History
June 13, 2013 — Steven Hayward
John’s post last week on “What Did Lee Atwater Really Say” is a hugely important piece of revisionist journalism, and its theme deserves sustained attention, as the Left these days defaults immediately to calling conservatives and Republicans “racist” because their arguments are otherwise so weak. Notice, in this regard, the new ABC News poll out yesterday finding that a whopping 76 percent of Americans oppose race-conscious college admissions. Rather than
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June 13, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here) is out with the magazine’s usual ration of high-quality reviews and essays. Yesterday we previewed Colin Dueck’s review/essay on the folly of liberals, who mistook the end of the Cold War for the end of geopolitical competition. Today we turn to our very own, very prolific Steven F. Hayward’s review of two books on the postwar revival of free
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June 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review and the author, most recently, of Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream–and How We Can Do It Again, published today. I asked Rich if he would write about the book for Power Line readers on the book’s publication date. Rich has graciously responded as follows: Scott, thanks so much for the invitation to tell your readers a
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June 6, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Professor David Gelernter of Yale University is a man of formidable learning with little patience for phonies. He has detected a tidal wave of phoniness in the celebration of “the greatest generation,” as he wrote in his 2004 Wall Street Journal column “Too much, too late.” As a remedy for the phoniness he detected, Professor Gelernter prescribed the teaching to our children the major battles of the war, the bestiality
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May 28, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Bret Stephens took up the subject of what he called “China eco-boosterism” in his Wall Street Journal column last week (behind the Journal’s subscription wall). It put those dead pigs that turned up floating down the Whampoa river earlier this year in a cruel, if familiar, American context: Once upon a time the future belonged to China—and China was going to be green. Greener than the hills of olde England.
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May 27, 2013 — Scott Johnson
On Memorial Day 2007 the Wall Street Journal published a characteristically brilliant column by Peter Collier to mark the occasion. I don’t think we’ll read or hear anything more thoughtful or appropriate to the occasion today. Here it is: Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for
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May 23, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
John Hay’s The Breadwinners: A Social Study (1883) is hardly a great novel. But it is, I’m confident, the best novel ever written by a future U.S. Secretary of State. And it’s a nice send-up of the “professional reformer” of the late 19th century — precursor of the modern “community organizer.” Indeed, the only fully realized character in The Breadwinners is its villain, a professional reformer. Claiming a commitment to
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May 22, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Writing from memory yesterday morning, I recalled the role George Will had played as National Review’s Washington columnist during Watergate. I was faithfully reading the magazine in 1973 and 1974, and I think I was remembering Will’s NR columns accurately, but I was also recalling an inside account written, I thought, by William Buckley or NR senior editor Jeffrey Hart. I couldn’t find what I was thinking of in Buckley’s
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May 19, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Over a period of decades, Edison Electric Company documented the electrification of southern California in approximately 70,000 photographs. Recently Edison donated or loaned these images to the Huntington Museum, which has now put some of them online. They are historically interesting and, in many instances, aesthetically beautiful. They remind us of the romance of southern California in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Click to enlarge: I like the sign at
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May 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Our friends at RealClearPolitics have posted Steve Chapman’s Chicago Tribune column “The false Nixon equivalence.” It addresses the subject I took up in “Nixon’s IRS” and, more broadly, in “A Watergate footnote.” Chapman makes the case that comparisons of Obama with Nixon in the matter of the current IRS scandal are misguided. I think the comparison is useful. The outrages committed by the IRS under Obama in the past few
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May 18, 2013 — Scott Johnson
One of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon included his alleged misuse of the IRS. Article 2 of the Articles of Impeachment was carefully framed to charge that Nixon “endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens,
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May 15, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
50 years ago, the nation witnessed seven dramatic days in May, as helmeted policemen used dogs and fire hoses against black children chanting freedom songs and hymns in Birmingham, Alabama. More than 3,000 peaceful demonstrators were arrested. The images from those days, including that of Birmingham police chief “Bull” Connor, are indelibly etched in the minds of those of us who saw them, and many of those who have seen
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May 12, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Two of my all-time favorite books on historical subjects unraveled the fraught controversies deriving from cases involving Communist spies. In Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, first published in 1978, Allen Weinstein settled the case referred to in the subtitle. Random House published an updated edition in 1997 and the Hoover Institution has just issued a third edition (the one linked above) in honor of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the book’s publication.
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May 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
John has undertaken a series comparing Benghazigate to Watergate. Benghazigate is still unraveling, so the comparison presents certain difficulties, but we are still in the dark concerning some of the most basic facts regarding the Watergate scandal as well. Nixon spokesman Ron Ziegler characterized Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” The Democrats, by contrast, characterized Watergate as something vastly greater than the crime on the surface. According to Senator Ervin, this
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May 5, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Visiting the site of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale to watch Professor Donald Kagan’s farewell lecture, I found the video below of George Will’s lecture to the group this past January. The lecture provides a short course in the Constitution and the revolt of the Progressives against it, from Wilson to TR and FDR, to LBJ and to Obama. It is learned and vivid, with some pungent
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April 27, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Yale history/classics professor Donald Kagan is a great old-fashioned scholar and teacher. The author of a classic four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, he has written many other books of distinction including Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy and On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace. Professor Kagan is retiring from his position at Yale. He gave his last lecture on Thursday afternoon to a
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April 23, 2013 — John Hinderaker
“Miss me yet?” the billboards asked, early in Obama’s first term. It took a while, but more voters than ever are missing George W. Bush. His approval rating is now up to 47%, right around where President Obama has been in recent weeks. Expect it to keep rising, as Obama makes him look good by comparison. When President Bush left office, I gave his two terms a B-. I won’t
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