Jeff Greenfield

Washington Post reporter John F. Harris, who covered the White House during Clinton’s last six years, has made the most ambitious effort thus far: to chronicle the Clinton years in the context of the era’s political trends and to connect the successes and failures of his presidency back to his character. It is a scrupulously […]

Four years ago, it seemed clear that even the most desperate of measures by Karl Rove and company would not save President Bush from defeat. Though the astonishing events of the third debate–Vice President Dick Cheney emerging from the wings dragging a humbled and repentant Osama bin Laden by the scruff of his neck–had given […]

His last book, Wealth and Democracy, was a modulated but unmistakable work of anger at what he saw as the accumulation of enormous unearned wealth at the top of an ever-narrowing pyramid that has left the average American facing economic vulnerability and political impotence. With American Dynasty, Phillips has put modulation aside; this is nothing […]

Measured by its length, and by the passions it stirred, Nixon’s Shadow stretches across our history more as a shaping event–say, the Civil War–than as an individual. To find something fresh to say about this figure may seem impossible. But David Greenberg, in his first book, pulls it off. By focusing not on what Nixon […]

In those days of peace and prosperity, America was, in the words of one observer, “a hotbed of rest.” But what, I kept wondering, if we were in a different climate? What if the United States had been divided by an unpopular war, or by intense racial and cultural divisions? What if great numbers of […]

On March 4, 1841, about an hour and a half into the longest inaugural address in American history, President William Henry Harrison turned from his clause-by-clause celebration of the Constitution to warn of the lessons posed to the American republic from ancient Rome: “[T]he senate continued to meet in the temple of liberty to talk […]