The New York Review of Books |
December 04, 2008 |
ESSAY
Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal.
Tags: David Hare | Gethsemane | Frozen Scandal
The New York Review of Books |
November 20, 2008 |
ESSAY
You would think first of all of a village fair:
the entire community of Germantown, Northwest Philly, taking itself up
on the brightest of bright sunny fall days and moving en masse, clumps
of people—groups of young men in the obligatory hoodies and low-riding
jeans, moms pushing strollers, dads lugging car seats, and everywhere
children, from toddlers on up, being pulled along (“You’ll remember
this all your life!”)—almost all of them African-American and all
melding together, as they crowded toward the entrance to Vernon Park,
into a full running, laughing stream. Hawkers hawked “Obamaniana”—the
man’s face glowing on posters, some huge, floating above the crowd; his
name carved in wood or stone; the Obama keychains and wallets and
everywhere the volunteers with their blue buttons and their clipboards,
making sure it all works smoothly.
Tags: Sweet Potato Pie | 2008 Election | Obama | McCain | "
The New York Review of Books |
November 06, 2008 |
ESSAY
Panning across the faces of the country’s leaders gathered in the
Cabinet Room to confront the “financial crisis” in late September, the
camera’s eye moves from the President—looking tired, shrunken,
desiccated—to his Treasury secretary and other powerful advisers, and
then slowly makes its way down and around the long Cabinet table,
trailing over the familiar waxen features of the barons of the Senate
and the House, lingering for a moment on the self-consciously resolute
face of the white-haired Senator John McCain, and finally reaches the
table’s end where it settles at last on the figure of a lean, solitary
black man slumped in his seat.
Tags: Obama | Election | US Politics
October 2008 |
INTRODUCTION
Some stories, ancient and eternal, are
inscribed in the world. The Fall of the Hero is one such, an endlessly
reenacted drama that turns on the precariousness of greatness and its
inevitable overreaching.
Tags: Military History | Napoloen | Segur | Russia
The New York Review of Books |
October 16, 2008 |
DISPATCH
You would think first of all of a village fair:
the entire community of Germantown, Northwest Philly, taking itself up
on the brightest of bright sunny fall days and moving en masse, clumps
of people—groups of young men in the obligatory hoodies and low-riding
jeans, moms pushing strollers, dads lugging car seats, and everywhere
children, from toddlers on up, being pulled along (“You’ll remember
this all your life!”)—almost all of them African-American and all
melding together, as they crowded toward the entrance to Vernon Park,
into a full running, laughing stream.
Tags: Sweet Potato Pie | Obama | Philly | Elections
The New York Times |
August 27, 2008 |
BOOK REVIEW
Scandal is our growth
industry. In our era, revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive
investigation, punishment and expiation but to ... more scandal.
Tags: War On Terror | Bush | CIA | Frozen Scandal | Suskind | Iraq
Tomdispatch.com |
March 25, 2008 |
LECTURE/ESSAY
To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me,
with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is
to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | War On Terror | Middle East | Iraq
El Pais |
November 10, 2007 |
ESSAY/TRANSCRIPT
Sin duda, uno de los atributos agonizantes de nuestra era posterior al
11-S es la necesidad permanente de reafirmar realidades que han sido
demostradas una y otra vez, y negadas con la misma obstinación por
quienes ocupan el poder oficiel
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Middle East | American Politics | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
November 08, 2007 |
ESSAY/TRANSCRIPT
Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post–September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler, brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official power.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Middle East | American Politics | Iraq
What Orwell Didn't Know (Book) |
November 2007 |
ESSAY
We pride ourselves in being realists first of all, and thus we know
well, or tell ourselves we do, that “the first casualty when war
comes is truth.”
Tags: American Politics | Foreign Affairs | Orwell
Los Angeles Times |
November 04, 2007 |
OP-ED ESSAY
Perhaps it would have surprised George Orwell, poet laureate of the
Cold War, to find himself so much in our thoughts in this second decade
of the post-Cold War age.
Tags: American Politics | Orwell | Middle East | Foreign Affairs
Los Angeles Times |
June 01, 2007 |
OP-ED ESSAY
Being invited to deliver a commencement address to the Department of
Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn
star.
Tags: War On Terror | Iraq | Media | Foreign Affairs | Commencement
Tomdispatch.com |
May 31, 2007 |
SPEECH/ESSAY
When my assistant greeted me, a number of
weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the
commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a
bad joke.
