95 articles
IT'S NOT very often that a president articulates a new foreign policy for the United States. On Tuesday night, President Bush did just that. On the evening of September 11, the president had--appropriately--responded to the attack on the United States by vowing to bring to justice "those who are…
IN HIS State of the Union Address, President Bush spoke to evildoers and do-gooders. The evildoers, he said, would see their terrorist operations stopped. The do-gooders, he said, would see their efforts infused with federal money and programs. Let's talk about the latter group. "My call tonight,"…
IT TURNS OUT that the politics of personal destruction does have cultural consequences.
PRESIDENT BUSH'S State of the Union address last night should be judged in the context of a remarkable political shift since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Before then, Republicans trailed Democrats on two important counts: which party most Americans identify with, and whether they intend to…
GEORGE W. BUSH is a war president and is prepared to be one until he leaves office. He made that clear last night. "Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch, yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch. We cannot stop short. . . ."…
IN A STUNNING article in the Washington Post magazine entitled "Bust and Boom," Matt Brzezinski reports on a terrorist plot in the Philippines that was foiled by Manila police in January 1995. Authorities had been notified about a fire alarm going off in an apartment complex and decided to check it…
THE DAY OF SEPTEMBER 11 I spent at the office watching TV with colleagues, dumbstruck. Around 6, I walked home through the deserted city to my house five blocks past the Capitol, on Capitol Hill. Washington was silent that clear, balmy evening. Police barricades blocked my normal route, past the…
IN AUSTRALIA, the era of big government is alive and well. WorkCover, the official workplace safety group in New South Wales, Australia, is getting ready to release a set of guidelines aimed at improving the working conditions of women (and men) involved in the sex industry. "Getting on Top of…
IN 1993 HISTORIAN Doris Kearns Goodwin complained that Joe McGinniss had borrowed extensively for his "The Last Brother" from her 1987 book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys." "He just uses it flat out, without saying that it came from my work," Goodwin told the Boston Globe. "You expect that…
Dear Sirs: Thank you for your recent "Notification of Assessment and Pending Civil Action" wherein I am informed that unless I make good a $3.53 tax debt by January 25, the State of Maryland will send "the sheriff" to seize my house and sell it "at [my] expense." That seems a reasonable plan to me,…
RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN People often refer to Dubai as the Hong Kong of the Gulf, but it's really more like Vegas. A sparkling, semi-independent emirate on the Arabian Sea, Dubai is where rich Arabs go to gamble, meet hookers, and drink. But mostly drink. Dubai is drenched with booze. The airport…
WHEN SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell and Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda met in Washington on January 10, they resumed talks on a critical issue sidelined by September 11: immigration reform. It was bound to come back. For though the attacks raised security concerns that may make it harder…
FARM BILL. When those two words crop up, the normal reaction is to tune out. Don't this time. The farm bill that's working its way through Congress is a disaster. It costs too much. It enriches the well-to-do. And it's likely to cause an egregious case of role reversal. For years the United States…
When Men Were The Only Models We Had My Teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling by Carolyn G. Heilbrun University of Pennsylvania Press, 159 pp., $24.95 THE ARCHIVIST Otto Bettman once published a book entitled "The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible." You could call this a subtext in Carolyn Heilbrun's…
WAS THERE MORE to the John Walker story than we know? For all the tens of millions of words that gushed forth about Walker, and the endless speculation as to how this young man could have gone so dreadfully wrong, has a potentially key element of the case gone almost completely unreported? The…
THE BUSH DOCTRINE, as promulgated by President Bush following the events of September 11, contemplates preemptive use of force against terrorists as well as the states that harbor them. If the United Nations Charter is to be believed, however, carrying out that doctrine would be unlawful: The…
THE INDICTMENTS of American Taliban John Walker Lindh and "shoebomber" Richard Reid will have broader consequences than many Americans imagine. As important as these cases are for the investigation of al Qaeda and related terrorist activities in Afghanistan, they should also make it possible to…
Marlene Dietrich Photographs and Memories compiled by Jean-Jacques Naudet, edited by Maria Riva Knopf, 288 pp., $40 JUST SHORT of fifty and in the throes of an affair with Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich tried to get pregnant. She didn't succeed, but in the decades ahead, she reshaped her body to fit…
SOME CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE is stronger than other, as when you find a trout in the milk--so wrote that old crank Henry David Thoreau. If there's not quite a trout in the suspected biofraud by government biologists studying Canadian Lynx, there surely is a minnow or two in the milk. Not surprising…
