Tucker Carlson

Hosted by Charlie Sykes.

On August 30, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an unsigned editorial criticizing an editorial the same paper ran a century before. The offending piece: “Jass and Jassism,” a denunciation of jazz music published in 1918. “Why is the jass music, and, therefore, the jass band?” New Orleans’s paper…

Arkansas senator Tom Cotton blasted Barack Obama for his accommodation of Russian aggression over the past eight years and argued that Russia has committed "crimes and transgressions against the United States and our interests" while the administration "looked the other way." Speaking to Tucker…

Best book I’ve read this year: Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, by James Morris. Has any book ever come with a less gripping title or a more unappealing cover? But it turns out what say is true, at least in this case. It’s fantastic.

I FEEL LIKE I'VE KNOWN Hunter S. Thompson for most of my life. I first encountered him in 1981, when I was 12. A family friend had moved out after a long stay in the guest room, and I decided to find out what he'd left behind. On the nightstand I found a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I…

IT ALL STARTED with the squirrels in the ceiling. They've always lived there, between the rafters over my office at home. For years, the squirrels and I got along fine, until late one night a couple of months ago, when two of them got into an argument. I don't know what the fight was about, acorns…

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN People often refer to Dubai as the Hong Kong of the Gulf, but it's really more like Vegas. A sparkling, semi-independent emirate on the Arabian Sea, Dubai is where rich Arabs go to gamble, meet hookers, and drink. But mostly drink. Dubai is drenched with booze. The airport…

EPIPHANIES are rarer in life than in literature. But they do occur, those moments when everything changes in an instant, when you know your understanding of the world will never be quite the same. I had one of those this summer, when I saw my first potato cannon. We were in Maine, visiting friends…

I got a new job a few months ago. It happened suddenly. One day, I was writing stories for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The next day, I was doing a daily show for CNN. Virtually everything about my life changed dramatically. I did my best to ignore it. Finally, one night last week, I had to face the truth:…

People in my Virginia neighborhood don't gather in bookstores on Sunday nights to talk about ideas. People in certain parts of Northwest Washington do, as I discovered last weekend when I attended a discussion of The Slate Diaries at Politics & Prose, a lefty bookseller on upper Connecticut Avenue.

ASK A FEW prominent Democrats about the relationship between Al Gore and Bill Clinton and the word you're most likely to hear, probably more than once, is "psychodrama." According to those who know him, Gore has come to resent a lot of things about Clinton. He resents Clinton's lack of respect for…

EVEN BEFORE George W. Bush stomped Al Gore in the second presidential debate, there were signs that Bush's campaign was gaining ground. One big sign, actually. A Gallup poll commissioned by CNN and USA Today showed Bush ahead nationally by 8 points. A poll by Gallup released three days before had…

ON SEPTEMBER 15, Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign manager, got a call from the FBI. An agent informed Allbaugh that one of Al Gore's closest advisers, former representative Tom Downey, had received confidential information from the Bush campaign, including a book of internal strategy memos…

Summer houses are like time capsules. I remember this every June when we go to Maine, to the same place I've gone most of my life. My wife has been going with me every summer since we were in the 10th grade, so it always feels a bit like waking up back in high school when we arrive. In a dresser…

Chicago

AS OF LAST WEEK, Al Gore had been invited to participate in 45 presidential debates. Gore has "accepted all of them," boasts aide Mark Fabiani, "legitimate and half-way legitimate," including an offer from would-be moderator David Letterman. Gore says he wants to debate as often as possible, and he…

IF YOU'RE a Democratic strategist, there are two ways you can look at last week's Republican convention in Philadelphia: You can be irritated. Or you can be dismissive. Al Gore's campaign team in Nashville has chosen the latter.

Philadelphia

Saginaw, Michigan

PAT BUCHANAN likes to fight. But only on TV. Off the air, the bellicose talk-show-host-turned-third-party-presidential-candidate can be surprisingly meek, even timid, the sort of person who structures his life to avoid the mildest confrontation. This spring, Buchanan was booked for a live interview…

Buffalo, N.Y.

