When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, he knew three things. First, he was breaking federal law. Second, he was very likely to go to prison. And third, he was willing to spend much of the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary as the personal “cost” of ending the disastrous war in Vietnam. In the …
The death of Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023) on June 16 comes at a time when America is engaged in a grim public conversation about the unauthorized disclosure of top secret and classified government documents. In June 1971, Ellsberg engineered the most important leak of secret documents in American history. He died from complications of pancreatic cancer at his home in Kensington, Calif. He was …
Where do we go from here? First, I cannot as a historian put Mr. Donald Trump’s indictment into context because this has never happened before in our 247-year history. That’s the context. It’s unprecedented. The classified documents case will play itself out in the federal court system. On a grave occasion like this, I don’t want to write about politics per …
Last week, President Joe Biden visited Hiroshima. He was the second sitting president of the United States to make the pilgrimage to the site of the most destructive moment in human history. On Aug. 6, 1945, at 8:14 a.m. local time, the United States dropped a uranium 235 gun-mechanism atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a plutonium …
Public respect for the U.S. Supreme Court has plummeted. A 2022 Pew Research poll indicates that only 39 percent of Republicans have a strongly favorable opinion of the court, and only 13 percent of Democrats. Independents give the court a 25 percent approval rating. In 1987, 80 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats had a high regard for the …
Just at the end of April, Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China offered to help negotiate a peaceful end to the war Russia has been waging against Ukraine. This news put me into a bittersweet mood. I remembered that moment — in 1905 — when American President Theodore Roosevelt offered to mediate the Russo-Japanese War. The Russian Empire and the Empire …
This is another in an occasional series of articles by Clay Jenkinson on some of the less well-known presidents of the United States. Poor James Monroe (1758-1831). His greatest challenge was living in the shadow of his two illustrious predecessors, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Most people know that Jefferson and his frenemy, John Adams, died on the same day, the …
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance has been restored by the U.S. government, just 55 years after his death and 68 years after his clearance was stripped from him during the most hysterical period of the Cold War. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said, “More evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was …
So here we go, another American detained in Putin’s Russia. Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal has been incarcerated in Moscow’s Lefortovo prison. He is accused of spying. Gershkovich is not so high profile as Brittney Griner of the WNBA, but the charges against him are much more serious. It is likely that he will languish in prison for a considerable …
A Florida charter school principal was forced to resign this past week after a photograph of Michelangelo’s David was shown in a sixth-grade art class. Hope Carrasquilla of the Tallahassee Classical School was forced out after several parents complained, one of whom called the famous 16th-century statue “pornographic.” Carrasquilla was not the teacher who showed the image to students without …
In the movie “Dumb and Dumber,” Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels make a wrong turn at the Colorado border and, after driving through the night, wind up many hours later in a perfectly flat landscape in central Nebraska. Jim Carrey’s character, Lloyd, who mistakenly thinks they must now be in the fabled Rocky Mountains, looks around and quips, “That John …
The firebrand Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.” Although her tweet …
This is one of an occasional series of articles Governing is publishing this year by Clay Jenkinson on some of the less well-known presidents of the United States. In the tributes to Jimmy Carter that have flooded the news and social media in the wake of his announcement that he will live out the last days of his life at home under the …
As the American people decide whether to panic, assign blame or shrug at the violation of American airspace by a handful of strange objects, one of them certainly a Chinese spy balloon, it may be useful to look back to a previous moment of national space panic. The Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite Oct. 4, 1957. Sputnik — …
There are people who can name all the presidents, some forward and backward. I can do pretty well from George Washington through Andrew Jackson (1-7), but once you get to Tylers and Taylors things get a little murky. And I can count backward from Joe Biden to Herbert Hoover (46-31), but then I start second guessing myself about Coolidge, Pierce …
Prince Harry’s “long-awaited” memoir, “Spare,” is anything but. Its 410 pages are causing a big stir in both Britain and the United States and it must be a source of great angst within the royal family. It’s hard to know whether his publisher urged him to ratchet up or ratchet down his conflict with his father, his brother, his sister-in-law …