THE NATION'S FIELD OF DREAMS It seems the Nation won't let the facts interfere with a Bush-bashing opportunity. The Wall Street Journal noted in its "Best of the Web" column Friday that a Matt Bivens story in the Nation, "The Enron Box," began with a howler: "When George W. Bush co-owned the…
The Spy Next Door The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Phillip Hanssen, the Most Damaging FBI Agent in U.S. History by Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman Little, Brown, 288 pp., $25.95 The Bureau and the Mole The Unmasking of Robert Phillip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History by…
BOOKS IN BRIEF The Votes That Counted How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election by Howard Gillman (University of Chicago Press, 280 pp., $27.50) There is no shortage of books on the case of Bush v. Gore. The Weekly Standard has already reviewed 11 of them in essays by Noemie Emery and…
Building Capitalism The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc by Anders Aslund Cambridge Univ. Press, 550 pp., $27 TWO YEARS AGO in an interview, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos Oil and one of Russia's leading oligarchs, whether it was possible to have risen to his financial…
HE'S BEEN CHARGED, he's back from his summer home in Kandahar, and the talk shows fill with John Walker again, and it won't be the last time, will it? There will be no closure for us, folks. He will be in our lives forever, even from prison, a specter that reappears and floats, impossible to swat…
"I'M ONE of the hawks . . . when it comes to defense," says Senator Robert C. Byrd with a straight face. "But I'm becoming a little nervous as I hear that we're going to spend more and more and more on the military." That was Byrd's reaction to the gratifying news that President Bush has decided to…
JOHN WALKER LINDH glanced casually over the shoulder of the U.S. Attorney standing next to him as the government lawyer read aloud the formal charges against the young man most people know as the American Taliban. Lindh was terse, but polite, in his almost-whispered responses to federal magistrate…
IT'S A bankruptcy of mammoth proportions. Thousands of people could see their life savings wiped out, hundreds of thousands will feel the pain, and tens of millions will have their lives seriously affected. Of course I'm talking about Kmart's decision to file Chapter 11. The odd thing is that while…
Monday, January 21, 2002, Episode I: Justice
FEW DEBATES are as hard to keep up with as the biotech debate. The first problem is all that science. Sensible people, of course, major in English to avoid terms such as blastocyst. Then there are the competing jurisdictions of federal and private monies, law and commerce, science and religion.…
DIVORCE IS in the news again--and not just because of Michael Jordan's marital woes. In the past two weeks, both USA Today and the Washington Post have run fawning profiles of E. Mavis Hetherington, one of the nation's leading divorce researchers. Hetherington, an emeritus professor of psychology…
LAST WEEK the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) made headlines when it issued a broadside that would, if followed by Congress, grant an open-ended license for biotech researchers to clone human life. True, the NAS recommended that Congress ban "reproductive" cloning, that is, the use of a cloned…
AS DETAILED in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Doris Kearns Goodwin's 1987 book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," used a number of phrases and sentences without quotation marks that had been drawn from three earlier works: Rose Kennedy's "Time to Remember," Hank Searls's "The Lost…
MY ARTICLE in the latest The Weekly Standard, "A Historian and Her Sources," points out several instances of copied language in Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys." Despite the fact that she had improperly copied from others, Goodwin in 1993 criticized Joe McGinniss for…
DO THEY suddenly have too much time on their hands over at the Pentagon? On Tuesday, the Defense Department press office issued a release that was, as these things go, full of piss and vinegar
CELEBRATING Martin Luther King Day gets done in different ways. If there are delightful afternoon games all over the NBA and solemn ceremonies at the White House, there is also, in certain quarters, an angry score-settling and wound-picking that can't be confused with "celebration" in any way. That…
A CHRONIC annoyance in the media these days is the casual equation of religious conservatives with the Taliban. One example from the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian is a doozy. In a January 15 editorial mocking a prominent conservative Southern Baptist on the occasion of his death at 92,…
THERE ARE a great many obvious reasons to be thankful the president is alive and well and not another victim of death-by-choking. But one lesser reason to rejoice is that, had things taken a turn for the worse, we would never have heard the end of it from conspiracy buffs. Think about it. Even with…
Jerusalem IF NEW PROOF were needed that reforming Yasser Arafat is a lost cause, the Israeli navy's pre-dawn seizure last week of a cargo vessel destined for Gaza City and packed with 50 tons of weapons supplied by Iran should have provided it. The ship was registered to Arafat's Palestinian…
IS PRESIDENT BUSH a big government conservative? Yes, a point that will be affirmed when the White House's new federal budget (for fiscal 2003) is unveiled early next month. "The president didn't say, 'I want it to be a big government conservative budget,'" says a White House aide. What he ordered…
NEXT WEDNESDAY, January 23, Rep. Dan Burton's House Committee on Government Reform will hold a hearing on the "history of congressional access to deliberative Justice Department documents," Burton having served a subpoena for certain such documents on Attorney General Ashcroft in early September,…
