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General with tarnished stars to speak at Duke
Posted on August 22, 2013 by DukeCheck

lFour star General David Petraeus (retired) will speak in Page Auditorium on September 11 at 6 PM.

There is no charge for admission, but tickets are required. That means you can visit the Duke Box Office to get tickets for free, or lazy people can sign on to www.tickets.duke.edu and pay a $6 service charge per head.

Petraeus capped a wildly successful Army career with top commands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though both wars foundered, his reputation did not.

He retired after President Obama selected him as director of the CIA. Such was Petraeus’s stature that he won a 94-0 Senate confirmation vote. There was a backdrop of speculation that Petraeus wanted to use this as a stepping stone for political office, which he denied.

But that idea was fanned almost daily by right wing talk radio hosts like Sean Hannity and Rush Bimbo.

The right wing blather came to an abrupt end on November 9. 2012 when the retired General conceded he not only had a wife (shown on left) but a girlfriend (picture below). The wife was daughter of the commandant at West Point when he was a star student and their romance was testimony for the potential that many saw in Petraeus’s budding career.

The girlfriend was a woman wrote a biography about him decades later, spending quite a bit of time in the war zone in the process.

Petraeus wound up as chair of the KKR Global Institute, and in case you do not know what those initials stand for, think of Wall Street, where Kohlberg, Kravits and Roberts is one of the most aggressive and feared players in the secretive world of private equity. So Petraeus is a rain-maker and prop for KKR.

Now back to Duke.

This will be the annual Ambassador Dave and Kay Phillips Family International Lecture Series, which under the leadership of Professor Peter Feaver has taken on a hawkish tone and has brought some of the most distinguished speakers that Duke has attracted in recent years. Or as Goombah, the consigliere of DukeCheck put it, the series should be relabeled, “Hawks who used to have power continue to speak out.”

Last year, for example, it brought Karl Rove and Howard Dean, erstwhile dominoes in the Republican and Democratic Parties, to campus to debate how the 2012 Presidential election would affect America’s global role.

The year before it brought Condoleezza Rice out of retirement; it also sponsored a speech by the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey AM ’84 (who did his thesis on Irish literature renewal and thus is a poster boy for Uncle Dick’s assertion that people with humanities degrees can be found in all walks of life).

In 2010-2011 the lecture series found Robert Gates, erstwhile Secretary of Defense. And the year before we tolerated the self-promoting TV journalist (and now admitted plagiarist) Fareed Zakaria.