It’s Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, and I have been thinking again. If I had to say what is needed inside the heads of young and middle-aged Americans, it would be a far better knowledge of history, and therein hangs a…
The other day I went to see Darkest Hour, the movie about Winston Churchill’s heroics in the spring of 1940 in steeling the British upper classes to resist Hitler and to relieve Dunkirk by sending off a civilian armada to…
At the theater last month I overheard a mother speaking to her young daughter about theaters and presidents. The mother said, “A president, Thomas Jefferson, got assassinated in an old theater like this one.” The girl said that she didn’t…
Yes, Virginia, after thousands of books, lectures, debates, veteran memoirs, and documentaries, there is still something to say about World War II that advances our knowledge of that tragic, deadly and totally unnecessary world conflagration that claimed 65 million lives and changed the shape of the world. Military historian and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson says it in his huge, dense, and important new book.
D arkest Hour, Joe Wright’s recent film, vividly describes the closing days of May 1940, when Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg swept over western Europe. In Britain, despite overwhelming odds, Winston Churchill convinced his country to fight on. It is an excellent film…
There’s never a bad day to remember and salute those who’ve fought to protect America. But there are special days when this is particularly appropriate. December 7 is one of those days. It was 76 years ago tomorrow that the…
So, a few days ago was my 73rd birthday. I spent it in Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, with my wife and our dog, Julie, and my wife’s nurse, Gemma. I swam twice each day, on my back, looking up…
White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly was attacked last week for his comments that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man and that the Civil War might have been avoided by compromise. But no one attacked the comments…
T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruellest month…mixing Memory and desire…” But he never spent a sun-drenched, late summer’s day on Antietam Creek where poignant beauty mixes with memory and blood. The battle of Antietam, or Sharpsburg (southerners use…