IN MARCH, the chairman of the Constitution party, a little-known but very conservative political party based in suburban Virginia, wrote a letter to Alan Keyes urging him to leave the GOP. "We encourage you to come and join with us," the letter said, "in firm reliance on God's divine providence and…

Pittsburgh

If there's one thing that Third World Marxist dictatorships seem to have in common, it's a high tolerance for reckless driving. I first discovered this in 1988 after a particularly long dinner party in then-Communist Nicaragua. A friend and I were headed back to our hotel in Managua, doing about 70…

Miami

In 1975, the National Council of Churches, an organization of about 30 mainline religious denominations, published an informational pamphlet entitled Cuba: People-Questions. Written in perfect irony-free Albanian-farm-report prose, the pamphlet offers church members a short history of U.S.-Cuban…

Miami, March 30

FRANKLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- JANUARY 30

Phoenix, Ariz.

By the time this appears in print I will be -- my fingers freeze at the thought of typing the word -- a non-smoker. Someone who doesn't smoke. A smoke-free person. The guy who used to chain at his desk all day but doesn't anymore.

Greenville, South Carolina

Des Moines, Iowa

Council Bluffs, Iowa

HOW SEVERE IS THE HEALTH care crisis? I'll tell you, said Al Gore during a speech at a New Hampshire hospital recently. Thanks to the greed and unchecked power of the pharmaceutical industry, many Americans must leave the country in order to find affordable life-sustaining drugs. "Does anybody here…

LAST MONTH during an interview on Meet the Press, host Tim Russert asked George W. Bush if he planned to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay political group. "Oh, probably not," Bush replied. How come? asked Russert. "Well, because it creates a huge political scene," Bush said. "I mean, this…

BY THE FIRST WEEK of November it had become clear to the people who run Hillsdale College that the school's president, George Roche III, would have to step down. Roche's daughter-in-law, Lissa Roche, had recently shot herself to death on campus. Rumors that she and Roche had been having an affair…

At the end of September, the various candidates running for president released their financial statements. Beneath the minutiae was a striking fact: So far this year, Steve Forbes and George W. Bush have spent roughly the same amount of money, about $ 20 million. But that number alone doesn't tell…

FOR AN ORGANIZATION with a reputation for exclusivity and intolerance, the Republican party is surprisingly reluctant to kick anyone out. Earlier this month, after years of embarrassing fellow Republicans with his sniping at Jews, Pat Buchanan released a book suggesting the United States should…

LENORA FULANI has never been ashamed of being called a radical. As a leader of the hard-left (and now defunct) New Alliance party, Fulani ran for president twice on a platform so extreme she was dismissed by the Nation as a fringe case. Long a slogan-shouting fixture at leftist demonstrations in…

Des Moines, Iowa

MIKE FORBES LIKES SOUP. But he doesn't like corn. So when Forbes, a third-term congressman from New York, found corn in his dehydrated soup-in-a-cup, he had a member of his congressional staff remove every kernel.

"I'M GOING TO BE president of the United States," Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire says in a perfectly even voice. "I really believe that."

I'm writing this somewhere over New Mexico, on a United flight to Los Angeles. This is the day's last plane out of Washington, the one for people who absolutely have to be in L.A. by midnight. Evidently a lot of people do. Every seat is taken. Watching the passengers file on, I realized that I…

Los Angeles

THE DAY AFTER THE 1984 REPUBLICAN convention, Ronald Reagan gave a speech to a group of preachers in Dallas in which he ruminated on the role of religion in public life. "The truth is," Reagan said, "that politics and morality are inseparable. . . . Our government needs the church because only…

Tallahassee, Florida

WHILE WRITING HIS ACCOUNT of the 1995 Dayton peace accords, Richard Holbrooke had a dispute with his publisher. Holbrooke, still flushed from his starring role in the agreement that halted the fighting in Bosnia, wanted to call his book, To End a War. Random House, fearful of being overtaken by…

If you didn't know better you might think Steve Forbes and Christine Todd Whitman were friends. The two have known each other since their years together at Far Hills Country Day School in the 1950s. In 1993, Forbes did more than almost any other person to help Whitman become governor of New Jersey,…

WHILE MANY INTELLECTUALS on the left are content to complain about America's rightward drift, Steve Kangas prided himself on a pragmatic approach. A few years ago, Kangas, a 37-year-old Internet pornographer from Las Vegas, created a Web site called "Liberalism Resurgent: A Response to the Right"…

I got a call from a friend of mine the other day asking if I'd write a letter of recommendation on her behalf to a medical school. No problem, I said. I write a lot. I can handle it.