Immigration has always been a fraught subject in America. We all know that except for Indigenous people (Native Americans), at some previous point all of the rest of us made the long journey to America from somewhere else. In the past 400 years, Europeans, Africans and Asians have filled up the continent to the tune of 334 million people. The liberals and …
Thirty-five states gaveled open new legislative sessions last week. Many are making a point of how quickly they chose a speaker – the vote took all of 30 seconds in Washington state, for example. That is in sharp contrast to the chaotic events in the U.S. House of Representatives a week earlier, which were a sad reminder of how fraught …
As the holidays approach, I thought it might be useful to lighten the tone a little as we survey the national political situation in 2022. Two weeks ago, former President Trump’s attorneys came forward with two top security documents that they said they found in a storage facility rented on Trump’s behalf near Mar-a-Lago. Putting aside for the moment the fact that …
“No honest person can now deny that [Donald] Trump is an enemy of the Constitution,” Liz Cheney said after the former president appeared to call for terminating the U.S. Constitution in a post on his alternative social media site, Truth Social, on Dec. 3. The Truth Social post heard across the Republican Party as former president Donald Trump appeared to …
Donald Trump announced a new run for the presidency Nov. 15. This comes at a time when several investigations seem to be closing in on him. The Justice Department is investigating his appropriation of government documents, some of them highly classified, that belong to the National Archives. For this he may be indicted. The state of Georgia has been investigating Trump’s attempts …
Book banning is on the rise in America. According to PEN America, from July 2021 to June 2022, there were 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, involving 1,648 titles by 1,261 different authors. PEN America is a free expression advocacy group headquartered in New York. In the period from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022, Texas had the most …
Amtrak’s Wink and Nod to the Great Northern I boarded the Amtrak’s Empire Builder train in Minot not long ago, en route to the railroad’s terminus in Seattle. A journey of 1,178 miles, 27 hours, starting at 9 a.m. CDT on a Friday and ending at 10:15 PDT Saturday morning, a day later. That meant we rode in daylight (in late …
This is the second of a two-part feature about the intersection of agriculture, business and culture at a place called the Corn Palace in the southeast corner of South Dakota. It is a long way from a roadside attraction dedicated to corn in southeast South Dakota to the mucilage of a $47 billion corn industrial complex that makes maize barely …
Although the Corn Palace began its long run with geometric designs, it soon took a thematic approach. The most frequent themes have celebrated the frontier, the homestead period, intrepid pioneers, the American West, plains flora and fauna, the coming of the railroad, and Native Americans, but there have also been years dedicated to Egyptian (1911), Dutch (1914) and even Turkish …
This is the first part of a two-part feature about the intersection of agriculture, business and culture at a place called the Corn Palace in the southeast corner of South Dakota. Plenty of people happen upon the World’s Only Corn Palace while traveling through South Dakota, perhaps on their way to Badlands National Park or Mount Rushmore. Or the annual Sturgis megamotorcycle rally. Not so many …
Queen Elizabeth’s death Sept. 8 hit me harder than I expected. As an American small “r” republican, I usually find America’s obsession with the British royals perplexing. But Elizabeth was much more than a monarch. She was the embodiment of Britain’s unique place in the world through a tumultuous century. The queen’s death after the longest reign in British history, …
The last half century has been a period of great disillusionment. In the 1950s, the American people overwhelmingly trusted their government, their president, news sources, educational systems and basic American institutions from the Justice Department to the Department of Defense. Today, the American people are largely disaffected and cynical about those same institutions. A recent NBC News poll indicated that 74 percent of the American people believe …
The great American novelist John Steinbeck liked North Dakota well enough when he passed through with his poodle, Charley, in October 1960, but then he crossed the border at Beach, N.D., and Wibaux, Mont. At that juncture, he wrote, “I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love, …
At a Portland (Ore.) City Council meeting a decade ago, a local environmental activist concluded his remarks by dumping a load of garbage he’d collected onto the floor of the council chambers. Whatever the impact this stunt had on council members, it immediately moved Aaron Landsman, an out-of-town artist who was in the audience by chance. It suggested to him a …
