One day in late 1983, Bob Kiley and Dave Gunn took a trip to Coney Island. Kiley was the newly appointed head of New York’s huge Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which moves more than a third of the people in the United States who use public transportation. Gunn was the man Kiley was trying to […]
Jonathan Alter
Jonathan Alter, a contributing editor of the Washington Monthly, is a former senior editor and columnist at Newsweek, a filmmaker, journalist, political analyst, and the publisher of the Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter where this piece also appears. He is the author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life. His latest book is American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial--And My Own.
Posted inMarch 1985
The Case for Brotherhood
Taking a hard line on crime doesn’t mean taking delight in punishment.
Posted inJuly 1984
On Political Books
What’s next for Ed Koch? Cover boy, that’s what. The ever-visible Ed has never been more ubiquitous than in the months since publication of his controversial autobiography, Mayor. He’s hit the top of the nationwide best-sellers list, he’s done guest spots on such shows as “Gimme a Break” and ‘All My Children,’ he’s milked the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Posted inMagazine, November 1982
Reagan’s Regulatory Report Card
Government regulation is a bit like sex. (Bear with me for a moment—or would you prefer to read about “cost-benefit analysis” right away?) Most people can agree it’s a necessary thing, but start talking about how much is necessary—and of what variety—and opinions quickly diverge. Liberals generally tend to be permissive in both regards, and […]
Posted inOctober 1982
Jonathan Alter On Political Books
Lou Cannon is the Lou Gehrig of Reagan reporters. He must hold some sort of record for consecutive campaigns covering a politician without being sent to another beat or brought into the front office as an aide. Since 1966, when Reagan first entered politics as governor of California, Cannon has been there to make sure […]
Posted inSeptember 1982
Sam Nunn: Can He Escape the Respectability Trap?
From time to time the political landscape shifts in such a way that an aperture flicks open, revealing with some certainty which issues will dominate the decades ahead, and which people will dominate those issues. One of the issues, of course, is national defense, a subject that relates not only to national security, but to […]
