Patrick B. Pexton is the deputy editor of National Journal. In addition to serving as the magazine's No. 2, Pexton directs the coverage of foreign affairs and defense. Pexton joined the magazine in 1998 from Army Times Publishing Co. in Virginia where he was editor of Navy Times, one of five independent newspapers about the U.S. military published by that company. Earlier there, Pexton covered the Pentagon, the secretary of Defense, and the joint chiefs as a reporter for six years, and played a key role in uncovering two national stories about the Navy of the 1990s-the Tailhook sexual harassment scandal, and the widespread cheating by midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. Previously, he worked for the Journal newspapers in the Washington suburbs covering politics and Maryland state government, and before that for the Shoreline Times newspapers in Connecticut, covering state and local government. In Maryland and Connecticut, Pexton won 14 journalism awards for his state and local coverage. Pexton writes op-eds on defense and foreign policy that have been published in The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com, Newsday, The New York Post, and The Miami Herald. In 1991 Pexton wrote a book on the Persian Gulf War, titled The President's War, published in Tokyo. It is still widely used in Japanese universities for courses on how U.S. foreign policy is made. Pexton holds a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C. He studied in Bologna, Italy, for the first year of his graduate studies. Pexton was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a bachelor's degree in political science.
Bloggers: Permit me a bit of shortchanging shorthand to summarize an excellent discussion on Hillary Clinton, a person and personality who always provokes strong feelings. It seems that we have a rough division here: On the one hand, we have the grassroots structuralists who see a fundamental need for Hillary to remake the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy, and policy and planning process, or else State will never be able to accomplish anything asked of it, no matter who is in charge. On the other, we have the policy-above-process crowd, who desperately want Hillary to bust outside the conventional U.S. foreign… Read more
It seems we have three themes going on here, 1) it has only been through the tremendously hard and vigilant work of the U.S. military and civilian agencies that we have warded off another September 11-style attack; 2) that 9/11 was an unrepeatable bit of elegant terrorism so don’t worry too much; and 3) Mike Scheuer’s provocative point, as I interpret it, that if we had, in addition to toppling the Taliban in Kabul in Nov/Dec. 2001, sent every Army Ranger, Green Beret, 82nd Airborne trooper, and 10th Mountain Division soldier and every CIA operative to swarm over the… Read more
Bloggers: There’s still time to post on our question about which U.S. wars have been worth fighting and why, or why not, and my thanks to all who have done so already. Speaking parenthetically, we at National Journal, in asking this question, in no way meant any disrespect to the brave men and women who have fought and died in America’s wars and who are fighting in two conflicts as we speak. They did their duty and often sacrificed all. But it is the decision makers in this town who sent them there, and it is these politicians and… Read more
Here's a link to the text of President Obama's speech today in Cairo, if anyone wants to comment on the speech itself, please feel free: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html … Read more
President Obama’s gifts as an orator may be many, but most of our experts this week are skeptical that his speech in Cairo tomorrow can do much to change the image of America in the Muslim world. That will only be changed by different policies, and hard work, and too, an acknowledgement that Muslims, whether Arabs or other, should be treated as equals, not as failures, or people we should be lecturing to. Whatever Obama says, wrote Michael Brenner, the words, “must carry a credible commitment to action; they must be followed by concrete changes in what the United… Read more
Thanks to our bloggers for their input so far on what to do about North Korea in light of Pyongyang’s continued bellicosity, threats, and mixed signals. I note that last night Pyongyang announced it would put the two American journalists captured at the Chinese border on trial on June 4. Here’s a Thursday morning summary: Overall, I’d say most of the experts are pessimistic about the potential for breakthroughs, or even much progress, with Pyongyang regardless of whether the blogger advocates a harder line, continued engagement, or a period of benign neglect. And the experts think that if there… Read more
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