Philip Terzian

Not for the first time, Americans appear to be slightly confused about events in France. The mass demonstrations that began as a protest against President Emmanuel Macron’s “climate-change” taxes gave comfort to conservatives here, and not without reason. The new levies on gasoline and diesel…

To his credit, President Trump rose to the occasion on the death of George H. W. Bush. Among other things, his immediate response—on Twitter, of course—was a generous and eloquent tribute, mindful not only of the late president’s distinction but of his own obligation to the office he now inhabits.…

I used to write a fair amount about West Germany and report on the federal elections. Like most American journalists, historians, political analysts, and politicians—and most Germans, for that matter—I could not imagine the collapse of the Soviet empire and the unification of the two Germanies.

Since most political journalism tends to be wishful thinking, most of the post-midterm analysis this year followed predictable paths.

My attention was caught last week by an op-ed piece in the Washington Post written by Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III. Mr. Sullenberger, of course, is the pilot who skillfully maneuvered his disabled airliner to safety on the Hudson River, saving all 155 of its passengers and crew. His essay…

The shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue—11 dead, 6 wounded—was especially shocking: It was the most lethal attack on Jews in American history. At the same it reminded us how disconcertingly commonplace mass violence has become. In February, 17 people were gunned down at a high school in Florida, and…

I was awakened out of my reverie the other morning by a shocking news flash: Nikki Haley was resigning from her post as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations! According to initial reports, the envoy’s announcement was “sudden” and “unexpected” and “caught Washington”—certainly caught me—“off guard.”

Looking ahead to 2020.

What started as a rebellion in rural England over agricultural regulations has become a continent-wide quarrel about who governs whom.

But we tend to romanticize athletes and sports, and gambling will inevitably complicate relations.

On a bookcase in my office here at The Weekly Standard may be found a well-thumbed copy of a volume entitled Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968) by Robert T. Elson.

The highest office in the land has become deeply bureaucratized.

Political archaeologists will have plenty of specimens and fragments to examine in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. The incivility that greeted the Supreme Court nominee was among the worst in modern times—no small achievement while the Haynsworth, Bork, and Thomas hearings live in…

Anyone inclined to believe that social media have hardened our public discourse will have found ample evidence last week, when John McCain died.

The Turkish president's thuggish autocracy and reflexive anti-Americanism make him very popular in his country.

Mitch McConnell has not forgotten the painful lessons of the Bork nomination.

I was a little surprised last week to learn that Bill Loud, patriarch of the Southern California family depicted in the first reality-television show (An American Family, PBS, 1973), had died—at the patriarchal age of 97. But of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised: A generation or more has…

Spoiler alert: It's Stalinism.

Lord Carrington, 1919-2018.

When asked whether he intended as prime minister to offer the British public moral guidance, Harold Macmillan answered that if the people wanted moral instruction, “they should consult their bishops.” Macmillan wasn’t suggesting that people don’t need guidance, nor was he without convictions…

I would be the first to concede that President Trump’s behavior at the recent G7 summit, while not unexpected, was certainly unconventional. In his patented way, the president seemed to waver between a breezy, hail-fellow-well-met manner and irritability, declining to endorse a summary declaration…

One of the pleasant surprises of this movie season has been Chappaquiddick, an account of the famous episode from 1969 in which Mary Jo Kopechne was left to drown in a car driven into a pond, and abandoned, by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. It’s not a perfect film by any means; but Kennedy is treated not…

A writer in the New York Times Magazine recently fixed our present epoch in time as “a few decades after the heyday of the notorious ‘three-martini lunch.’ ” The gin-soaked midday meal, he explained, had been “an anachronistic ritual during which backslapping company men escaped a swallowing sense…

Philip Terzian: A new book defending Jimmy Carter’s presidency reveals how his supposed strengths became liabilities.

It’s fitting that Sen. Elizabeth Warren should have chosen the Center for American Progress’s ideas conference to declare, as she did last week, that “democracy is crumbling around us.” For the death knell of democracy is one of her party’s oldest ideas, a staple of progressive nightmares from…

There were a handful of primary elections last week in Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia, and while the results from Middle America were more or less predictable—“establishment” Republicans prevailed against some Trumpier-than-thou candidates—the headlines were revealing in their way: “Parties’…

The wedding, this weekend, of Britain's Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle has already generated a number of Pavlovian, and entirely predictable, responses.

Paul Ryan’s attempt at institutional reform resulted only in sectarian and ideological strife.

Far be it from me to say whether Donald Trump’s diplomacy on the Korean peninsula entitles him to join Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama among our recent Nobel Peace Prize laureates. But Condoleezza Rice is surely correct to suggest that the Trump administration—including ex-secretary of…

By happy coincidence, on the very day that ex-FBI director James Comey published his self-serving memoir, my wife and I happened to be rummaging around in the George C. Marshall research library on the campus of Marshall’s alma mater, Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington. It was entirely…

Writers and editors at the Denver Post recently did what more than a few journalists have only dreamed of doing: They denounced their proprietor in the pages of the Denver Post. So audacious was their action that the gesture made the front page of the New York Times, which reported approvingly that…

A touch of old Washington passed away March 30 with the death of 94-year-old Anna Chennault.

There was a snowstorm in Washington, D.C., a few days before the arrival of spring, and while it deposited a handful of inches on the ground and closed area schools for the day, the evidence was gone nearly as soon as it had arrived—and largely forgotten. Not, however, by a 33-year-old first-term…

I confess to a weakness for the attorney general, Jeff Sessions. I say this despite the fact that I disagree with him on various issues​—​civil-asset forfeiture, for example, and the opioid crisis. But as is often the case in politics, certain whimsical reasons recommend him. To my mind, his very…

Like most American cities, Washington has been grappling lately with the issue of historic monuments and statuary, public and private, and whether they ought to be displaced and discarded. The good news this past week is that, in a departure from recent custom, a new statue—eight feet high, encased…

Judge Frederic Block, meet Judge H. Lee Sarokin.

I was struck by the convergence of two stories in a recent edition of the New York Times.

Say what you will about Donald Trump’s intellectual acumen, but he does have a certain flair for drawing attention in directions he desires—or better yet, prompting his detractors to say things he wants them to say. This may not be “genius” in the usual sense of a much-abused term, but it’s a…

If you should find yourself in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, you might be surprised to discover a U.S. naval vessel moored on the Pothong River near the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. It is the USS Pueblo, a modest craft launched in World War II, recommissioned by the Navy in…

When J. Edgar Hoover died suddenly in May 1972, there had been one director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the previous 48 years. In the nearly 46 years since that day, there have been 15 of them.

I've never stuffed a note in a bottle, and tossed it into the ocean. But I seem to have done the bibliographical equivalent, and the evidence has washed up on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

In the winter of 1949, the first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, announced his impending retirement from office.

I was surprised last week to learn that plans for the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago have run into local opposition.

In 1898, when the 42-year-old George Bernard Shaw stepped down as drama critic of London’s Saturday Review, he introduced his successor, Max Beerbohm, 26, with these words: “The younger generation is knocking at the door, and as I open it there steps sprightly in the incomparable Max.”

Journalists like anniversaries, or at least this one does, and 2018 is an ideal vantage point from which to survey the past. It’s been a half-century now since the annus horribilis of 1968, for example, and a century-and-a-half since my favorite president (James Buchanan) died. But more to the…

Everyone had a good laugh last week at the expense of Matthew Petersen, chairman or commissioner at the Federal Election Commission since 2008, who had been nominated by President Trump to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In a televised hearing before the Senate…

Frank Bruni had an interesting column the other day in the New York Times. Naturally, it was about Donald Trump, and naturally, it registered disapproval. But the point was more psychiatric than political: Entitled “Donald Trump Could Really Use a Friend,” it assembled a host of testimonials to…

On inauguration eve 1991, in Rhode Island, the departing governor, Edward DiPrete, had a morsel of news for the incoming governor, Bruce Sundlun.

This is a day of mourning for Americans who believe that our politics are broken, who yearn to reach across the aisle, stop the partisan bickering, and eradicate the influence of money, Big Business, the military, corporate media, parochial interests, anti-tax activists, the NRA, the AMA, the CIA,…

The death of 83-year-old Charles Manson reminds us of two things, among others: It is usually a fallacy to believe that life in America in the recent past was somehow better than it is at present. And second, punishment for the crime of murder is not always the same as justice.

