I.

“Trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to readers of The New Republic is not easy.” On June 2, 1944, W.H. Auden penned that sentence in a letter to Ursula Niebuhr. On January 26, 2010, Andrew Sullivan posted it as the “quote for the day” on his blog. Displaced and unglossed quotations are always in some way mordant, and bristle smugly with implications. Let us see what this one implies.

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush

By John Yoo

(Kaplan, 544 pp., $29.95)

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

By Garry Wills

(Penguin, 288 pp., $27.95)

I.

In December 2008, Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “If the president, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” Cheney’s answer included a reference to a military authority that President Bush did not exercise. “The President of the United States,” he said, “now for fifty years is followed at all times, twenty-four hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.” The vice president added that the president “could launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen” without checking with Congress or the courts, and noted also that “he has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” And then he shifted to the war on terrorism: “It’s unfortunate, but I think we’re perfectly appropriate to take the steps we have.”

Analysts are still mulling over the Copenhagen accord, trying to figure out what it means for the fate of global climate politics. The humdrum answer is that it all depends—we'll have to see how individual nations tackle their CO2 emissions in the months and years ahead, and then watch how the next round of international talks shake out. But if it's specifics you want, check out Harvard economist Robert Stavin's analysis. First, a recap of the negotiations that led to the deal:

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

By Neil Sheehan

(Random House, 534 pp., $35)

In late March 1953, a colonel named Bernard Schriever sat in a briefing room at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, listening as John von Neumann, the brilliant mathematician, and Edward Teller, the physicist, discussed the future of the hydrogen bomb, the far more powerful follow-on to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki eight years earlier. The United States had detonated its first hydrogen device the previous year in the Pacific, vaporizing a tiny atoll with a force of greater than ten megatons, or ten million tons of TNT. (In contrast, the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima yielded a mere twelve kilotons, or twelve thousand tons of TNT.) Whereas the A-bombs used against Japan had relied on the process known as fission, splitting atoms of uranium and plutonium, the new H-bomb used the power of a fission explosion to fuse isotopes of hydrogen, releasing even more energy in weapons of theoretically unlimited yield. The only problem, from the Air Force’s point of view, was that the first fusion device was an impractical behemoth. It weighed eighty-two tons--hardly something one could load into the bay of a bomber.

Francisco Toro and Juan Nagel write the Venezuelan news blog Caracas Chronicles.

The Honduran crisis surely reached its Rococo stage this week after fresh elections organized by the coupsters' regime saw the election of a conservative rancher as president—while Brazil's nearly sainted left-wing president, Lula da Silva, promptly rejected the poll as undemocratic ... a scant few days after welcoming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Brazil with open arms.

The election of President Lobo has split the international community, and in mostly predictable ways. His victory has been recognized by the U.S., Peru, Panama, Colombia, and Japan, while Spain has announced it will soon re-visit its tough stance. The region's left-wing governments, however, remain staunchly opposed to recognizing any election tinged by association with June's coup.

Brazil is now leading the guys with the pitchforks, a group that includes Argentina's Cristina Kirchner, Chile's Michelle Bachelet, and the OAS, alongside such shining exemplars of democratic principle as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and the Castro brothers in Cuba. The problem for this group is that Lobo's election comes with the real legitimacy of a vote that was mandated by Honduras’s constitution and had been scheduled and planned long before June's coup. What's more, despite calls for a boycott by deposed president Mel Zelaya, Sunday saw turnout top 60%--slightly higher than the turnout five years ago, when Zelaya himself was elected, and about the same level of participation that saw Barack Obama elected in the U.S. last year.

All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.­ --Gabriel García Márquez

I.

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.

This was the maiden sally of the United States at the U.N. Human Rights Council, a resolution under the rubric of "promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development." Phew!

The measure was introduced by the U.S. and by Egypt, which, of course, has a long and sterling record as an insurer and defender of civilized liberties. After all, earlier this year, Freedom House gave the Cairo regime a ranking on its freedom of the press index, placing it with three other bastions of human rights at 128th out of 195 countries--a notch above the Central African Republic and a few notches below Congo (Brazzaville). Are we to expect that soon America will co-sponsor a motion with Saudi Arabia on the liberties of women?

