Why Dick Cheney Should Run in 2012

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:43:58 GMT

Gallup is not asking about him in its prospective polling, and his daughter Liz's recent ]]>Fox News Sunday

A Look Inside Iran's Regime Driven By Nuclear Ambitions

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:55:30 GMT

They warned him not to talk. When Maziar Bahari was finally freed after 118 days in an Iranian prison on phony espionage charges, he was instructed never to speak of what had happened in jail. If he told his story, his interrogator said, he would be hunted down. "We can put people in a bag no matter where in the world they are," the interrogator said. "No one can escape from us."

Why Palin Matters to Obama—And to You

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:59:56 GMT

Richard Nixon sensed trouble. seated in the cow palace in San Francisco at the GOP convention in 1964, he listened as Barry Goldwater said: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty—is—no—vice." A 41-second ovation ensued. Then Goldwater continued: "And let me remind you also—that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." As Rick Perlstein reconstructs the scene in his book ]]>Before the Storm,

Rethinking the Lessons of Vietnam

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:03:07 GMT

Napoleon was not a particularly philosophical man, but an observation of his that has come down to us bears thinking about. "What is history," he once asked rhetorically, "but a fable agreed-upon?"

The Great American Ideological Crackup

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:49:31 GMT

Shortly after the 2004 presidential election, I was chatting with a senior figure in the Democratic Party when, inevitably, the talk turned to why John Kerry had lost. My interlocutor's theory of the case: the voters did not know the truth about George W. Bush. Why didn't they know the truth? I asked. The reply: because of Roger Ailes.

The Obama-Bush Connection

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:06:05 GMT

Obama is a lot more like Bush 43 than anyone involved would readily admit.

Meacham: McChrystal and Gates on Afghan Debate

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:44:28 GMT

Coming from Robert Gates—the epitome of the soft-spoken, buttoned-down public servant—the rebuke was particularly striking. Military officers, Gates said last week, should give their advice to America's civilian leadership "candidly but privately," an allusion to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's remarks in London about the need for counterinsurgency, not counterterror, in Afghanistan. Less noted was the fact that Gates included civilians in his admonition, a broader criticism of all leaks. But the general's comments, which came in a question-and-answer session after a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, are the ones that have roiled Washington and the foreign-policy establishment, producing a head-snapping conversation in which conservatives are cheering the suggestion of dissent within the ranks and liberals are going on about how military officers should shut up and salute. Consistency, though, has never been an especially widespread partisan virtue.

Editor's Letter - Meacham

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:00:06 GMT

On Nov. 2, 1945—All Souls' Day in the Catholic tradition—J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke to scientists at Los Alamos. "It is clear to me that wars have changed," he said. "It is clear to me that if these first bombs—the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki—that if these can destroy 10 square miles, then that is really quite something. It is clear to me that they are going to be very cheap if anyone wants to make them." Oppenheimer basically had it right: nuclear weapons are not particularly cheap, but the knowledge, once unleashed, could not be contained. This was a persistent concern among the scientists who made the Manhattan Project come to life, including Albert Einstein, who wrote FDR in 1939 about "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." (The Pulitzer Prize–winning book ]]>American Prometheus,

Know Thy Enemy. And Then Defeat Him.

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:19:55 GMT

For several weeks now—beginning in the last days of August—people inside the Obama administration, the military, and the diplomatic community have been unusually unanimous on the subject of Afghanistan. Their refrain: we do not know what is going to happen; no one knows what is going to happen. Then they pause, and, in case we missed the point, say: we do not know what is going to happen.

I Was a Teenage Death Panelist

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 15:37:42 GMT

Though I did not realize it on either occasion, I have twice served on death panels. The first was more than two decades ago, when my grandmother was ill and there was little hope of recovery. My grandfather asked me (in passing, to be sure; I was 16) whether we ought to prolong her life by artificial means or let her die what I clearly remember his calling "a noble death." Then, last year at this time, my father was diagnosed with a fatal case of lung cancer (three packs of cigarettes a day for 40 years will do that to you) and quickly ended up on a respirator for several days, with, the doctors advised, no hope of ever waking up. His wife and I consulted over a painful weekend and made what was to us a clear decision. A priest was summoned, prayers said, and the machines turned off. He died within moments.

Meacham: We Shouldn't Withdraw From Afghanistan

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:21:31 GMT

The answer came quickly, and clearly. in may president Obama gave NEWSWEEK an interview on what he had learned in his first months in office. When asked what had been his most difficult decision, Obama answered without hesitation: the order to send 21,000 more American troops to Afghanistan in this, the eighth year of the war there. Later in the conversation, Obama said that the American people, broadly defined, understand and appreciate the complexity of many of the problems facing the country. The implication was straightforward: that he, with his professorial talent for explanation, was the man for a moment when America, or at least the chunk of it that had voted for him, was willing to hear him out, often at length.