Despite everything we know, or think we know, about the private life and opinions of Judge Roy Moore, I have no doubt that he will win the Alabama special election on December 12, and succeed to Attorney General Jefferson Sessions's old Senate seat.

I'm delighted, of course, by the news that Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales's personable younger son, is now engaged to Meghan Markle, described by Wikipedia as an "American actress, model, and humanitarian." I wish them both health and happiness.

If Americans think our nation is painfully divided, two statistics from across the Atlantic might put their minds at ease. The first is the percentage of British voters who chose, in a binding referendum last year, to abandon the European Union: just slightly under 52 percent. The other is the…

It's becoming increasingly unlikely that Roy Moore will be elected to the Senate—or, perhaps, endure as the Republican nominee for the seat once held by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions. But in the event that Judge Moore wins his election, it is interesting to note that more than a few…

I was in New England for a few days last week and found myself at breakfast one morning with a group of Armenian academics, born in Lebanon but now settled permanently in and around Boston. By any measure, they were a distinguished group—historians, physicians, political scientists—and for them, of…

Amanda Hess, a David Carr Fellow at the New York Times, who “writes about Internet culture for the [Times] Arts section,” recently took to its pages to tell us what she thinks of politicians who podcast. Executive summary: She doesn’t approve of them (“Politicians Are Bad at Podcasting,” Oct. 27).

Last week's release of surviving documents on the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not the first time the federal government has made a clean breast of things on the subject, or attempted to do so. There were plenty of leaks when the Warren Commission was deliberating, back in the Bronze Age…

At this juncture, we can stipulate that President Trump would probably have been well advised to follow Gen. John Kelly’s reported advice and write a letter of condolence to the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson instead of calling her on the telephone. No doubt Trump had reasoned that words of regret,…

My guess is that up until two weeks ago, the name of Harvey Weinstein meant little if anything to most people, including readers of this magazine.

When I first learned the big news this week about Jeff Glor, my mind wandered back three decades, and more, to the mid-1980s. But who is Jeff Glor, you ask? The 42-year-old Glor is lead anchor on the CBS network's 24-hour streaming news service, called CBSN, and he has just been named by the…

My guess is that up until two weeks ago, the name of Harvey Weinstein meant little if anything to most people, including readers of this magazine.

By the time you read this, it is entirely possible that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have resigned his office in despair and frustration. He finds himself, after all, at “the breaking point” (New Yorker) in relations with his mercurial boss, President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, over at PBS…

Before Jack Henry Abbott, there was Edgar Smith.

Before Jack Henry Abbott, there was Edgar Smith.

Reactions to the death of 91-year-old Hugh Hefner this past week seem to waver between tributes to his pioneering role in the postwar Sexual Revolution–and horror at the consequences of his pioneering role in the Sexual Revolution. My own view of the aforementioned Revolution is that it would have…

One day, when he was running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter was asked what he thought about Hubert Humphrey. In fairness to Carter, it should be remembered that Humphrey—the former vice president and 1968 Democratic candidate—was lurking in the background that…

For those of us who wish (or hope) that Donald Trump may ultimately settle into something resembling a conventional president, his ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon offered a glimmer of encouragement last week.

For those of us who wish (or hope) that Donald Trump may ultimately settle into something resembling a conventional president, his ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon offered a glimmer of encouragement last week.

We Americans are a resilient people, but like resilient people everywhere, we need the occasional interlude of rest and relaxation. Which is why after two weeks of something like a national nervous breakdown over equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee, we welcomed the approach of Labor Day, the…

Readers will recall that just before memories of the Confederacy became an existential threat to national unity, Americans were worried about another—and surely more plausible—menace to the United States. In early August, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator who has been successfully testing…

On the evening of Oct. 14, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of his famous Fireside Chats to a national radio audience. What used to be called Community Chest drives—local campaigns to raise money for social-welfare charities—were about to be launched, and FDR wished to pay…

Like many, perhaps most, Americans, I had never heard of the professional football quarterback Colin Kaepernick until he became better known for kneeling before games than for throwing passes during games.

During the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Jeb Bush took to calling Donald Trump the “chaos candidate.” It didn’t seem to have much effect at the time, but Bush was prescient: The chaos candidacy is now the chaos presidency. And yet, as Henry Adams once wrote, while order is the dream of man,…

Family connections used to take me occasionally to northeast Mississippi, and when my wife and I were feeling adventurous, we would drive the 35 miles or so north to Tupelo to visit the birthplace of Elvis Presley.

On August 2, the White House press room was the scene of one of those dialogues of the deaf that so infuriate people outside Washington. Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s senior policy advisers, stepped to the podium to endorse an immigration reform bill sponsored by two Republican senators,…

In the past half-century, there have been two presidential elections that Democrats should have won by a landslide but did not.

In the past half-century, there have been two presidential elections that Democrats should have won by a landslide but did not.

Opinions may vary about Donald Trump Jr., but nearly all can agree that his meeting with the mysterious Natalia Veselnitskaya—and two or four or seven other people in Trump Tower last summer—has done his father no good. I plead agnosticism on this particular case, tending to conclude that it…

Opinions may vary about Donald Trump Jr., but nearly all can agree that his meeting with the mysterious Natalia Veselnitskaya—and two or four or seven other people in Trump Tower last summer—has done his father no good. I plead agnosticism on this particular case, tending to conclude that it…

The name of William Woodward (Hootie) Johnson, who died last week at 86, is not likely to be widely familiar. He was the scion of a South Carolina banking dynasty, and something of a civil-rights pioneer in his home state: Recruiter of African-Americans in the family firms and local politics;…

Jim Acosta, senior White House correspondent for CNN, has acquired a certain renown lately for his habitual, and carefully staged, verbal confrontations in the White House press room with President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. You could make the argument that both Spicer and Acosta, in…

Jim Acosta, senior White House correspondent for CNN, has acquired a certain renown lately for his habitual, and carefully staged, verbal confrontations in the White House press room with President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer. You could make the argument that both Spicer and Acosta, in…

Hobby Lobby, the Oklahoma City-based arts-and-crafts chain, was recently fined $3 million by the Department of Justice for purchasing and shipping artifacts–Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform tablets, among other things, mostly from Iraq–to its headquarters by way of an antiquities dealer in the…

I've been reading the post-mortems on last week's G20 summit in Hamburg, and depending on the source, it was either the dawn of a new Era of Good Feelings in global affairs, or another catastrophe in the history of the 6-month-old Trump presidency. The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in-between.…

Now that the 2017 commencement season is past, I'm emboldened to express my shock that the University of Pennsylvania didn't honor its most famous—and arguably, most distinguished—graduate, Donald J. Trump (Class of 1968) with an honorary degree. Shock, I would say, but not necessarily surprise:…

One evening in 1984, working late in the offices of the Los Angeles Times, I was interrupted by a reporter giving a local woman a tour of the premises. The woman’s name was Judy Johnson, the reporter informed me, and she was the principal source for a story that had just broken—and had hypnotized…

London

When the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke at the Brookings Institution in Washington in March 2016, a handful of Armenian-American pickets appeared on the sidewalk beside Massachusetts Avenue, holding signs aloft and chanting about Erdogan's burgeoning Islamist dictatorship and the…

You know about the Oscar curse: The notion that winning the Academy Award for Best Actress is great, but often followed by professional oblivion. Is there a New York Times curse as well?

In the summer of 1972, two days after the Watergate break-in, Simon & Schuster published Sen. Edward Kennedy's second book, a scathing condemnation of American medicine entitled In Critical Condition: The Crisis in America's Health Care. Composed largely of excerpts from recent testimony before…

George Osborne, Britain's longtime Chancellor of the Exchequer until the fall of the Cameron government, seems to have raised some eyebrows recently with his announcement that, beginning in May, he will become editor of the [London] Evening Standard. And keep his seat in the House of Commons.

If there's a president of the United States who likes the press, he has not yet been elected. Of course, in modern times, there have been presidents who charmed certain columnists and correspondents (John F. Kennedy) or liked to banter with the White House press corps (Franklin D. Roosevelt). But…

If there’s a president of the United States who likes the press, he has not yet been elected. Of course, in modern times, there have been presidents who charmed certain columnists and correspondents (John F. Kennedy) or liked to banter with the White House press corps (Franklin D. Roosevelt). But…

Readers of the Washington Post op-ed page might be forgiven for believing that they're under assault—from adjectives, lots of adjectives. Consider, for example, these opening sentences from the three separate pieces spread across the top of the page this past Monday.

