Tom Selleck: What I've Learned

Michael Sebastian interviewed Tom Selleck for Esquire magazine.

Tom Selleck, 79, has been an actor for more than five decades. His memoir, You Never Know, is out now. He spoke to Esquire in May in New York City. Here is Selleck in his own words.

I was playing baseball in our little neighborhood. I got ahold of one and it broke a window. We all scattered and ran to our houses. My mom found out about it. I said, “Are you going to tell Dad?” She said, “No. You’re going to tell Dad.”

He wasn’t one to fly off the handle. He said, “Thank you for telling me. I’ll see you in the morning.” In the morning, he took me down the block to the Rockwell house. He said, “Knock on the door and tell him.” Mr. Rockwell answered. I said, “I’m the one who broke your window.” He said, “Thank you for telling me.”

We went in the house and measured the window, and then my dad took me to the hardware store and bought all the stuff to replace a window. We replaced that window.

I played forward on the USC basketball team, riding the pine.

I didn’t think a lot of things through then. I was on academic probation every year, always on the edge, almost ineligible once.

You were deferred from the draft if you were in college. I had signed a contract at 20th Century Fox, and I was in their new-talent program. I didn’t have a student deferment anymore. So I was either going to be drafted or I’d volunteer for the Army. I enlisted in the California Army National Guard and did six years. I’m proud to be a vet.

After my six months of active duty, I drove down from Fort Ord in Monterey. I wore my uniform because I wanted to have it on when I saw my folks. It was a very difficult time in the country. Military veterans weren’t treated very well. The country was going in a different way, and I didn’t agree.

You can read the rest of the interview via the below link:

Tom Selleck Talks 'Blue Bloods,' 'Magnum,' and Being in the Military (esquire.com) 

Dorothy Parker Slices And Dices: A Look Back At The Book Reviews of Writer Dorothy Parker

Ellen Meister at the Daily Beast looks back at the sometimes vicious wit of writer Dorothy Parker, but notes that she also wrote fondly of two of my favorite writers - Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett.   

You may know Dorothy Parker as the acid-tongued wit who once said a performance by Katharine Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B,” and who reviewed a Broadway play with the line, “The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy.”

But Parker was more than just a hard-bitten theater critic. She was also a poet, short story writer, screenwriter, and literary critic. In fact, she was The New Yorker’s book reviewer from 1927-1933, writing under the pseudonym Constant Reader, and held a similar post at Esquire decades later. 

Of course, not all of Parker’s reviews were negative.  An avid reader, she loved and hated with equal intensity. And though the positive reviews might not be as entertaining as the scorchers, the books live on, and are worthy of our attention.  Here are five examples of books Dorothy Parker recommended.

Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
Parker adored this collection of Hemingway short stories, while castigating those who insisted that only his novels should be taken seriously. She said, “Mr. Hemingway's style, this prose stripped to its firm young bones, is far more effective, far more moving in the short story than in the novel. He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories; he is, also to me, not the greatest living novelist.” She goes on to say Men Without Women is “a truly magnificent work,” and “I do not know where a greater collection of stories can be found.”

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
Dorothy Parker was a big fan of Dashiell Hammett’s work, calling him “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.” And while she explains that he doesn't have Hemingway’s scope or beauty, she says it's true that “he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. And it is also true that he is a good, hell-bent, cold-hearted writer, with a clear eye for the ways of hard women and a fine ear for the words of hard men, and his books are exciting and powerful and—if I may filch a word from the booksy ones—pulsing.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/22/dorothy-parker-slices-and-dices.html

Ellen Meister is the author of Farewell Dorothy Parker. 

Whodunit? CNN's Peter Bergin Asks Who Really Killed Bin Laden?

 

CNN.com offers a piece by Peter Bergen that disputes the account of "the Shooter," the former Navy Seal who was interviewed by Esquire and claimed he shot bin Laden.

The Shooter went on to complain that after leaving the Navy he had no health benefits or pension.

