Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Ben-Veniste

The sentence is lawyerly in the most revealing way: it sounds measured, even polite, while quietly putting a famous government body on trial. Ben-Veniste doesn’t call the Roberts Commission wrong; he indicts its process. “Did not fully utilize the information available” is a scalpel phrase, implying not just oversight but an institutional choice to stay incurious when curiosity would have been inconvenient. It frames failure as procedural, which is how you make a moral accusation without having to prove malice.

The second clause tightens the vise. “Conclusions…quite short sighted” signals that the commission’s errors weren’t merely factual; they were anticipatory failures, unable (or unwilling) to see downstream consequences. Then he drops the real charge: “scapegoated individuals.” That word detonates because it flips the expected direction of accountability. Commissions are supposed to distribute responsibility upward, toward systems and decision-makers. Scapegoating pushes it down, protecting institutions by offering up digestible villains.

The rhetorical hedges matter. “I think” and “indeed, in some cases” aren’t timidity; they’re courtroom calibration. He’s staking a claim that can survive cross-examination, suggesting a pattern while leaving room for defensibility. Contextually, the Roberts Commission investigated Pearl Harbor, a trauma that demanded explanation fast. Ben-Veniste’s subtext is about how democracies metabolize catastrophe: when the public needs closure, official narratives often trade complexity for a cleaner story, and real people become the price of that cleanliness.