Conventional wisdom has tended to rank the Cuban missile crisis as the Kennedy presidency's highest drama and grandest success. Drama, yes. But this provocative recounting of the administration's policy toward Castro's Cuba suggests that Kennedy brought the crisis on himself.
Kennedy's team treated the bureaucracy as the enemy, launching a counterinsurgency that centralized authority in the White House, and placed a dangerous amount of power in one man's hands.
The significance of the Gettysburg Address
Riding motorbikes without a helmet, flying planes while half asleep—not to mention discussing books he’d never read and using words he didn’t understand—William F. Buckley courted adventure in all that he did. Here, the conservative godfather’s onetime protégé and longtime nemesis fondly recalls their friendship—and argues that Buckley was not the snob many thought him to be.
Frederick Douglass called it "a sacred effort," and Lincoln himself thought that his Second Inaugural, which offered a theodicy of the Civil War, was better than the Gettysburg Address
Often, history shows, it is not the attributes—a rugged respect for principle, a refusal to govern by the polls—that we are prone to think we should want
In an act of “open-air sleight of hand,“ Lincoln created a new Constitution, revolutionized the Revolution, and gave us a country changed forever
Pundits ascribe the fast rise of Georgia’s presidential candidate to the rising power and acceptability of the New South, but there’s a lot of the Old South at work in the phenomenon as well. From talks with Carter, his relatives, and friends, and from visits to the candidate’s hometown, the author assembles a revealing study of the man behind the big hominy grits smile.
Raoul Berger, violinist manque, impeachment scholar par excellence, fiddles his own tune, reports author Wills. His story is a remarkable one: like his groundbreaking study of impeachment, it has a surprise ending.