READ HIS BOOKS IF YOU HAVE NOT, THEY WILL MOSTLY BE AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC LIBRARY
In his more direct histories, Paul Johnson characterized Augusto Pinochet as "the most misunderstood man of the 20th century." Pinochet is one of the left's biggest boogiemen, the evil right-wing dicatator. But I spent time studying him and his Chicago Boys' revolution, which transformed Chile from a typical third world socialist hellhole to a sleek, modern, capitalist, prosperous, corruption-free democracy, reading the seminal history of Chile during that era, Out of the Ashes by James Whelan, reading the actual memoirs of Pinochet himself, reading even leftist histories and making friends with Chileans left and right, and that's the only summary that can be made about the man who did so much good for Chile and wasn't nearly the tyrant going after the innocent he was portrayed as on the left.
Pinochet in fact was a victim of the Castroite propaganda machine's "black legend," demonized outside the context of his time, history and geography into a monster while all of his transformations of the country into a free market democracy went ignored. The Pinochet haters out there hated Pinochet in fact, for that, because they always hated the prosperity of the West. Johnson grasped this sorry distortion of history to perfection.
The late, great Robert Conquest, (who died in 2015 ) bookends with Johnson.
Bookmark
I read “Intellectuals”. It was good, but not particularly brilliant.
Ping
A great writer!