The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was described beautifully by Gay Talese in The Kingdom and The Power, his amazing book about The New York Times. On the scene in Dallas, Wicker “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas,” wrote Talese. “It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.” To read Wicker’s report, click here. Talk about grace under pressure.

In Slate, Michael Moran argues that much of America’s economic difficulties has nothing to do with actual economic problems, and everything to do with the paralysis of the American political system. “Only about 30 percent of the trouble facing the U.S. today is economic,” he writes. “The U.S. economy, compared with all the other developed economies, is in the best structural and demographic shape to weather this storm and ultimately regain its health. But a cancer does exist: The real problem America faces is political, and once again today, it is on stark display.” Moran blames this problem on Americans who don’t vote in primary elections; by leaving the choice of candidates to the partisans of both parties who tend to favor more extreme standard-bearers. “The result: an American economic crisis that is eminently solvable has been trusted to the hands of political hacks representing fringe minority factions within each political parties whose primary incentive is to avoid providing ammunition to the other side. Thus has our political system turned a simple question of accounting into an economic version of the Arab-Israeli conflict – a conflict for which the solution has been clear for 40 years if only either side were willing to deal with reality.”

Well, sure, but blaming 120 million people is the same as blaming no one. I would point the finger at something simpler: the Senate rule that requires 60 votes to cut off debate on a bill. This is usually incorrectly referred to as the number of votes needed to cut off a filibuster, which often leads people to wonder why a majority party doesn’t challenge the minority party to mount an old-fashioned, stand-on-their-feet, gum-up-the-works, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-type babblethon. In fact, the super majority is what is needed to stop senators from adding amendments to the bill, which can be inconsequential and paralytic.

But the super majority is just a rule of the Senate, as changeable as any. Prior to 1975, Rule 22 of the Senate said that it took two-thirds of the Senate to invoke cloture and end a filibuster; in 1975, that number fell to 60. Thirty-five years later, we can see that 60 is still way too high. I understand that the Senate prides itself on its role as the more deliberative of the two houses, the one less reactionary to tides and trends. But as we see, sixty votes doesn’t protect deliberation; it empowers obstruct. It doesn’t protect minorities; it neuters the will of voters.

Just to be clear, protecting the filibuster may be a long-honored custom, but it ain’t the law of the land. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says “Each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.” For the first 15 or 20 years of the Senate, there was no right to unlimited debate. After that, the right to filibuster was enacted. By 1917, after a long era of Senatorial obstructionism, the two-thirds threshold was established. The Founding Fathers almost certainly did not envision the establishment of any kind of a super majority, because the gave the Vice President the right to break deadlocks in the Senate when the body was “evenly divided.” Now the body can be deadlocked when the vote stands at 59 to 41, a state of affairs that clearly disenfranchises the Vice President. Although I bet most people don’t care about that.

Let’s start a campaign: Bring Democracy to the US Senate. In January 2013, when a new Senate convenes as part of the 113th Congress, it will have to adopt the rules that will govern its proceedings. Those rules will be adopted by a simple majority vote. We must begin a campaign to persuade the Senate to change Rule 22. to either get rid of the super majority, or at very worst, lower the threshold to 55 votes. Since pledge-signing seems all the vogue these days, let’s get the people who are going to run for the Senate in 2012, incumbents and challengers alike, to pledge that they will end the tyranny of Rule 22.

Nothing in John Brown’s life more became him than the way he took leave of it. One of the strangest and most challenging figures in American history, a combination of practical fiasco and undiminished confidence, Brown was a failed tanner, a failed farmer, and in narrow terms, a failed insurrectionist. As much as anybody, he put the blood in Bleeding Kansas; his activities there in the mid-1850s were crowned with the cold-blooded midnight murder and dismemberment at Pottawatomie Creek of four unarmed men who had the misfortune of having a different point of view than the country’s most driven abolitionist.

Brown was a terrorist in the cause of God’s will, no less than Mohammad Atta. Terror was the only thing he was good at, and murderous, bloody terror was what he intended to ignite when he and his platoon of twenty-one true believers seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. The raid was a dismal botch, and within forty-eight hours, Brown and his men had been easily vanquished, ten of them killed in action. Brown himself was bludgeoned into unconsciousness in the final assault on his stronghold in the armory by a marine lieutenant named Israel Green, but only after had attempted to kill him with his sword. Hastily mustered the night before, Green had brought a light ceremonial sword instead of a battle sabre, and when he stabbed Brown, the blade bent in half. Had he successfully killed Brown, it is unlikely that the raid would have inflamed the country as it did, and the incident would eventually have become eclipsed in memory, overcome by other events.

