U.S. air strikes since Friday have opened a corridor through which tens of thousands of Yazidis, trapped and starving on a mountain in Iraq, have escaped to safety in Kurdistan. The Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters were sent reeling by the Islamic State last week, bolstered now by the arrival of U.S. air power, recaptured two [...]
Missing from the retelling of the Watergate story are the astonishing achievements of that most maligned of statesmen in the 20th century. It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion [...]
Increasingly, across this city, the “I” word is being heard. Impeachment is being brought up by Republicans outraged over Barack Obama’s usurpations of power and unilateral rewriting of laws. And Obama is taunting John Boehner and the GOP: “So sue me.” Democrats are talking impeachment to rally a lethargic base to come out and vote [...]
Sen. Carl Levin was aghast. Before his committee sat, unapologetic and uncontrite, Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose company had paid no U.S. corporate income taxes on the $74 billion it had earned abroad in recent years. “Apple has sought the Holy Grail of tax avoidance,” said Levin. “Apple has exploited an absurdity.” […]
President Reagan was holding a meeting in the Cabinet Room on March 25, 1985, when Press Secretary Larry Speakes came over to me, as communications director, with a concern. The White House was about to issue a statement on the killing of Major Arthur Nicholson, a U.S. army officer serving in East Germany. Maj. Nicholson [...]
In the last stanza of “The Battle of Blenheim,” Robert Southey writes: “But what good came of it at last?” Quoth little Peterkin. “Why, that I cannot tell,” said he; “But ’twas a famous victory.” What did it really matter? The poet was asking of the triumph of the Duke of Marlborough — “Who this [...]
“I’ve got a pen,” said President Obama last week. “I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions…that move the ball forward.” “When I can act on my own without Congress, I’m going to do so,” the president added Wednesday at North Carolina State University. Thus did Obama signal that he [...]
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” said Secretary of State Henry Stimson of his 1929 decision to shut down “The Black Chamber” that decoded the secret messages of foreign powers. “This means war!” said FDR, after reading the intercepted instructions from Tokyo to its diplomats the night of Dec. 6, 1941. Roosevelt’s secretary of [...]
Is the Second Reconstruction over? The first ended with the withdrawal of Union troops from the Southern states as part of a deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after the disputed election of 1876. The second began with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a century after Appomattox. Under the VRA, Southern states [...]
President Barack Obama No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached. The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive. The Barack Obama revealed [...]
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade. The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened. Fast forward to our [...]
It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth—a rising, thriving middle class. So said Barack Obama in his State of the Union. And for one of his ideas to reignite that engine, Republicans applauded. “And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic [...]
In that year of happy memory, 1972, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, declared he would chop defense by fully one-third. A friendly congressman was persuaded to ask Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to expatiate on what this might mean. The Pentagon replied the Sixth Fleet might have to be pulled out of the Med, leaving [...]
When, in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you,” and, “Your children will live under communism,” Eisenhower’s America scoffed. By 1980, however, the tide did indeed seem to be with the East. America had suffered a decade of defeats. Southeast Asia had fallen. The ayatollah had seized power in Iran. Moscow had occupied [...]