Manchester, New Hampshire

Cobb County, Ga.

LAST WEEK, WHITE HOUSE press secretary Joe Lockhart explained why Bill Clinton beings the Senate impeachment trail at a profound disadvantage. The case that Republicans will bring against the president, Lockhart told the New York Times, is based on "the most prejudicial record that could possibly…

THE RALLY ORGANIZED BY JESSE JACKSON on the Capitol steps last week was advertised as a prayer vigil against impeachment; but for demonstrator Haji Warf, a 33-year-old non-profit-foundation employee from the Virginia suburbs, the event was "part of the grieving process." Warf has been involved in…

REP. BOB LIVINGSTON'S SATURDAY-MORNING surprise resignation threw House Republicans into confusion and chaos. But only for about an hour. Before most Americans even learned that Livingston had withdrawn as speaker-designate, a number of his colleagues had already spread word that they intended to…

IMAGINE YOU'RE SEAN WILENTZ. For years, you have labored in the vineyards of academia, writing footnoted books, getting tenure, rising to become director of the American Studies program at Princeton. Things are going well. Then, suddenly, you become famous -- not for your research on 19th-century…

IF YOU'VE BEEN READING THE PAPERS RECENTLY, you know there is no way the House of Representatives can impeach Bill Clinton. Republicans allegedly don't have the votes. Two days after impeachment hearings began on November 19, representative Peter King of New York announced that not only was he…

Detroit

WHEN SHE APPEARED on the Today show in January, Hillary Clinton outlined the parameters of the now-fabled "vast right-wing conspiracy." But she named only three actual conspirators, two of whom happened to be senators from North Carolina -- Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth. (The third was Jerry…

The Labor Day parade has begun to wind its way through downtown Denver, and Ellen Moran has to raise her voice above the brass band to explain how Dottie Lamm is going to beat Republican Ben Nighthorse-Campbell in the Colorado Senate race this fall. The presidential sex scandal may be the only…

THERE IS A POINT AT WHICH EVEN James Carville runs out of spin. Until recently, that point existed only in theory. Then, last week, Ken Starr submitted his report on the Lewinsky investigation to Capitol Hill and the normally talkative consultant seemed to run out of things to say. So, Carville was…

Most high-school textbooks claim the First World War precipitated the breakup of the British Empire, but it's hard to believe British newspapers didn't have something to do with it. Outside of San Francisco, Great Britain consistently produces the worst daily journalism in the civilized world,…

Los Angeles

The day after terrorists blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Sandy Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, held a meeting at the White House to discuss the American response to the bombings. The secretaries of state and defense, along with the attorney general and the heads of…

Palatine, Ill.

Palatine, Ill.

Seneca Falls, New York

WHEN JAMES CARVILLE first announced his plans to launch an "all out" public-relations war against independent counsel Kenneth Starr, official Washington seemed almost shocked. An attack by a president's campaign manager on a sitting independent counsel was, the Washington Post pointed out tartly,…

A couple of years ago, I watched an entire infomercial about toupees. It was late, and I was stranded alone in a motel room, but it wasn't boredom that kept me tuned in. It was the testimonials. "The girls at the health club used to laugh at me," one satisfied wig buyer explained to the camera.…

ON FRIDAY, A FEDERAL JUDGE in Washington rejected the Clinton administration's claims of "Secret Service privilege," a previously unknown legal theory that would have prevented members of the president's Secret Service detail from having to testify before the Lewinsky grand jury, even if they had…

LAST YEAR RON UNZ WENT TO Sacramento to meet with Republican state legislators about Proposition 227, the so-called English for the Children ballot initiative Unz created that would eliminate California's vast system of bilingual education. The meeting should have been the beginning of a fruitful…

A friend once told me that the surest way to avoid a speeding ticket is to have your license and registration ready for the cop by the time he shows up at your car window. Police officers appreciate the courtesy, he explained. And rooting through the glove box ahead of time might prevent the…

