Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has written an op-ed in today’s New York Times calling for an “overwhelming show of force” to “restore order to our streets.” He is calling for the military to be deployed in U.S. cities to quell unrest in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other unarmed African Americans at the hands of police. In his editorial, Cotton references the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis of 1957, when President Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to Arkansas. Cotton offers this as proof that there is historical precedent for the kind of action he is calling for, noting that Eisenhower said at the time that a failure to send the 101st to Little Rock “would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy.”
Missing piece of the story. Orval Faubus was Bill Clinton’s closest mentor.