Understanding Teddy Kennedy

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:46:05 GMT

In the 1950s, Charlottesville, Va., was—as it largely remains—an idyllic place of Jeffersonian architecture, Blue Ridge vistas, and seemingly endless white horse-country fences. It was fashionable in certain Eastern circles for children of the Ivy League to journey south for law school at the University of Virginia. Louis Auchincloss did it, and so, in 1956, did Edward Moore Kennedy. "At law school he was already known for three things that stayed with him: drinking, driving fast, and women," says Charles Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, who overlapped with Kennedy at UVA. The substantive side of Kennedy—the one that has received so much attention since he died of brain cancer at 77—was in evidence, too, if less noted. "He and John Tunney, who became a senator from California, won the moot court, and you didn't win that if you didn't have good lawyerly instincts. That was a big deal."

Mike Ross, a Man From Hope

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:14:23 GMT

Mike Ross is not exactly what you would call a colorful character, at least not in the context of national political theater. An Arkansas Democrat and five-term congressman, he is an amiable former state legislator and chief of staff to his state's lieutenant governor. Before the past few weeks, it is safe to say that few people outside Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District had heard of him, and you have to have been engaged in the details of the struggle over the president's health-care bill to have heard of him even now. But Ross—who is, inevitably, from Hope—is not a bad way to gauge where real people stand on the big questions being debated in Washington.

Steaks, Pragmatism, and the View From the Delta

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:16:38 GMT

At first, there was something comforting in the predictability of the evening's conversation. At Doe's Eat Place on Nelson Street in Greenville, Miss., last Wednesday, within the space of perhaps five minutes, I was twice told that "the media" are too liberal. (Once was by my father-in-law, a Sarah Palin admirer, who delights in Bill O'Reilly's occasional volleys against NEWSWEEK.) With the possible exception of South Carolina, Mississippi has been the most reliably conservative state in the country since Fielding Wright, the state's governor, ran as Strom Thurmond's vice president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948. It is tempting to paint the scene at Doe's as something you would expect in an unreconstructed red-state redoubt, and then perhaps contrast the gathering in the Delta with the president's prime-time press conference as images of parallel worlds that will never intersect.

A Lion, But No Lionization

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:42:32 GMT

It was an unusually candid admission, particularly for a politician. A few years ago, in a meeting with NEWSWEEK editors, a distinguished and well-known United States senator—the session was on background, so I cannot identify the lawmaker by name—reflected on the fleeting nature of glory in his line of work. When he had first come to the Senate, he said, he had looked at his desk on the floor of the chamber, a desk that bore the name of each senator who had ever sat in that seat. Eagerly, the new man's eyes ran up and down the list. "And you know what?" he said, recalling the moment. "I didn't recognize a single one of them. Easy come, easy go."

An Opportunity for Tehran

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:39:28 GMT

Maziar Bahari is a NEWSWEEK reporter, a documentary filmmaker, a playwright, author, artist, and, since June 21, a prisoner being held in Iran without formal charges or access to a lawyer. The Iranian state press has attached Bahari's name to a "confession" made in vague terms and conditional tenses about foreign media influence on the unrest in Iran that followed the declaration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection on June 12.

Love Books? You’re In The Right Place.

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:15:57 GMT

A true story: in 1986, when I was a senior in high school, I read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and then read Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. Both were about the interplay of the personal and the political, and I was so swept up by both that, after finishing The Wise Men, I started the whole thing over again, rereading Warren and then rereading Isaacson and Thomas. Years later, when I first met Thomas, I somewhat sheepishly told him this. He looked at me for a moment, then said, "You must have been a real dork." To that I plead guilty, but I would not trade the serendipity of encountering the two books at the same time for anything. At the time (and ever since), I was intrigued by the extent to which the character of those in authority could affect the course of history.

Meacham: Theocracies Are Doomed. Thank God.

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:44:19 GMT

For years American conversation about Iraq has included a refrain about how we cannot expect to create a Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates. The admonition is true: if you think about it, America itself is not really a Jeffersonian democracy either (we are more of a Jacksonian one, which means there is a powerful central government with a cultural tilt toward states' rights). And yet Jefferson keeps coming to mind as the drama in Iran unfolds. The events there seem to be a chapter in the very Jeffersonian story of the death of theocracy, or rule by clerics, and the gradual separation of church and state. In one of the last letters of his life, in 1826, Jefferson said this of the Declaration of Independence: "May it be to the world what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves."

Meacham: The Micawbers and Mrs. Roosevelt

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:30:39 GMT

The numbers are, by and large, pretty good. In the Gallup poll, President Obama's job-approval rating in May averaged 65 percent, a figure that puts him in good company. Only three other presidents elected to their first terms—Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan—have scored higher, and Obama's average tops those of his most recent predecessors: the two Bushes and Clinton. But while 55 percent have a favorable view of his stewardship of the economy in general, there are two troubling figures that foreshadow political problems for the president and, more important, intractable problems for all of us: 48 percent disapprove of his handling of the federal budget deficit, and 51 percent are unhappy with his control of federal spending. (Or, as Republicans would say, his lack thereof.)

Newsweek Voices - Jon Meacham