIDS activists. And those liberals who try to comfort themselves with the notion that the NRA wins legislative battles because of their vast campaign contributions are engaged in self-deceptive self-justification. The NRA wins at the ballot box, not in the streets and not by checkbook. The NRA does what I have long begged my LGBT allies to do, at first with mixed results, and more recently with much greater success. They urge all of their adherents to get on the voting rolls. They are diligent to the point of obsession in making sure that elected officials hear from everyone in their constituencies who opposes any limits on guns, especially when a relevant measure is being considered, and they then do an extraordinary job of informing their supporters of how those officials cast their votes.
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