Barack Obama’s Presidency is less than a year old, and he has already found himself on the roller coaster ride of American politics, media and celebrity. It must have been a pleasant surprise to wake to the news on October 9th that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. While it will be derided Read More
When I was a kid, my parents had an expression, WASPy Jews. It was based in part on our one German-Jewish relative: Trudy (a pseudonym). Trudy was cold, straightforward, and wealthy. German Jews and Eastern-European Jews used to be the Sunnis and Shi’ites of American Jewish life. Having lately visited Trudy, I wanted to record Read More
Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America , by Ted Morgan. Random House, 685 pages, $35.
Way before Ann Coulter decided that a book accusing millions of fellow citizens of being traitors would be career-enhancing, another prominent Washingtonian was up to the same trick. Only with a twist. Instead of writing a best-seller and going Read More
George W. Bush is no Woodrow Wilson, let alone Winston Churchill. Yet in his speech last week at the National Endowment for Democracy, Mr. Bush said much that deserved saying. He also left out a lot that was worth saying, as American politicians almost always do when they talk about democratic values.
In urging Read More
If for nothing else, Bush II should find a place in history as the guy who dropped the bunker-buster on the Garden of Eden. It’s not everybody who can lay claim to having destroyed the Mesopotamian cradle of Western Civ, but given the administration’s indifference to the past (i.e., “old Europe” vs. “new Europe”), you Read More
Avarice and conspiracy invariably smell most foul when they seep into scenes of sacrifice and hope. The stench that made its way into Iraq this week, pulled in amid the powerful currents of triumph and selflessness, was unmistakable in its rankness. What should now be a moment of deep satisfaction-mitigated but not negated by terrible Read More
Only those with a valid claim to geezerhood are old enough to remember a pre-Miranda-warning America. That was nearly 40 years ago, when men were men and cops were brutes. That was back in the era when the police administered what was then called “the third degree” often enough that everybody knew it was slang Read More
Did you ever think that in this last quarter of the last
year of the last century of the second millennium, we’d be debating World War
I? Or that a three-line, four-column front-page headline in The New York Times would contain the
words “Versailles Pact”? Those two words haven’t been featured so prominently
in any Read More
I got a phone call the other day from a rollicking-voiced person at National Public Radio who wanted to audition me for a program the network was doing on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation. She wanted to know if I could babble on about how that event tied in with Read More