Tags: War On Terror | Iraq | Media | Foreign Affairs | Commencement
The New York Review of Books |
December 21, 2006 |
ESSAY
In the ruined city of Fallujah, its pale tan buildings pulverized by
Marine artillery in the two great assaults of this long war (the
aborted attack of March 2004 and then the bloody, triumphant al-Fajr
(The Dawn) campaign of the following November), behind the lines of
giant sandbags and concrete T-walls and barbed wire that surrounded the
tiny beleaguered American outpost there, I sat in my body armor and
Kevlar helmet and thought of George F. Kennan.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
July 2006 |
CATALOG ESSAY
In November 2003, barely six months into the Iraq War, Specialist Joseph Darby returned from leave and asked a fellow soldier at Abu Ghraib prison to tell him what had happened while he’d been away.
Tags: Middle East | Torture | Iraq
May 04, 2006 |
REMEMBRANCE
When I look back over the many years of
conversations with Carol Feldman, I realize that what brought us
together, first and foremost, was our vices.
Tags: In Memoriam
Tomdispatch.com |
February 26, 2006 |
INTERVIEW
The phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many
other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of
emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off."
Tags: American Politics | Middle East | Iraq
The New York Times Magazine |
September 11, 2005 |
ESSAY
Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man’s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white
blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from
hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven.
Tags: War On Terror | Foreign Affairs | American Politics | Middle East | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
August 11, 2005 |
EXCHANGE
For more than two years the United States has been fighting a war in
Iraq that was launched in the cause of destroying weapons that turned
out not to exist.
Tags: Middle East | Downing Street Memo | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
July 14, 2005 |
EXCHANGE
The great value of the discussion recounted in the Downing Street memo...is to show,
for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of
decision-making.
Tags: Downing Street Memo | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
June 23, 2005 |
ESSAY
When I was invited to give this speech,
I was asked for a title. I dillied and dallied, begged for more time,
and of course the deadline passed.
Tags: War On Terror | Commencement | American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
June 09, 2005 |
ESSAY
It was October 16, 2002, and the United
States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war
against Iraq.
Tags: Downing Street Memo | Iraq | American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
April 28, 2005 |
ESSAY
Just past dawn on January 30, Iraq's Election
Day — the fourth of the US occupation's "turning points," after the fall
of Baghdad, the capture of Saddam Hussein, and the "handover of sovereignty"
— I stood at the muddy gates of Muthana Air Base outside Baghdad watching
the sun rise, pink and full, into a white-streaked sky; then, feeling
a sudden tremor beneath my feet, I started abruptly: the explosion was
loud and, judging by the vibrations, not far off.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
March 10, 2005 |
EXCHANGE
"Issues don't win elections, constituencies do." As this political
chestnut suggests, issues serve politicians mainly as a way for them to
consolidate constituencies—and "make a majority," as Andrew Hacker puts
it.
Tags: American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
February 10, 2005 |
EXCHANGE
Between the publication of my article, "Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story,"
and the receipt of these letters, and mainly thanks to the President's
nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general and the hearings that followed, we have had a
public discussion of the "outrageous memos authored by highly placed
administration lawyers" to which Mr. Rivkin refers.
Tags: War On Terror | Torture | American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
January 13, 2005 |
ESSAY
Driving north from Tampa on Florida's Route 75 on November 1, as the
battle over who would hold political power in America was reaching a climax
but the struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down
the top of my rented green convertible, turned the talk radio voices up
to blaring, and commenced reading the roadside.
Tags: American Politics
The New York Times |
January 06, 2005 |
OP-ED ESSAY
At least since Watergate, Americans have come
to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation
is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation.
Tags: War On Terror | Torture
The New York Times Magazine |
December 26, 2004 |
REMEMBRANCE
"Go to Haiti!" James Chace leaned in close, left hand grasping
my upper arm, fixed me with that incomparable stare, raised his right
index finger and, like some unlikely fire-and-brimstone New England preacher
reincarnated in blazer and khakis, intoned portentously: "Hear me well,
young Danner: Go to Haiti!"