The 250th birthday of the United States is coming in four years. Already the great cultural institutions of America (National Endowment for the Humanities, Library of Congress, Smithsonian, prestigious universities) are thinking about the appropriate way to celebrate this important anniversary. We can expect fireworks, parades, festivals, orations — and protests, criticism, demands for a full-on national recognition of all …
This is another in an occasional series we are calling The de Tocqueville Interviews.* This summer, America’s unique, exasperating gun culture has taken center stage. On May 24, the Uvalde school shooting horrified the nation. Within a month, President Biden signed into law (above) the most substantial piece of gun safety legislation passed in the U.S. in decades. Yet on June 23, the U.S. …
The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the striking down of a longstanding New York City gun law have received most of the attention at the close of this year’s U.S. Supreme Court, but many court watchers are equally focused on recent decisions about the separation of church and state in America. On June 27, 2022, in the case Kennedy v. Bremerton School …
The late Stephen Ambrose liked to begin his lectures on the Lewis and Clark Expedition by saying that the men (and one woman) of the Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery traveled “from sea to shining sea.” And yet typically, accounts of the journey begin with Lewis and Clark leaving St. Charles, Mo., on May 14, 1804, with three heavily laden boats, a couple of horses, …
The surge in migrants attempting to illegally cross into the U.S. along its southern border reached an all-time high in May. The 239,416 reported arrests surpassed the previous record, set just two months earlier, by almost 20,000 people. This chaos at the border isn’t going away, says Alex Nowrasteh, director of economic and social policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, …
It’s Primary season in America, with all the chaos, expense and bombast that phenomenon has come to represent in our national political life. The major media now give more attention to off-year primary elections in half a dozen battleground states than they gave to the quadrennial general national election a generation ago. As if they were interpreting the tarot or …
We take annual conferences of the National Governors Association for granted, but nobody had ever thought of bringing America’s governors together until Theodore Roosevelt galloped onto the national stage in 1901, ascending to the presidency after the assassination of William McKinley in Buffalo, N.Y., on Sept. 14 of that year. It’s not hard to imagine Roosevelt, a strong Hamiltonian nationalist who essentially invented the modern presidency, calling the …
Growing up in the 1980s in a family of journalists, Garrett Graff’s sense of Watergate was shaped by the on-screen exploits of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men,” in which they portray Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively. But when the recent impeachment of Donald Trump prompted him to take a fresh look back at the Nixon administration, Graff stumbled …
In 2014, Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Crimea, a peninsula of southern Ukraine that juts into the Black Sea. The West grumbled and imposed economic sanctions, expelled Russia from the Group of Seven (G7) political and economic forum but chose not to go to war against Russia. Although the sanctions hurt the Russian economy, and no doubt impaired the lives of the 144 …
“All modern American literature,” Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’” Despite such accolades, this masterwork from Twain — the pen name used by Samuel Clemens — has been slowly disappearing from American classrooms, a development primarily driven by the novel’s repeated use — 219 times in all — of that uniquely offensive term that …
This is second in a series in a historical look at the U.S. Supreme Court to coincide with nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation process, which continues this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Three dangerous trends appear to be jeopardizing the independence and credibility of the third branch of the federal government. Court decisions are increasingly falling out along what appear to be purely partisan lines. …
This is the first in an occasional Governing series on the Supreme Court in preparation for nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation process, which enters its next phase on March 21 when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to publicly make her case for why she should win approval to sit on the nation’s highest court. The Supreme Court has been more than usually visible in …
The evolution of the sprawling cities of the American West is inextricably bound to America’s 20th-century fascination with dam-building. But that decades-long story, rife with dammed and diverted rivers as well as political intrigue, is being reshaped by climate change, drought and overuse into a tale of ecologic and economic misadventure. Despite the problematic history of the big dam projects, …
America’s consciousness is indelibly shaped by the competing legacies of three distinct personalities: a fast-talking New Yorker, a quintessential Yankee and a Virginia squire. In his book, “Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding,” historian Darren Staloff explores the social, intellectual and personal dynamics that shaped these men and helped define the nation. Staloff teaches courses …