"When a man is in his thirties, the idea of serving in somebody else's presidential administration can be exciting; in one's fifties, it merely...
Media’s Legal Victories
"When the media win a court case, we all hear about the victory; when they lose, “the issue” (in the words of the New York Times upon one such...
Media and the Kennedy Administration
"Where, in the case of the Kennedy presidency—the apotheosis of an imperial clan if there ever was one—was the media's alleged “inherent bias...
Correcting Argument Mistakes
"While mistakes ought to be admitted as promptly and economically as possible, care ought to be taken to fill the resulting hole in the line of...
Nixon’s Betrayal of Conservatives
"There is no sadder chapter in the whole history of American conservatism than that which describes how Richard Nixon, in whom the majority of...
Stoic Response to History
"to resist the inevitable as stoutly as one can … it may not be inevitable after all—my notion of the future may be mistaken. In the second place,...
Lessons of Watergate
"Watergate teaches us, too, the virtues of having politicians, rather than mere managers and technicians, operating the levers of ultimate power....
Decline of U.S. Strength Perception
"We labored for at least two decades to persuade the rest of the world that we are a paper tiger. We succeeded, and the world is acting...
Leadership and Conviction
"The struggle for survival must not be led, on behalf of the American society, by some doubt-ridden egghead exquisitely poised between Yea and Nay....
Political Conversation vs. Reality
"The talk of politicians when they let their hair down bears very little resemblance to dinner-table chatter in a well-run vicarage, and Mr. Nixon,...
Media and Liberal Realignment
"The truth … is that American liberals lost effective control of the Johnson administration and its agenda in or about 1966, when Johnson's Great...
The Gamble of Mass Democracy
"The untested assumption required us to suppose that such an electorate, or at least a majority of its members, would be capable of exercising the...