Tags: In Memoriam
The New York Times |
November 21, 2004 |
OP-ED ESSAY
It seemed
somehow fitting, and fittingly sad, that Colin Powell saw his
resignation accepted as secretary of state on the day marines completed
their conquest of Falluja
Tags: Politics | Foreign Affairs
November 14, 2004 |
REMEMBRANCE
One of the last times I saw James Chace I was standing right here, at this very podium, and he was sitting right…there.
Tags: In Memoriam
November 04, 2004 |
REMEMBRANCE
Sad as I am not
to be with you this day I take a bit of solace in thinking that Richard
would have granted me a dispensation, once he learned that I had spent
the last week among voters in the cities and towns of the great state
of Florida - studying, as it were, abnormal mass psychology.
Tags: In Memoriam
The New York Review of Books |
November 04, 2004 |
ESSAY
It has been clear for several months that the United States
is losing its war in Iraq. What remains to be seen is whether Americans
will come to realize this fact before the election or after it.
Tags: American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
October 07, 2004 |
ESSAY
They have long since taken their place in
the gallery of branded images, as readily recognizable in much of the
world as Marilyn struggling with her billowing dress or Michael dunking
his basketball...
Tags: Iraq | Torture | Middle East
The New York Review of Books |
June 24, 2004 |
ESSAY
What is difficult is separating what we
now know from what we have long known but have mostly refused to admit.
Tags: Iraq | Torture | Middle East
The New York Review of Books |
June 10, 2004 |
ESSAY
Last November in Iraq, I traveled to Fallujah
during the early days of what would become known as the "Ramadan Offensive"—when
suicide bombers in the space of less than an hour destroyed the Red Cross
headquarters and four police stations, and daily attacks by insurgents
against US troops doubled, and the American adventure in Iraq entered
a bleak tunnel from which it has yet to emerge.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq | Torture
The New Yorker |
April 05, 2004 |
COMMENT
As the war in Iraq enters its second year,
Americans find themselves trapped in an epistemological black hole: the
war's end recedes into an indefinite future while its beginning grows
daily more contentious and obscure.
Tags: American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
February 12, 2004 |
EXCHANGE
I am glad that Ambassador Horan finds my article "interesting
and accurate, as far as it goes." I must confess that I feel the
same way about his letter—up to and including the implication that
the writer does not, alas, go quite far enough.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Iraq | Middle East
The New York Review of Books |
December 18, 2003 |
ESSAY
Autumn
in Baghdad is cloudy and gray. Trapped in rush-hour traffic one October
morning, without warning my car bucked up and back, like a horse whose
reins had been brutally pulled.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
The New York Review of Books |
September 25, 2003 |
ESSAY
We see the world through the stories we tell, and
until recently the story most Americans told themselves about the war
in Iraq was a simple and dramatic narrative of imminent threat, daring
triumph, and heroic liberation —a story neatly embodied in images
of a dictator's toppling statue and a president in full flight gear swaggering
across a carrier deck.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
Zoetrope All-Story |
SUMMER 2003 |
ESSAY
The first time I was killed, or nearly so,
came just past dawn on election day 1987 at a deserted crossroads in northern
Haiti.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Writing
The New York Times |
October 08, 2002 |
OP-ED ESSAY
A year after a tiny band of religious zealots managed with stunning
audacity to mutilate the face of America, the world's sole superpower
trembles on the threshold of a new imperial season.
Tags: American Politics | Foreign Affairs | War On Terror
The New York Times |
October 16, 2001 |
OP-ED ESSAY
In Afghanistan,
the targets are running out. Such are the frustrations of the powerful;
Joseph Conrad, writing of an African "heart of darkness" a century
ago, well understood: "Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war
anchored off the coast...
Tags: War On Terror | American Politics | Foreign Affairs
The New York Review of Books |
February 22, 2001 |
ESSAY
After you have spent some days searching
for the secret of political legitimacy in Miami and West Palm Beach, you
want to go further.
Tags: American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
December 21, 2000 |
ESSAY
Gaze upward, through the gaseous clouds
of rhetoric littering the sky from the campaign that would not end—"I
will never let you down," "I will restore honor and dignity to
the White House"—and you can spy, casting a shadow on the land
like Barthelme's Dead Father, an enormous pair of lips, belonging not to
the Vice President or the Texas governor but to a young woman from Beverly
Hills who one fateful day delivered a slice of pizza to the President of
the United States.
Tags: American Politics
The New York Review of Books |
November 02, 2000 |
ESSAY
Few of our predilections seem more distinctly
modern than the compulsion to name "our era" and thereby claim
it.