Jeff Koltys is 13 years old and in the seventh grade at the Mary E. Volz Middle School in Runnemede, N.J., a blue-collar suburb outside Philadelphia. On a recent Wednesday morning he describes as typical, Jeff arrives at his 9: 30 class, a "gifted and talented" program reserved for the school's…

Last week, the New Yorker informed its readers of least two previously undisclosed facts about Linda Tripp. First, in the spring of 1969, Tripp, then 19, was arrested in the town of Greenwood Lake, New York, on charges of grand larceny. Second, in 1987, on a federal security-clearance form she…

MONICA LEWINSKY'S THERAPIST is on the phone from Los Angeles explaining how her patient wound up having an affair with Bill Clinton. Starting work as an intern at the White House, says Irene Kassorla, a Hollywood psychologist who has counseled Lewinsky, is "like your first day of kindergarten. Can…

IF PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SECRETARY Mike McCurry seems calm these days, it may be because he has seen it all before. Seventeen years ago this month, McCurry's first boss, Sen. Harrison "Pete" Williams, a four-term Democrat from New Jersey, went on trial for his role in the Abscam scandal. Months…

Shortly after the Monica Lewinsky story first broke, Hillary Clinton asked her old friend Harry Thomason to come to Washington. Thomason, who was in the middle of producing both a sitcom pilot and a feature film, dropped everything and bought a plane ticket. Within days, the Hollywood producer had…

PAUL BEGALA IS NOT YOUR ORDINARY PR sleaze -- so why is he acting like one? In his private life, the presidential adviser is by all accounts a decent, upright person, an ardent Catholic with three children and a stable marriage. Off camera, he is friendly, intelligent, and witty. He is well liked…

PRESIDENT CLINTON MAY HAVE FINALLY denied flat out that he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but the country is still waiting for prominent Democrats to say they believe him. Strip away the qualifiers, and public support for the president has ranged from hesitant to ainusingly…

TWO DAYS AFTER THE WHITE HOUSE sex story broke in the United States, Al Hayat, an influential Arabic-language newspaper published in London, ran large, above-the-fold photographs of Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton. " President's Relationship With Daughter of Jewish Doctor May Be Cause of His…

One Friday morning in June 1992, six-week-old Nakya Scott woke up in an apartment in southeast Washington, D.C., and began to cry. Nakya's mother, 19- year-old Latrena Pixley, gave the girl a drink of water, but the crying continued. Frustrated, Pixley put the baby back into her crib. As Pixley…

The first time Frank Luntz met Rep. Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana congressman was drinking beer with his friends in a box at an Orioles game. It was the fall of 1995, and Tauzin had just joined the Republican party after eight terms in the House as a Democrat. Luntz, who makes his living giving…

NOW THAT HIS REPUTATION has been destroyed, his remains dug up from Arlington National Cemetery and returned to San Diego, it's easy to forget the impressive audacity with which M. Larry Lawrence told lies. Below is an unexpurgated example of Lawrence in action. It comes from a 1993 Senate Foreign…

The first law of journalism is that the reporter is the one who gets to ask the questions. It may not be a fair arrangement (though I like it), but it is customary. So it was a little disconcerting when I got a phone call the other day from the subject of an unflattering article I was writing.

In a world brimming with publicity-hungry porn stars and talkative lesbian mud wrestlers, it takes a special kind of politician to win air time on Howard Stern's radio show. Christie Whitman has done it effortlessly. Stern, whose support of the New Jersey governor in 1993 was so effective that she…

Does global warming exist? If so, is it caused by man-made pollutants, or by some natural phenomenon? And if the earth's temperature really is rising, is there anything that can be done to reverse it? Questions like these are debated by responsible scientists all over the world. But you would never…

At the bottom of a stairwell at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., a large oil painting leans against what appears to be a broken shopping cart. The portrait is filthy and badly scratched, its gilt frame smashed at the edges. Wipe the dust away and it is still possible to read the…

The Cat in the Hat doll lying at his feet grinned as Al Gore leaned back in his chair to reflect on the broken state of American politics. It was a little before noon on the first Friday of September. Gore was sitting in an empty classroom at the Woodman Park Elementary School in Dover, New…

MIDWAY THROUGH A PRESS BRIEFING on the last day of July, a reporter asked White House press secretary Mike McCurry if he would "address the allegations that deal with Kathleen Willey and whether or not she was harassed by the president." In the context of a press briefing, the question was not…

