“The United States of America—the greatest potential force, material, moral, and spiritual, in the world.” —G. Lowes Dickinson For Paul Johnson, American history was a non-subject in his days at Oxford and its School of Modern History in the 1940’s. “Nothing was said of America, except insofar as it lay on...
Not too far from my house in Phoenix, Arizona, stands a Christian school that may just say everything about the educational reform debate in this country—and why it is so often impossible to make any sense of it, in particular. One assumes that what this school has to offer is back-to-basics education, superior teachers, a...
“‘Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.” —William Shakespeare “Just the facts, ma’am.” Joe Friday’s prescription for getting at the truth has been followed by Seymour Hersh, whose investigation of the secret life of John F. Kennedy, America’s “prince of the people,” is peppered with facts as recalled by...
Not too long ago, the London Daily Telegraph resurrected a 1962 essay by Ian Fleming on “How to Write a Thriller,” in which the creator of James Bond said, “If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have one quality: you simply have to turn the page.”...
Larry Naman had had enough of arrogant and unresponsive politicians, and so he shot one. This past summer, the (media-described) drifter took aim and shot at the head of Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox—a run-of-the-mill politician in Phoenix, known primarily for how loud and how often she can shout “police brutality.” But thanks to...
Procrastinating readers can pat themselves on the back if they waited to pick up David Rieff’s Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World until it came out in paperback. For one thing, the Los Angeles riots, which so captivated television-transfixed Americans for a couple of days last year until the weekend arrived and the networks...
Newcomers to Arizona, among whom I count myself, are sometimes startled to discover just how liberal are the gun laws in one of the nation’s most conservative states. As long as it’s not concealed, carrying a gun is almost as acceptable to Arizonans as a saguaro cactus—although businesses may ask you to cheek your weapon...
One of the problems with treating an event like Watergate as history is that, for most of us, it isn’t. The “third-rate” burglary that became a constitutional crisis leading to the only resignation of a sitting President in our history may be two decades old, but it is still very much with us. In last...
“Democracy is Lovelace and the people is Clarissa.” —John Adams I was born in 1946, right in the middle of Harry Truman’s accidental and tumultuous first term as President. I have no memory of the man until one early November morning in 1952, when my mother and grandmother were discussing the election of Dwight Eisenhower....