Thirty years ago this week, rumors began circulating about the supposed extramarital affairs of Sen. Gary Hart, the leading candidate for the 1988 Democratic nomination for President.
In response, Hart challenged the media. He told The New York Times in an interview published on May 3, 1987, that…
She was perhaps the most beautiful ocean liner ever built. Her three funnels (the aftmost a dummy) were raked and diminished in size from fore to aft. This gave her the sleek, powerful, forward-driving look that was the essence of the art deco style that so inspired her interior design. And in her…
It has all the hallmarks of an urban legend. A Midwestern state (which one varies with the telling) was so unsophisticated that its legislature once passed a law declaring the value of the mathematical constant pi to be 4 (or 3, or 3.2, or some other simple, exact number) instead of, as every…
Today is Alexander Hamilton’s 250th birthday. Unless, of course, it’s his 252nd. He claimed to have been born in 1757, but there is considerable nearly contemporary evidence that he was actually born in 1755. But there is no argument that he was not yet 50 when he died at the hands of Aaron Burr…
Gerald Ford was perhaps the most gifted natural athlete ever to occupy the White House. Captain of his high school football team and on the varsity of a major football power, the University of Michigan—where he was voted the most valuable player in 1934—he excelled as well in swimming, skiing,…
A new look at a man who “three Presidents served under.”
Andrew Mellon (1855-1937) was the most historically significant secretary of the treasury since at least Salmon P. Chase during the Civil War and perhaps since Alexander Hamilton himself. Appointed by Warren Harding in 1921 he served until…
Pork is not a partisan issue and not a new one. The term “pork barrel” is over a century old in its political sense, an allusion to the regular handing out of joints of salted pork, stored in barrels, by plantation owners to slave families before the Civil War. Because it is believed with nearly…
I did not mean to imply that Alger Hiss passed atomic secrets to the Russians. I used the atomic secrets image only as an example of a serious disclosure of classified information, as opposed to the trivial “outing” of someone who has had a desk job at Langley for the last several years and is such…
The Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to the British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter. The good news, I suppose, is that at least I knew who he was when I learned about his prize. That is a good deal more than can be said for Elfriede Jelinek, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Imre…
Ellen Feldman writes that post-election fatigue is an unlikely reason for President Bush’s recent troubles, given “the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina.” I’ve taken a few cheap shots myself over the years, so I don’t much mind this rather gentle one, especially as I’m…
