ArcaMax

In 1963, the legendary Russell Baker, writing in The New York Times, explained how we in the press, years before the nation's next presidential campaign, are miraculously able to agree upon who qualify -- and, perhaps more importantly, who do not qualify -- as plausible White House contenders. Baker identified the "Great Mentioner" as the ...Read more

On Oct. 15, 2010, a father who knew from painful personal sacrifice the terror and the loss of combat, wrote to his son, who was at that moment leading a Marine platoon enduring almost relentless combat: "I know you guys have taken some licks in the last few days. ... Robert you will likely lose one or more of your precious Marines if you haven'...Read more

One of the great fringe benefits of working around American politics during the past 10 American presidencies has been the colorful characters I've gotten to meet. Characters do not come more colorful than Dick Tuck. Having just learned that he had lost a California state Senate primary, he was asked by a Los Angeles radio reporter for a ...Read more

From Aug. 10, 1994, to April 25, 1995, Major League Baseball went on strike. The 1994 World Series was canceled. Fans, furious at both management and the players, voted with their feet by staying away afterward. Average attendance at games fell by more than a fifth, and -- of more urgent concern to the owners -- total revenues dropped by one-...Read more

Three aging U.S. veterans of the war in Vietnam, each of whom still bears the scars of battle, took their seats on the stage of Washington's Kennedy Center on a cool September evening. They were there to discuss Ken Burns' historic 18-hour PBS project, "The Vietnam War," which will deservedly earn the nation's attention. The three -- John ...Read more

Labor Day has already come, and summer is all but over. Autumn -- with shorter days, cooler nights and a new school year -- is upon us. Now -- in beautiful September and not in the dead of winter, overshadowed by Christmas -- ought logically to be New Year's Day, which means resolutions and predictions.

I personally resolve to break my bad ...Read more

On a late summer night, some 230 days into the Trump presidency, a dozen Pennsylvania voters gathered around a conference table in Pittsburgh and were asked by respected Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart to just give "a word or a feeling about Donald Trump."

The answers from this group -- five of whom had voted for Trump in November -- ought ...Read more

Eric Hoffer, a San Francisco longshoreman and philosopher who died in 1983, the year President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, could have been analyzing contemporary American politics when he wrote, some 66 years ago, that "mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a ...Read more

It was obviously an earlier, less cynical time when the president of the United States could explain an unscheduled drive from the White House he had once taken. "I was outraged," the president wrote when he was out of office, "when I read in the newspapers about a black family. ... The husband and wife were both employed in a government ...Read more

American campaigns were not always, I can testify from personal witness, about the politics of personal destruction. Your political adversary was your opponent, not your enemy. Just 10 years ago, at the funeral of a former Republican president, the eulogy, at the personal request of the deceased, was given by the Democratic president who had ...Read more

At 2 o'clock on a Friday morning in July -- after having successfully run in three national elections on their party's repeated promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which Barack Obama had spent the first two years of his own presidency (and a lot of political popularity) getting passed -- the case of those in the Senate majority ...Read more