Tags: Media | Olympics
The New York Review of Books |
October 05, 2000 |
ESSAY
In foreign affairs, folly is the privilege
of great powers, for they alone can be certain to survive it. Last month
Americans embarked on a policy of exquisite folly: funding both sides
of Colombia's civil war.
Tags: Latin America | Clinton | Colombia
The New York Review of Books |
September 02, 2000 |
ESSAY
Like ill-matched partners in a bad marriage,
American politics and American television seem bound inextricably together,
unable to escape a relationship that increasingly degrades both partners.
Tags: Media | Politics
PBS |
January 2000 |
ESSAY
Striding triumphantly down the streets
of conquered Srebrenica, General Ratko Mladic announced to a television
interviewer that "on this great Serb holy day," commemorating "the uprising
against the Turks, the time
Tags: Balkans | Srebrenica | PBS
The New York Review of Books |
July 15, 1999 |
REPORT
Carried forward amid an ocean of cheering
refugees in the Stankovic refugee camp, Madeleine Albright could hardly
contain her excitement. "We have been victorious," the secretary
of state shouted triumphantly to the roaring crowds, "and Milosevic
has lost!"
Tags: Kosovo | Balkans | Clinton
The New York Review of Books |
May 06, 1999 |
ESSAY
Across this near-exhausted century, imagery recurs. The knock at
the door, the forced march, the mass evacuation - expressions now impossible
to hear without their attendant echoes.
Tags: Balkans | Kosovo | Clinton
The New York Times |
April 04, 1999 |
BOOK REVIEW
Six decades ago, in a classroom
at Groton, a young man rose slowly to his feet, gazed down at a sheaf
of papers in his hand, and began to read.
Tags: Vietnam | Foreign Affairs
The New York Review of Books |
October 22, 1998 |
ESSAY
Standing motionless among their hulking war machines like statues in the
dark, 200,000 Croat soldiers dropped their cigarettes, then clambered into
tanks and trucks and armored personnel carriers and, in a sudden earsplitting
eruption of grating gears, pushed forward into Serb-held Krajina.
Tags: Balkans | Croatia
Das Magazin/ Tages-Anzeiger (Zurich) |
September 26, 1998 |
ESSAY
Im Juli 1995, während die Menschen
in Europa und Amerika Fe- rien machten, wurden in einer kleinen Stadt
in Ostbosnien Hunderte von Muslimen mit verbundenen Augen auf Lastwagen
und in Busse geladen.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia
The New York Review of Books |
September 09, 1998 |
ESSAY
Only now, more than three years after he recorded the interview with CNN's
World Report, can one see subtle signs of Richard Holbrooke's discomfort
and unease.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica
The New York Review of Books |
April 23, 1998 |
ESSAY
Near the lovely North Portico of the White House, on a mild and breezy evening
in mid-June 1995, the President and First Lady danced alone.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Clinton
PBS |
Spring 1998 |
DOCUMENTARY
To the hundreds of
millions who first beheld them on their television screens that August
day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed wire seemed powerfully
familiar.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Karadzic
The New York Review of Books |
March 26, 1998 |
ESSAY
Plunging forward into
pitch-black night, their faces lashed by unseen branches, Srebrenica's fleeing
Muslims stumbled forward one against another.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica
The New York Review of Books |
February 19, 1998 |
ESSAY
On May 22, 1995, fifteen months after Bosnian Serbs—bowing to an
ultimatum from Western leaders infuriated by the televised carnage of
sixty-eight dismembered bodies at Sarajevo's Markela marketplace—had
withdrawn their tanks and cannons and mortars from the mountains and ridges
above the city, heavily armed Serb soldiers in camouflage
uniforms forced their way into a United Nations "weapons collection
point"...
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica
The New York Review of Books |
February 05, 1998 |
ESSAY
Early one February afternoon in 1994, people in
Sarajevo shed their heavy coats and hats and poured out into streets and
markets, allowing themselves to forget, in the bright warming sun, that
from artillery bunkers and snipers' nests dug into hills and mountains
above the city hunters stared down, tracking their prey.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Sarajevo
World Policy Journal |
Spring 1998 |
EXCHANGE/ESSAY
Synopsis:
Our differences regarding enlargement do indeed remain deep,
even after you were generous enough to teach me a number of things
in your well-crafted letter -- in particular, what you call the "central
syllogism" of European security.
Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs
World Policy Journal |
Winter 1998 |
EXCHANGE
I thought Mark Danner's essay, "Marooned
in the Cold War," made a strong case against NATO
enlargement, cogently presenting the negative arguments.
Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs
World Policy Journal |
Fall 1997 |
ESSAY
Three years have passed since I stood in a
tiny market in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through a chaos of smoke
and running feet at the scores of dead heaped about the blood-slick earth.
Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs
The New York Review of Books |
December 18, 1997 |
ESSAY
In the bitter wind and cold of late December 1995,
shortly before the coming of Orthodox Christmas, the Serb fathers of Sarajevo
began trudging toward the graveyards.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Clinton | UN
The New York Review of Books |
December 04, 1997 |
ESSAY
To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television
screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed
wire seemed powerfully familiar.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia
Harper's |
December 1997 |
ESSAY
Three years have passed since I stood in a marketplace
in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through the chaos of smoke and running
feet at the scores of dead heaped upon the earth.
Tags: Cold War | Foreign Affairs
The New York Review of Books |
November 20, 1997 |
ESSAY
Scarcely two years ago, during the sweltering days of July 1995, any citizen
of our civilized land could have pressed a button on a remote control
and idly gazed, for an instant or an hour, into the jaws of a contemporary
Hell.
Tags: Balkans | Bosnia | Srebrenica
President Reagan and the World (book) |
July 1997 |
COMMENTARY
I think I'd like to begin by asking about Iran-Contra the question the
Jesuits like to ask when they see a difficult problem, which is: What
is its quiddity? What is its "whatness"? What separates it from
everything else - in particular, from other scandals?
Tags: Latin America | Iran-Contra | Reagan
El Salvador: Photographs by Larry Towell |
June 1997 |
INTRODUCTION
Inward-gazing and self-absorbed, Americans tend to learn about the world only during times of crisis.
Tags: Latin America | El Salvador | Larry Towell
The New Yorker |
November 25, 1996 |
TALK OF THE TOWN
A spectator of the culture wars writes: For
a while there, Bob Dole had me worried.
Tags: Media
The New Yorker |
May 13, 1996 |
COMMENT
Hypocrisy may be the mother's milk of politics,
but there are occasions -- the controversy now being manufactured in Congress
over "secret" Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia is one -- when
the glass runs over.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Balkans | Bosnia
The New Yorker |
February 26 & March 4, 1996 |
SHOWCASE
That excellence equals beauty was taken for
granted by the Greeks, fathers of the Olympiad, and Hassiba Boulmerka
embodies the equation's power.
Tags: Olympics
The New Yorker |
September 26, 1994 |
COMMENTARY
You can do anything with a bayonet, Napoleon
is said to have observed, except sit on it.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Haiti
ABC |
July 27, 1994 |
TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY
How can it be that America is
on the verge of invading a country already burdened by catastrophe? What does it take to get killed here?
Tags: Haiti
The New Yorker |
April 04, 1994 |
PORTFOLIO CAPTION
For besiegers of cities, a child is an especially lucrative target. If
the aim is to sow terror among those holding out behind the walls, how
better to do it than by murdering children?
Tags: Balkans
ABC |
March 30, 1994 |
TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY
American fighter planes in the
skies over Sarajevo. To the survivors in the ruined city below, the planes
are a familiar sight.
Tags: Bosnia
The New Yorker |
December 06, 1993 |
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Heading up into the mountains of Morazán, in the bright, clear
air near the Honduran border, you cross the Torola River, the wooden slats
of the one-lane bridge clattering beneath your wheels, and enter what
was the fiercest of El Salvador's zonas rojas...
Tags: Central America | Latin America | El Salvador
The New York Review of Books |
December 02, 1993 |
ESSAY (PART III)
Late on a breezy afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
the elected president of the Republic of Haiti, descended from his limousine
on Capitol Hill and, accompanied by his entourage of Haitian aides and
American lawyers, made his way slowly into the Capitol to meeting room
S-116, where a group of senators and staff assistants awaited him.
Tags: Aristide | Haiti
The New York Review of Books |
November 18, 1993 |
ESSAY (PART II)
On a sunny Columbus Day afternoon, Father Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, president of the Republic of Haiti, walked slowly down the steps
of the Georgetown house in which he has made his home for much of the
last two years, and faced a restless crowd of reporters and photographers.
