events [and found] the ground littered with ... the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence [as demonstrable in] a study of three needless wars", World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. Sexual harassment controversy On October 24, 2017, Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor at The New Republic from 1983 until his resignation in 2014, admitted to "offenses against some of my colleagues in the past" after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate sexual advances. Beinart, who was the magazine's editor at the time of the harassment of the woman, subsequently said had not done enough to stop the behavior and felt shame for not doing so. Beinart wrote that when he reported one such incident in particular to Peretz— Wieseltier's harassment of Sarah Wildman, then an assistant editor of The New Republic— he was ignored. The sexual harassment only got worse. Beinart has since said that he was afraid if he pursued the matter further, he would be jeopardizing his own career.Wildman, Sarah. "I was harassed at the New Republic. I spoke up. Nothing happened.". Vox, Nov. 9, 2017. According to The New York Times: "Several women... said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters." Wildman later alleged that she was fired in retaliation for complaining: "In disclosing this incident to my superiors, the outcome was, in many ways, far worse than the act itself. It’s not exactly that I was disbelieved; it’s that in the end, I was dismissed", she wrote in Vox. Wildman wrote that the sexual harassment went hand in hand with gender discrimination at the magazine during Peretz's and Beinart's tenure: "The women knew we had a far shallower chance of rising up the masthead than our male counterparts; all of us hoped we’d be the exception. To do so, we entered into a game in which the rules were rigged against us, sometimes pushing us well past our point of comfort in order to remain in play." Peretz later claimed that he could recall nothing about the harassment. But Beinart later said and wrote that when he directly reported Wieseltier's