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Politics
And why you almost never feel them coming
In 1954, the merciless Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin was finally taken down.
An interview with the president and his wife in the Oval Office
My chat with President Reagan in the Oval Office about term limits
There I was, standing outside a room in the White House, ready to have a one-on-one meeting with President Ronald Reagan.
An incidental, oddly enduring acquaintance
During the 1968 election, when I was 14, I became fascinated by politics. With my grandfather’s help, I began collecting political buttons from every presidential election in the 20th century and quite a few in the 19th.
Six aspects of the man - three personal and three political - hint at how posterity will view him.
In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations. Yet they’ve always proved invaluable.
Why do they usually avoid holding conventions in New York?
This summer marks a sea change in the traditions of American party politics.
It was, they believed, a matter of honor.
On June 18, 1804, Alexander Hamilton—a Revolutionary leader, then a framer of the Constitution and a farsighted Treasury Secretary, and now a successful New York lawyer and politician—received a polite but peremptory note from Aaron Burr, the vice president of the Unit
When does a single gaffe sink a campaign?
Alexander Hamilton conceived an America that encouraged huge successes like his own.
The 18th century was an aristocratic age, even in relatively egalitarian America. The elite were the major landowners in the plantation colonies, such as Thomas Jefferson, and the great merchants in port cities, such as John Hancock.
…And the real secret in Strom Thurmond’s past
The dog that saved Eisenhower
On September 23, 1953, Senator Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate for vice president, took to the airwaves in an attempt to save his political career. The Californian had been a rising star ever since he exposed the Communist spy Alger Hiss in 1948.
Two cheerleaders and a Secret Service man's corpse
On November 1, 1950, All Saints’ Day, my twin sister and I joined four other cheerleaders from St.
OUR AUTHOR FEARED THE WORST AND FOUND HE WAS NOT ALONE.
In late 1942, when I was eleven, my parents and I arrived in the United States, refugees from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Fourteen members of my family were not as fortunate, and their ashes lie in the fields surrounding Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Sobibor.
In his last speech as president, he inaugurated the spirit of the 1960s.
Whatever the calendars say, in some figurative sense, America’s 1950s ended, and the 1960s began, on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D.
WHY THE TROUBLE IN FLORIDA WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN
CONGRESS IS TRYING TO LEGISLATE THE HISTORY OF WHAT HAPPENED ON THE EVE OF PEARL HARBOR.
A determined president fires his constitution-defying celebrity general in Korea.
On April 10, 1951 in Washington (April 11 in Asia), President Harry S. Truman removed Douglas MacArthur as the Army’s supreme Asian commander, replacing him with Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway.
WHICH PRESIDENT WILL HISTORY COMPARE HIM MOST CLOSELY TO?
A major new installation at the Smithsonian Institution explores the nation’s biggest and most important job.
OVER THE PAST HALF-CENTURY, POLLING HAS REMADE THE ELECTORAL PROCESS. IS IT HELPING DO THE WORK OF DEMOCRACY MORE EFFECTIVELY OR ERODING IT?
Old-style politics and the death of Edgar Allan Poe
The whole campaign was a sham. It pitted a well-known Washington insider, an incumbent too smart for his own good, against a candidate from the Western boondocks who many thought was simply not up to the job and whom others suspected of having used mind-altering substances.
The miseries of the vice president who goes after his boss’s job
Pity Al Gore. No matter how many times the Democrats’ nominee has switched campaign strategies, advisers, and locales, he has still found himself facing the same basic conundrum: how to run for President from the Vice President’s office. It is a deceptively difficult problem.
When John Adams was elected president, and Thomas Jefferson as vice president, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.
When the two parties gather to select their candidates, the proceedings will be empty glitz, with none of the import of old-time conventions. Or will they?
How bad is it when presidents get really sore?
The rumor first began to spread around Washington last year: Senator John McCain had a skeleton in his closet. Was it something to do with his past as a war hero in Vietnam? His voting record in the Senate?