I just got off the phone with a legendary spy. Well, let me amend that: a legendary counterspy. Legendary at least to those who have followed the twists and turns of one of the great unresolved spy mysteries of the past century, one of the secret pivots in the clandestine history of the Cold War: Read More
It's kind of like going back in time. Tomorrow morning KT McFarland will join Robert McFarlane, Reagan's national security advisor, for one of her K.T. "kitchen talks" at the house of some emigrees from the Soviet Union. And in the evening, she has that fund-raiser (pdf of invite here) with Henry Kissinger, General P.X. Read More
James Carroll claims to have left the priesthood in the early 1970’s. House of War suggests otherwise. This history of the Pentagon is Mr. Carroll’s Stations of the Cross, performed in penance for the sins of America’s military-industrial complex. House of War is not about the Pentagon as an institution or even as a symbol. Read More
In this pungent and partisan book, John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University, comes not only to bury the Cold War but to praise it—as a conflict freighted with fear that “ended in a triumph of hope.” In the decades following World War II, communism seemed to be on the march and Read More
It remains to be seen whether George W. Bush’s boast about his drug plan will rival his “mission accomplished” swagger on the deck of that aircraft carrier. One thing for sure is that it’s the equal in user friendliness to the income-tax form. No one who gives a damn about the people needing the plan Read More
Those are Ladbroke's odds against New York's winning the 2012 Olympic Games. And if you want a sense of the hunger for good news, and what some might call wishful thinking, over at NYC2012, the metaphorical champagne corks were popping there when the bookie cut the odds from 50-1. But while the professional Read More
Old editions of the Yale Songbook included a German drinking song called "The Pope." This was its first stanza: "The Pope, he leads a jolly life / He's free from every care and strife. / He drinks the best of Rhenish wine, / I wish the Pope's gay life were mine."
But the next stanza decided Read MoreLike many people of my generation in this country, I grew up reading books that were illustrated by the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971). His bold, black-and-white graphic style made an emphatic impression on young readers, and his illustrated editions of Shakespeare and other literary classics-his Moby-Dick was a great favorite of mine-were often awarded Read More
With smoke still billowing like a funeral pyre from the
ruins of the World Trade Center, cries could be heard for vengeance against an unseen and unknown enemy who left no return address. Hunting down and punishing the "folks" who did these things will test the nation's patience, although it is far more important to be Read MoreFor Norman Birnbaum, capitalism is all stick, no carrot.
After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century , by Norman Birnbaum. Oxford University Press, 432 pages, $35. The "socialism" Norman Birnbaum extols in After Progress is what most Americans would call communism. Mr. Birnbaum, Georgetown University law pro- fessor and founding editor Read MoreHarry Gold , by Millicent Dillon. Overlook Press, 280 pages, $26.95.
Six years ago, when I came to New York from the Midwest to seek my fortune as a writer of the intellectual sort, I developed an obsession with an obsession. Colleagues in my adopted city could not stop arguing about the Communist Party of the Read MoreA few weeks before Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited Washington, I was talking with an old-style liberal anti-communist: a man who was a Democrat in domestic and social matters, but who had decried the Soviet Union all the years of the Cold War. I began to doubt it, though, when he warmed to his theme, Read More
