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Politics
As I write these lines, another mid-term election has gone into the books, without profound impact on the nature of things.
Governor Mario Cuomo of New York has used history as a guide and a solace for a good part of his life.
Those who see Governor Mario Cuomo of New York for the first time are likely to be surprised.
In the autumn of 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt was spending what seemed to Washington insiders like a remarkable amount of time in the company of the congressman from the Tenth District of Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Nearly a hundred years ago, two rival cities fought hard and dirty to win the battle of numbers.
In mandating a national census every ten years, the framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned a counting, not a bashing, of heads.
An hour and a half of growing astonishment in the presence of the President of the United States, as recorded by a witness who now publishes a record of it for the first time
Some 20 years ago, a friend let me leaf through several photograph albums compiled by his grandfather, an Army surgeon who had spent the 1880s and 1890s stationed at dusty Western outposts, helping to keep a wary eye on the Indians, only recently subdued.
Corruption must be fought in ways that preserve fairness and freedom. Otherwise, the reformers can be as bad as the rascals.
One balmy summer morning this year, the headlines sang a song of scandal. GINGRICH’S PAY TO AIDES IN 2 RACES RAISES QUESTION OF RULE-BREAKING, said one.
A year ago, we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted that this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the republic.
Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s honeymoon was a lavish grand tour through a sunny, hospitable Europe. It was also filled with signs of the mutual bafflement that would one day embitter their marriage.
The captain of a transatlantic liner was his ship’s social arbiter as well as her commander. In consultation with the purser—and often only after contacting the home office—he carefully surveyed the passenger list, selecting from it for his own table in the great dining saloon that handful of men and women whose prominence was so obvious that even the most socially ambitious travelers would be willing to accept assignment elsewhere.
The battle over John Tower’s nomination as Secretary of Defense earlier this year goes down as one of those struggles that whirled trivial and profound issues in the blender of journalism and produced a somewhat mystifying concoction.
Seven days into his presidency, George Bush held a quick, almost spur-of-the-moment news conference in the White House press room, something like a student voluntarily subjecting himself to what once upon a time was known as a snap quiz.
"Memoirs,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once told young Richard Goodwin, “are the most unreliable source of historical evidence.
Almost 50 years after Whittaker Chambers first told a government official that Alger Hiss was a communist, and 40 years after Chambers’ charge was finally made public, Hiss has written Recollections of a Life, billed by its publisher as
Martin Van Buren had his eye on the presidency for most of his political career, and he managed to pave the way to the White House door first for Andrew Jackson and then for himself. His son John was evidently less ambitious.
Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then, the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But, after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860 retains its terrible urgency.
In the crowded months between the beginning of the 1860 presidential campaign and the attack on Fort Sumter, it is easy now to see the emergence of Abraham Lincoln as something preordained, as though the issues had manufactured a figure commensurate with their importance.
To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign.
The American political campaign as we know it today was born on August 28, 1934, when Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author and lifelong socialist, won the Democratic primary for governor of California.
Joseph McCarthy’s fall from favor after the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings was precipitous enough to satisfy all but his most unforgiving victims.
The distasteful questions we ask our presidential hopefuls serve a real purpose.
Has the press gone too far?” is a question that has been asked more frequently in this presidential campaign than any other.
Union Station in wartime Washington. A young man in a Navy uniform escorts a short, stocky blonde woman in her 50s along the crowded platform toward a waiting train.
It’s not surprising that Democrats seek to wrap themselves in the Roosevelt cloak; what’s harder to understand is why so many Republicans do, too. A distinguished historian explains.
Despite his feeling that “we are beginning to lose the memory of what a restrained and civil society can be like,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, and a lifelong student of history, remains an optimist about our system of government and our resilience as a people.
My father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen and is now, at 59, the senior senator from his home state.
It took place in 1948, and it was orchestrated, with difficulty, by the program director of a faltering Portland, Oregon radio station. He persuaded two Republican candidates to argue formally about an actual issue, with no moderator.
In October 1984, President Ronald Reagan and Senator Walter Mondale came together on the same platform in Louisville, Kentucky, and again in Kansas City, Missouri. Correspondents tossed questions at them; each answered.
A brilliant demagogue named Huey Long was scrambling for the presidency when an assassin’s bullets cut him down just 50 years ago.
In May 1932, Louisiana’s flamboyant senator, Huey Pierce Long, told a throng of newspapermen to prepare for a headline-making announcement.
He had all the right qualities. Only the time was wrong.
It’s been a long time since anyone put in a good word, or in fact any kind of word at all, for Franklin Pierce. I am a New Hampshire man who lives not far from the house where the 14th president was born and who therefore grew up, so to speak, beneath his paling shadow.
Only ten of our 40 presidents have written accounts of their time in the White House.
30 years after judging Eisenhower to be among our worst presidents, historians have now come around to the opinion most of their fellow Americans held right along.
Critics charged that Ike was spineless in his refusal to openly fight Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Secret recordings made in the Oval Office of the President in the autumn of 1940
INTRODUCTION BY ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.