Richard Carlson is a journalist, former diplomat, and media executive who served as director of the Voice of America and president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting during the early 1990s. He contributed articles to The Weekly Standard spanning international affairs, political figures, and media culture. His pieces for the magazine covered topics ranging from Middle East politics to domestic political controversies.
It was a cold Saturday night on Columbus Day weekend 1969 when Lance Brisson and I pulled up behind a Yellow cab parked at a crazy angle on the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets, an expensive area of San Francisco called Presidio Heights.
The tone of girlish shock that permeated the news coverage of the Hewlett-Packard "spying scandal" was something to behold. Reporters surprised to learn about pretext phone calls? I don't think so. I know about these things. In a much earlier life I was a reporter. I also worked for one of the most…
"We're like the Mafia." --Jared Paul Stern I DON'T KNOW JARED PAUL STERN, the New York Post gossip writer accused of blackmailing a billionaire, but over the years I've learned a little about the gamier side of gossip-columning. Stern's self-dealing, unsubtle as it was, is no big surprise.
AT THE VOICE OF AMERICA during the Cold War some of the most troublesome employees were those who broadcast daily to the Soviet Union and its satellite states, in Russian, Azeri, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, and so on. These staffers were often émigrés--well-educated, sometimes…
MAHMOUD ABBAS'S and Ariel Sharon's ministerial jets passed in the Washington night recently as each man presented arguments and complaints to President George W. Bush. But, so far as is known, not a word was uttered about the 600-pound gorilla in the checkered keffiyeh, Yasser Arafat, whom Bush did…
ONE OF MY PARTNERS as an observer at the South African elections of 1994 was General Olusegun Obasanjo, now president of Nigeria. We traveled around together a bit during those two weeks in May, through Soweto and the migrant labor camps near Johannesburg. We talked a lot. A smart, decent fellow,…
THE OTHER DAY, General Tommy Franks made a pleasing announcement: The ruling Baath Socialist party of Iraq was dead, its carcass hung upside down on a fence. After more than 30 years of torture, repression, and self-dealing, the party that had controlled every element of life in Iraq was officially…
ACCORDING TO the Washington Post, a fellow you've probably never heard of named Rafik Hariri wants to build a $25 million house in Washington, D.C., a Kennedy Center-scale monument better suited to the banks of the Tigris River. Why did Hariri pay $13 million for the property on Foxhall Road back…
I WAS OFTEN BOTHERED about what happened to my gun during the James Meredith riots at Ole Miss. Quite a few people were shot during that crazed Sunday night in the fall of 1962. Two civilians died, and 168 U.S. marshals were wounded when bullets flew into the Lyceum Building. No one ever knew who…