IT'S ADVICE a Republican consultant might deviously give to a Senate Democrat: Open the New Year with a harshly partisan attack on a Republican president with approval ratings in the mid-80s. Suggest that his tax cuts--mostly not yet in effect--are responsible for the return of budget deficits. And…
ON JULY 5, 1995, Enron Corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Six days later, Enron executives were on a trade mission with Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor to Bosnia and Croatia. With Kantor's support, Enron signed a $100 million contract to build a 150-megawatt power…
My Declaration of Independence by James M. Jeffords Simon & Schuster, 136 pp., $14.95 ANY SERIOUS STUDENT of the Bible has, at one point or another, had to grapple with the Moses Paradox. The Moses Paradox is the proposition that Moses was the humblest man in all the earth, information that would…
HOW SHOULD we deal with tyrants who threaten the security of the United States and its friends? Tyranny is not a word with which modern political scientists and government officials are comfortable; they prefer more neutral formulations, such as "unitary rational actor" or "state of concern."…
IN THE AFTERMATH of September 11, Senator Charles Schumer recommended the World Trade Center be replaced with "something grand." It's a curious word. Who speaks of grandeur any more? Certainly not many of the fashionable architects, designers, and pundits suggesting what to do with the site. There…
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS believed in ESP, so I'd like to think he may have caught a mystical glimpse of future CNN newsbabe Paula Zahn in his tea leaves when he wrote these wise and cynical words in 1933: "Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair." There was a big…
THE BORN-ALIVE INFANTS Protection Act is an attempted "modest first step" on abortion, a measure that would simply protect a child who survives an abortion. The bill passed in the House by a vote of 380-15 in September 2000. Last June, it was approved 98-0 in the Senate, when it was introduced by…
STEPHEN AMBROSE, COPYCAT (CONTINUED) As Fred Barnes reported in our cover story last week, bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose lifted the words of historian Thomas Childers and published them as his own. Ambrose subsequently apologized to Childers for the unacknowledged debt that "The Wild Blue"…
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW is just this side of 90, and has the ailments that are normally associated with her advanced years. She is, in fact, more or less housebound, leaving only to visit her stable of doctors or for emergencies--such as last week's trial in a Baltimore city court, in which she found…
Christopher Caldwell reviews Bernard Lewis's 'What Went Wrong?'
AS PRESIDENT OF Harvard University, Larry Summers holds perhaps the most prominent office in American academia and, you might think, one of the most powerful. But after just six months on the job, he now better understands who really holds the power. In late December, three members of Harvard's…
Kabul OUTSIDE his small workshop on a dusty street here the other day, Mohammad Nasim lined up a colorful display of satellite dishes. Shouting to be heard over the racket made by his ten workmen's hammers and drills, he said he's selling 25 to 30 satellite dishes a week. In Taliban times, sales…
WHAT NEXT in the war on terrorism? We hear from many corners that it is still too early to ask this question. If you mention the word Iraq, respectable folks at the State Department and on the New York Times op-ed page get red-faced. After all, the mission in Afghanistan is not over. The…
AT THE END of a long driveway that snakes under a canopy of trees, an angel sits in the Bowie, Maryland, backyard of Hugh and Barbara Cassidy. She is guarded by Easter-Island masks built by metal sculptor Hugh, while former nursery-worker Barbara has fashioned a shade-covered ivy grotto. From a…
THE ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER has undertaken a heroic and important task: getting reporters to think about religion. A few years ago a bunch of journalists and I were flown up to Maine to learn about evangelical Christianity from a group of academics. It was an intriguing and coherent lesson…
YESTERDAY New York City developer Forest City Ratner abandoned the design of a September 11 memorial it commissioned after the project brought outcries from firefighters and the public. Forest City Ratner, which manages fire department headquarters where a memorial will eventually stand, expressed…
IN 1993 HISTORIAN Doris Kearns Goodwin complained that Joe McGinniss had borrowed extensively for his "The Last Brother" from her 1987 book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys." "He just uses it flat out, without saying that it came from my work," Goodwin told the Boston Globe. "You expect that…
HERE'S A juxtaposition, for you--a pair of enjambed propositions fresh from Thursday's Washington Post: "In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the…
MOST veteran newspaper journalists live by a simple rule when they cover a truly dramatic event: Tell the story and get out of the way. It's an axiom that served Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden well when, in 1996, he began the work that would become his best-selling book "Black Hawk…
IN THE END, it was Andre Miller who drove me over the edge. Miller is a nice little point guard out of Utah who's in his third year with the Cleveland Cavaliers. He averages 15.8 points and 10 assists per game; he makes good decisions.