An elementary lesson of life is that systems are often invented by geniuses but usually administrated by less gifted individuals. This explains a lot about zero-tolerance policies in schools, prosecutorial discretion, and other topics of recurring interest. The best-known example, in popular…

You never can tell about Senate confirmation.

"[The British monarchy's] mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic." —Walter Bagehot To a certain degree, Bagehot's law was adopted as well by American presidents, whose status was upheld by a tradition of decorum and whose prestige was accentuated by a certain—well, mystery.…

"[The British monarchy's] mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic." —Walter Bagehot To a certain degree, Bagehot's law was adopted as well by American presidents, whose status was upheld by a tradition of decorum and whose prestige was accentuated by a certain—well, mystery.…

Having run twice, and unsuccessfully, for the presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton is now an official object lesson in how not to run for political office. No doubt, Clinton was a subpar candidate—especially when compared with her husband—but one strike against her is manifestly unfair: that she had…

Having run twice, and unsuccessfully, for the presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton is now an official object lesson in how not to run for political office. No doubt, Clinton was a subpar candidate—especially when compared with her husband—but one strike against her is manifestly unfair: that she had…

Suppose, for a moment, that Donald Trump is elected president Tuesday evening. It seems unlikely, but is not impossible; and we've faced the apocalypse a couple of times in recent memory.

It may well be, as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter suggests, that Donald Trump represents "the final stage of a dumbed-down America"—a process that seems to have begun, by Carter's reckoning, with George W. Bush. Trump, writes the novelist Richard Ford in the Times Literary Supplement, is "a…

It may well be, as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter suggests, that Donald Trump represents “the final stage of a dumbed-down America"—a process that seems to have begun, by Carter's reckoning, with George W. Bush. Trump, writes the novelist Richard Ford in the Times Literary Supplement, is "a…

The news that Hillary Clinton's campaign maintained lists of journalists for friendly leaks and helpful advice—Maggie Haberman and John Harwood of the New York Times, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, etc.—is not news, exactly. Some would argue that the more interesting story would be a list of…

If you ever worry about the quality of news on the Internet, consider a recent story at BuzzFeed from reporter Adrian Carrasquillo. The writer notes indignantly that Donald Trump's infamous campaign comments about Mexican immigrants were not unprecedented: Speaking on a radio talk show, in 2011,…

I've lately had the pleasure of being interviewed on John Batchelor’s cerebral radio program, which originates in New York but is heard all over the country. Since I am in Washington, and not New York, I speak to Mr. Batchelor by telephone—which means that his millions of listeners hear but do not…

In the increasingly unlikely event that Donald Trump is elected president, it should be conceded that he could prove to be a transformative chief executive in unexpected ways—indeed, in ways that good progressives would, ordinarily, welcome. Case in point: The federal civil service.

One hundred and fifteen years ago this week, President William McKinley was shot while attending a reception at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. His assailant, an anarchist son of Polish immigrants named Leon Czolgosz, had stood in a receiving line to shake McKinley's hand and, concealing a…

"Trump just failed his first foreign policy test," tweeted Hillary Clinton after Donald Trump returned from his meeting with the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Actually, the opposite is true: Trump was smart to accept Peña Nieto's invitation to Mexico City, and smarter still to comport…

At this late hour, there is a chance—admittedly a very slim one—that Donald Trump might wish to avoid a catastrophic loss to Hillary Clinton, or that Republican leaders might petition him to step aside as their nominee. There is time enough yet for such a thing to happen, and there is a remote—a…

No doubt, the "computer glitch" that caused Delta Air Lines to shut down for six hours on Monday morning, canceling some 300 scheduled flights, was a great inconvenience to many summer travelers: People make plans based on estimated times of arrival; connecting flights require a combination of luck…

For obvious reasons, I've lately been pondering examples from recent history where political nominees have proved too toxic for their own parties. There are more than a few examples—Tom Hayden, David Duke etc.—but only one with anything like contemporary resonance: The 1966 gubernatorial election…

On the very day that Donald Trump announced that, as president, he would wage war on pornography, a press release arrived on my desk from the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation. The foundation, it announced, is inviting nominations for the 2016 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Awards, which "honor individuals…

On this date 50 years ago, Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old ex-Marine and engineering student, climbed to the observation deck of the Tower at the University of Texas in Austin and shot 49 people, killing 14. Earlier in the day he had stabbed his wife and mother to death; Whitman himself was shot and…

Whether Donald Trump emerges from the Republican convention as the GOP presidential nominee is an open question at the moment. I happen to believe that he will; but it is theoretically possible that he will not—and we might well see a brokered convention, or a fractured convention, in Cleveland…

A book about a statesman by a politician prompts two questions: Do we learn anything new about the statesman, and do we learn anything useful about the politician? In this case, the answer to both questions is yes.

The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen took Speaker Paul Ryan to task this week for Ryan's tepid endorsement of Donald Trump—"What I know about Ryan is that he could not be proud of endorsing Trump"—and compared him at length, and distinctly unfavorably, with a Republican from an earlier era,…

Americans of the last generation may associate Cliveden with the Profumo affair of the 1960s, which began when Britain's secretary of state for war spotted a London party girl emerging nude from its swimming pool and began a liaison that would later bring down the government. So wrote Liesl…

I don't know how important Jerry Brown's endorsement of Hillary Clinton will prove to be, but in the closing hours of the California Democratic primary campaign, and the closing days of the primary season itself, it cannot hurt. Brown is a four-term governor of California, three-time presidential…

Let us stipulate, first, that it is not a crime against morality for zoological parks to exist, especially now that zoos tend to reflect our understanding of animal cognition. Wild animals are no doubt happier in the wild; but a zoo may be seen as refuge as well as a place of confinement,…

I had not realized, until very recently, that the business of depicting famous people on American currency is a zero-sum game. Alexander Hamilton is, at the moment, the hero of a blockbuster Broadway musical, and so there was never any chance that he might be supplanted on the $10 bill. (More about…

Queen Elizabeth II has achieved two royal milestones during the past year. Last September, she became the longest-serving British monarch in history, beating the record previously held by her great-great grandmother, Queen Victoria. For nearly a decade now, she’s been the oldest British…

Is tiny, pro-Western, landlocked, democratic, free-market, Christian Armenia (pop. 2.9 million) a threat to its neighbor, Turkey (pop. 75 million)? According to the government of Turkey, and its autocratic Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Armenia's "alliance" with Russia is lethal to…

This past Monday's business was briefly interrupted by the specter of BREAKING NEWS on the office television, featuring a photograph of Justice Clarence Thomas. For a fearful moment I wondered what the BREAKING NEWS might be – and was quickly reassured when I saw, from the crawl at the bottom of…

Rummaging around the other evening in a box of magazines and newspaper clippings with my byline, I stumbled upon the November 1975 issue of a journal called the Alternative: An American Spectator. Mindful, as always, of capricious mortality, I have lately been subtracting from the volume of paper…

By the time you read this, it is possible that Vice President Joe Biden will have announced his candidacy for the presidency. Or not. 

It occurred to me not long ago that, given my age and station in life, I should probably not purchase any more suits. Gazing at the contents of my clothes closet, there can be little doubt that I have more than enough to see me through the balance of my working life, and beyond—if, lest we forget,…

Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s annual self-advertisement, has now ended for this year. Bookstores will disassemble their earnest displays of “banned books,”and the semblance of normality will return to public libraries. And we will be left with the sobering thought that, in…

Did you see the CNN debate on Wednesday night? Neither did I. Oh, I watched a few highlights that seemed to be agitating social media—Carly Fiorina cutting Donald Trump down to size, for example—but like the Super Bowl, I contented myself with reading about it the next morning.

President Obama’s unilateral renaming of Mount McKinley in Alaska has agitated the Ohio congressional delegation, and more than a few observers across party lines, largely because it was done without constitutional authority. To be sure, such niceties have not stopped this president in the past.…

Now that President Obama has returned from his two-week summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard—that is to say, now that life in political Washington is back to normal—we may put this annual media ritual in some perspective. Or put another way: If you're an admirer of Obama, you will regard this brief…

A little over 30 years ago, three generations of the McMartin family, who had run a nursery school in Los Angeles for decades, were arrested, jailed, and put on trial, charged with hundreds of sensational counts of child sexual abuse. Six years later, when no convictions had been obtained, all…

Proof positive that it’s the latter half of August—when just about everyone is on vacation, or ought to be—arrived this week with the news that the latest social media sensation in Great Britain is a clandestine video of Prime Minister David Cameron.

