A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian reflects on his friend and mentor, the founder of this magazine, who died on Thanksgiving Day at 96.
Jon Meacham
Jon Meacham, a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, is a historian, writer, and the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Posted inMagazine, November/December 2019
The Man Who Invented Celebrity Politics
How Walter Winchell created the media environment that enabled Trump’s rise.
Posted inMagazine
The Savage South
The ultimate answer from President Grant’s Washington about whether federal troops could establish order and enforce the laws–laws that would have allowed blacks to vote–was depressing and epochal: No. As usual, politics was paramount: Grant later recalled that Ohio Republicans prevailed on him to hold off from intervening in state affairs to placate national Republican […]
Posted inMagazine
From Here to Eternity
Now comes a new offering from Hanson, Ripples of Battle, which once again has a strong resonance with the events of the day. This book arrives in an uneasy climate, a time that seems less certain than the months after September 11. In the long run, will the war with Iraq ignite a democratic revolution […]
Posted inMagazine
The Son Also Rises
Nearly a decade ago, just before Al Gore joined Bill Clinton on the 1992 ticket, I happened to spend a day with the young senator back home in Tennessee. I was a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and had been assigned to do a “day in the life” piece on Gore; we spent most of […]
Posted inMagazine
Whittle, Down to Size
Everything you really need to know about Chris Whittle sits in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. There, the media mogul has erected a $55 million headquarters that relentlessly replicates Thomas Jefferson’s spread at Charlottesville. With its red-brick arches, wrought-iron gates, and 120-foot clock tower, it’s a massive, unexpected building—rich, as Whittle has said, in “energy and youthful spirit.” […]
Posted inMagazine
Dukedumb
No doubt about it, David Duke was a hell of a story. For political reporters, the former Klansman’s Louisiana campaigns were relics of the segregationist South, bracing proof that the old Confederacy’s worst instincts are still alive. For high-brow essayists, Duke emerged as a symbol of the struggle between good and evil in the American mind—a […]
