Watching the wake for Martha Coakley on television Tuesday night, I saw John Kerry hobbling into the Sheraton Boston ballroom, his crutches supporting the hip replacement he'd had last week.
What a difference between this very serious and cerebral senator and the lightweight who aspired to join him in the upper house of the U.S. Congress.
I allude to two efforts by Kerry to reveal facts that others would prefer to leave undisturbed.
This week marks Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, a national holiday. Decades after his first civil-rights marches, what is the meaning of King's legacy? And what do we know about the man himself? Below, read some of the best TNR articles from our archives:
"A Moral Revolutionary" by Garry Wills (09/13/82) The life and trials of MLK.
Sarah Palin’s autobiography Going Rogue doesn’t have an index. Why? Well, I’m not exactly sure. But it sure makes finding gems in the text--such as the defense of that $150,000 clothing bill, the petty attacks on Katie Couric, and Palin-isms like “maverick” and “dang!”—a pretty tough slog. So, here’s an index. A really, really long and thorough one. Want to know where Palin celebrated one of her baby showers with her gal pals? It’s in here. Want to know how she feels about the ACLU, or Ashley Judd, or Steve Schmidt?
In The New York Times on Saturday, the conservative writer and politician John R. Miller made a more-or-less convincing case that America's standing in the world is more-or-less irrelevant when it comes to conducting a successful foreign policy. Today, on Foreign Policy's website, two scholars summarize an American Political Science Association report on the same topic. The report's conclusion is the opposite of the one reached by Miller, and is broader in its argument. The authors claim that Obama's election has not yet solved America's image problems, for example, and they describe what they see as increasing post-cold war partisanship on foreign policy issues. The summary's central claim, however, is muddled. The idea that America's standing in the world is unimportant is called "dead wrong" by the authors, who begin their section on this issue by writing:
During the Cold War, the United States was anxious that its reputation for protecting its allies, especially those in Europe, be seen as credible by both Soviet leaders and Europeans. As Lyndon Johnson explained to Martin Luther King, Jr. in early 1965, "If I pulled out [of Vietnam] ... I think the Germans would be scared to death that our commitment to them was no good, and God knows what we'd have in other places in the world."
The fact that this story is cited as evidence of the importance of America's standing is bizarre, and the notion that we stayed in Vietnam to reassure our allies is nauseating.
More recently, the Bush Doctrine was reversed in Bush's second term in part due to falling support abroad -- involving both credibility and esteem -- that made it harder for the United States to get what it wanted.
On a rainy day in 1993, I sat with my parents at the opening ceremonies of the Holocaust Museum and heard President Clinton, who was doing nothing to stop the genocide in Bosnia, suggest that the genocide in Bosnia must be stopped, because never again can we allow genocide to occur.
After several weeks of swooning, news reports are finally being filed about the gap between Senator Barack Obama’s promises of a pure, soul-cleansing “new” politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as the manipulative illusion that it is.
Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Stephen B. Oates
(Harper & Row, 416 pp., $18.95)
Protest at Selma:
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
by David J. Garrow
(Yale University Press; $15.00)
This piece was originally published on August 24, 1968.
William Faulkner located Mulberry Street so precisely and described its major industry so vividly in one of his early novels that lustful visitors from the rural mid-South memorized the passage and used it as their guide to the rows of dingy houses where three-dollar whores did business until the military authorities forced the city to clean up the neighborhood during World War II.
