Robert Novak

The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't)

The Strong Man

Blacklisted by History

Champaign, Ill.

Hubris

Reagan's Revolution

DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN, during his long and illustrious public career, did not flinch from controversy. I doubt, therefore, that he would object to my having inserted him posthumously into an intriguing debate over recent history: Who was responsible a half-century ago for opening the door to…

A Look over My Shoulder

Editor's Note: Robert L. Bartley, the distinguished former editor of the Wall Street Journal, died today at 66. Here are two articles about him published previously in The Weekly Standard.

General Patton A Soldier's Life by Stanley P. Hirshson HarperCollins, 826 pp., $34.95 IS THERE ANY JUSTIFICATION for yet another biography of the much-chronicled General George S. Patton Jr., particularly after the superb "Patton: A Genius for War" by Carlo D'Este (1995)? Certainly not the one…

Master of the Senate The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro Knopf, 1,167 pp., $35 IT HAS BEEN twelve years since publication of "Means of Ascent," the second volume of Robert Caro's "The Years of Lyndon Johnson," but the long-anticipated third volume, "Master of the Senate," is worth the…

In the Arena A Memoir of the 20th Century by Caspar W. Weinberger, with Gretchen Roberts Regnery, 412 pp., $34.95 WHEN I OPENED Caspar Weinberger's memoir, an irresistible impulse propelled me to the chapter describing his outrageous persecution in 1992 by Lawrence Walsh, the out-of-control…

The president's most trusted adviser is a Soviet agent. The nation's leading nuclear scientist is turning secrets over to the Kremlin. The entire federal government is honeycombed with Communists. American intelligence agencies are infested with Russian spies. Soviet agents are working in the…

Campaign finance reform is one of the issues that the Democrats will seek to capitalize on in 2000, targeting Republicans for resisting any change. It's very much like the tax issue. If the Republicans don't have an alternative to present, they play into the Democrats' hands.

Joseph McCarthy

Somewhere in this collage of fancy, notes, and errant musings might be found a legitimate biography of the fortieth president of the United States. Certainly, Edmund Morris did not spend the last fourteen years idly waiting for the muse to seize him. Quite apart from his unprecedented access to…

Only a wordsmith of William F. Buckley's caliber could try, and largely succeed, in depicting Joe McCarthy as an engaging, sympathetic, and ultimately tragic figure. Buckley's McCarthy is a rogue -- but not a loathsome enemy of freedom so detestable that the very word "McCarthyism" is a name…

The CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was recently named in honor of George Bush, who served there only one year as its director and whose connection with the spy business was tangential at best. The honor should have gone to Allen Dulles, called, by his British counterpart Sir Kenneth W. D.…

I HAD ARRIVED LATE FOR A RALLY in the south Alabama town of Robertsdale on the first day of George Corley Wallace's 1970 campaign for governor. Late on that early-spring evening, some 5,000 Alabamans -- all white, predominantly male, and many wearing bib overalls -- turned out for fried fish and…

THIS IS THE NINTH ANNIVERSARY of I. F. Stone's death. When he died of a heart attack in a Boston hospital on June 18, 1989, he rated a top-of-the-page New York Times obituary that called him "a pugnacious advocate of civil liberties, peace and truth" and asserted that his "integrity" was…

I first met Barry Goldwater in 1957, when I was a 26-year-old reporter for the Associated Press helping cover the Senate Rackets Committee's investigation of organized labor. I liked him immensely. He was a reporter's dream: friendly, funny, and oh so helpful, telling just about everything he knew,…

Brian Mitchell

The insights into the workings of the White House that readers will find in this enthralling collection -- a transcript, with commentary, of covertly recorded conversations with Lyndon B. Johnson during his first nine months as president -- are typified by the disclosure of LBJ's intervention in a…

Ian Smith

As a 15-year-old in 1946, I attended the final home game of my fellow townsman from Joliet, Ill., DePaul University basketball great George Mikan. When Joliet mayor Art Janke was introduced before the game to present an award to Mikan, the more than 20,000 fans gathered at the old Chicago Stadium…

Twenty years after he last held public office and seventeen years after his death, the name of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller is mentioned in Republican circles mainly as a pejorative.

WHILE ENUMERATING THE SINS of his opponent in his rambling closing statement at the second presidential debate, Bob Dole blurted out this indictment: "President Clinton opposes term limits." Perhaps supporters of limiting congressional terms should have been grateful for those five little words, in…

On Sunday afternoon, April 21, I watched the Chicago Bulls mop up the meaningless season finale against the Washington Bullets, collecting their 72nd victory in the process. No team in the National Basketball Association had won as many as 70 games before -- thus suggesting to many that the 1996…

On Sunday afternoon, April 21, I watched the Chicago Bulls mop up the meaningless season finale against the Washington Bullets, collecting their 72nd victory in the process. No team in the National Basketball Association had won as many as 70 games before -- thus suggesting to many that the 1996…

James Stewart, the celebrated investigative reporter, has performed a remarkable job of reconstructing the Whitewater affair in Blood Sport (Simon & Schuster, 479 pages, $ 25). But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book has been the reaction to it.

An early defining moment of the American experience in Vietnam came on January 11, 1963, when Adm. Harry Felt, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, was conducting an airport press conference following a visit to Saigon. As the American correspondents in general and Malcolm Browne of the…

It was a bad night for Colin Powell last week at Washington s Omni Shoreham Hotel, where the American Conservative Union held its annual dinner. The General himself was nowhere to be seen. His transoceanic book tour completed, Powell was in seclusion deciding whether to seek the presidential…