As nearly all veterans like myself are aware, one has to put in 20 years in the military to receive continuing health benefits and a pension. I find it hard to believe that the Shooter was unaware of this fact.

Now other parts of his story are being questioned, including the claim that the Shooter was in fact the Navy SEAL who shot and killed bin Laden.

Peter Bergen says he interviewed another Navy SEAL who participated in the bin Laden. His story matches the former Navy SEAL who wrote an account of the bin Laden raid in No Easy Day.  

In February, Esquire magazine published a lengthy profile of "The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden." The story did not identify the killer by his real name, referring to him only as "the Shooter."

The Shooter told Esquire that the night bin Laden was killed he had encountered al Qaeda's leader face-to-face in the top-floor bedroom of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden had been hiding for more than five years.

The Shooter explained that when he found bin Laden in his bedroom the al Qaeda leader was standing up and had a gun "within reach" and it was only then that the Shooter fired the two shots into bin Laden's forehead that killed him. That account was in conflict with the account from another raid participant in a wildly successful book "No Easy Day."

Now, another member of the secretive SEAL Team 6, which executed the bin Laden raid, tells CNN the story of the Shooter as presented in Esquire is false. According to this serving SEAL Team 6 operator, the story is "complete B-S."

 

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

 

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/26/world/bergen-who-killed-bin-laden/index.html?hpt=hp_c2   

Navy SEAL 'Shooter' Author Didn't Intend Victim Narrative

Ward Carroll at Military.com offers a piece on the author of the Esquire magazine piece on the former Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden.

The feature story in the most recent edition of Esquire magazine deals with the experiences of the SEAL who shot Osama Bin Laden during the historical raid and after he left the Navy. The article, titled “The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden . . . is Screwed,” has generated some controversy because of the perception among many veterans and agency officials that it gives little play to the veterans benefits unused by the subject while suggesting that the government is guilty of a “startling failure . . . to help its most experienced and skilled warriors carry on with their lives.”
But is the man who killed Osama Bin Laden really ‘screwed’?

“That’s not the word I would have used,” the article’s author Phil Bronstein said, explaining that the title was created by somebody on Esquire’s staff after he submitted it. “But I stand by the magazine’s use of it.”

The veteran newspaperman and war correspondent insists his goal was not to paint the former SEAL as a victim, but to highlight where the system – including the support of non-profit organizations and corporations along with the Department of Defense and the VA – falls short of giving top tier operators what they need once they elect to transition to civilian life. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/02/21/obl-shooter-story-victim-narrative-unintended.html?comp=1198882887570&rank=1

You can also read a previous post on the Esquire piece via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/02/navy-seal-who-shot-and-killed-bin-laden.html

Navy SEAL Who Shot And Killed Bin Laden Speaks Out

The British newspaper the Daily Mail offers a report on the interview of the U.S. Navy SEAL who shot and killed Public Enemy Number 1, Osama bin Laden. 

The Navy SEAL who claims he shot and killed Osama bin Laden in the famous raid which captured America's most wanted terrorist has spoken for the first time about the moment he shot bin Laden three times in the head and watched him take his last breath. 

The Team Sox member - who is referred to as 'The Shooter' for the safety of his family - described in unforgettable detail the days leading up to the kill, the moment he shot bin Laden three times and the fallout from the raid.

Once they given their mission, the woman at the CIA - made famous by Jessica Chastain's portrayal in Zero Dark Thirty - told the team bin Laden was '100 per cent on the third floor' of his compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan. 

In an interview to appear in the March edition of Esquire magazine, The Shooter describes for the first time in unforgettable detail the tense and life-changing two minutes that changed the course of history. 

"'I can't tell you 100 per cent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding (his wife Amal) in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don't know. For me, it was snapshot of a target ID, definitely him.

"This was repetition and muscle memory. That's him, boom, done."

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2276972/He-dead-tongue-I-watched-breath-Navy-SEAL-killed-Osama-bin-Laden-describes-moment-shot-times-head-after.html#axzz2KaEld7ol