Jack Valenti dies…

…and CBS runs a story about his accomplished life.

Problem is, they bury this at the very end:

After earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for piloting bombing missions over Italy in World War II, he worked his way through night school at the University of Houston, then earned a master’s in business administration from Harvard.

But never mind that…he was a prominent motion picture industry lobbyist, and that’s what matters. All of that ‘risking your life for freedom’ nonsense has nothing to do with movies. Sure, he strapped his ass into a rickety old B-25 and commanded 51 successful combat missions, but so what? And that whole messy Kennedy assassination, you know, where Valenti accompanied his friend (and newly sworn-in President) LBJ back to Washington on Air Force One. Pfff. He helped create the motion picture rating system, man! Come on!

Incidentally, that goo dripping from your monitor about right now is sarcasm.

I didn’t know Jack, but wish I did. It’s hard to guess which of his life events he considered the most important. But I guarantee: of the several thousand movie people he broke bread with through the years, he remembered very few by name. Yet, I bet he could recall the names, ages and home towns of each of his bomber crew, sixty five years later.

The Greatest Generation loses another player.