MSNBC Host Ronan Farrow Groomed From Childhood To Be State Propagandist

[...][Richard] Holbrooke, a loyal friend of Mia Farrow’s [...] hired Ronan as a speechwriter when he was 15. There is Holbrooke’s formidable widow, the journalist and socialite Kati Marton, the ex-wife of Peter Jennings. There is Diane Sawyer, Holbrooke’s ex-girlfriend, who is now advising Farrow. “I’ve told him, ‘If there is anything you want to do that I have a cautionary tale about, I’ll be there.’” Sawyer told the New York Times.

And there is Hillary Clinton, who, upon Holbrooke’s death, “took Ronan under her wing.”

Farrow has these people to thank for most of the jobs and awards that adorn his résumé. Marton last year presented him with the Richard C. Holbrooke Award for Social Justice. The New York Times’ profile featured Farrow receiving an award from a foundation that aids Holocaust survivors. Last week, after just three days on the air, Farrow picked up the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Exploration and Journalism at an event at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan.

Farrow’s credentials from Yale Law School and Oxford precisely match Bill Clinton’s, and that combination took on a special cachet when the Arkansas governor was elected president in 1992. The ambitious New Jersey senator Cory Booker, who runs in the same celebrity-political circles as Farrow, has the same résumé.

Clinton’s labor secretary, Robert Reich, another Yale Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar, once told the Boston Globe why he ended up at Yale Law School: a “lack of imagination.”

“Yale Law School was the place you went when you didn’t want to be a lawyer, but you wanted to be involved in public affairs,” Reich said, “and you didn’t know how to get your foot in.”

The last bit was never going to be a problem for Farrow, though. Holbrooke, who had employed him at 15 and was, according to Marton, so loyal to Mia Farrow that he forbade Marton from watching Woody Allen movies, created a position for him in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

There, Farrow earned a six-figure salary serving as a liaison between Holbrooke and humanitarian non-governmental organizations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“Because of the importance of NGOs, Ambassador Holbrooke took the initiative,” Holbrooke’s deputy explained the job to an inquiring reporter. “Which is one of the first times if not the first time that we know about it in the history of the State Department — to hire a specific liaison for NGOs.” He continued, “I think it’s a very valuable role that I think would be a benefit in other offices as well. So considering that we’re doing it as among the first in the State Department, I think it will be a model that will be followed because of its utility.”

In fact, the position was eliminated when Farrow left. “We have several officers working on the topic of NGO engagement,” the deputy special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Jarrett Blanc, tells National Review Online.

Shortly after Holbrooke died in December 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton placed Farrow at the helm of the newly created Office of Global Youth Issues. There, “special adviser” Farrow was “responsible for implementing and amplifying youth policy and programming throughout the Department” and oversaw “an historic effort to empower young people as economic and civic actors through U.S. programs, encourage governments to respond to youth through U.S. diplomacy, and directly engage young people around the world.”