Honoring Claudia Rosett’s Mighty Pen

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The New York Sun

The Center for Security Policy awarded yesterday its Mightier Pen Award to independent journalist Claudia Rosett. Ms. Rosett, who is journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, was honored particularly for her reporting on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.


The Mightier Pen Award recognizes writers who have stressed the necessity of military strength and robust U.S. national security policies for international peace. Previous recipients of the award are William F. Buckley Jr., A.M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, and Mark Helprin.


As attendees dined in Midtown over baked salmon and lemon artichoke puree, the Center for Security Policy founder and president Frank Gaffney Jr. introduced the awardee, saying she had “traveled the world over and gotten into the places to find the truth where it is not easily found.” He praised Ms. Rosett as a “journalist’s journalist” who is a “one-woman truth squad on the United Nations.” Mr. Gaffney referred specifically to Ms. Rosett’s articles on the U.N. oil-forfood program as a prism through which to understand the “inherent shortcomings, if not defects, of an institution that many of us would like to have be a real instrument for promoting freedom and protecting it around the world” he said. “Sadly, it is not. And we now have a better understanding of why it’s not, thanks to the reporting of Claudia Rosett.”


Ms. Rosett began by thanking her father on several points. She thanked him for getting up early and flying in to see her accept the award, for teaching her that markets matter, and lastly for reading E.B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” to her when as a child.


About her work, Ms. Rosett said, “I did not set out to cover the United Nations,” but set out to write about tyrants, and over and over their trails kept leading to the United Nations.She said she kept arriving at their doorstep thinking the institution was troublesome, misguided, and in some instances corrupt — but overall too inefficient to do much damage. But her experiences “exploring the parallel universe at Turtle Bay” over the last few years have made her “believe it actively does harm,” she said.

The United Nations was born in the middle of the last century, said Ms. Rosett, at a time when the American government, while triumphant in a noble cause, “nevertheless believed it was necessary to find an arrangement acceptable not only to allies such as Great Britain and then Nationalist (not Communist) China, but also to Stalin’s Soviet Union.”


She said the United Nations was created as a “superstate.” If one prints out an organizational chart of the United Nations, each one of the many items that will appear in the “spaghetti” before one’s eyes is a “cave into which you can dive, an underground world.” That is why, she said, that researching the United Nations is like “spelunking.”


On the subject of reform at the United Nations, Ms. Rosett said Ambassador John Bolton has been sent in there and “the charge of the Light Brigade” is going on now. She said it is time to change the terms of the debate, asking, “if we had no U.N. today and had to create something” for countries to interact, “would we create anything that would look like what we’ve got?”


* * *
PASTA AND POLITICS The chairman of the Bronx Conservative Party, William Newmark,greeted guests at a recent annual holiday party that filled the Morris Park Community Association building on Bronxdale Avenue.

Assemblyman Patrick Manning — standing at 6 feet 11 inches — towered over the room. The New York gubernatorial candidate told the Knickerbocker that he wants to tame the tax and spending habits in Albany. He said there needs to be an “adult in the candy store,” referring to the state capital.


Boroughs other than the Bronx were represented at the party. From Queens was a Republican and Conservative Party candidate for City Council in 2009, William Horowitz, who studied journalism at St. John’s University.


Enjoying the festivities were a former state assemblyman from the Bronx, Vincent Marchiselli; and a former congressman, Mario Biaggi. Also seen were Jay Savino, Anthony Colavita, and Mario Biaggi Jr., all three of whom, the Knickerbocker hears, have expressed interest in running for the state Senate in the 34th District.


Present were two Republican candidates for U.S. Senate: Vietnam veteran and former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, and Sullivan County attorney William Brenner, who is a graduate of New York University School of Law. The latter said one of his priorities is “keeping good jobs, small businesses, and entire industries in New York where they belong.” Mr. Brenner was accompanied by two of his campaign workers, Gina Puccio of Woodbourne, N.Y., and Amanda Goldsmith of Liberty, N.Y.


The Knickerbocker also spoke with a former Republican district leader from the 69th Assembly District, Evan Edwards, whose great-uncle, Gus Edwards, composed the music to “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” and “School Days”; the Conservative Party district leader for the 81st Assembly District, Mark Goret; the 76th Assembly District leader of the Bronx Conservative Party, Steve Stern; and the Columbia County Conservative Party chairman, Matthew Torrey.


A handful of Democrats were in attendance, too, including a former assemblyman, Stephen Kaufman, and the chairman of the the political club Committee 100 Democrats, Ricky Martinez.


gshapiro@nysun.com


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