Col. Bud Day, Vietnam War Hero, Dies at 88 http://t.co/VicucbrkWe
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 28, 2013
“Col. Bud Day, Vietnam War Hero, Dies at 88,” the New York Times tweets, linking to their obit of Col. Day:
Col. Bud Day, an Air Force fighter pilot who was shot down in the Vietnam War, imprisoned with John McCain in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton” and defiantly endured more than five years of brutality without divulging sensitive information to his captors, earning him the Medal of Honor, died on Saturday in Shalimar, Fla. He was 88.
His death was announced by his wife, Doris.
Colonel Day was among America’s most highly decorated servicemen, having received nearly 70 medals and awards, more than 50 for combat exploits. In addition to the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, he was awarded the Air Force Cross, the highest combat award specifically for airmen.
In a post on Twitter on Sunday, Senator McCain called Colonel Day “my friend, my leader, my inspiration.”
Colonel Day’s life was defined by the defiance he showed in North Vietnamese prison camps, where besides Mr. McCain, the future senator and Republican presidential candidate, whose Navy fighter jet had been downed, his cellmates included James B. Stockdale, also a Navy pilot, who became Ross Perot’s running mate in his 1992 presidential campaign.
It’s a sensitively-worded obit, and at first glance, surprisingly free of leftwing bias. However, I’m not sure if the Times’ publisher, “Pinch” Sulzberger would approve of the wording of the Tweet linking to it, which described Col. Day as a “Vietnam War Hero.” As the Media Research Center noted in July of 1999, quoting from a profile of Suzlberger in the New Yorker:
An alert MRC fan tipped us to the profile of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in the July 26 issue of The New Yorker magazine by authors Susan Tifft and Alex E. Jones, who are writing a book on the Sulzberger family.
Sulzberger, nicknamed “Pinch” (in comparison to his Times predecessor and father, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger), traveled a familiar path for the children of the Eastern elite in the 1960s and 1970s:
“He had been something of a political activist in high school — he had been suspended briefly from Browning for trying to organize a shutdown of the school following the National Guard’s shooting of students at Kent State — and at Tufts he eagerly embraced the antiwar movement. His first arrest for civil disobedience took place outside the Raytheon Comapny, a defense and space contractor; there, dressed in an old Marine jacket of Punch’s, he joined other demonstrators who were blocking the entrance to the company’s gates. He was soon arrested again, in an antiwar sit-in at the J.F.K. Federal Building in Boston.
“Punch had shown little reaction after the first arrest, but when he got word of the second one he flew to Boston. Over dinner, he asked his son why he was involved with the protests and what kind of behavior the family might expect of him in the future. Arthur assured his father he was not planning on a career of getting himself arrested. After dinner, as the two men walked in the Boston Common, Punch asked what his son later characterized as ‘the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life’: ‘If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?’ Arthur answered, ‘I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country; we shouldn’t be there.’ To the elder Sulzberger, this bordered on traitor’s talk. ‘How can you say that?’ he yelled. Years later, Arthur said of the incident, ‘It’s the closest he’s ever come to hitting me.'”
Did Sulzberger ever recant from his youthful radical chic views of the Vietnam War? Judging by his paper’s encomium for former Weatherman turned future Obama crony Bill Ayers, published, in what would later turn out to be a horrific moment of synchronicity, on September 11th, 2001, I would doubt it.
(Via Twitchy.)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member