Well, one minor mystery of the American presidency was clarified this week.

Many decades ago, on my first day as the designated conservative on the editorial page staff of the Los Angeles Times, I attended the morning editorial meeting presided over by our courtly editor, Anthony Day.

As a lifelong student of the manners and habitat of the American upper-middle, and upper, classes, I am of course a weekly reader of the Vows (weddings) pages in the Sunday New York Times. The tone of these notices has evolved with the years—the weekly essays on one featured couple tend to…

Jon Stewart’s shrewdness as a crowd pleaser has never been more evident than in his treatment of Caitlyn Jenner. Earlier this week, when Bruce Jenner’s sexual transformation made the cover of Vanity Fair, Stewart strung together a series of television commentaries about Jenner’s appearance. Most,…

We're living in a transgender moment in America -- which is a little odd, when you think about it. For transgender people are not exactly new to the news: The British travel writer James Morris became Jan Morris as long ago as 1972, and the ophthalmologist Richard Raskind became tennis pro Renee…

During Christmas vacation 1968-69 I ran into a high school friend much wiser in the ways of the world than I. He had stumbled onto a curious job for the next few weeks— collecting the proceeds from a chain of bowling alleys in the Washington area, counting the loot, and delivering it to corporate…

I walked into my local Starbucks yesterday morning with a certain foreboding. As everyone must know, the chief executive officer of Starbucks, one Howard Schultz, had commanded that Starbucks employees ("baristas," in corporate parlance) write this phrase -- #RaceTogether -- on the coffee cups they…

Anyone who has toured a house for sale in the past few decades knows that walking into a child’s bedroom is a little like entering a trophy shop. The trophies might be neatly arranged on shelves and tabletops, or strewn haphazardly across the floor; and they might be measured in feet, rather than…

Having twice visited Castro's Cuba -- once during the 1970s, when Cuban troops were fighting in Angola and Mozambique, and again a dozen years ago, long after the Soviet subsidies had disappeared -- I can attest that the place is a horror.

With nearly every passing day, yet another detail in last month’s sensational Rolling Stone article alleging gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house collapses under the weight of scrutiny. Its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, has retreated into strategic silence; her editor, Will Dana,…

I went to my favorite pen shop in downtown Washington the other day to buy some ink, and on reflecting that the act of riding the subway to buy a bottle of ink had a certain antediluvian quality, I was seized with a very antediluvian idea. I decided that I wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes as…

The brief military career of 44-year-old Hunter Biden, Vice President Joseph Biden's younger son, seems to have ended after one month in the naval reserve. Biden is reported to have tested positive for cocaine use, and was immediately discharged. It was "the honor of my life to serve in the U.S.…

One summer morning almost exactly 20 years ago, I drove out to Leesburg, Virginia, to meet a courtly businessman named B. Powell Harrison and discuss the fate of Dodona Manor. Dodona Manor, a plain, early-19th-century Federal-style residence, had been the home of General George C. Marshall: His…

Arriving home the other afternoon by car, I noticed an elongated object straddling the lawn and driveway in front of our house. “Is that a snake?” I asked my alluring wife, whose fondness for such creatures is approximately the same as my own. But before she could answer, or even focus on the…

Who was Herschel Grynszpan? He was a 17-year-old Polish Jew, born and raised in Germany, who in November 1938 walked into the German embassy in Paris, where he had been living for two years, and shot a 29-year-old diplomat named Ernst vom Rath, who died two days later. Vom Rath’s assassination was…

The first magazine to which I subscribed was neither Boys’ Life nor Sports Illustrated; it was Mad, whose longtime editor (1956-85) Albert Feldstein died last month at the age of 88. I was gratified to see that his death, at any rate, was duly noted with lavish tributes and extended obituaries. He…

It's  hardly news that conservatives are not especially welcome on college and university campuses. Speech codes are designed to restrict discourse and punish the exercise of fundamental rights. Faculties are disproportionately left-wing in their politics. Administrators are sometimes intimidated…

I once lived for a year in a small town in Alabama. Like many small towns in the mid-20th century, Anniston was worried about its long-term prospects, and kept thinking of ways to keep the town, especially the downtown, vital. If this had been New England, the town fathers would have closed off one…

In an essay on Winston Churchill, the late British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr mentions that Churchill, at age 11, expressed a desire to play the cello, but that the interest “was not encouraged, and soon died out.” What might have been, in Churchill’s case, is intriguing to Storr: “It is possible…

Everyone of a certain age, it is said, remembers the moment when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been shot. Yet even though I was 13 years old at the time, and recall quite a lot from 1963, I do not remember this, though for a technical reason.

The death of Manfred Rommel last week, at 84, ended a life that might be taken as a metaphor for contemporary Germany.

Like the Eiffel Tower, the Capital Beltway is an industrial monstrosity that, inadvertently, has come to represent its hometown to the outside world.

According to the polls, a little more than a majority of Americans oppose intervention in Syria, although it is difficult to say exactly what this means since the subject is decidedly ambiguous. Does intervention mean the sort of limited air campaign that President Obama seems to have in mind, or…

I found myself thinking not long ago about Helen Keller, specifically the famous scene in her autobiography where she describes cold water being pumped from a well onto one hand while Annie Sullivan spells out w-a-t-e-r in Helen’s other palm. 

No doubt, the bankruptcy of Detroit will have unintended consequences. But one possibility, currently under discussion, is especially distressing: sale of the paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts, which, unlike most municipal collections, is owned by the city, not a nonprofit trust.

Liz Cheney's decision to challenge a three-term incumbent Republican senator has caused a certain amount of soul-searching within the GOP. The Republican dilemma—support for a dynamic candidate versus loyalty to a good soldier—is a real one.

Rooting around in a bookstore not long ago, I stumbled upon a second edition of Functions of a Complex Variable (1917) by the Scottish mathematician Thomas MacRobert. Immediately I felt a chill, a sense of doom and foreboding, I had not experienced since youth. This was a dread mathematics text…

The American position on the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic should be obvious.

Stan Musial, the St. Louis Cardinal who died a few weeks ago, seems to have been one of those great athletes of good character—player-hero, civic monument, example to youth—that sportswriters forever seek but seldom find.

The idea of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska succeeding Leon Panetta at the Pentagon is, as the fictional king of Siam once put it, a puzzlement. Friends of Israel are up in arms at the prospect, but Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times thinks he's just the sort of contrarian…

In the week before the Newtown shootings, much attention was paid to the case of a man who pushed a subway rider onto the tracks in New York. The victim was killed by an oncoming train, and the whole horrific episode was captured on film by a New York Post photographer. Two days later, a…

I have what might be called a philosophical attitude toward the defeat of Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts. Brown, it seems to me, played his part in history by delivering “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” (in the immortal phrase of David Gergen) to the Republicans for three years—a brief but pleasant…

Last week was an eventful one in Washington, but one piece of news came and went with surprising swiftness. The executive editor of the Washington Post, Marcus Brauchli, was fired by the Post’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth—and hardly anyone paused to notice.

I recall an interview with William Faulkner in which he said that he didn’t read books but read in books, the distinction being that he seldom consumed a volume from start to finish but preferred to stick his toes in here and there, read favorite chapters over and over, proceeding from finish to…

There was an interesting moment at the Republican National Convention last week: just a moment, and scarcely noticed, but it seemed to sum up a Mitt Romney problem which, in a rational world, would not be a problem. 

A great deal has been made—and is being made—of the fact that Wade Michael Page, the man who shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, was a veteran of the U.S. Army. The press appears to be searching for some pertinent connection between details of Mr. Page's service and…

I first began reading the Washington Post sometime in 1956-57, whenever I learned to read in the course of first grade. One of my parents had declared that newspapers were deliberately written at a fifth-grade level, and I was determined to find out what “fifth-grade level” meant. I discovered that…

Herewith a handful of assorted volumes that, having crossed the literary editor’s desk, strike The Weekly Standard as interesting—even pleasant—reading in a variety of moods and circumstances.

