1990 Major: History
"A former publisher of the Washington Post, Philip Graham, said that "journalism is the first rough draft of history." Reporters get the first crack at figuring out what just happened. You have to know how to ask questions, how to dig up facts, how to challenge assumptions, how to write up your findings in a meaningful way. Sound familiar? Studying history at Duke was the perfect training for me. Years ago, my editors gave me a simple assignment: Figure out what went wrong during the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Yikes. Where do you even start? I started digging and asking questions and eventually found an amazing cache of primary-source documents: hundreds of unpublished oral-history interviews with people in charge of the war. Believe it or not, I ended up writing a book, "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." It showed that U.S. officials repeatedly and intentionally misled the public, year after year. I never thought I'd write a book, let alone a history book, but sifting through all those documents about America's failures in Afghanistan brought back a lot of memories of doing the same thing in Perkins Library. You never know."
"You will go very far in life if you can learn how to ask smart questions and write clear sentences. Sounds simple, but it's not."
