Columns, pieces and posts
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, […]
Let me tell you what I think of the criticism that President Bush (a) reversed a half century of Republican philosophy on free trade and caved in on tariffs, and (b) accepted and endorsed a big-government farm bill that was so greasy, pork-filled and fat-laden that if you took the Farm Security and Rural Investment […]
How is George W. Bush doing? In Washington the past weekend everyone I spoke to answered that question by referring to the recent USA Today poll that said the president’s popularity continues undiminished and, amazingly enough, for reasons apart from the war. People like him. They respect him. Almost eight in 10 said they thought […]
“Former President Bill Clinton met with NBC executives Wednesday in Los Angeles to discuss hosting his own talk show, according to several television sources.”—Los Angeles Times, front page, May 2 As befits our subject, I will begin this piece with an assertion of my brilliance. Years ago when asked what I thought Bill Clinton would […]
The coming departure of Karen Hughes has been covered every which way but mostly as a story about a modern woman who, having it all, decided to relinquish some of it, at least for a while, so she could lead a more personally enjoyable life back home, in Texas, with her son in a local […]
This week an old giant returned to speak of what roils us. His words were welcome, heartening and necessary. But they were not, I think, sufficient. In Rome John Paul II, our warrior-saint of a pope, addressed, finally, the sex scandals that continue to rock the American Catholic Church. Now the pope is a great […]