Instead, Brown survived, and in ensuing six weeks, became a most eloquent champion of ending slavery. “I believe that to have interfered as I have done — as I have always freely admitted I have done — in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right,’’ said Brown at his trial. “ Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments– I submit; so let it be done!’’

Throughout the north, and in Europe as well, Brown’s noble attitude elevated him to the status of martyr, and stirred the anti-slavery feelings that in most of the population had been largely latent. Emerson and Thoreau applauded him, John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated him in poetry, and Victor Hugo honored him from abroad. “Living, he made life beautiful,” Louisa May Alcott wrote on the day he died, “Dying, made death divine.” Feelings were stirred in the South, too; the whites of the South were rightly alarmed that a blow had been struck, however ineptly, at their slaveocracy, and were entirely shocked that their northern cousins were far more sympathetic than outraged. Brown may have failed to incite a rebellion, but he had polarized the country, and made the continuation of a country half-slave and half-free an impossibility.

In his excellent new book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, Tony Horwitz has done a terrific job in explaining the raid and its effects. More than anything, he has restored Brown’s humanity. Long portrayed as a fiery-eyed zealot, Brown here is portrayed as a man defined by a willingness to act on his convictions. If slavery was immoral, then acting to end it could not be. Prior to his capture, Brown could be defined by all the things that he wasn’t—a successful farmer, a successful businessman, a shrewd strategist. After his capture, he became the thing he was at his core: a man who saw evil and could not countenance its continuation. Not two years after his execution, as his countrymen took arms against the slaveholder, they went into battle singing that his truth was marching on.

For eight or nine months after 9/11, I felt pretty depressed about the mass murder of people who were exactly like me and who on another day could easily have been me, and about the brutal attack on the city where I had made my home. Sometime in the spring, however, I read an article about a deputy fire chief named Orio Palmer, a marathoner who on 9/11 ran up eighty-some flights of stairs to reach a sky lobby that had been the point of impact, and who took charge of the scene and began directing rescue operations until, quite terribly, the building collapsed.

I cannot say why, but my mood was lifted when I learned about Orio Palmer. His magnificent courage, his steadiness, his calm determination to do what he had trained his whole life to do, just uplifted my entire spirit, and the terrible gloom I had felt for months fell away.

Later I began to collect stories of other acts of courage that day. Like that of Welles Crowther, a 25 year old kid who went to the floor of impact and rescued survivors. Only a handful of people who had been on that floor survived, but all of the ones who survived where helped by Welles Crowther, who himself did not survive. And Rick Rescorla, the old soldier who was head of security of Morgan Stanley, and who got nearly every one of the 500 people in his company out safely, singing as he went the ancient battle song Men of Harlech (amended to reflect his birthplace in Cornwall). He did not survive. Ed Beyea, a quadriplegic who was being carried down the fire stairs in his wheelchair because the elevators were out, and who took himself off the line because he was causing a back up. He did not survive, and neither did his friend Abe Zelmanowitz, who stayed with Ed with rather than leave him to face his fate alone. Dave Karnes, the retired marine from Wilton, Connecticut, who walked out of his office, went home and put on his old uniform, drove down to Ground Zero, and started climbing the wreckage, and who, on that night of 9/11, located two Port Authority officers buried in the rubble, two of the last people to be pulled out of the rubble alive. Bill Feehan, a fire chief who led his men from the front, and like Davey Crockett fighting to his last breath at the Alamo, was pulling rubble off of people with his bare hands when the second collapse overwhelmed him. Jan Demczur, a Polish immigrant window washer who was trapped in an elevator with some other passengers, and who used the handle of his squeegee to scrape through the drywall of the elevator shaft, creating a hole through which he and the others escaped. Bryan Clark and Stanley Prainmath, two men who found themselves alone in an stairwell, and who helped each other escape. What amazed me at the time, what amazes me to this day, is that so few people know these stories.

We cannot help but get swallowed up in the terrible tragedy of the 3000 people who died that morning, but maybe 10,000 people or more survived, thanks to courage and resolve of people like those whose names I’ve mentioned, and many, many more. We think of the event as a tragedy, and it manifestly was, but it was also our Dunkirk. Our inability to allow that view, our inability to recognize the acts of heroism, left us feeling weaker and more fearful, and frankly more vulnerable to the manipulations of our government. But we should not forget: Under the most terrible of conditions, courage emerged. Grace emerged. Determination emerged. Orio Palmer and Rick Rescorla and Welles Crowther rose up and wrestled the lives of thousands from the grasp of our enemies.