The resolution passed in a voice vote, which means by acclamation. I am sure that the delegates from Cuba and China and other paragons of press freedom also shouted "aye" to the question. In any case, there was no "nay" or "abstain" recorded. So that settles it, I suppose, "freedom for all." Doubtless that the crime of insulting the president of Egypt, which can get you five years in jail, will vanish from the books ... and maybe from the courts, too. On the other hand, do not count on this.

In the latest issue of Newsweek, Jonathan Tepperman has a very confused piece arguing that nuclear disarmament is a bad idea because “[t]he bomb may actually make us safer.” Taking a stand against Washington’s allegedly overwhelming “nuclear phobia,” he writes, “Knowing the truth about nukes would have a profound impact on government policy.” I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone suggest that they know “the truth” about nuclear weapons, but I’m quite certain that Tepperman hasn’t found it.

The thrust of the article is that nuclear-armed states won’t fight each other because “all states are rational on some basic level” and because the “iron logic of deterrence and mutual assured destruction is so compelling.” In other words, they won’t wage even a conventional war out of fear that it’ll go nuclear and destroy them in the process. This, of course, assumes that states are monolithic actors and that rationality precludes catastrophe, both of which are silly propositions, as Tepperman himself inadvertently shows when he cites the Cuban missile crisis as evidence for his thesis. During the crisis, he writes, “Both sides stepped back from the brink when they recognized that a war would have meant curtains for everyone.”

Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama's reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has "moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11." Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence.

I.

Early last spring, outside a guesthouse in Kabul where I was staying, an injured Afghan man limped up to the locked gate. He wore a blazer with suede elbow patches and leaned on crutches. Because a suicide bomber had attacked the building not long before, a guard blocked the entrance of the unannounced supplicant. The fact that the man refused to give his name didn't help his case.

Guantnamo Bay, Cuba

No season in living memory has offered the embarrassment of architectural riches on view in exhibitions across the United States this summer. With retrospectives on Frank Gehry at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rudolph Schindler first at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and now at the National Building Museum in Washington, and a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe double-header in New York, not even the most avid proponent of the art can complain that architecture is being slighted, as it had been by major American museums for much of the last decade. Why, how, where, and when exhibitions on established artists occur can be traced to a variety of motivations, from so-called calendar shows that mark an anniversary of some sort to surveys that reflect the general perception that it is time for a fresh look at a particular body of work. In the case of "Mies in Berlin" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Mies in America" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the reasons are more personal in nature. This exhibition project began as the brainchild of Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, a study center and the world's foremost museum of the building art. An heiress to the Seagram liquor fortune, in 1954 she persuaded her father and the company's president, Samuel Bronfman, to let her select the architect for its new New York headquarters and to oversee its construction. The twenty-seven-year-old Lambert chose no less than Mies van der Rohe, universally acclaimed as one of the titans of modern architecture.

From The Editors: For our inaugural glimpse inside the archives, we bring you “J-School Confidential,” Michael Lewis’s perceptive and hilarious look inside Columbia University’s graduate program in journalism. At a time when our profession is reassessing its very purpose, it’s good to have a reminder of what journalism is—and isn’t.

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The cheer with which Western commentators greeted Mikhail Gorbachev’s tease that the Berlin Wall might come down “when the conditions that generated the need for it disappear” is another sign of how credulous we have become in receiving blandishments from Moscow. It is not only that Gorbachev categorically denied that the Wall “was a result of an evil intention.” He also asked us to acknowledge that conditions in 1961 justified its erection. More than that: since those conditions still exist today, the Wall remains a legitimate expression

This article was originally printed on October 1, 1962

It has become a settled conviction, at least among American democratic idealists, that the contest which engulfs the political life of the whole world is between Communism and democracy.

This article was originally printed on October 1, 1962

It has become a settled conviction, at least among American democratic idealists, that the contest which engulfs the political life of the whole world is between Communism and democracy.

This article was originally printed on June 24, 1967

Originally Published on December 28, 1963.

Originally published on November 11, 1967.

They brought Che Guevara at five o'clock in the afternoon of October 9 to the airfield outside the small town of Vallegrande in southeastern Bolivia. The fighting had been fierce. Che had been among the first casualties and his comrades had been fighting viciously to recover the body. They failed. Most of them also fell, among them Che's Cuban bodyguards Antonio and Pancho. The remainder, after 30 hours of battle, managed to get away, pursued by the Bolivian army's tough, US-trained Rangers.