Weisberg: For Presidents, Loyalty Has a Price | Newsweek Newsweek Voices - Jacob Weisberg

Getting Off the Island
5/29/2009 12:00:00 AM
Late one night in February 2004, the U.S. ambassador for war-crimes issues, Pierre-Richard Prosper, and the Danish ambassador to the United States, Ulrich Federspiel, sat in the living room of Denmark's ambassadorial residence in Washington ironing out the details of an agreement to repatriate Guantánamo's only Danish detainee. His name was Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, and while he had drawn little attention in the United States, his fate had been the subject of intense negotiations between Danish diplomats and a group of high-ranking American officials, including Prosper, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the White House National Security Council's legal adviser, John Bellinger.
Friendly Fire at the White House
Michael Isikoff 5/21/2009 12:00:00 AM
Fending off criticism from human-rights and civil-rights groups at a private White House meeting Wednesday, a frustrated President Obama complained about the "mess" he'd been left by his predecessor.
THE NEXT 100 DAYS
Long Hot Summer
Eleanor Clift 4/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
The long hot summer is typically a phrase that strikes fear in the hearts of politicians. In the '60s, it meant race riots in American cities. In the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks, it evoked an oblivious media obsessing over an intern who had gone missing and who was having an affair with a congressman, and a wave of shark attacks, which turned out to be not much of a wave after all.
INTERNATIONAL
Obama's Challenge
John Barry 4/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
At the G20 summit this week, President Obama confronts a problem no American president before George W. Bush had to face: suspicion and even hostility toward the U.S. government from European allies. Bluntly, the Bush administration all but destroyed traditional transatlantic ties, including the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain.
The Editor’s Desk
Jon Meacham 3/7/2009 12:00:00 AM
On a late winter afternoon, the sunlight fading outside the window, John McCain was sitting in his Senate office—he uses Barry Goldwater's old desk—shaking his head about the billions of dollars in earmarks in the federal budget and talking about the future of his party. Rush Limbaugh was Topic A in the capital; the radio giant's long speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference—one in which Limbaugh repeated his hope that President Obama will "fail"—had led to a tactical Washington tempest. Sensing an opportunity, the White House had singled out Limbaugh as, in Rahm Emanuel's words, "the intellectual force" of the Republican Party. It was not a bad strategy: in the NEWSWEEK Poll, 46 percent have an unfavorable opinion of Limbaugh. (As a point of contrast, Obama's unfavorable rating is 22 percent, and even Nancy Pelosi fares better than Limbaugh.)
POLITICS
Let's Make a Deal
Michael Isikoff 3/4/2009 12:00:00 AM
President Obama's White House lawyers played a critical behind-the-scenes role in brokering an agreement that requires George W. Bush's former aides Karl Rove and Harriet Miers to testify before Congress about the mass firings of U.S. attorneys, according to congressional and White House sources.