(For a time I tried to tell these stories in a screenplay and then later in a graphic history. An artist named Paul Maybury did these sample illustrations. At top, Rick Rescorla, wearing a black suit, leads his people to safety. Below, a triptych showing an isolated Stanley Prainmath escaping to safety with the help of a stranger on the other side of a pile of rubble, Bryan Clark. Thanks once again to Paul for his work and enthusiasm for this project.)

Ryan Adams shot the video for this gem of a song on September 7, 2001. The World Trade Center looms in all its dopey, stolid earnestness throughout the film, oblivious to its imminent destruction. It always chokes me to see this.

Disunion, The New York Times’ series on the Civil War which I helped create and worked on, was honored by the New Media Institute with one of its 2011 New Media Awards. This marks the second award for Disunion, which was honored earlier this year by the American Historical Association for Best History Writing on the web. Disunion was chosen in the field of history, and was selected for how well the site used technology to serve and communicate with its audience. Congratulations to my colleagues who helped create such an interesting site.

I had the great pleasure of talking about And the War Came with Jim Fuller and his friend Bill Walker on WOUB radio in Athens, Ohio. Jim and Bill are very knowledgeable about the Civil War, and it was very rewarding to talk with people who are so well informed and so thoughtful about the issues that surrounded the conflict. I am very grateful that I was invited onto the program. Anyone who wishes to hear the broadcast can listen to it here. Thanks, guys!

Fifty years ago (fifty years ago tomorrow, to be precise), my mom and dad drove my brother and me from our home in Baltimore MD to Culpepper County, Virginia, about sixty miles away, for a centennial reenactment of the first Battle of Bull Run, which took place 150 years ago today. About 2000 reenactors restaged the first great battle of the war for about 70,000 spectators. It was an awfully hot day, about 100 degrees, and my dad declined to pay $4 each for grandstand seating, preferring to maneuver for a slice of shade. Northern newspapers criticized the event: “90 minutes of profuse feigned violence in scorching heat”, ludicrous restaging”, “a grisly pantomine” and a general chiding for staging such pageants while the scars of the war remained unhealed and great issues remained before the nation. True, true, very true. Nonetheless, we loved it!

My dad, Clem Malanowski, took these pictures. I believe his ambitions exceeded his equipment and his skill, but I like some of these shots quite a bit: the troop in the top photo, with the unfurled Stars and Bars and their gallant brigadier with his sword and the lovely crinolined ladies on the right (God, think of the sweat!); my brother Matt and me (wearing a Confederate cavalry hat with the left brim dashingly upturned, plus a canteen on a strap), posing with a Yankee reenactor; the spectators, who even from the back look all abuzz (the men’s straw hat industry has been clobbered by the universal appeal of the baseball cap); a rebel artilleryman, ramrodding something into the barrel of his Parrot gun; and the rather bulky statue of General Thomas Jackson, standing like a stone wall at the battle where he earned his name, in a cape that he doubtless did not wear during the battle 150 years ago today.

People may not realize, but many institutions and groups made special efforts to mark the centennial, not the least of which was Life magazine, which, with its visual eclat and dexterity, was still at its peak as an American institution. Life published a six part history of the war, the highlights of which were a series of fourteen full-page or double=page paintings of battles, which to my eight year-old mind, were some of the most stunning images I had ever seen. For the first Battle of Bull Run, the editors chose Stanley Meltzoff, an artist known primarily for his painting of fish and sport fishing. Meltzoff decided to depict the scene where a stampeded Union army ran into the gaggle of spectators who had come down to watch the splendid battle, resulting in clogged chaos on the Warrenton Turnpike. Meltzoff brilliantly assembled in one scene a group of individuals who in all likelihood did not run into one another, and created a thought-provoking, emotionally moving painting. From left, by the cannon: Alfred Waud, the noted Civil War artist, works at his sketch pad; a vivandiere mourns a dead soldier, while behind her another stands with a pistol, just to the right of William Howard Russell, the famous war correspondent of the London Times, looking through binoculars; at center, photographer Matthew Brady, in a white duster, who has lost his camera but found a sword, walks between two Zouaves; a drunken officer, reported to have been wearing two hats, is above a despondent young picnicker; at right, in the carrriage, Judge Daniel McCook, transporting the body of his son Charles, an 18 year-old private in an Ohio regiment. The 63 year-old judge had ridden with several congressmen to join the fight; by happenstance he met up Charles, who met his death later that day. here shown .

Yes, that’s me in The Daily Briarcliff today, shown standing in Law Park, talking about And the War Came. Thanks to Tien-Shun Lee for a terrific article. To see it in its entirity, click here.