When John Connally became governor of Texas in 1963 he quickly sought to get his own man on the state Banking Board. He chose Robert Strauss, then a prominent Dallas lawyer and civic leader (and, not coincidentally, a close Connally ally). But Strauss didn’t want the job and demurred in his…

THE LATE ALAN BARON, the roly-poly political analyst and Washington raconteur who edified and amused the nation's political cognoscenti for two decades before his death in 1993, used to watch the slow atrophy of the national party conventions with sadness and pain. And he concluded there was only…

In his multivolume Story of Civilization, Will Durant tells the tale of a young English nobleman who was a favorite at the court of Elizabeth I. Once when he was presenting himself to the queen, he bowed with elaborate obeisance -- and inadvertently broke wind. So utterly consumed with…