Roundup: Talking About History

Fred Barnes: The Underappreciated President

...It was two decades before Ford's success as president began to be appreciated. When presidential scholar Fred Greenstein of Princeton developed a half-dozen non-partisan, non-ideological measures for judging modern presidents, he found that Ford scored surprisingly well. Greenstein labeled Ford "underappreciated." Ford's greatest strength, Greenstein wrote in his book The Presidential Difference, was his "emotional intelligence." This is the quality of emotional sou

PBS Roundtable: Former President Gerald Ford's Legacy Remembered

RAY SUAREZ: We're joined by presidential historian Michael Beschloss; Ellen Fitzpatrick, professor of American history at the University of New Hampshire; Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and former director of the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Library; and Ron Nessen, President Ford's press secretary from 1974 to 1977, and the author of the memoir "It Sure Looks Different from the Inside." Mr. Nessen currently is a journalist-in-residence at the Brookings Institution.

Bob Woodward: Writing an End to Watergate (Re: Jerry Ford)

On Sunday, Sept. 8, 1974, President Ford attended church alone. He sat by himself in a pew at St. John's Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square. He took Holy Communion. Back at the White House at 11:05 a.m., he went on television to announce that he had decided to pardon Richard Nixon for any crimes he might have committed during Watergate. The country's obsession with the scandal "could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it," he read from a statement. &qu

Richard O'Mara: H.L. Mencken, 'The Sage of Baltimore,' had a zing bloggers can't touch

BALTIMORE -- There's still time in this semicentenary year of H.L. Mencken's passing to review his contributions to American letters and ponder why - even amid the modern effluvia of our hydra-headed media - he remains the most widely quoted American writer. Why does this curmudgeon, with a wit like a poniard, who dealt in the ephemeral currency of the news, and whose heyday had ended by the middle of the last century, still claim attention? Any doubters should visit th

Mark Steel: The 12 greatest Britons ... an alternative view of our nation's history

The Tories, being cool and young, have presented a list of top people. Because everything now is judged by lists, which is why every night there's a television programme called something like The 50 Top TV Wasps. And the Tories' list, of British people who've created the nation, tries to be modern and inclusive and ignores Churchill and Thatcher, and there was probably someone who suggested replacing Alfred the Great with Lily Allen. For example, they include Aneurin Bevan, the soc

Mark Updegrove: How will history judge Bush?

[MARK UPDEGROVE is author of ``Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House.''] An unpopular war raging inconclusively overseas. A truculent North Korea defying U.N. resolutions and flaunting its military ambitions. A sharply divided Congress squabbling bitterly over foreign policy. And a beleaguered second-term president in his last two years in office, struggling to keep his administration afloat in the face of anemic approval ratings. George

Mustafa Akyol: Remembering Abdul Hamid II, a pro-American caliph

[Mustafa Akyol is a writer based in Istanbul.] AL QAEDA'S STATED GOAL--to reestablish the caliphate, the political leadership of worldwide Islam embodied first in the successors of the Prophet Muhammad and most recently in the four-century rule of the Ottoman dynasty--is pure, ahistorical fantasy. One way to appreciate this is to revisit the 33-year reign of the most remarkable modern caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909). An ally neither of bigoted Islamists nor of the radical

John Londregan: Don't Cry for PInochet

[John Londregan, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author of Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile.] The death of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte marks the definitive end of his efforts to associate himself with conservatism. It also marks the ultimate success of his efforts to avoid accountability for his murderous behavior as a leader of the Chilean military junta that took power in 1973. In September 1973, Chile was in the midst

Orlando Patterson: A Holiday for Us All

[Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest columnist.] Christmas seems to bring out the worst in America’s culture warriors. The Christian right continues its crusade against those waging “war against Christmas.” Multiculturalists have nearly banished “Merry Christmas” and “Silent Night” from the public domain and are now going after outdoor Christmas trees. Atheist activists like Sam Harris are goaded into defending the outing of their Christmas trees with

James Sturcke: The commercial roots of Christmas

early October, shortly before the shops began to fill up with singing Santas and fake trees, a senior Scottish churchman urged an end to "plastic" Christmas. "It is of great concern that so many people feel under pressure to present the perfect Christmas," said the Right Rev Alan McDonald. "Stop thinking of presents and start thinking about the present!" was the speech's catchily headlined press release. Concerns over the rampant commercialism of

