Arnold Beichman

The Lady Upstairs

THE CANADIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE SERVICE has just issued this warning: There is an increasing threat from what Canada's CIA calls "home-grown terrorists" living in communities across Canada. And presumably awaiting orders.

Vancouver

THERE IS NOTHING SADDER--for me anyway--than watching a newspaper or magazine go under, as has just happened to the New Leader, for which I used to write.

Nicholas Miraculous

The Master of Seventh Avenue

"SPANISH POLITICAL ADS KICK off Bloomberg TV campaign" was the New York Daily News headline the other day discussing the early opening of New York City's mayoral campaign. The headline brought back childhood memories of New York's Lower East Side when a politician who didn't speak some foreign…

Lane Kirkland

MCDONALD'S IS CELEBRATING ITS 15TH anniversary in Russia. Its sales have risen steadily, reaching $310 million in 2004. The company reports that it is serving more than 200,000 customers daily in more than a hundred Russian locations. Well, three cheers for McDonald's, but what's the big deal?

Double Lives

Vixi

THE TITLE of the May 1994 Commentary magazine essay was "The Degradation of the New York Times." Written by Joseph Epstein, the article was an uncanny forecast of the disaster that befell the Times almost a decade later. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was publisher then and now. If only Epstein could…

AT LONG LAST a Pulitzer Prize committee is looking into the possibility that the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin's infamies, might be revoked. In order to assist in their researches, I am downloading here some of the…

ALL THE TALK about President Kennedy and his sexual exploits with a White House intern is full of leers and jeers and smutty comparisons to President Clinton. There has been little talk, though, about how reckless behavior may have affected his ability to function as chief executive. There is some…

My Brother's Keeper

BACK IN THE EARLY 1950s I would occasionally lunch in New York with Jay Lovestone, the onetime secretary of the American Communist party. Joseph Stalin had ousted him in the 1930s, and Lovestone had subsequently become an anti-Communist strategist with an office at the International Ladies Garment…

FROM THE FALL OF FRANCE and the retreat from Dunkirk in June 1940 until America was attacked at Pearl Harbor, England fought alone against the most formidable military machine in the world. Germany had also invaded its onetime ally the Soviet Union in June 1941, but that battle did little to…

BETWEEN 1950 AND 1970, two battles of the Cold War raged across Western Europe and the United States. The first was the fight against the Soviet Union’s effort to control the world of ideas and letters. The second was the struggle to overcome the anti-Americanism of European intellectuals. These…

Almost four decades ago, in the aftermath of the Belgian Congo crisis, the pseudonymous Peter Simple of the London Daily Telegraph published a parody of the United Nations. Simple transformed New York's U.N. headquarters into the "Bar of Public Opinion," an East Side "rum joint" run by "a gloomy…

LAST YEAR I WAS PART OF A DELEGATION sponsored by the International Republican Institute to monitor parliamentary elections in Ukraine. I chose to be an observer in the city of Zhitomir because my parents, who came from Ukraine in the early 1900s, used to talk a great deal about this city as the…

One of the great but seldom-heard stories of the Cold War is the subject of Ted Morgan's superb new biography, A Covert Life, and its hero, Jay Lovestone, is crisply summarized by the book's sub-title: Communist, anti-Communist, and spymaster.

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE A SADDER GROUP of people than the children of Americans who spied for the Soviet Union. I am thinking of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the son of Alger Hiss, and now Harry Dexter White's two daughters, who in a recent letter to the New York Times Book Review…

Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kiril M. Anderson

David King

Thomas Lahusen

SOME THREE DECADES AGO, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem titled " Stalin's Heirs." It was a plea to the leadership of the Soviet Union to prevent the return of Stalinism. At the time, the embalmed corpse of Stalin -- once displayed in the Red Square Mausoleum alongside Lenin's -- had been…

LONG AGO AND LONG FORGOTTEN at least in today's Kremlin, is Boris Yeltsin's decision on November 6, 1992, to outlaw the Communist party as a criminal organization. Party leaders challenged that decision in the Constitutional Court. Today the Communist party is making its comeback. And with a…

The intellectual phenomenon called "anti-anti-communism" ought to be dead by now, along with the system that the anti-Communists successfully dele- gitimized even as the anti-anti- Communists were doing their worst to delegitimize them. But an essay in the December 18 issue of the New Yorker…