IT SEEMS that conservative provocateur David Horowitz, ever willing to pee in the punch bowl of American academia, has done it again. Horowitz--who, among other things, heads up the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture--had pollster Frank Luntz survey Ivy League humanities…
IS THE Enron scandal over already, the White House part of it, that is? Not quite. We've only finished the first round. For sure, President Bush and his administration won the round, emerging totally unscathed. Bush was not implicated in any wrongdoing. Neither Democrats nor the media laid a glove…
OVER THE WEEKEND Bill Keller of the New York Times pumped out a column dumping on three lame-duck Senators, all Republicans--Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Phil Gramm. For Keller, it's more than time for them to go.
WATCHING all the self-contradicting Enron chatter over the weekend reminded me of the quintessential Ronald Reagan anecdote. You remember--the one about the optimistic kid, shoveling manure with a smile on his face. After all, the kid reasoned, "there's got to be a pony in here somewhere."
HAS SEPTEMBER 11 fundamentally changed the nation's political landscape? The common view among political consultants seems to be that it hasn't. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, appearing at a Hudson Institute event on January 3, argued that though change is more exciting than continuity,…
"WE ARE LOOKING for subjects," Ken Burns recently said of his documentaries, "that hold up a mirror to who we are." Mark Twain is the subject of the director's latest film, a two-part special that PBS will air on January 14 and 15. And what Burns sees reflected back at him by Mark Twain bears…
THE BRAVE NEW WORLD ORDER is hurtling toward us at Mach speed. With the announcement by Advanced Cell Technology that it has created the first human clones and developed them into six-cell embryos, the country finds itself at an ethical point of no return. Either Congress will ban human cloning, or…
EDITOR'S NOTE: Christina Hoff Sommers, author of "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men," was stopped from completing her remarks at a government conference on drug-abuse prevention for boys, held in Baltimore on November 1. Partway through her talk, Sommers, an…
TREASON TRIALS are in the air, as U.S. authorities seek a solution to the case of John Walker Lindh, the Taliban fighter from Fairfax, California. Predictably, misinformation is rife, with amateur experts weighing in on a topic most Americans have enjoyed the luxury of ignoring for the past 50…
Keith Joseph by Andrew Denham and Mark Garnett Acumen, 458 pp., $39.50 JUST twenty-five years ago, Britain stood on the brink of economic disaster as the "sick man of Europe." One of its two major parties was chained to socialist dogma, and the other was intellectually bankrupt. It's fitting that…
IN HIS SHOWCASE political event of the week, President George W. Bush will finally get to sign the "No Child Left Behind Act," his cherished education bill, which cleared Congress in December. It is already being described as a revolution in federal education policy, a triumph of bipartisanship and…
EPIPHANIES are rarer in life than in literature. But they do occur, those moments when everything changes in an instant, when you know your understanding of the world will never be quite the same. I had one of those this summer, when I saw my first potato cannon. We were in Maine, visiting friends…
WHILE MANY OF US were enjoying our Christmas turkeys and toasting the New Year, two Americans spent the holidays deep in the jungles of the Philippines, their bodies malnourished, their mouths covered with sores, on the verge of mental breakdown, and led around on leashes by terrorists. It is now…
THE TORCH BURNS ON "Thank God." Those were the words of Senator Robert Torricelli last week after federal prosecutor Mary Jo White announced she would not indict him for campaign finance violations--in this case, good old-fashioned bribes stemming from contributions to his 1996 Senate campaign. In…
SAIGON--In our national psyche, the word "Vietnam" remains heavily loaded with meaning, a synonym for failure. But as I travel through Vietnam, witnessing the explosion of free enterprise and the affection for so many things American, a divergent thought keeps recurring: We won, and we won big.…
IT WAS A very Brady New Year for a handful of firearms makers and Chicago gun retailers. On December 31, 2001, an Illinois appeals court ruled that the families of five Chicago area murder victims may sue the gun manufacturers and dealers for public nuisance. In a 35-page opinion, the court…
New Editor's Note, September 5, 2002: In yesterday's New York Times, Tom Friedman called this classic Larry Miller column essential reading. In case you missed it, enjoy!
