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Politics
The La Follette children grew up in the painful brilliance shed by an illustrious father.
“One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a president,” Franklin Roosevelt once said.
No Chief Executive has ever made it out of the White House without being scalded.
Remember Admiral Bobby Ray Inman? He was the Clinton Secretary of Defense-designate with a short fuse and an even shorter career as a nominee.
The Johnsons and the Kennedys are popularly thought to have shared a strong mutual dislike, but stacks of letters and a remarkable tape of Jacqueline Kennedy reminiscing show something very different and more interesting.
When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died four months ago, magazine and newspaper articles published around the world celebrated the facts of her life. And the fables too, as it turns out.
“Tilden or blood,” cried the newspapers, but the man himself wouldn’t lift a hand for the presidency.
Sushi and sashimi are being brought out in Shuji’s Restaurant in New Lebanon, New York, around twenty-five miles from Albany, with the sliced ginger and that boiling-hot green pastelike stuff you mash into the soy sauce.
A newly discovered document almost certainly written by the young Abraham Lincoln shows him dismantling a shifty political rival with ruthless wit and logic.
As soon as he moved to Illinois in 1830, Abraham Lincoln found himself on the opposite side of the political fence from Peter Cartwright, a well-known Methodist preacher and politician.
A long-time Republican-party insider and close student of its past discusses how the party has changed over the years, for better and for worse, and where it may be headed.
Jack Kemp was born in 1935 in Los Angeles; his father owned a small trucking company. He came of political age in a time and place that made it likely enough that he would become a lifelong Republican, and he did.
First Ladies have been under fire ever since Albert Gallatin called Abigail Adams “Mrs. President.”
I am informed that, whenever Rush Limbaugh has cause to mention Hillary Rodham Clinton, he cues in “Hail to the Chief” as background music. There’s nothing like subtlety.
Jack Kennedy came into the White House determined to dismantle his Republican predecessor’s rigid, formal staff organization, in favor of a spontaneous, flexible, hands-on management style. Thirty years later, Bill Clinton seems determined to do the same thing. He would do well to remember that what it got JFK was the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.
In early October of 1963, Representative Clement Zablocki, a Wisconsin Democrat, led a House Foreign Affairs Committee fact-finding delegation to South Vietnam. Invited to the White House when he returned, Zablocki told President John F.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stood together in America’s perilous dawn, but politics soon drove them apart. Then, in their last years, the two old enemies began a remarkable correspondence that is both testimony to the power of friendship and an eloquent summary of the dialogue that went on within the Revolutionary generation and that continues within our own.
It is a bromide by now to say that the voters last November were in an anti-incumbency frame of mind. Not only did they turn out the sitting president, but in at least fourteen states they approved measures to limit the tenure of the men and women they send to Congress.
Gilbert Stuart flattered himself that the prominent men and women whose portraits were his fortune admired him almost as much for his good manners and genial gossip as for his skilled artist’s hand.
When, some years ago, Nigel Hamilton, the English biographer of Field Marshal Montgomery, told an American friend that he hoped one day to write about John F. Kennedy, the friend protested that there were already far too many books about Kennedy and his family.
William Randolph Hearst was a journalist, politician, art collector, and bon vivant with a passion for power, possessions, and women.
In 1935, Fortune magazine published a profile of the Hearst empire, which said that William Randolph Hearst’s assets—28 newspapers, 13 magazines, eight radio stations, two movie companies, inestimable art treasures, rea
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
When Ross Perot dropped like a stone out of the presidential race last July, he gave as his ostensible reason the fear that the contest would end up in the House of Representatives because no candidate could win a majority in the Electoral College.
An extraordinary new historical novel begins with the great political scandal of the 1970s, then visits the great political scandal of the 1820s.
The two-party system, undreamt of by the founders of the republic, has been one of its basic shaping forces ever since their time.
Most of our presidents have been avid athletes, even Taft. Could a party safely nominate an overweight and unabashed couch potato who scorned exercise?
Right now, of course, it is the coming election that provides most of the material on which this column casts its regular history-conscious eye. But not this time. September is the month of pennant races, and I’ve got baseball as well as Presidents on my mind.
Even paranoids have enemies, the old joke runs. And according to Driven Patriot, the elegantly crafted new biography of James V.
Thus did Franklin Roosevelt characterize the man who was to be his running mate in 1944 and, as everyone at the astonishing Democratic Convention knew, almost certainly the next president. Here is FDR at his most devious, Harry Truman at the pivot of his career, and the old party-boss system at its zenith.
The elder statesman sets the record straight on JFK, LBJ, Stalin, the bomb, Charles de Gaulle, Douglas MacArthur, and, most of all, the American presidency.
I can still see Harry and Bess Truman coming toward us across the crowded terminal of the Kansas City airport on that night in 1970, their 86-year-old faces pinched and almost grim with concern.
They have finally done it. The networks, hard-pressed for cash, have not only pooled their coverage of this summer’s national party conventions but reduced it to a selection of “highlights” chosen by the editors.
It was 1956, and Adlai Stevenson was running against Dwight Elsenhower for president. People who supported Stevenson tended to feel an almost personal emotion for him, and I felt as if a beloved relative were running.
As a college sophomore in 1960, I had little interest in politics, except that the woman I was dating was a member of the Young Democrats on campus.
A clipping selected at random from a generous stack tells me that the would-be Democratic candidate Tom Harkin is pitching a “populist, sharply partisan message.” I get the impression that the two adjectives are interchangeable.
On the 20th anniversary of Watergate, a recently discovered diary reveals a similar conspiracy four decades earlier.
Lawrence O’Brien, the head of the Democratic National Committee at the time of the Watergate break-in, was not the first O’Brien burglarized on behalf of the GOP. Forty-two years earlier, James J.
Writing a biography is an act of self-discovery.
It’s vice-presidential agony time again.
"Down with the debunking biographer,” Lyndon Johnson wrote in his college newspaper in 1929. “It now seems to be quite a thing to pull down the mighty from their seats and roll them in the mire. This practice deserves pronounced condemnation.
In April of 1951, I was ten years old and living with my family on Chicago’s South Side when the newspapers reported that General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was to be paraded past our neighborhood as part of the clamorous tour of American cities that followed his recall from