Tags: Aristide | Haiti
The New York Review of Books |
November 04, 1993 |
ESSAY (PART I)
On a sweltering morning in Port-au-Prince, in July of
1915, a party of gentlemen attired in black morning coats, striped pants,
and bowler hats strolled past the wrought-iron gates and around the courtyard
of the elegant mansion that housed the French legation and pushed through
a side door.
Tags: Aristide | Haiti
The Council on Foreign Relations |
1993 |
ESSAY
It strikes me that "The Future of
the Transatlantic Relationship" has quite a considerable past.
Tags: Foreign Affairs
The New Yorker |
October 25, 1993 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Americans are so devoted to democracy and
so respectful of its central ritual that we tend to confuse the one with
the other. Call it the Election Day Myth.
Tags: Haiti
The New York Times Magazine |
March 07, 1993 |
ESSAY
For a half-dozen years,
Iran-contra has haunted American political life. The ghost arose anew on
Christmas Eve, thanks to President Bush's pardons, and it is fated to reappear
one day soon when Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel, releases his
final report.
Tags: Foreign Affairs
The New Yorker |
August 17, 1992 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
During the nineteen-eighties,while Iraqis
and Iranians killed one another by the hundreds of thousands in a struggle
for supremacy in the Persian Gulf, the United States maintained a vigilant
neutrality-or so Americans were assured by the governments they elected.
Tags: Iraq
The New Yorker |
May 25, 1992 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Less than a year after Americans paraded
in the streets to celebrate victory in the Gulf War, the entire conflict,
which appeared so cataclysmic at the time, is rapidly receding from view.
Tags: Iraq
Aperture |
WINTER 1992 |
ESSAY
Rarely has the portal, the moment of passage
from ordinary to revolutionary time, been so well captured in a single
image: At the wheel of the gray BMW sits the young dictator, well-dressed,
prosperous, slightly overweight, his face impassive, his shoulders thrown
back; he has spent all but five of his thirty-four years in the Palace,
fifteen of them as President-for-Life, having been inaugurated, at his
dying father's insistence, as a mountainously obese, glassy-eyed teenager.
Tags: Haiti
The New Yorker |
December 31, 1991 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
With the publication of Oliver North's memoirs
and the start of the Colonel's nineteen-city tour to promote it, the Iran-Contra
affair completed a five-year journey from tragedy to farce and began
its inevitable transformation into "product."
Tags: Iran-Contra
The New Yorker |
October 21, 1991 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Two weeks ago, when Haitian soldiers deposed
their country's President, jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States reacted
quickly and forcefully, cutting off foreign aid and freezing Haiti's assets
in this country.
Tags: Haiti
The New York Times |
August 11, 1991 |
BOOK REVIEW
Driving south in Haiti
one day in the spring of 1986, I passed a great 18-wheeled tractor-trailer
speeding north, heard a volley of automatic weapons fire, and, craning my
neck to look back, witnessed an absurd and amazing tableau...
Tags: Haiti
The New Yorker |
July 29, 1991 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Though the Cold War no longer
casts its shadow over us, our government has shown little eagerness to
surrender the powers it claimed under cover of that shadow.
Tags: CIA | Foreign Affairs
The New Yorker |
June 17, 1991 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Like an untreated infection within the political
system, the Iran-Contra affair continues to grow, spreading corruption
not only into the future but, oddly, back into the past as well.
Tags: Iran-Contra
The New Yorker |
June 03, 1991 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Three months after United States Marines
liberated Kuwait City, the victors of Operation Desert Storm are still
being honored across the country.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
The New Yorker |
January 21, 1991 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
In November, a year after the Berlin Wall
was breached, American troops and airmen by the thousand began leaving
the German bases they had occupied for four decades and heading for the
Persian Gulf.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Cold War
The New Yorker |
December 10, 1990 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
For almost four months, the United States
has been sleepwalking toward war. Though there are the trappings of a
debate -- hearings in Congress, argument and speculation on the editorial
pages, discussion on the public-affairs programs -- thus far they have seemed
insubstantial when set against the reality of President Bush's military
buildup
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
The New Yorker |
November 19, 1990 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
A year after the Berlin Wall was breached
and the "post Cold War era" proclaimed, Americans face the prospect
of a "hot war" fought against an enemy that a few months ago
they didn't know they had.