LEXINGTON, KY (AP): Fifty-two-year-old Harrodsburg businessman Arnold J. Uncommitted, who had never before run for public office, stood before a delirious crowd of supporters at his makeshift headquarters here last night, basking in his near-upset of President Obama's reelection campaign in…

Here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD we are prostrate with admiration! President Obama's sudden reversal of opinion on gay marriage was, by any measure, an incredibly gutsy thing to do.

Connoisseurs of tea leaves will note that President Obama, in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day, was very careful to avoid use of the word "genocide" in describing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. The killings, he explained, were…

Rock 'n' roll may be here to stay, but the impresarios who brought it to us are only human. Bill Graham of Fillmore fame was killed in a helicopter crash in 1991. The two Dons, Kirshner of Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and Cornelius of Soul Train, died recently in their mid-seventies. Now, the…

It would be tempting to describe Hilton Kramer, who died last week at 84, as the last of his breed, his kind: the cultural mandarin who, perched near the top of the totem pole, issued pronouncements on arts and letters with the confidence and erudition of, say, an Edmund Wilson or John Ruskin.

Living in Los Angeles many years ago, I used occasionally to wonder about the people I would see on the sidewalk, at the art museum, in a restaurant. You got accustomed to seeing recognizable faces at random—Vincent Price in a frame shop, Mary Astor at the Motion Picture Home. But what about the…

Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times is sad that the transitional government in Egypt is putting 16 American citizens on trial for promoting democracy in Egypt. David Ignatius of the Washington Post is worried that the nascent Muslim Brotherhood might stick to its principles in governing Egypt…

People are entitled to complain about bias in the media, but I’m largely indifferent to the problem. This is not because “liberal bias” doesn’t exist—I’ve been a journalist for 40 years and lifelong witness—but because it is so pervasive, and so impervious to challenge, that it is hardly worth…

My colleague Michael Warren recently asked Jon Huntsman to comment on why he had failed to appeal to Republican voters, and got this response:

When former senator Rick Santorum talks about how much he loves Jesus, or hates abortion, he is usually addressing a gallery that is hungry for such rhetoric, and likely to applaud with enthusiasm. But has anyone ever been elected president of the United States because of his religious credentials?…

One way to gauge the present state of European unity is to know that Turkey, which has energetically sought membership in the European Union for the past decade, is now having second thoughts about the enterprise. According to the German Marshall Fund, in 2004, three-quarters of Turks thought EU…

I react to the allegations of child abuse and obstruction of justice at Penn State with a certain reserve. This is not because I regard pedophilia as a victimless crime, or worship at the shrine of Joe Paterno. It is because, as a staffer at the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, I witnessed the…

One intriguing, even unexpected, aspect of the race for the Republican nomination has been the emergence—perhaps we should say the reemergence—of the religious issue in presidential politics. Anyone who thinks that John F. Kennedy put it definitively to rest in 1960 in his famous address to the…

I was surprised the other day at lunch when someone asked me a question that, I suppose, must come with age: Had I any regrets in life? 

"In lapidary inscriptions," said Dr. Johnson, "a man is not under oath." Still, I have been a little startled by the Princess Diana-style reaction to the death of Steve Jobs. The Internet has been weighted down with lachrymose tributes; even the mainstream press is given over to extended…

An instructive name pops up somewhere between Chris Christie's speech/answer at the Reagan Library this week and Bill Kristol's reaction here. That name is Dwight D. Eisenhower.

My Western friends got a good laugh out of the shattered nerves in Washington—and all along the eastern seaboard, as far as I can tell—after last week’s earthquake. Just as my New England/Midwestern friends are amused by Washington’s paralysis when it snows, the Californians of my acquaintance were…

From: Mme Safia Farkash

The apparent fall of the Qaddafi regime, and the likely capture (or killing) of the tyrant himself, will signal the end not only of four decades of internal repression and external terrorism, but one of the more vexing orthographic challenges in modern American journalism: the spelling of the…

Full marks to Jay Cost for his deft evisceration of Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, and their resurrection of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a liberal Democrat. What Fineman and Matthews don't know about American history could fill a book—and in each instance, has done so.

Returning home the other evening to an empty house from a three-day trip, I checked the thermostat in the darkened vestibule and noticed that the temperature was a few degrees higher than the setting. My alluring wife, who is more cost-conscious than I about such things, had left the air…

I notice that when Congressman Anthony Weiner is asked about resignation—usually on the fly, generally while hurrying past a scrum of reporters—that aura of contrition quickly evaporates. “No, I’m not resigning,” he declares, and the narrowed eyes and pursed lips familiar to viewers of his C-SPAN…

The news has flown a bit under the radar here in the United States, for understandable reasons; but the results earlier this week of the Scottish parliament elections are historic. Whether this is good or bad history, of course, remains to be seen. For the first time, and much against the odds and…

Glorious Army

The death of Madame Nhu in Rome, at the age of 87, brings home one age-old lesson, and another we Baby Boomers increasingly appreciate: Fame is fleeting, and time passes with disconcerting swiftness.

As an editor, I pay a certain amount of attention to centennials, bicentennials, sesquicentennials, and the like. This year, for example, is the centennial of the birth of William Golding, Spike Jones, and Hubert Humphrey and the sesquicentennial of the firing on Fort Sumter. But I was momentarily…

Two random thoughts on the book biz, prompted by a couple of casual encounters with print this week.

At the Jazz Band Ball

It has come as something of a surprise to many that Joseph Lelyveld's new biography of Gandhi -- Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India (Knopf) -- seems to be causing considerable offense in Gandhi's homeland, largely because of Lelyveld's discussion of Gandhi's relationship with a…

The Picture of Dorian Gray

There's a pretty good chance that you are one of the 63-million-plus (and counting) people who have watched 13-year-old Rebecca Black's video version of "Friday," a three-minute pop number recorded in January and posted on YouTube earlier this month. Rebecca Black is a California middle school…

The Monroe Doctrine

June 7, 1944

The Mayaguez Incident

I should explain, at the outset, that I am agnostic on the subject of public broadcasting. It's obvious that NPR suffers from a left-wing bias—so obvious that it seems not to be noticed by NPR—but the fact is that I seldom listen to its programming except the classical music on one (WETA) of the…

Like most Americans, I suspect, I have no strong feelings in any direction on the subject of Charlie Sheen. I am neither a fan nor habitual detractor.

Eighty-two-year-old Donald Hall, former poet laureate and all-around man of literary distinction, was one of the recent recipients of National Medal of Arts at the White House, and is seen here in a photograph with President Obama:

President Obama has, at long last, publicly called on Col. Moammar Qaddafi to end his 42-year tenure as dictator of Libya.

I note with regret Michelle Obama’s announcement this week that her husband the president, to her evident relief, has kicked his cigarette habit. No details were forthcoming—how he managed to stop smoking, just how serious his habit might have been, and so on—but in the present age, none were…

The Reagan Centennial having come and gone, we may detect certain trends in current Reaganology. One, exemplified by the new HBO documentary (Reagan) directed by Eugene Jarecki, is that Reagan was not conservative at all—a myth perpetrated by right-wingers, according to Jarecki, who have sought “to…

The Civil War

President Obama’s speech in Tucson was fine, as far as it went. The protocol in such circumstances seems to require presidents to call for healing, unity, civility, fellowship, and a determination to move forward, as well as a shout-out to heroes and victims. The president appears to have done all…

Going Home to Glory

A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith

I happened to walk past the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington the other day, and tried to picture how the block had once been configured. Where there is now an open plaza and grand monument there was once a traffic island—dividing Pennsylvania Avenue where it intersected with…

The Dream Machine

For me, the great political mystery of the last two years is not what makes Barack Obama tick, or where the Tea Party came from, but Hillary Clinton. Namely, why did she give up life tenure in a U.S. Senate seat from New York to join the Obama administration as secretary of state? I seem to be…

The Oxford Book of Parodies

I record with interest and, perhaps, a measure of surprise and sorrow a brief dispatch from the frontiers of culture—in this case, the hallowed precincts of the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Suffice it to say that the 92nd Street Y is the sort of place where Charlie Rose might…

Once upon a time I was a member of the policy planning staff at the Department of State, and had a security clearance. It was so long ago that I cannot now recall the level of security my clearance allowed, but it was suitably low. Like most people under such circumstances, I was curious about what…

I couldn’t help but notice that the New York Times obituary this past week for Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, failed to mention the occasion that first brought their love affair to public attention. If the institutional memory of the Times has failed in this instance—which I doubt,…

China, the sleeping giant, the middle kingdom, the inscrutable republic of a billion entrepreneurial Marxists lurking behind a Great Wall, is destined to claim the attention of the world in the foreseeable future. And as its economic power continues to multiply, and underwrites China’s traditional…

Decision Points

Like many of our amphibian friends, birds have been around since dinosaur times, and denuded of their feathers, would not look out of place sharing a prehistoric savanna with Tyrannosaurus Rex. But unlike the terrible lizards of yore, birds have survived and adapted over time, congenially sharing…

There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse, our ability to do our work here in Congress.

