Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Ronald Reagan
Reagan's commitment to deregulation, aggressive military spending, and diminished oversight created an appearance of corruption that some critics claimed was worse than Watergate.
Critics saw him as weak, but in his one term in office Carter had significant achievements in foreign affairs and environmental and energy policy.
Editor’s Note: The author was a longtime columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, and since has been a television commentator, documentary filmmaker and author of three New York Times bestsellers.
Largely unknown to his cabinet, Ronald Reagan broke with previous U.S. policy and initiated a global campaign of economic and political warfare against the Soviets.
The Soviet Union was erased from world maps not because of a reform process or a series of diplomatic arrangements. It simply could not sustain itself. Historians will debate for decades, perhaps centuries, which factors weighed most on the Soviet system. Was it the bankruptcy of State ideology?
The Trump Administration has proposed massive cuts to history programs whose mission is to teach Americans what made their country great
During the Obama Administration, it seemed that one of the few things that Congressional Republicans and the White House could agree upon was cutting history programs.
In one day, the stock market plummeted 22 percent shortly after the author became Chairman of the Federal Reserve
I’d scrutinized the economy every working day for decades and had visited the Fed scores of times. Nevertheless, when I was appointed chairman in August 1987, I knew I’d have a lot to learn. That was reinforced the minute I walked in the door.
Most associate Ronald Reagan with California, but he spent his formative years in the midwest. On the centennial of his birth, a handful of small Illinois towns want a share of the limelight.
Back in 1965 Ronald Reagan published his first memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, borrowing the title from a line in the 1942 Warner Brothers film Kings Row.
On the 25th anniversary of two famous Reagan speeches, the former Speaker of the House asks why we haven’t learned more from the 40th president
Why Have Our Presidents Almost Always Stumbled After Their First Four Years?
Now you can lift a glass to the President’s memory in his ancestral shebeen—but, alas, there will be only water in it
Visitors to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, are treated to many tableaux from the President’s long, varied life: a re-creation of the kitchen in his childhood home in Illinois, the booth at Chasen’s (the Los Angeles restaurant) where he proposed to Nancy Davis, an exact replica of the Oval Office—and, now, an authentic Irish pub where he hoisted a pint of ale more than 20 years ago.
What a skeptical biographer discovered about a very elusive subject
Cold Feet In The Oval Office
There I was, standing outside a room in the White House, ready to have a one-on-one meeting with President Ronald Reagan.
An Incidental, Oddly Enduring Acquaintance
During the 1968 election, when I was 14,1 became fascinated by politics. With my grandfather’s help, I began collecting political buttons from every presidential election in the twentieth century and quite a few in the nineteenth.
Six Aspects Of The Man—Three Political, Three Personal—Hint At How Posterity Will View Him
In their surprisingly short history, presidential debates have never lived up to our expectations—yet they’ve always proved invaluable
A recent presidential edict will make it harder for historians to practice their trade.
From Berlin to Washington to Area 51, landmarks of the era are opening up to tourists.
When the two parties gather to select their candidates, the proceedings will be empty glitz, with none of the import of old-time conventions. Or will they?
How bad is it when Presidents get really sore?
The rumor first began to spread around Washington last year: Sen. John McCain had a skeleton in his closet. Was it something to do with his past as a war hero in Vietnam? His voting record in the Senate?
The English journalist has spent more than a decade preparing a book on this country’s role in the most eventful hundred years since the race began. He liked what he found enough to become an American himself.
Evans likes to refer to The American Century as “history for browsers.” There are searching essays at the start of each chapter, but most of the book consists of tiropage spreads concerning particular people or events.
…and grow, and grow, from almost no employees to three million. Don’t blame the welfare state, or the military; the truth is much more interesting.
THIRTY YEARS AGO A HARD-FOUGHT gubernatorial campaign heralded the third great political upheaval of our century
IT WAS A FUNERAL TO REMEMBER. The rain had been pelting for hours when the mourners gathered in St.
And how it grew, and grew, and grew…
The federal government was still in the process of establishing itself in 1792 and did not have a good year financially. Total income was only $3,670,000, or 88 cents per capita. Outlays were $5,080,000. The budget deficit therefore amounted to fully 38 percent of revenues.
A long-time Republican-party insider and close student of its past discusses how the party has changed over the years—for better and for worse —and where it may be headed.
Jack Kemp was born in 1935 in Los Angeles; his father owned a small trucking company. He came of political age in a time and place that made it likely enough that he would become a lifelong Republican, and he did.
The “loser decade” that at first seemed nothing more than a breathing space between the high drama of the 1960s and whatever was coming next is beginning to reveal itself as a bigger time than we thought
That’s it,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then U.S. ambassador to India, wrote to a colleague on the White House staff in 1973 on the subject of some issue of the moment. “Nothing will happen.
"Gosh, it would be fun to play a President of the United States," said Lt. Reagan.
In April of 1942 I enlisted in Psychological Research Unit 3 at the Santa Ana Army Air Base.
Corruption must be fought in ways that preserve fairness and freedom. Otherwise the reformers can be as bad as the rascals.
One balmy summer morning this year the headlines sang a song of scandal. GINGRICH’S PAY TO AIDES IN 2 RACES RAISES QUESTION OF RULE BREAKING, said one. That’s the Republican whip of the House of Representatives they were talking about.
A year ago we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the Republic.
Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket.
It depends on whose interpretation of both history and the current crisis you believe. For one of America’s most prominent supply-side economists, the answer is yes.
Jude Wanniski was among the early leaders in the revival of supply-side economic theory.
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