AS FRED BARNES reported in our cover story last week, bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose lifted the words of historian Thomas Childers and published them as his own. Ambrose subsequently apologized to Childers for the unacknowledged debt that "The Wild Blue" owes to "Wings of Morning" (both are…
ON JULY 5, 1995, Enron Corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Six days later, Enron executives were on a Clinton Commerce department trade mission to Bosnia and Croatia. With Kantor's support, Enron signed a $100 million contract to build a 150-megawatt power plant.…
WHAT NEXT in the war on terrorism? We hear from many corners that it is still too early to ask this question. If you mention the word Iraq, respectable folks at the State Department and on the New York Times op-ed page get red-faced. After all, the mission in Afghanistan is not over. The…
EVERY GENERATION has its war, and every war has its merchandise. During the '70s, Americans supported our nation with "Ayatollah is an Assahollah" T-shirts. During the Gulf War, some patriots bolted "Bomb Saddam" license plates to their Camaros, while others used anti-Saddam condoms, confident…
ON WEDNESDAY the New York Post got religion. The one-word coverline shouted "Outrage." Below, the front page said, "How street vendors dishonor our heroes at ground zero." The accompanying photo seemed unintentionally lighthearted. It showed a smiling, chubby Asian woman standing behind a fold-out…
IN A KIND OF apotheosis of multiculturalism, the choicest al Qaeda suspects captured in the war on terrorism are about to take up residence under the American flag, at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. Navy base at the eastern tip of Cuba that has incongruously stayed in operation throughout the four…
THE HEADY DAYS of unalloyed patriotism that followed September 11, in which Americans lost their hyphens and became heroes instead of victims, are over.
WHERE DOES Larry Summers, Harvard University's new president, stand on affirmative action? That may or may not have been the major concern of the senior members of the Afro-American Studies Department who laid various grievances before Summers in recent weeks. But by year's end it had elbowed aside…
FOR THOSE OF US who still turn first to the sports page each morning, last weekend provided one of those rare moments when greatness makes just a temporary stop on those pages en route to a more permanent place in history books and sports almanacs. And once again, Brett Favre was involved. No, I'm…
EARLY IN THE MORNING of September 15, I drove home to New Jersey. As dawn broke on the empty highways I realized that something curious had happened: An American flag had been hung from every single overpass between Washington and Philadelphia. It was the first evidence I saw of the wave of flags…
WHEN I LAST reported on the Gurkhas, the elite Nepalese warriors in the service of the British army, there was much anticipation that they would be unleashed on the Taliban. After all, about 150 Gurkhas happened to be in nearby Oman performing joint military exercises at the time of the September…
HISTORIAN Stephen Ambrose did the right thing and did it graciously. He acknowledged that his best-selling book on B-24 crews in World War II, "The Wild Blue," contains passages almost identical--and in the case of a few sentences and phrases, absolutely identical--to those in "Wings of Morning," a…
CYNTHIA COTTS waits until the last sentence of her latest column to get to the point.
[img nocaption float="right" width="340" height="677" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]8796[/img]Wings of Morning The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II by Thomas Childers Perseus, 288 pp., $17.50 paper The Wild Blue The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany…
HOW GOOD was George W. Bush's first year as president? Superb, really. And in comparison with the two most interesting first years in modern memory, Bush's was much, much better than Bill Clinton's, but not quite so brilliant as Ronald Reagan's. Bill Clinton's first year was a mixed bag. The…
IF THE CREATORS of college football's Bowl Championship Series weren't already reeling from all the criticism they've gotten since Nebraska backed into tonight's national championship game in the Rose Bowl against Miami, they should be now. The Oregon Ducks finished the season ranked number two in…
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, Wallid Shatter, an Arab-American member of President Bush's Secret Service detail, was ordered off American Airlines Flight 363 from Baltimore to Dallas. He was on his way to join the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch.
Editor's Note: On Saturday night Michael Jordan scored 51 points against the hapless Charlotte Hornets and became the oldest player in league history to score over the half-century mark. Two days later he dropped 45 on the division-leading New Jersey Nets. Wondering why he came back? Then read "The…