It’s a minor tragedy of the historical profession that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s instincts as a partisan ultimately trumped his gifts as a scholar. The son of a distinguished historian, he published a much-admired monograph on Andrew Jackson, and had begun a multi-volume history of the New Deal…

Not so long ago I arrived at Dulles airport, outside Washington, after a very protracted journey from Russia, including a layover in Germany. Like most transatlantic voyagers, I was weary, only approximately awake, and felt vaguely unwashed. Standing for a long time in a long line to present my…

As noted last week, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. awarded its annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to 40-year-old Tina Fey, former writer/performer on Saturday Night Live (NBC) and current writer/producer/performer on 30 Rock (NBC). In the…

Readers of a certain age will remember Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), the Republican senator from Maine who enjoyed a certain renown in her day as the first woman whose name was entered into the nomination process for president by a major party (1964), and for her daily habit of wearing a fresh…

One of the more preposterous institutions in Washington—in a city with an abundance of them—is the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded since 1998 by the same people who invented the Kennedy Center Honors. I have no idea who or what committee of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for…

My alluring wife was a Junior Leaguer, once upon a time, and got a big laugh out of a lecture she was obliged to attend on making “cold calls.” It was the first time either of us had ever heard the term, and she was especially amused at the idea of being coached about so simple a task as picking up…

Under the auspices of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, Martin Morse Wooster has revised and expanded his 2006 study of where and why foundations go wrong. A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and maestro of the rarefied art of philanthropic study,…

I think it's worth mentioning that, in a federal election of some historic significance, foreign and defense policy played a relatively small role. To be sure, foreign policy seldom plays an important role in American electoral contests, and mid-term elections are especially occupied with domestic…

This week’s (October 31) issue of Parade offers the same garden of earthly delights—“Who Are You Calling a Cougar? Betty White Goes Wild,” “Peanuts at 60: Why We Still Love the Great Pumpkin,” Marilyn vos Savant, the world’s smartest woman—that have made it America’s most beloved Sunday supplement…

One of the inherent difficulties of defining left-wing bias in the press to journalists is that it is something like describing the ocean to fish: It is so pervasive, and such a comfortable, nurturing environment, that it is hardly noticed.

Among Barbara Tuchman’s many sins as an historian was the notion, propagated in her popular volume The Guns of August (1962), that the Great Powers had more or less blundered into conflict in 1914, and that smarter diplomacy might well have prevented the Great War. So pervasive is the Tuchman…

It’s been awhile since a German chancellor’s pronouncement caused a global reaction. But Angela Merkel’s remarks—to a conference of the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union in Potsdam—that multiculturalism hasn’t worked in Germany, and that the attempt to build a multicultural society and…

Among those regions of the country that are culturally self-conscious--northern New England, Southern California, Appalachia--the South has been especially occupied, during the past two centuries, in defining what constitutes its distinctive character. As with any such topic, there is no end of…

The name of Joshua Slocum (1844-1909) barely registers now, but a century ago, he approached what we would call celebrity today. Descendant of a loyalist family that fled to Nova Scotia after the Revolution, he led a life that would be impossible in our time: running away to sea in his youth,…

A few months ago the Wall Street Journal ran a splendid essay by Allen Barra that could only be described as therapeutic. Entitled “What ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Isn’t,” it was a calm, clear-headed, even humorous, evisceration of a novel that seems to be universally admired, required reading in…

The Weekly Standard got a solicitation in the mail the other day from Prospect magazine—an estimable journal of politics and the arts, but edited and published in London, as the cover letter made abundantly clear.

Remember, this is about Joe Biden:

Garin Hovannisian is a product of what might be called Armenian-American aristocracy. His great-grandfather Kaspar stood helplessly by while his pregnant mother and infant brother were killed by the Turks in 1915, escaped to Ellis Island in 1920, and built an agricultural/real estate empire in…

In the world of the 20th century portrait there is John Singer Sargent, and all the rest. But first in line, just behind Sargent, is Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937), a poor Hungarian boy who rose to eminence in his own country, and in the wake of a stunning likeness of Pope Leo XII--now in the…

In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) there is a character called Uncle Toby who had been hit on the head by a flying stone at the Siege of Namur--and never stopped talking about it. Nearly three centuries later, two specimens are sitting on my desk which can only be described as Uncle…

You might have thought that Kennedy kitsch was not likely to proceed much further beyond The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg (2005), or that the gold standard had long ago been established with Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John…

If Americans know anything about the presidential election of 1924, they know that it was won by the incumbent Calvin Coolidge in a landslide over the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis of West Virginia, a prominent lawyer and diplomat who was a compromise candidate after 103 ballots at a convention…

The Library of America, founded in the late 1970s with initial funding from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, grew out of an idea of Edmund Wilson’s that there ought to be an American equivalent of the French Pleiade editions, which seek to keep classics in…

On the Thursday after Memorial Day, 1933, J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. sat at the witness table awaiting the resumption of a hearing by the Senate Banking Committee investigating the practices of New York investment banks. Suddenly, a publicist with the Ringling Brothers circus thrust a German-born dwarf…

Sometime in the mid-1980s a pop cultural landmark was reached when Baby Boomer journalists started writing columns complaining about the current state of rock music. This process might have been jump-started by the affront of Madonna to such people as Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe or Robert…

This week's Fareed Zakaria quotation comes courtesy of Cindy Adams, who interviewed the great man in her New York Post column (Sept. 27) about how he manages to find the time to do the innumerable extraordinary things he does. Answer: He doesn't have the time.

President Obama was asked recently about "Waiting for 'Superman,'" the Davis Guggenheim documentary about public education which depicts a handful of qualified inner-city students competing for a limited number of spaces in charter schools.

Since 1963 Theodore C. Sorensen has been subsisting on his eight-year career as a ghostwriter for John F. Kennedy, and faithful readers of the New York Times have come to rely on his periodic contributions to the editorial pages during the past 47 years. Here Sorensen has repeated, with emphasis,…

The British author-diplomat Duff Cooper once divided the ages of man into arbitrary three-decade increments: From birth to 30 is youth, and from 30 to 60 years is middle age. Early last month I descended, irrevocably, into old age.

We might as well enjoy this sort of excruciating scholarly adoration of Barack Obama before the November elections, at least. This is from a new Princeton University Press release on 'Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition' by James T. Kloppenberg:

The death this week of 82-year-old Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Reagan years, reminds me of Cokie Roberts, of all people. And leads me to think that Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters – and congressional Democrats in general – are…

Having safely deposited our daughter in Williams-town, Massachusetts, for the summer, my alluring wife and I decided to shunpike our way back home to Washington—a picturesque way to describe avoiding metropolitan New York, Interstate 95, the New Jersey Turnpike, and their attendant horrors. This…

Permit me to remind my colleagues, in response to the sudden retirement of 89-year-old Helen Thomas, to be careful what you wish for: It may be satisfying to see her finally heading toward the exit--although I am not so sure this is permanent--but she has always been good for a laugh and rueful…

At the moment, it is reasonable to assume that the price of Britain's political system would appear to be some sort of governing coalition of the Tories and Liberal Democrats. This might take the form of a formal blue/yellow alliance, with LibDems in a Tory cabinet; or it might mean LibDem support…

A number of names are being tossed about in the sweepstakes to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens, and the three front-runners at the moment seem to be Merrick Garland and Diane Wood, both federal appeals court judges, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, former dean of the Harvard Law School. My own…

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs recently issued an astonishingly bumptious statement opposing the congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide, beginning with these words: "Like swallows returning to Capistrano, Congress's annual determination to debate the history of the…

There's an amusing video this week of the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in the midst of a televised attack on--who/what else?--George W. Bush when the lights go out. Chavez is plunged into darkness and, miraculously, ceases talking.

