I had my job interview at The Washington Monthly in February 1976. Everything went extremely well. In those days most of the life of the magazine took place in three locations, none of which exists anymore: the La Salle Building, a combination cheap residential hotel and office building, where the actual office was; the old Sholl’s Colonial Cafeteria, […]
Magazine
Posted inMagazine
The Wins of War
World War II would rank right at the top of the list of subjects most likely to defeat any attempt to fulfill the writer’s basic mission: “make it new.” The war is too immense (could it be the single most extensive human endeavor in the history of the world?) and too well written about already by […]
Posted inMagazine
Middle Class Hero
Letting his ego out for a trot, Kevin Phillips begins Boiling Point by observing that during last year’s presidential campaign, Bill Clinton, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Tom Harkin, Mario Cuomo, Jerry Brown, Lloyd Bentsen, Douglas Wilder, and Dick Gephardt all demonstrated that they had either read his last book, The Politics of Rich and Poor, “or drawn […]
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 […]
Posted inMagazine
The Right Fluff
For a long time, the 1,011-page book sat in my house, making an indentation in a chaise lounge as I threw reproachful looks its way. Then a 33-page epilogue arrived and I really got depressed. Now, while Im still trying to figure out who Ross Perot and Bill Clinton are, Richard Ben Cramer wants me […]
Posted inJune 1992
How Phil Donahue Came to Manage the ’92 Campaign
A loss of control: You could say it’s the thread running through the events of our time, but then the metaphor would be backwards. Rather, it’s the thread that’s unraveling through the events of our time. At the international level, the loss of control is generally good news. At the national level, the loss of […]
Posted inJune 1991
On Political Books: Cliffhanging
How the consummate counsel came to need a lawyer
Posted inMagazine
Slumlord
In the summer of 1965, the Watts riot and the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam destroyed the mood of triumphant liberal comity that was supposed to be the foundation on which the solution to the crisis in the urban ghettos would be built. The first sign that something had gone profoundly wrong came in the weeks […]
Posted inMagazine
Paradigm Lost
Every time a president of the United States proclaims himself to be in favor of returning power to states, cities, and neighborhoods, and opposed to our trying to solve national problems from Washington, he is echoing, probably unconsciously, a little book published in 1953 called The Quest for Community, by Robert Nisbet. Nisbet’s work is the […]
