On March 2, 1982, a date the residents of Weirton, West Virginia, still enunciate with divorce-court exactness, the National Steel Company issued an ultimatum to the workers at its Weirton mill. Either they would have to buy the aging mill and operate it themselves, or else National would gradually shut it down
Posted inMagazine
The All Purpose Made-to-Order Korean Airliner Tragedy Story
In the wake of the Korean airline tragedy in September, conservatives and liberals have attempted to explain the incident in light of their political views. Unfortunately, since so little evidence has emerged so far that reveals what really happened, these explanations have been largely speculative. The Washington Monthly, however, has managed to obtain advance galleys of dramatic, narrative accounts of the demise of KAL 007 that will be appearing shortly in three leading magazines: Paranoid Review, The New Apologist, and The Moscow Monthly.
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Values, Personal Choice, and The Failure of Liberalism
Do you remember the 1980 Republican convention? Think back for a minute and you’ll recall that there was a five-word mantra that recurred over and over—it was printed on the platform, repeated by speaker after speaker, even hoisted on banners. The five words were family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom; they were cojoined by a little-known speechwriter named […]
Posted inDecember 1983
South Vietnam: The Puppet as Puppeteer
It’s now exactly 20 years since Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu were found murdered in the back of an armored car. Of the dozens of decisive moments in the history of the Vietnam war, the Diem coup and the chaos in Saigon that immediately followed are beginning to look especially significant. Suddenly in […]
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Community Without Conformity
A couple of years ago I came across a huge set of photographs taken all over the United States in the 1940s. They struck me with great force, mostly because they seemed to direct attention irresistibly toward what might be called the American character. While the pictures showed a country in some ways vastly more heterogeneous than […]
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The Heart of a New Machine
Once owners can talk to their computers directly and receive an original response, the illusion of human interaction will be nearly complete.
Posted inMarch 1983
Harvard vs. Democracy
Readers of The Boston Globe awoke one morning in 1981 to a peculiarly revealing story about Harvard. It seems that administrators at the John F. Kennedy School of Government were contemplating a name change to bring the school into conformity with Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, whose professional cachet they envied and whose […]
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Today’s Best Journalism: Better Than Fiction
The sensation that Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent caused when it was published in 1959 can be taken as a sign of how hungry the nation was at that moment for some sense of the texture of modern Washington. Today it seems incredible that Advise and Consent could have made the earth move—it’s terribly dated, a routine procession of […]