Politics & Power Quote by Peter Jennings

"George W. had a plan" lands like a perfectly calibrated newsroom dagger: calm, clipped, and devastating in its understatement. Peter Jennings isn’t narrating a colorful anecdote; he’s exposing a quiet form of privilege as strategy. The word "plan" is doing the moral heavy lifting. It implies foresight, agency, and savvy - all qualities often celebrated in political leaders - then immediately reframes them as tools for evasion rather than service.

The second sentence tightens the vise. "He arranged" suggests access and influence without having to say "connections" or "family name". Jennings, a journalist trained to let verbs carry the indictment, chooses language that points to orchestration rather than accident. Joining the Air National Guard isn’t described as patriotic duty or a respectable path; it’s presented as a mechanism with a clear output: "which meant he would not be sent to Vietnam". That blunt causal chain strips away the comforting ambiguity that often shields elite decision-making.

Context matters: for Americans of Jennings’s generation, Vietnam wasn’t a distant policy debate. It was a sorting mechanism that measured who paid in time, trauma, and bodies - and who could buy their way into safer lanes. Jennings’s intent is to puncture the heroic biography that clings to presidents and replace it with a more uncomfortable portrait: a future commander-in-chief who treated war like a logistical problem to be solved for himself, even as others had no such options.