History
THOMAS MALLON’S NEW NIXON
With the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in arriving this June, we should prepare ourselves for a deluge of Watergate- and Nixon-related material. This may well be the last good anniversary opportunity to revive and relive this massively frightening, entertaining scandal before the vast majority of those who cared about these matters as they were …
MAESTRO ROBERT CARO
In the Times yesterday, Joe Nocera wrote a column that groused, if I read it correctly, about a man attaining excellence in his life’s work, and gently chided the man, it seems to me, for being great. Nocera, whom I generally admire for his lucid writing about the turgid field of business and economics, took …
AND THE WAR CAME. . .TO PLEASANTVILLE
Many thanks to The Group, who invited me to come speak about And the War Came at their monthly meeting last Friday at the Mt. Pleasant library in Pleasantville. The very attentive audience asked a lot of good questions, and I am very grateful for the chance to come and talk about the origins of …
IRONCLADS AWAY!
Thanks once again to Jackie Eberstein, Charlie Schultze and my other friends at the Civil war Forum of Metropolitan New York for inviting me to speak at their monthly dinner last Wednesday. With the sesquicentennial of the duel between the Monitor and the Merrimac coming up on March 9th, and with Lieutenant John Worden, the …
TOM WICKER, RIP
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 …
END THE TYRANNY OF RULE 22
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 …
IRONY AND THE TERRORIST
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 …
9/11 @ 10: COURAGE
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 …