The next time you encounter a learned discussion of 'the liberal media' -- which usually features stalwart denials of political bias, combined with pious invocations of professional standards -- consider the life and career of James Wieghart, who died this week at the age of 76. Mr Wieghart's…

I don't know whether it's age or climate change, but the Tiger Woods Crisis has left me in a mystified state. I say this as a non-golfer who follows the pop cultural news with some fidelity. But both Woods' televised statement of apology -- for which the networks interrupted their scheduled…

I, too, was surprised by Sen. Evan Bayh's decision not to run for a third term. In an institution where members have a habit of hanging on until they leave the chamber feet-first--casting votes while attached to IVs, being wheeled in and out for quorum calls--it is always noteworthy when a…

One final contribution to the post-mortem on the State of the Union address. 

It is my private hope that this evening's speech to a joint session of Congress will be President Obama's final State of the Union address. This is not because of any animosity toward the president, but because I support abolition of the State of the Union address.

Every schoolboy knows George Orwell's famous essay on "Politics and the English Language" (1946), the point of which is that politics misuses language, and injures it in the process. You don't have to search very far to find examples, especially here in America where the language of politics tends…

Before it becomes the received wisdom on the left that Scott Brown won because Martha Coakley lost, permit me to express the opinion that Coakley may not have been the most skillful candidate in American political history, but she was defeated not by her own deficiencies but by national trends and…

Lee Smith, a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, Hudson Institute scholar, and a close student of Middle East politics, has been pondering the Arab world, with particular urgency, since 9/11. Resident in Cairo, Beirut, and New York, with a wide and varied acquaintance throughout the Arab…

Scott Brown's rejoinder to David Gergen in his debate with Martha Coakley the other evening--"With all due respect, it's not the Kennedy seat and it's not the Democrats' seat. It's the people's seat"--is a great line and a memorable line, and may well survive the special election next week and…

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house the other morning at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Church, favored sanctuary for local left-wing Catholics, as prominent Democrats said farewell to Smith Bagley. Bagley, a Reynolds tobacco heir who, with first wife Vicki raised money for Jimmy Carter and were social…

Thankfully, it seems finally to have dawned on President Obama that al Qaeda is an indefatigable enemy of the United States, and will seize any and every opportunity to kill Americans. And it appears to have surprised Janet Napolitano to realize how determined al-Qaeda can be, whether commissioning…

The timely retirement of Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) seems to have garnered much of the attention in political Washington. But the departure of Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) is likely to have more historic consequences. That is because Dorgan's decision not to seek re-election leaves his…

The "retirement" of Sen. Christopher Dodd reminds me of Enoch Powell's observation that "all political lives ... end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." Whether or not this is strictly or generally true, it certainly fits the experience of the Dodd family.

Journalists, long on confidence but chronically short of knowledge, have been lately offering end-of-decade summations. The fact that the first decade of the 21st century doesn't actually end until this time next year hasn't slowed them down; and there's universal agreement that this was, as Andy…

Why Are Jews Liberals?

Until THE WEEKLY STANDARD offered me a parking space and I began driving to work, I was a lifelong consumer of public transportation. Trains, in particular, are a favorite of mine, including subway trains and underground shuttles. I am less enthusiastic about buses. This may be because of the…

It is not a good sign that General McChrystal has spoken only once, and by teleconference call, with President Obama during the past 70 days. This would suggest that the commanding general of allied forces in Afghanistan is at significant odds with the White House, and close to resigning his…

Just about everyone in Washington seems agreed that Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., committed a terrible gaffe the other evening when he shouted 'You lie!' during a pause in President Obama's address to Congress on Wednesday. I am not certain that he did, but this episode does nicely illustrate Michael…

Rep. Joseph Wilson of South Carolina shouted 'You lie!' from the floor when President Obama told Congress that his health care 'reform' proposals would not insure illegal aliens. As it happens, it was Joseph Wilson, and not Barack Obama who spoke the truth in that exchange, and I leave it to others…

First, two volumes intended for the coffee table, well worth examining in detail. The West of the Imagination by William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann (Oklahoma, 604 pp., $65)--one William Goetzmann is a distinguished historian of the west at the University of Texas, the other W.G. a…

When I labored at the New Republic, some 35 years ago, the TRB column was written by an amusing man named Richard Strout, who had arrived in Washington in 1920 to write for the Christian Science Monitor, had been moonlighting as TRB since 1943, and had three abiding pet peeves.

The next time someone complains that poetry is never in the news, it might be worth reminding them to be careful what they wish for. Poetry has been in the news lately, and the news has not been uniformly glorious.

If there is to be a reaction against Susan Boyle, let it begin here.

The Washington Post published one of its trademark editorials this morning ("Keeping the Polls Open") about a Supreme Court case that may decide the fate of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires 16 Southern states to obtain approval from the Justice Department before altering…

Joe Queenan is an essayist whose jaundiced eye, sharp tongue, and sharper humor have dissected the great American insect, to great effect, in these pages. But in Closing Time: A Memoir (Viking, 352 pp., $26.95) the microscope is turned inward in a genuinely remarkable--certainly startling and…

Last Lion

Bounding up to the stage to accept his Oscar for impersonating Harvey Milk in Milk, Sean Penn leaned into the microphone and, with just a hint of a smirk, declared: "Thank you--you commie, homo-loving sons of guns!"

Cromwell's Head

When the jazz singer Blossom Dearie died recently at age 82, the New York Times described her as a "cult chanteuse," explaining that the six Verve label albums she recorded in the late 1950s, "are today regarded as cult classics."

Two books were published last year about the 1958 National  Football League championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts. This was the contest that, according to the subtitle of The Glory Game, "changed football forever" and has since been called, by popular consensus, the…

Bill Press's professional life, such as it is, has been very complicated in recent years.

Caroline Kennedy's swipe at a Senate seat in New York ended in debacle last week, and Governor David Paterson bore the brunt of the blame. With some reason: His dithering, ineptitude, and needless dissembling reminded New Yorkers of the squalid circumstances that had brought him to the governorship…

One of the less appealing aspects of art scholarship and criticism in the past half-century has been the extent to which it has wasted its time defining art. To be sure, presented with the spectacle of a row of bricks or Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" or a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde, one…

One of the conventions of modern presidential transitions is the ritual exaltation of vice presidents-to-be. The incoming vice president, it is announced, will have unprecedented responsibilities in the new administration. His desk will be located just inches from the Oval Office; he will be first…

A little over 12 years ago I brought home a beagle pup to the welcoming arms of my son and daughter, then aged 11 and 5. The last of our three hounds had died two years earlier, and the interregnum had merely intensified their longing for a new beagle.

You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.

This space is not usually reserved for confession, but I have a secret vice to reveal: I close my office door here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, direct my computer to the YouTube site, and bathe in the sights and sounds of Barack Obama music. Specifically, I have found myself addicted to four videos in…

Like most Americans, I suspect, I will always remember where I was, and what I was doing, when I learned that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley would cease to be investment banking houses and become traditional bank holding companies.

John McCain of Arizona chose to introduce Sarah Palin of Alaska to the Republican ticket in Dayton, Ohio, of all places. There are good reasons why Ohio's sixth largest city was chosen for this honor, I am sure; but the venue seemed to annoy a young editorial aide at the Washington Post who grew up…

While a certain indignation about Barack Obama's 'lipstick/pig' remarks is understandable, and probably necessary, it is encouraging to see that women are also turning Obama's words to their advantage, wearing T-shirts and carrying signs--"God, guns and lipstick made America great"--that suggest…

Last week, after Barack Obama had consented to allow the people of Western Europe and the Middle East to gaze upon him, Republicans in America seemed especially disheartened. Their presumptive candidate, John McCain, trailed Obama in the polls. The press, when it wasn't breathlessly chronicling…

When it comes to wheels, I'm a small car man. Always have been, always will be. Automotively speaking, I really do believe that small is beautiful. Not for everyone, of course, but unquestionably for me.

If inspirational claptrap is the stuff of diplomacy, then Barack Obama should flourish in the White House.

