A Century of Destiny | Newsweek Boomer Files

How Long Was the Hundred Years’ War?
9/26/2009 12:00:00 AM
One hundred seventeen years, to be precise. And you thought the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were never-ending—although at this rate, they might be. Iraq has now outlasted World War II, while in March Afghanistan will edge out Vietnam as the longest American war ever.
The Last Cold Warriors
9/17/2009 12:00:00 AM
Thompson is Nitze's grandson and had access to all his papers. But the book betrays no favoritism (and, for balance, he was allowed to go through Kennan's private diaries, too). Thompson is critical and admiring of both men, and he even leans a bit against Nitze on policy.
Scenes from the Invasion of Poland
Andrew Nagorski 8/31/2009 12:00:00 AM
Angus Thuermer is 92 now, a retired CIA agent living the quiet life in the picturesque horse country of northern Virginia. But 70 years ago, when war was about to break out in Europe, he was working as a junior reporter in the Berlin bureau of The Associated Press. In late August 1939, his bureau chief sent him to Gleiwitz, along the Polish border, since he knew "something was going to happen."
Hitler and Health Care Don’t Mix
Jon Meacham 8/15/2009 12:00:00 AM
Churchill should have known better. Campaigning in 1945, he delivered a speech suggesting that an unchecked Labour government would impose a socialist regime whose survival would require "some form of Gestapo." The British people had just finished nearly six years of war with Nazi Germany—the campaign fell between VE and VJ days—and recoiled at their prime minister's comparison of an opposition party with what he had once called "all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule" in the noble days of 1940.
‘Inglourious Basterds’: When Jews Attack
8/14/2009 12:00:00 AM
"Inversion" is the name of the game here. Tarantino, who began his career as a video-store clerk, has created a body of work consisting of elaborate riffs on second-tier genre films (blaxploitation, gangster, martial arts), every detail of which he seems to have seen and memorized. In Inglourious Basterds (the dimwitted misspelling is never explained), he's after bigger game and a more consequential subject: those gritty World War II epics in which an unlikely, ill-shaven group of hard-boiled recruits must perform some impossible mission (The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Naked and the Dead, and, of course, Enzo Castellari's Inglorious Bastards, to which Tarantino's title pays homage). Here, the ill-shaven GIs belong to a group that the movies used to represent as soft-boiled—they're all Jewish—and their mission, under the leadership of a blond, cigar-chomping, decidedly un-Jewish lieutenant named Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt, playing what you might call the Lee Marvin role), is simply to ambush and kill as many Nazis as they can—and then bring back their scalps as trophies.
Getting Away With Murder
7/8/2009 12:00:00 AM
It's a sad irony: as the world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia is relapsing into some of its Soviet ways. Much of what we've been seeing with the intimidation of journalists in Iran is routine in Russia—in fact, for reporters, Russia is now more dangerous than it was even during the Cold War. Seventeen have been murdered since 2000; in only one case has the killer been punished. Only Iraq and Algeria have worse records.