Roundup: Talking About History

Barry Werth: On Ford's Pardon of Nixon

[Barry Werth is the author of “31 Days: The Crisis that Gave Us the Government We Have Today.”] AMERICA got its first real impression of Gerald Ford on the steamy August morning 33 years ago when he took office as president, and most people instantly liked what they saw. Mr. Ford stood in the driveway of his suburban split-level house, hours before assuming a post he never sought and hoped to avoid having to fill. One of the questions he took was about Harry Truman’s comment when he

Robert Drury and Tom Clavin: How Lieutenant Ford Saved His Ship

[Robert Drury and Tom Clavin are the authors of the forthcoming “Halsey’s Typhoon: The True Story of a Fighting Admiral, an Epic Storm and an Untold Rescue.”] FOR Americans under a certain age, Gerald Ford is best remembered for his contribution to Bartlett’s — “Our long national nightmare is over” — or, more likely, for the comedian Chevy Chase’s stumbling, bumbling impersonations of him on “Saturday Night Live.” But there’s a different label we can attach to this former president,

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

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

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why they deny the Holocaust (because they were never told about it)

[AYAAN HIRSI ALI, a Somali immigrant who served in the parliament of the Netherlands until earlier this year, is the author of "Infidel," an autobiography to be published in February.] ONE DAY IN 1994, when I was living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I were both immigrants from Somalia and had both applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted it; she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My hal

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

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."

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

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

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

Bret Stephens: Polite society helped pave the way for Iran's Holocaust conference.

"Not acceptable," says Ban Ki Moon, new Secretary-General of the United Nations. "Repulsive," say the editors of Britain's Guardian newspaper. "An insult . . . to the memory of millions of Jews," says Hillary Rodham Clinton. Global polite society is in an uproar over the Holocaust conference organized this week in Tehran under the auspices of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Moral denunciation is what reasonable people do--what they must do--when

Anne Applebaum: Holocaust Denial Is No Joke

On Monday, the Iranian foreign ministry held an international conference. There's nothing unusual in that. Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one thing, the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects—deputy ministers and the like—the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman w

Diana Muir Applebaum & Paul Applebaum: The Gene Wars

Macedonian nationalists want Greece back, or at least its northern provinces. Their latest weapon is an obscure genetic study, which claims that while Macedonians belong to the older Mediterranean substratum of peoples, Greeks do not. Consequently, the study concludes, the Macedonians predate even the earliest Greek civilization.1 Among Macedonian political activists who believe that Greece “has held Macedonian territory illegally for… ninety-three years” and who dream of the re-unification of h