Now that Donald Trump’s voters have pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, what’s next for those who don’t want to see their kids drown? Climate hawks cannot give up now; surrender will ensure victory for the plutocrats and polluters. More than ever, those who want a sustainable future for their children […]
John F. Kennedy
Posted inPolitical Animal
High-Profile Hatred: Trump’s Resentment of Obama Will Only Intensify (Updated)
It was the easiest call in the world…and also the best one. Former President Obama was named the 2017 winner of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Thursday for carrying on his fellow Democrat’s legacy. “President Kennedy called on a new generation of Americans to give their talents to the service of […]
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
Putting the Mind Over What Matters
In Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift there is a scene where the crazy poet-hero, Von Humboldt Fleisher, now widely known as Delmore Schwartz a clef tells his protege Charlie Citrine about his hopes and dreams for the presidency of Adlai Stevenson. “If you could believe Humboldt (and I couldn’t),” says Charlie, “Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-souled man. In his […]
Posted inMagazine
The New Patriotism
I was born in 1954 which makes me, I suppose, a member of the post-Vietnam generation. Here is how the war directly touched my life: I registered for the draft when I turned 18, and the following year I was given the lottery number of six. I remember summoning forth in myself at the time […]
Posted inMagazine
Kennedy’s Woman Problem—Women’s Kennedy Problem
The intelligent woman’s guide to the touchiest issue of the 1980 campaign.
Posted inPolitics
The Foreign Service as Mirror of America
When the bodies of the two American diplomats murdered in the Sudan were brought home last month, a State Department official commented to the press, “I hope this outrage lets everyone know we’re not a bunch of cookie-pushers in striped pants. We’re a corps of highly competent, professional people, in a highly difficult, demanding, dangerous […]