Tags: Foreign Affairs | Cold War
The New Yorker |
October 01, 1990 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Though the rhetoric surrounding the Middle
East crisis has softened somewhat since the threats of mid-August, the
United States and Iraq remain caught in what President Mitterrand has
called the "logic of war."
Tags: Foreign Affairs
The New Yorker |
September 24, 1990 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
The last great public scandals of the decade
are remarkable, above all, for their inconclusiveness, their strange resistance
to closure.
Tags: Iran-Contra
The New Yorker |
September 10, 1990 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Americans tend to examine distant regimes,
and the commitments our government has made to them, only during times
of crisis.
Tags: Middle East | Iraq
The New Yorker |
July 16, 1990 |
NOTES AND COMMENT
Just past ten on a sunny morning last month
in Port-au-Prince, four men carrying automatic weapons, two of whom wore
the green uniforms of the Haitian Army, strolled into the garden of the
Hotel Santos, where Haiti's Council of State was meeting with union and
business leaders, and asked for Dr. Louis Roy.
Tags: Haiti
The New Yorker |
December 11, 1989 |
A REPORTER AT LARGE
On February 7,1986, the day the dictator
Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, Michèle Bennett, flew off to exile
in France, a crowd of jubilant Haitians invaded the National Cemetery,
a vast expanse of concrete crammed with bright-colored tombs — ivory
and turquoise and rose -- bearing the names of Haiti's great families.
Tags: Haiti
The New Yorker |
December 04, 1989 |
A REPORTER AT LARGE
A few weeks after the fall of Jean-Claude
Duvalier, in February, 1986, the statue of Christopher Columbus presiding
over the harbor of Port-au-Prince was seized and thrown into the sea by
persons unknown, who left fastened on the empty pedestal a sheet of paper
with a simple scrawled message: "Pa de blans en Hayti!"
Tags: Haiti
The New Yorker |
November 27, 1989 |
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Mornings in Port au-Prince, just before dawn,
as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines
of the city began to take shape in the dirty air—tiny houses, painted
aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white;
gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke—my colleagues and I
would go off in search of bodies.
Tags: Haiti
The New York Times |
January 08, 1989 |
BOOK REVIEW
Having ferreted out the ''sophisticated
rebels'' of Europe from Cardiff to Cracow, H. Stuart Hughes found
himself rather nonplussed when asked to suggest their counterparts in
the United States.
Tags:
The New York Times |
July 17, 1988 |
BOOK REVIEW
History, it's said, is written
by the winners; but perhaps it's truer to say it belongs to the least
reticent. Dean Rusk, on becoming Secretary of State, vowed never to write
his memoirs.
Tags:
The New York Times |
October 25, 1987 |
BOOK REVIEW
On West Germany's ''Day
of National Unity'' this summer, a dapper, white-haired, German-born American
stood in the Bundestag, facing the President, Prime Minister and other
high officials of the West German Government, and spoke about German history.
Tags:
The New York Times |
July 19, 1987 |
BOOK REVIEW
Tags:
The New York Times Magazine |
June 24, 1987 |
ESSAY
Three hours out of New
York, I start awake to find myself floating over a grotesque landscape -
the sickly, reddish-brown hills of Haiti, wave upon wave of blood-dark corrugations,
thickly marbled with white sand.
Tags: Haiti
The New York Times |
June 07, 1987 |
BOOK REVIEW
"I
don't recognize myself as a satirist,'' said Vladimir Voinovich. ''No,
I'm just trying to depict reality.''
Tags:
The New York Times |
April 05, 1987 |
ESSAY
It
is likely the question was first asked as soon as it could be - that the
hope of abolition followed shortly after the task of creation.
Tags: Foreign Affairs
The New York Times |
January 25, 1987 |
BOOK REVIEW
Wolfgang Leonhard would
seem well qualified to deliver what he promises here -- a ''new policy
toward [the] USSR.''
Tags:
The New York Times |
May 09, 1986 |
OP-ED ESSAY
In Haiti, as in many deeply troubled places, it was comforting to identify
the national demons with one man, and to assume that his destruction would
bring theirs.
Tags: Haiti
Harper's |
April 1986 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
An American's distrust of welfare should come as no surprise. Public
assistance threatens what is after all the central doctrine of
capitalism: that the incentive to work is born of the burning desire to
have, and then to have more.
