I came across an item entitled The CIA and abstract expressionism in my news feed and was intrigued by the name Tom Braden therein. A trip to Wikipedia confirmed this was the same Braden who authored Eight is Enough and hosted Crossfire on CNN.
I have a memory of some family members discussing said host of Crossfire around the table in Juneau, and that he was some relation of Great Grandma Steele, but I don't remember the details. Can anyone fill them in?
Sunday, April 28, 2013
The CIA, abstract expressionism, and Tom Braden
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7 comments:
I have no idea, but am curious and waiting for a member of the older generation to provide details.
Grandma Steele's maiden name was Braden. Tom was her cousin - first cousin, I believe.
Unless he was Mom's cousin - grandma's nephew. I bet Meredith knows for sure.
Roy wanted me to write a comment about the coincidence of his post and my reading group selection this month, Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan. The night before he wrote this post, I had finished a chapter where Tom Braden is mentioned, "for the second point, he quoted a remark by his old CIA friend turned broadcaster, Tom Braden,to the effect that the United States was the only country on the planet
that didn't understand that some things work better when they're small." Sweet Tooth, is a novel about a female MI5 operative (funnily enough, I thought I was reading M 15, guess that is what happens when you put off reading until 10pm and are dead tired but trying to finish a book in time), whose mission is to secretly recruit a writer to publish material that supports the British governnment's anti-communism agenda. The above quote is in reference to comparing the British approach vs. the American approach to fund artists who have similar ideologies in attempts to sway the lefties to anti-communism rather than let them drift towards the communist perspective.
I'm currently reading "Enduring Love" by Ian McEwan. He's one of the contemporary writers whose prose I am consistently impressed with.
We'd better check our family trees...which are around somewhere...to find out for sure. I know Tom Braden was a relatively close relative of Mom's, but I'm not sure whose cousin he was.
Nicole, I've always thought it was M15! Now I know.
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