Listen up. It’s not for the squeamish, this business of looking closely at the Bush family definition of “what it takes” to succeed in politics. “You know, the family is ferocious from start to finish,” says my foremost living authority. Richard Ben Cramer is the author of the classic What It Takes about the […]
Listen up: The conversations here are with William F. Buckley and Ron Rosenbaum–the first trying stylishly to obscure, the second earnestly to decipher, the strangest, almost unmentionable development in our politics: that the presidential campaign rivals George Walker Bush and John Forbes Kerry were each and both inducted, two years apart, into the most […]
The literature of our party conventions is not Mencken. It’s Mailer. Starting with his still-breathtaking Esquire account of the 1960 Democratic convention that nominated John F. Kennedy in Los Angeles (Superman Comes to the Supermarket), Norman Mailer’s is an astonishing record of observation, invective, prophecy and lyricism–something of each mixed all together in one of […]
One more thing about Julia Child, please. It strikes me she is the feminist we will remember. The French Chef, like the Statue of Liberty, will stand a long time for American values that she had a lot to do with transforming. Emerging 40-plus years ago, just ahead of Betty Friedan and The Feminine […]