FOR A POLITICIAN WHOSE POPULARITY stems from the perception that he doesn't take himself too seriously, Bill Weld has sounded a lot like Joan of Arc lately. At a press conference in Boston last month, the now-former governor of Massachusetts explained that the fight over his nomination to be…

Even at a downtown intersection at 8:45 in the morning, I recognized the man the moment he rapped on my car window. He was wearing a tweed sport coat with leather patches on the elbows and a rep stripe tie. He had a bulky ring of keys in his hand, and he looked frustrated and impatient, like a…

THE SERVICE FOR GAY EPISCOPALIANS and their supporters held at the Church of St. Luke and the Epiphany in downtown Philadelphia last week could have been a reenactment of a civil-rights rally from 35 years ago, and in some sense it was. Sweating parishioners fanned themselves with programs as the…

YOU PROBABLY DON'T HEAR A LOT about global warming these days. But then, you probably don't live in the Republic of Maldives. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom does -- he's the president of the Maldives, in fact -- and last week at the second United Nations Earth Summit in New York, he explained what global…

Probably the weirdest stop on Kelly Flinn's quick journey from disgraced adulteress to feminist hero came on May 11, during her first appearance on 60 Minutes. Correspondent Morley Safer opened the segment by explaining how sexism had destroyed Flinn's brilliant career in the military. In the old…

One Saturday night in early May, Annette Sorensen, a 30-year-old Danish tourist, went to the Dallas BBQ restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with her boyfriend. As the couple drank margaritas inside, their 14- month-old daughter Liv sat outside -- unattended in a stroller on the sidewalk.…

IN MARCH, JAMES A. BAKER III was summoned from semi-retirement and appointed United Nations envoy to the Western Sahara. His charge: to quell a dispute between the government of Morocco and a rebel group over a sparsely populated tract of land. Less than a month later, the former secretary of state…

THE REV. CARLTON VEAZEY is an abortion fanatic. The middle-aged Baptist preacher looks like someone you might see at an Operation Rescue protest. And indeed, Veazey has spent some time at rallies outside abortion clinics, though hardly on behalf of Operation Rescue. Veazey is part of a new strain…

The other day I came across the outline of a book I once tried to write. It was going to be titled New Columbia: A Book on D.C. Statehood. My co- author and I were excited about the idea, and our earnest enthusiasm showed in the pitch we sent to publishers. "The creation of a 51st state," we wrote,…

In 1994, John Miller, chief spokesman for the New York City police department, tried to explain to a reporter just how effective the force had become thanks to a new policy called "community policing." The overall drop in serious crime that year would surely be the greatest ever recorded, Miller…

One week after being sworn in as secretary of defense, William S. Cohen held his first news conference. Cohen's opening statement -- his first substantial public remarks as manager of the most powerful military force in history -- contained a total of 902 words. Cohen devoted 74 of those words to…

The guests at the Washington banquet were just getting their dessert when the image of a woman named Sally Nungesser appeared on two enormous video screens. The videotape of Nungesser showed her standing at a podium making strange facial expressions -- twitching her eyebrows, crinkling her nose,…

Seldom has a politician left public office with more self-generated fanfare than Sen. William S. Cohen. "Last week, I announced that I would not seek reelection to the Senate," Cohen announced for the second time in a January 1996 Washington Post op-ed. "I have been moved by the reaction of my…

"David Gergen doesn't like this? David thinks it's inappropriate? Gee, that'll put me cold in my tracks. I think I'm going to stop." James Carville seems angry and amused at the same time. Yelling into the phone, his already garbled Louisiana speech rendered nearly unintelligible by sarcasm,…

Testifying before Congress in the spring of 1990, Arkansas state health director Joycelyn Elders took an unusual tack in her defense of legal abortion. "Abortion," she said, "has had an important, and positive, public- health effect," in that it has reduced "the number of children afflicted with…

About ten years ago, a gaunt, bald man in sandals walked up to me at Logan airport in Boston and handed me a book. "This is for you, friend," he said, smiling. "I wanted you to have it." The unsolicited gift turned out to be a hard-bound copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the holy Hindu poem, done up in…

