WASHINGTON — In the course of my lifelong study of political science and related perfidies, I have noted that many political leaders of high achievement have an extraordinary aptitude for ambiguity, not to say dishonesty. The best example of this…
Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt By Alexander Etkind (University of Pittsburgh Press, 264 pages, $30) Just before his death in 1967, the American diplomat William C. Bullitt published a scathing book on Woodrow Wilson that…
As Presidents’ Day 2023 approaches, we can anticipate the annual ritual of polls of scholars ranking the presidents. These polls can provide fodder for chitchat around the dinner table or at social gatherings, but in terms of providing illuminating insights…
The House of Representatives voted to remove the bust of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney from the entrance of the old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol building based on his authorship of the notorious Dred Scott decision (Dred Scott v….
Conrad Black is a respected conservative who has written interesting books, including a very good biography of Richard Nixon, and who hasn’t succumbed to the Trump Derangement Syndrome that afflicts far too many conservatives and Republicans these days. In fact,…
In the previous installments of this look back on the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, I have identified specific policy areas of failure that historians and FDR partisans ignore, downplay, or explain away in their infatuation with the nation’s 32nd president….
Great leaders rise to the challenges of the times. Franklin Roosevelt, who knew very little about economics, tried “experimentation” to end the Great Depression, but those experiments extended the Depression’s effects. Roosevelt, allegedly ahead of the American public, sensed the…
Netflix will soon feature Munich: The Edge of War, an adaptation of British author Robert Harris’ 2017 novel Munich, which portrays British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as a hero for negotiating what Harris calls his “shrewd” Munich Agreement in September…
Recently in The American Spectator, I wrote a somewhat controversial article claiming that Franklin Roosevelt was a failure as president. One of the areas of failure, I argued, was FDR’s decision-making during the Second World War, which resulted in the…