He dominated late-night television for 30 years, before our shoutfest era. A new biography of the reclusive Nebraskan is also an elegy for a lost America.
Nixon
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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 […]
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Tilting at Windmills
I’m getting too old to write my-generation pieces anymore and I have one more thing to say, so I’d better say it now. The rap on my generation—people born during the baby boom, but young enough so that the sixties represented an adolescent romance rather than a permanent life commitment—is that we’ve returned to the […]
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Ben Bradlee and His All-Star Revue
The two newspapers I make a point of seeing each day are The Washington Post and The Austin American-Statesman. I read the one for its national coverage, and the other for its reporting on state and local events, as well as for those service features, from grocery ads to movie listings, that make such a […]
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Moral Myopia: Michael Straight, Jack Anderson, The New York Review and The Washington Monthly
In its July-August issue, this magazine published a “Tidbits and Outrages” item about Leonard Garment and Michael Straight. In its entirety, it read as follows: “Leonard Garment has from the early days of this Administration been the White House’s man in charge of the arts. Michael Straight works under him as deputy chairman of the […]
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Civility, Community, and Humor: The Conservatism We Need
There are better elements in the conservative tradition than the defense of wealth and privilege.
