Class News

Ward Wickwire ’64 attends talk by J. Clapper, former DNI

October 20, 2020

Ward Wickwire, a close student of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale, attended a Zoom event sponsored by Mory’s that featured Jackson Visiting Fellow Lt. Gen. James Clapper (ret.), former Director of National Intelligence. Here is a video of Clapper's remarks, followed by some comments by Ward.

It was excellent and depressing. Great on history but depressing in that Clapper served as the first person to consolidate all defense information from each agency (Defense and FBI in particular) so the information presented to the President was not biased by an affiliation to one agency. Then, Trump essentially dismissed the whole effort.

Also attached is a response from Maureen Farrell, Director of Communications for the Jackson Institute. There are a number of links in her reply to my inquiries that are also a bit discouraging. My initial access to the webinars was through the Discussion Series that started in early Spring and ended in this summer. I also accessed a number of webinars in the Jackson Institute’s Visiting Fellows program that appears to have started in October 2019 and is still going on (Clapper was part of this program). Susan Rice was interviewed in this series just before Clapper and was excellent. I know Susan and her brother, John (a Yale graduate and currently a Trustee) who took over their mother’s condominium next to ours here in Maine.

As Maureen explains, the Jackson Institute appears to have different filing systems for each series, and there is no overall index. Equally discouraging is that the Law School and SOM are similarly disorganized and there is no overall index with key words etc. I’m confident Yale is not alone in having some smart people who do some stupid thing.

I’ll try to influence a better organization structure for the recordings but don’t hold your breath. These webinars are a great resource. My short-term suggestion is to check out the links to the Law School and SOM and advertise them to our Class on our Website We’ll include a request that any classmate who has viewed a webinar write up a brief summary and post it on our site with a link to the recording. I can start with a few noteworthy webinars I’ve viewed.