Both my country and I lost a great friend and freedom fighter this week: Herb Meyer, an unsung hero of the Cold War. He received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal for his November 1983 memo predicting a Soviet collapse…
I remember that morning as if it were yesterday. I was in my twenties, about to launch my book on H. L. Mencken, and looking for a job. The lobbyist Nancy Clark Reynolds, who knew Ronald Reagan, had suggested my…
North Carolina State University’s Harrelson Hall, a cylindrical, UFO-looking building at alma mater featuring a winding, spiral ramp leading students to windowless classrooms, jars as an oddity. At best, the math classes taught in that building induced marathon study sessions….
Castelvetro di Modena, Italy On May 14th a star failed to come out. Tom Wolfe passed away that day. With his passing the conservative movement lost its greatest social critic, and America lost one of its greatest novelists. As a…
Tom Wolfe, who died Monday at 88 after an illness, would have been a first ballot member of the Writers’ Hall of Fame if he had only written Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. Happily, I didn’t stop with this one….
Art Bell transcended the earthly plane on Friday the 13th. Make of that what you will. The late-night talker peaked perhaps in the late-1990s and early-2000s, when his show appeared on more than 500 stations and 15 million tuned-in nightly….
An hour or so after I first met Don and he expressed his enthusiasm for the job that he thought he could handle at The American Spectator the thought hit me: “I’ve just met a crazy man.” Don was looking…
Washington My friend and colleague, Donald Rieck, died late last week in an automobile accident. He leaves two charming and very young children. He also leaves many friends throughout the conservative movement, and shocked colleagues at The American Spectator. He…
I was traveling overseas when I learned of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. After 30 years he had become keystone in America’s legal system. But for me his unfortunate passing was overshadowed by the loss, just a few hours earlier, of…