Once upon a time--which is to say, a generation or two before Sean Penn and Britney Spears--the popular gossip culture in America was preoccupied not with dysfunctional entertainers but with misbehaving millionaires. And not the men who made the millions, but their errant sons and grandsons, such…

boris_johnson_3.jpg Boris Johnson

We may conclude three things with absolute certainty after the Pennsylvania primary. The first is that Hillary Clinton is a formidable campaigner, and as her deadpan consumption of a shot of Crown Royal attests, possesses the requisite combination of nerve and psychosis to run for president, serve,…

I've been a collector of odd volumes, the builder of a library, a stalwart of secondhand book shops, for as long as I can remember. Among my earliest memories are sitting--patiently, I like to think--on the floors of stores, long since gone, while my father perused the stock. By the time I could…

Washington

Along with ballroom dancers and Civil War re-enactors, dog show aficionados constitute an interesting subculture in American life. Beyond that brief description, I am disinclined to go--except, perhaps, to recommend the exceedingly amusing Best in Show (2000), the Christopher Guest "mockumentary"…

There is no question that Barack Obama did well yesterday, certainly better than a freshman senator of no great distinction had a right to expect. Obama may yet gain the Democratic presidential nomination; certainly the ingredients are there. But it should be noted that Super Tuesday was the…

There is no question that Barack Obama did well yesterday, certainly better than a freshman senator of no great distinction had a right to expect. Obama may yet gain the Democratic presidential nomination; certainly the ingredients are there. But it should be noted that Super Tuesday was the…

I felt a curious sensation earlier this week when Edward Kennedy, standing before a roomful of shrieking undergraduates in Washington, endorsed Barack Obama for president. It was not the rush of emotion that David Brooks described in the next day's New York Times, or irritation at the standard…

I felt a curious sensation earlier this week when Edward Kennedy, standing before a roomful of shrieking undergraduates in Washington, endorsed Barack Obama for president. It was not the rush of emotion that David Brooks described in the next day's New York Times, or irritation at the standard…

Civil War Leadership and Mexican War Experience by Kevin Dougherty (Mississippi, 207 pp., $50). When General Grant met General Lee at Appomattox, they broke the ice by reminiscing about their mutual experience in the Mexican War. Grant's attitude toward that conflict, expressed in his memoirs, is…

Houses of the Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America and the Way They Lived by Hugh Howard, photographs by Roger Straus III (Artisan, 354 pp., $50). The world of late 18th-century America is intriguingly antique and endlessly diverting, and while the Founders were hardly representative of the…

Visit the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, and cadets will show you the statue of General George C. Marshall '01 on the edge of the parade ground, and add proudly that Marshall was (and remains) the only soldier ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1953). They do this partly because…

My wife and I motored down to southside Virginia last weekend for a poignant event in the family chronicles: our last Parents' Weekend at Hampden-Sydney College, where our son is in his final year. The process of abandoning the nest can be prolonged in 21st-century America, I concede, but this was…

World War IV

"The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was…

Not long ago my wife, daughter, and I were driving along M Street in Georgetown, just past Wisconsin Avenue, when my wife gestured in the direction of an ancient building on the south side of M Street, now an elegant boutique.

For the coffee table.

Dean Acheson

You may have noticed that Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. I might not have noticed it myself, except that a waggish friend sent me an email on the day of the announcement, reminding me of the last time Cynthia Tucker,…

I have been instructing my 15-year-old daughter in driving with a standard transmission and, when asked how things are going, can respond truthfully that things are going about as well as can be expected.

May we recommend . . .

Being a superstitious fellow, I have tended not to think deeply about retirement. By that, I don't mean that I haven't been paying into various employer programs and federally mandated schemes, or investing wisely, over the decades. No, what I mean is that I haven't planned--or to put it…

APART FROM THE DEATH of a journalist, the saddest story for anyone in the news business--and the one most likely to waste expensive newsprint--is the martyrdom of an editor at the hands of his proprietor. There have been quite a few lately, and with the crisis of the newspaper business, there will…

An interesting book arrived here the other day which, as is often the case, impressed me in ways the publisher hadn't anticipated. Entitled The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concert-Going Experience, it proved to be something of a shock. With three or four…

FIRST, LET'S DISPENSE with formalities and come to quick agreement on the gathering scandal of Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., whose lascivious emails and instant messages to House pages have Washington in thrall. The Foley epistles are "abhorrent" (House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi), "repulsive"…

I'm very much looking forward to seeing the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie. It's a spinoff from his popular British television series, Da Ali G Show, and features Borat, a fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan, played by Cohen. The movie's ostensible title is Cultural Learnings of America for Make…

Ordinarily, the changing of the guard at the Department of Transportation is not an occasion for reconsidering matters of national security. But the retirement of Secretary Norman Mineta, and the nomination of Mary Peters to succeed him, might afford an opportunity to rethink and improve how we…

My wife's boss is currently on jury duty. I had lunch not long ago with an old classmate who regaled me with the saga of his tenure on a federal jury. Just this week a colleague told me about his service on the jury in a (locally notorious) criminal trial. Everyone has served on a jury, it would…

BEFORE COMING TO THE WEEKLY STANDARD, I was a newspaper columnist. And in the course of the many years that I practiced that dubious craft, the question I was asked most frequently was, "How do you come up with ideas?"

I AM FACING A CRISIS in my marriage. When I came to work at The Weekly Standard, a little more than a year ago, one of the perquisites of the job was a parking space in the building garage. To anyone who commutes to work in a city of a certain size, I need not explain what this privilege means. For…

IN MY YOUNGER AND MORE impressionable days I used occasionally to daydream about ending my career in journalism with a little finishing canter of public service.

NOW THAT THE PLAYOFFS ARE upon us, the basketball and hockey seasons have commenced, Super Bowl XL arrives in February, and baseball's Opening Day is just 17 weeks away, it is time for me to make a public disclosure, to confess the truth, and emerge from the closet, as it were:

THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM, "the nation's highest civilian award," was established by Harry Truman in 1945 to recognize notable service in World War II. Eighteen years later, John F. Kennedy, prompted by White House aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, decided to revive the moribund honor by…

WORKING AT THE WEEKLY STANDARD, which I joined some eight months ago, has been an unalloyed pleasure. With one somewhat disconcerting exception. My office is located in a corner where I find myself surrounded by twentysomethings, and for the first time in my life, I am not only one of the older…

NOT LONG AGO I STUMBLED upon what I would guess to be an undiscovered piece of T.S. Eliot ephemera--an obscure bone from the corpus, as it were--and have spent the past few years contemplating its announcement. It is obviously too unimportant to be included in any sort of biographical work or…

ON THE FACE OF IT, the implosion of the AFL-CIO at its annual convention--its two largest member-unions have just quit, and others threaten to follow--is no big deal. When it was formed, in 1955, by the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (which…

I HAVE LIVED IN TWO large cities in my life, Washington and Los Angeles, and if you have a taste for bumping into famous people, they are good places to live.

THE G8 SUMMIT IN GLENEAGLES, Scotland, which begins July 6, should be a slightly excruciating affair. While the American economy is chugging along, Europe's growth is largely confined to its unemployment figures. Russia's Vladimir Putin will be aware that his autocratic style of government in…

ON A RECENT SATURDAY, I attended a brief memorial service for Fred Stone, the late, longtime master of the Wolver Beagles, a private pack in Middleburg, Virginia, that has hunted the rolling Loudoun County farmland since 1913. Fred, who died at 72 this past March, had been master for some three…

THE SENATE MAJORITY LEADER, Bill Frist, and his Republican colleagues, face a momentous decision: Do they allow the Democratic minority to prevent the Senate from voting on judicial nominees, or do they invoke the "nuclear option"--that is, change the rules so a simple majority of 51 can force a…

THIS IS THE WEEK THAT Major League Baseball begins its new season. And, as everyone must know, Washington will have its own team for the first time in 34 years.

AGAINST GEORGE F. KENNAN, who died last week at the age of 101, "there was no official complaint, / And all the reports on his conduct agree / That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint." He was not just "the nearest thing to a legend that this country's diplomatic service…

WHO TO BELIEVE in the war of words between Salon, the feisty Internet magazine, and journalists who complain that its "scoops" and well-publicized charges against the American Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications are little more than nuggets of disinformation, sponsored by the…

Walter Cronkite

Whoever it was who said that journalism is the first rough draft of history was, presumably, a journalist. For no historian would ever suppose such a thing. And what better proof is needed than the periodic spectacle of journalists attempting to behave as historians?