History
March 3, 2013 — Scott Johnson
James Wagner has found himself in a familiar position and he has dealt with it in the familiar fashion. Speaking as the president of Emory University, he praised one of the constitutional compromises with slavery. Writing in the university’s alumni magazine, Wagner cited the provision counting slaves as three-fifths of the population that determined congressional representation (and electoral votes in presidential elections) as a compromise that should inspire today’s gridlocked
»
March 1, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Yasser Arafat was responsible for the 1973 Black September operation in Khartoum that resulted in the murder of the American ambassador to Sudan (Cleo Noel) and his departing aide (Curt Moore). I read everything I could get my hands on about the operation for the Weekly Standard article “How Arafat got away with murder,” including key cables released by the State Department in the immediate aftermath of the murders. I
»
February 27, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Five years ago today National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. passed away at home, at his desk, while working. NR commemorates his death with a symposium on WFB, an interview with Alvin Felzenberg, and a personal recollection by St. Paul native Larry Perelman. Buckley’s NR editorial colleague Jeffrey Hart opened my eyes to the claims of the great tradition while I had the great good fortune of being his
»
February 23, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I’m at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat. The historian Ronald Radosh — one of my favorites — spoke on a great panel on the culture this afternoon along with Andrew Klavan and Ben Shapiro. After the panel, I caught up with Ron to ask him a few questions on matters of interest to me. I’ve been wrestling with the interaction between iMovie and YouTube to get the
»
February 22, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Today is the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Of all the great men of the revolutionary era to whom we owe our freedom, Washington’s greatness was the rarest and the most needed. At this remove in time, it is also the hardest to comprehend. Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that resulted
»
February 21, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Steve recently recalled the name of former Massachusetts Senator Leverett Saltonstall with fondness. Steve’s recollection prompted this first-hand account by attorney and Power Line reader Bill Levin in which Saltonstall, or at least one of his life lessons, makes a cameo appearance: It is not every day that you get to share a Leverett Saltonstall story involving Eliot Richardson and Judge Bork. During the Bork confirmation hearings, working in the
»
February 14, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
From time to time, John and I celebrate Ulysses S. Grant — his great generalship and solid presidency (my characterizations). But if we celebrate Grant, we should also celebrate Thomas Hamer. For without Hamer, there would have been no Ulysses S. Grant, either literally or figuratively. Hamer was a lawyer in Grant’s boyhood hometown of Georgetown, Ohio, and a close friend of Jesse Grant, father of Hiram Ulysses Grant. But
»
February 14, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Neal Freeman is a former National Review staffer and editor. In 1965, he was detailed to serve as the press secretary in Bill Buckley’s quixotic campaign for mayor of New York. In my paperback copy of Buckley’s campaign memoir, The Unmaking of a Mayor, there is a photograph of an impossibly young and handsome Freeman looking over the draft of a speech with Buckley. Freeman recently drew on his long
»
February 12, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
As Scott reminds us, today is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. It also happens to be the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday. More remarkably, as Jean Yarbrough points out in Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition, Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day — February 12, 1809. Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin on the “Sinking Spring Farm” in Hodgenville, Kentucky, USA. Darwin was
»
February 12, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Henry Ford is reported to have said that “History is bunk.” Reviewing Paula Baker’s new book, Brad Smith reminds us of some history made by Ford: Ninety-five years ago Truman Newberry, a modest, well-mannered scion of an old-money Detroit family, suddenly found himself under federal indictment and his very name synonymous with political corruption. Newberry’s “crime”? He had run for the United States Senate as a long-shot underdog against the
»
February 7, 2013 — Scott Johnson
In writing the first volume of The Age of Reagan, covering the period 1964-1980, Steve Hayward had an inspired idea. He decided to tell the liberal’s side of the story partly from the perspective of Daniel Patrick Moynihan — “the thinking man’s liberal” — whose career spanned the entire period in view. It is one of many great things about the book. Moynihan’s heroic moment came in his brief representation
»
February 4, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
I am against Black History Month because, as argued here, it presents impressionable young students with a distorted, negative view of American History. The following tale is “illustrative” (as Chuck Hagel might say) of that effect and how I once tried, in a very limited way, to counter it. By the time my older daughter Laura reached Sixth Grade, she was on at least her sixth Black History Month. The
»
February 4, 2013 — John Hinderaker
This is, to me, one of the most interesting news stories in quite a while: DNA testing has confirmed that a skeleton dug up under a parking lot in Leicester is that of Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England and one of Shakespeare’s great villains. This is what the skeleton looked like when it was discovered amid the foundations of a Franciscan friary, the very place where historical
»
February 1, 2013 — Scott Johnson
As Paul noted earlier this week, the Senate confirmed John Kerry as Secretary of State Today by a vote of 94-3. Many have noted the record of Kerry’s opinions in American foreign policy is distinguished by its devotion to mischief, error and misjudgment. To take only one small example, Jay Nordlinger documented Kerry’s wayward ways on Latin America in the 2004 National Review article “Back in Sandinista days…,” kindly made
»
January 28, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of the themes of my Age of Reagan books is that to a certain extent Reagan’s administration represented a coalition government, as he had a number of prominent Democrats or ex-Democrats (like Minnesota’s Jeane Kirkpatrick) serving in senior posts. One of the most significant was Minnesota’s Max Kampelman, who passed away last Friday at the age of 92. Kampelman had been very close to Hubert Humphrey, and in fact
»
January 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Brother Mathis has done it again. Not content with provoking me to discourse on the nanny state last week, on Monday Joel produced a column about Martin Luther King Jr. and Obama. Our mutual pal Ben Boychuk suggested on Facebook that our pieces represented a good Right-Left counterpoint about MLK, as Joel’s account mostly follows the conventional liberal narrative, though with caveats that it’s “complicated.” (Isn’t everything “complicated” for liberals?)
»
January 21, 2013 — Scott Johnson
When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for
»
