Columns, pieces and posts
I am thinking about the moment in history in which we are immersed, and as usual my mind turns to the words of a great writer of the movies. In Robert Bolt’s screenplay of “Doctor Zhivago,” Lara and Zhivago, near the end of their drama, are huddled at his family’s old estate in the Ural […]
The pope’s trip to the Americas has ended in Mexico with the canonization of the fabled Juan Diego of Guadalupe, the 464th saint recognized by the church since John Paul’s papacy began. The pontiff has now recognized more saints than all his predecessors combined. His readiness to canonize is in service of an eagerness to […]
It is hot in New York. It is so hot that once when I had a fever a friend called and asked me how I felt and I said, “You know how dry and hot paper feels when it’s been faxed? That’s how I feel.” And how I felt all day yesterday. It is hot. […]
Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don’t know because he won’t say, at least not in public. Which is itself unusual. Silence is the refuge of […]
I mark the coming holiday remembering the words of a friend of Samuel Johnson, who said, “I meant to be a philosopher, but happiness kept breaking through.” Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, and we must celebrate. Let us hold high a single sparkler to honor those American institutions that, in this interesting year, did […]
Three scenes. It is a spring day in the early 1990s and I am talking with the head of a mighty American corporation. We’re in his window-lined office, high in midtown Manhattan, the view—silver skyscrapers stacked one against another, dense, fine-lined, sparkling in the sun—so perfect, so theatrical it’s like a scrim, like a fake […]
Dear Karen Hughes, The results are in, a consensus is forming, we want you onboard. It appears we hit a nerve last week when we asserted that Homeland isn’t really an American sort of word but a European, or rather Teutonic, sort of word, and should be retired as the name of the government’s new […]
Will President Bush get his proposed Department of Homeland Security through Congress? Yes. Should he? Yes. Why? Because what preceded it didn’t work; because it is what we have at a moment when time is of the essence; because an administration that has the responsibility of keeping the nation safe from terrorists must be given […]
In October 2001, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, an essayist who had worked in the U.S. government summed up the genesis of the tragedy this way: It was a catastrophic systems failure, a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure of the systems on which we rely for safety and peace. Another way to say […]
Every big speech has a text and a subtext. When Ronald Reagan spoke at Normandy on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, in 1984, his text consisted of a remembrance of what had happened there on the beaches on that day in 1944. He spoke of the efforts of the English and Scots brigades, the Americans, […]