The Steve Meshnick Book Group

In half an hour and change I'm having a Zoom for this book group of guys 50 and up who read history books, named for Steve Meshnick, a tropical disease guy at UNC who died just prior to the onset of COVID of cancer. Steve was a great guy. In many ways it's a shame I didn't get to know him better from a younger age. That was an unfortunate collateral effect of a break that happened between Natalie and some other girls in her class (one of whom ended up being Steve's daughter, though I don't think she was present in the initial event that led to the break) not too long after we got to Chapel Hill, maybe around 2011 or so. Natalie turned out just fine, as did the other girls (who were at fault), but it was a social rupture nonetheless.

Anyhoo, Steve was awesome. Funny, witty guy and legendary in the tropical disease world. My friend Dorothy out in Seattle who works on malaria in Uganda knew who he was and I ended up connecting them. He also wrote really witty songs, some of which are available on YouTube. Here's a fine one about John Snow. 

This week the book club is discussing Scott Anderson's The Quiet Americans, which I talked about briefly a week or so back. I ended up grinding through to the end, and learned a fair amount about the early days of the CIA, most of it reflecting poorly on the agency, Dwight Eisenhower, and particularly his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who turns out to have been a rigidly reductionist Anti-Communist who basically had his head up his ass. Between the two of them, they made a lot of what in retrospect seem very bad decisions, particularly around an opportunity to recast the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West following Stalin's death and another to support the Hungarian revolution that could have been in 1956. The book also offered clearer insight into US roles in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 (we basically did that) and the early days of Vietnam. The basic thrust of the book was that there were people on the ground in the CIA who learned from failures of stupid missions and had reasonable views of what the US could and could not do, but they were overruled by the President, JF Dulles and his brother Allen, who ran the CIA at the time, and we are still paying the price for it today.