It's hard to imagine Ed Rollins playing moralist, but there he was at the National Press Club in Washington last month, a Jeremiah with warm-up jokes. Distrust of the political system has reached dangerous levels among voters, he told his audience; the public is "cynical," even "disgusted," with…

Fraser, Michigan

JESSE JACKSON CAME TO THE END of his prepared speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago last week and decided to keep on talking. Veering from the text, Jackson launched without warning into an account of his father's brushes with racism during the Second World War. In Jackson's telling,…

Intellectuals love to talk about what an emotional medium television is, but it's hard to know exactly what they mean until you meet people who watch a lot of it. I finally understood one day this March when I went on a political show to discuss Ross Perot. During the program I made the point -- in…

Even on cable television, it doesn't get much stranger than the episode of Lenora Fulani's public-access talk show, Fulani!, that aired last month in cities across the country. The program's introduction, a 60-second montage of film clips and still photos set to music, opens with footage of the…

BETWEEN PREPARATIONS FOR traffic snarls, heat waves, and terrorist attacks, city officials in Atlanta had a lot to contend with during the week preceding the opening ceremonies at this summer's Olympic Games. Yet Mayor Bill Campbell and his wife Sharon still found time to organize and host what…

FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE Liberal Media Conspiracy, the lead editorial that ran in the Washington Post on June 17 must have come as something of a surprise. Over the course of 600 sarcasm-laden words, the Post dismissed the notion that the White House had committed anything so innocuous as a…

FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE Liberal Media Conspiracy, the lead editorial that ran in the Washington Post on June 17 must have come as something of a surprise. Over the course of 600 sarcasm-laden words, the Post dismissed the notion that the White House had committed anything so innocuous as a…

Bob Dole's last day in Congress should have amounted to an uninterrupted string of photo opportunities and warmly reminiscent speeches. Instead, he picked a fight with members of his own party. In a TV interview, Dole attacked conservative Republicans -- one of them, Gary Bauer, by name -- who had…

Bob Dole's last day in Congress should have amounted to an uninterrupted string of photo opportunities and warmly reminiscent speeches. Instead, he picked a fight with members of his own party. In a TV interview, Dole attacked conservative Republicans -- one of them, Gary Bauer, by name -- who had…

Joe Trento has a hot tip. Yet the 48-year-old chief reporter for the Washington-based National Security News Service seems strangely nonchalant as he lays out what could be the story of the decade: Bill Clinton was a CIA agent. As Trento tells it, the future president did a lot more than protest…

Joe Trento has a hot tip. Yet the 48-year-old chief reporter for the Washington-based National Security News Service seems strangely nonchalant as he lays out what could be the story of the decade: Bill Clinton was a CIA agent. As Trento tells it, the future president did a lot more than protest…

even by the low standards of academic squabbling, a recent attack on Princeton University professor John DiIulio stood out as unusually intemperate. In a story published in the February 12 Legal Times, a number of his fellow criminologists described DiIulio as a sloppy, dishonest scholar with…

While the rest of the country watched in shock as the bodies of 169 people were carried from the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City last spring, Morris Dees was busy writing direct mail. Just two weeks after the bombing, Dees, famed director of the Southern Poverty Law Center,…

Every year around this time, thousands of college seniors prepare their resumes to send to prospective employers. Cramming a lifetime's worth of experience onto a page or two is apt to be unpleasant for anyone, and for students it is often especially anxietyproducing, a stark reminder that four…

IN HIS RECENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Ben Bradlee sums up the schizophrenic feelings many journalists have about the Pulitzer prize. "First," writes the former editor of the Washington Post, "as a standard of excellence the Pulitzer prizes are overrated and suspect." Less than a page later, Bradlee goes on…

On June 16, 1970, a Nixon White House aide I named Jack Gleason called Ross Perot to ask for money. Months before, Perot had agreed to contribute $ 250, 000 to a secret fund set up by the Nixon administration to finance Republican Senate candidates running in the fall elections. To the exasperation…

The people chanting slogans in front of the Health and Human Services building in Washington one morning in March looked mostly like standard-issue left-wing demonstrators -- angry-faced women wearing backpacks and big earrings, slope-shouldered men with ponytails and workers-of-the-world boots - -…

