The thick-necked union boss, who’s short on manners and long on tough talk and machismo, is in many ways an endangered American archetype. Amid rampant political correctness and professionalisation, they seem like anachronisms from a lost age; Sean O’Brien, president …
Why liberal journalists need to be heroes
When Richard Nixon resigned as president 50 years ago, the country witnessed the birth of a monster. I am not talking about some sinister influence he exerted after his fall. I am talking about the media.
Having gratifyingly removed a …
The two faces of Henry Kissinger
In the coming days, many will lavish praise and blame on Henry Kissinger for what he did and did not do. A prime example is the coup in Chile that removed Salvador Allende in 1973, which Kissinger welcomed but did …
Post-Trumpism could save America
Just as Elizabeth I would have been disheartened to learn that she had lived during the Age of Shakespeare, I am sure that no living US president, from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden, wants to be a footnote to Donald …
Will a Trumpian party destroy the GOP?
Former president Donald Trump has again raised the spectre of a schism in the Republican Party. Last Thursday, he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he wouldn’t commit to backing the party’s nominee. This will strike many observers as …
Vietnam still haunts America
In the course of his troubled presidency, Richard Nixon spoke 14 times to the American people about the war in Vietnam. It was in one of those speeches that he coined the phrase “the silent majority”, while others provoked horror …
What the media gets wrong about Watergate
The media misremembers the Watergate scandal of 50 years ago in two significant respects: the first for an understandable reason, although one that ultimately is unflattering to the media. But the second misrepresentation defies explanation. Let’s take the puzzling one …
What I saw during Watergate
Fifty years ago this Friday, the police of Washington, DC discovered a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex. When the news first broke, I, like most people, gave it no notice. Within …
Watergate and the death of the scandal
In 1942, an entrepreneurial gourmet named Marjorie Hendricks opened a restaurant in the down-at-heel Washington DC neighbourhood of Foggy Bottom and called it the Water Gate Inn. Two decades later, developers drawing up blueprints for a waterfront complex of six …
The myth of Chinese supremacy
When I first arrived in China in 1976, four years had passed since Nixon and Kissinger had gone to Beijing to meet Mao, kicking off what Nixon would label “the week that changed the world”. But that interval was not …
What the West gets wrong about Putin
In 1999, Vladimir Putin suddenly sprang from bureaucratic obscurity to the office of Prime Minister. When, a few months later, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and Putin was voted in as President, governments around the world were taken by surprise yet again. …