Tags: American Politics | Welfare | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
February 1986 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
The public schools
of America long ago sank to a level of decrepitude guaranteeing them the
sort of dogged scrutiny by blue ribbon commissions reserved for a "crisis"
both intolerable and permanent.
Tags: American Politics | Schools | Education | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
January 1986 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
The immortal power of gossip was already
well understood in ancient Greece - "lt too," said Hesiod, "is a kind
of divinity" - but it required the particular talents of the present
age to make money off it.
Tags: Gossip | Media | Foreign Affairs
Harper's |
December 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Last year Americans spent $30 billion on
illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut
down their sources of supply.
Tags: Drugs | Foreign Affairs | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
October 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When a mysterious contagion known as
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome began to kill large numbers of
people a few years ago, various moral authorities took solace in the
observation that its victims, most of whom were homosexuals or drug
addicts, seemed well chosen for divine retribution.
Tags: Harper's Forums | AIDS
Harper's |
September 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
In an age when the peccadilloes of all the traditional idols, from
presidents to Miss Americas, are gleefully exposed, athletes totter on
their pedestals as the last American heroes.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Sports
Harper's |
August 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
The book, never a staple American product,
seems destined to become a rare and precious object intended only for
the cognoscenti who still know how to read.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Books
Harper's |
July 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Almost since its beginning, the nuclear age has defined itself as a tug
of war between technicians and diplomats, a match in which the
diplomats seem forever doomed to finish in the mud.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Arms Control
Harper's |
June 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Eighty years ago this summer the birth of a new era was announced not
by a star twinkling over Bethlehem but by a mushroom cloud rising over
Alamogordo. By miraculous intellectual effort mankind had acquired the
power to destroy the earth.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Arms Control
Harper's |
May 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Crime long ago emerged as one of those peculiar
phenomena of modern life - the permanent crisis.
Tags: American Politics | Crime | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
April 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
In the ten years since the last Marine was
plucked from the roof of the besieged U. S. Embassy in Saigon, "Vietnam"
has come to stand for a good deal more than America's first military defeat.
Tags: Vietnam | Foreign Affairs | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
March 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Disparaging television has long been a favorite national pastime - second in popularity only to watching it.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Television | Media
Harper's |
February 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
In the American religion there stands no icon more sacred than the "free market," embodying as it does the belief that Americans must trust in the benevolence of unseen forces to fulfill their destiny of wealth and power. In times of economic unrest, however, when factories close down, workers lose their jobs, and towns
become impoverished, the prayers to the mysterious market gods give way to cries of anger and disbelief.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Economics
Harper's |
January 1985 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When General Westmoreland hauled CBS into
court for libel last year, the American press responded with a flood of
sober commentary on a cherished subject - itself.
Tags: Journalism | Media, | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
December 1984 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When in 1947 the UN handed down the Solomonic
judgment that to resolve the "Palestine problem" the Holy Land
would be divided into two nations bound together in "economic union,"
the laughter on Sinai must have been loud indeed.
Tags: Middle East | Foreign Policy | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
November 1984 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When no less sacred a national symbol than
Miss America found herself displayed in a pornographic magazine last summer,
the public was duly outraged - at the pornographers, for profiting from
a young woman's inexperience; at the pageant committee, for demanding
she relinquish her crown; and finally at Miss America herself, for not
knowing better.
Tags: American Politics | Pornography | Media
Harper's |
October 1984 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
When Yasir Arafat spoke at the United Nations some years ago with a gun
in his belt, he was giving a performance in what has become the
terrorist theater.
Tags: Terrorism | Media | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
September 1984 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
Almost from the moment the first "contra"
was issued his American, made combat boots, the Reagan Administration's
secret war against Nicaragua has been embroiled in a vociferous if somewhat
bizarre public debate: Congressmen proclaim their outrage, editorialists
confess their misgivings, while officials in Washington - who are running
the war - blandly "decline to comment on intelligence matters."
Tags: Secret Wars | Foreign Policy | Latin America | CIA | Harper's Forums
Harper's |
August 1984 |
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
"The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Thus
Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, expressed what
has been the American poet's struggle from the beginning-to wrest from the land a separate work of art.
Tags: Harper's Forums | Landscape | Poetry
|