On the seventh floor of a nondescript office building just north of Dallas, Russell Verney is considering what may be the most pressing question of the presidential campaign season so far: Is Ross Perot crazy? Verney, a former Democratic operative and air-traffic controller from New Hampshire,…

It is the afternoon of the Arizona primary, and James Carville is talking on the phone in his office on Capitol Hill. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his belt unbuckled, Carville is leaning back in his chair with his running shoes on the desk while a friend brings him up to date on the latest exit…

HOPE YOU'RE NOT THE FEARFUL TYPE," says Yehuda Levin, Orthodox Jewish rabbi and national co-chair of the Buchanan for president campaign, as he maneuvers his aging aqua Oldsmobile through the streets of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. "The wipers are on the blink and it's kind of hard to see." In…

Late last year, Walter Anderson, the editor of Parade magazine, was summoned to the White House to meet the president. Anderson had just been nominated to serve as a member of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, a little-known post whose primary perk appears to be a…

Americans may be tired of politics, but you'd never know it from the sales of a book released last month called The Buying of the President.

California governor Pete Wilson recently took one of the most controversial stands of his career -- and it had nothing to do with illegal aliens or affirmative action. Since last summer, Wilson has refused to accept a $ 42 million education grant from the federal government. Although the money has…

HILLARY Rodham Clinton, even if her approval rating is now the lowest ever recorded for a president's wife. The First Lady does have her defenders, and two years ago, a number of them got together and formed an organization called the Back to Business Committee. To hear chairman Lynn Cutler tell…

On December 11, a jury in Wenatchee, Washington, acquitted Robert and Connie Roberson of 14 counts of child molestation. Since March, the Robersons had been in custody, charged with raping children on the altar of their church during Sunday services (Roberson is a Pentecostal minister). For those…

Editor's Note: We'll be on vacation this week, so I've cobbled together some of my favorite Casuals from Standard's past. Should make for good summer reading. Enjoy.

Most people get annoyed when salesmen call during dinner. Not at my house. We love it. A call from somebody hawking burial plots or new long-distance service may interrupt the meal, but it also gives us a chance to play Scare the Solicitor, my family's favorite parlor game. The object is to say…

Jonathan Kozol has made a career out of crying. Over the span of 30 years and nine books, the 59-year-old author has shed tears for nearly every segment of America's mistreated underclass, from illiterate welfare mothers in Boston to migrant farm workers in New Mexico. When you care as much about…

AT THE ENTRANCE TO THAISS PARK, a carefully landscaped patch of grass, trees, and Little League fields just inside the city line of Fairfax, Virginia, stands a bright enamel sign mounted on a steel pole. "AmeriCorps Adopt-a-Spot," it announces in eye-catching letters. Below is the word " LITTER,"…

In June 1993, the Washington Post ran a story about a ballroom- dancing school for children called Mrs. Simpson's Dance Class. The article alleged that Mrs. Simpson's, by its invitation-only enrollment policy, had denied proportionally correct numbers of black students the opportunity to join…

For bored shoppers seeking titillation in the supermarket checkout line, the October i0 issue of the National Enquirer did not disappoint. Sandwiched between write-ups on Mexican wolf boys and Oprah's suicidal niece, one story stood out as the week's most lurid. hockingly, at least 600,000 children…

EARLIER THIS MONTHA LITTLE-KNOWN Washington advocacy group called the Sentencing Project released a report with an unassuming title: "Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System." The 30-page study began with a simple but disturbing claim: "Almost one in three (32.2 percent) young black…

This summer, the House of Representatives moved to cut or eliminate some 130 education programs. Some, however, were so sacrosanct that even the energized Republican budget-slashers let them be. The Even Start Family Literacy Program, beloved by politicians in both parties, survived the brutal…

AS ADVANCE PUBLICITY GOES, Maureen Dowd's column on Malcolm "Steve" Forbes, Jr., the billionaire magazine publisher who announced for the presidency Sept. 22, wasn't the best the candidate could have hoped for. Writing in the New York Times last month, Dowd described the 48-year-old Forbes as…

After 29 years as a patrolman with the Philadelphia police department, Jim McDevitt isn't easily shocked. But he sure seems surprised to learn that Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's ice cream is one of the 110 actors, writers, and intellectuals who signed an August ad in the New York Times calling for a…