The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson Patrick Weil (Harvard University Press, 400 pages, $35) William Bullitt was one of the most interesting Americans of the 20th century. He turns…
Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made By Derek Leebaert St. Martin’s Press/476 pages/$35 Derek Leebaert writes interesting and provocative books. In The Fifty-Year Wound, he assessed the triumphs but also the costs of America’s…
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…
Several writers (including The American Spectator’s own Daniel J. Flynn) have been calling our attention to the reappearance of a rare phenomenon in American politics — a defeated incumbent trying another run at the presidency. Only once was this done…
The “journalist” Bob Woodward is promoting his forthcoming audiobook The Trump Tapes just in time for the midterm elections. Earlier this week, he said he considers former President Donald Trump to be “dangerous” and a “threat to democracy” and a…
Two Harvard Law School professors, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, recently published a book with the intriguing title Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State. Far from “redeeming” anything, their book actually recounts why administrative law in general and the…
It has become commonplace for historians and scholars to compare presidential corruption to Warren Harding, claiming he is the standard to measure dishonesty in the White House. It is repeated on both sides of the political aisle, Republicans as well…
Let’s face it: Joe Biden sucks. Everything about him sucks. He sucks as a messenger, his economic policies suck, he completely sucks as a truth-teller. He sucks in the integrity department. And people suffering from the debilitating effects of old…
On Wednesday, March 3, a televised Biden event turned into a head-scratcher. The president seemed to at last open himself up to answering the press’s questions in a serious way. Fifty days into his presidency, he has still not held…