Aram Bakshian is a writer and critic who served as a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He contributed essays and book reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2005 and 2016, often exploring presidential history, architecture, and American political culture.
After a presidential election year when the word "character" was bandied all over the place—often by people possessing very little of the commodity themselves—history may have something to teach us. So readers interested in a clear definition of character, and its importance as an essential element…
After a presidential election year when the word “character" was bandied all over the place—often by people possessing very little of the commodity themselves—history may have something to teach us. So readers interested in a clear definition of character, and its importance as an essential element…
Survivors of the old Ottoman Empire, my paternal grandmother included, were accustomed to beginning bedtime stories with a rather puzzling stock opening: “Once upon a time, there was and there was not . . ." Contradictory on its face, it actually made a lot of sense, especially when prefacing a…
When Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk told his mother that he wanted to quit school and be an artist, she gave him an earful:
When it comes to first ladies, one size does not fit all. From Martha Washington to Michelle Obama, presidential spouses have ranged from the brilliant to the batty, the dutiful to the distraught. But then, so have their husbands, so it really isn’t all that surprising. Come the 2016 election, we…
I was raised in a Hoover household. By the time I came along in 1944, Herbert Hoover had already begun to reclaim the respect of many Americans, despite the vilification he had suffered at the hands of the New Deal propaganda machine. As the Great Depression waned and America went to war, and we…
I have known Ben Stein for 50 years. We met as rival high school newspaper editors in early-1960s Washington, and then forged a close, lasting friendship a decade later as colleagues in the beleaguered Nixon White House.
While he couldn’t resist exaggerating a little for effect, the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer had a point when he observed that, all too often, great movements “start as a cause, evolve into a business, and end up a racket.” Consider three of the major social crusades that reshaped modern…
Editor's Note: Bob Dole will be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday, January 17, 2018. To mark the occasion, we are sharing this piece from our archives.