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: Target becomes a target of the Che Guevara myth

Until yesterday Christmas shoppers at Target department stores could purchase a 24-CD carrying case decorated with the image of Che Guevara. When I heard about it, I wondered why the retailer would want to promote the memory of a mass murderer. What's next, I asked, when I spoke with a representative of the company on Wednesday, Pol Pot pajamas? Late Wednesday evening Target sent me this statement: "It is never our intent to offend any of our guests through the merchandise we c

Roger Kimball: Intellectual Diversity Unwelcome at American Universities

[Roger Kimball is co-Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books.] It's no secret that American universities, while trumpeting "diversity," are among the least diverse places in the Western world. When it comes to the sort of diversity that matters at educational institutions--intellectual diversity--they are more like one one-party states, bastions of what the literary critic Frederick Crews called "Left Eclecticism."

Aydin Mehmet Ali: Why Cypriots need to break the silence of their unofficial history

One of the greatest intellectuals of the Turkish Cypriot community, Aydin Mehmet Ali who is an international education consultant, author and trainer spoke to Toplum Postas? about the need for Cypriots (both Greek and Turkish Cypriots) to break the chains of their silence over unofficial history that has for so long been swept under their Cypriot carpets. Rather than relying on the elite who impose their official history, Ayd?n explains why it is imperative that Cypriots take ownership of their

Humberto Fontova: A Tale of Two Dictators

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, a Conservative Book Club "Main Selection."] Two former Latin American heads of state have been much in the news lately – one because he passed away and the other because his death seems imminent. The terms "human rights abuses," along with "murders and tortures," appear consistently in the articles on one while being almost completely absent from the ones on the other, where the term

Max Boot: Hitler's Mideast helpers

MAHMOUD Ahmadinejad has an impeccable sense of timing. Just a week after the Iraq Study Group recommended a heart-to-heart with him, the president of Iran convened a conference in Tehran to examine whether the Holocaust really occurred. The answer from such"scholars" as David Duke, the notorious former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, was a resounding no. On one level, Ahmadinejad's embrace of Holocaust denial might seem surprising. A man who has repeatedly called for Israel to be"wiped off

Anthony Selden: Blair biographer assesses his legacy

[Anthony Seldon is the author of Blair; his new book, Blair Unbound, is due to be published in July 2007.] Within the next seven months, Tony Blair will have gone, and the landscape of British politics will change utterly. The daggers are being sharpened and the pens filled to tear into his record. Already a picture is emerging of a prime minister who had a strong first term, a disastrous second, and a flawed third while battling to secure his legacy. This view will un

David Farley: Did the Vatican steal Jesus' foreskin so people would shut up about the savior's penis?

In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. "This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home." Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big n

H-Diplo: WaPo taken to task for editorial that was soft on Pinochet

1) From: David Noon, University of Alaska: The Washington Post editorial about Pinochet -- approvingly cited by David Horowitz -- must rank among the more intellectually dishonest pieces to appear in that newspaper's pages in recent years. The bulk of the piece aims to argue one irrelevant point (that Castro is/was worse), one questionable assertion (that Jeane Kirkpatrick was "right" about right-wing dictators) and one enormous falsehood (that Pinochet deserves credit fo

Susannah Heschel: Nativity of the Jews

[Heschel holds the Eli Black Chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and is the author of "Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus" (University of Chicago Press).] Mary and Joseph must have been great parents. Jesus' followers were so impressed by his religious personality that they believed he was anointed by God (Christos means "anointed" in Greek). Because Jesus became such a religious hero, the Nativity narratives in the Gospels, written long after his death

Bashir Abu-Manneh: In Palestine, a Dream Deferred

[Bashir Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard College.] Since occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel has been the only sovereign state in British Mandate Palestine. Palestinians have been living either as second-class citizens in the Jewish state; or as colonized residents of the West Bank and Gaza with no human or political rights; or as refugees dispersed and stranded in neighboring Arab countries, in often extremely difficult conditions. The chances of Palestinians over