History and the Fall Election

AS THE 1936 presidential election approached, Republicans were desperate to defeat Franklin Roosevelt and undermine the new Social Security legislation Congress had passed in 1935. The Republicans failed in the campaign of disinformation that they launched, but what they did and how Roosevelt fought back to win a second term carries with it important lessons for the Obama administration and the 2010 midterms.

The 1936 story, told in detail in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s, “The Age of Roosevelt,” began in October when a group of Detroit industrialists worked out an anti-Social Security c... More

Tiger Woods's Golf Lesson

LIKE SOUTH Carolina governor Mark Sanford, former president Bill Clinton, and former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, golfing great Tiger Woods—the winner of fifty-six professional golf tournaments from 2000 to 2009—has become a charter member of the Celebrity Adulterer’s Club. His decision to hold a televised news conference apologizing for his transgressions is a familiar one, and in the conference, Woods—whose wife was not in the room with him—made a point of offering no excuses. “I convinced myself that the rules did not apply,” he declared. “I have... More

Evergreen Season

FOR MOST New Yorkers, the Christmas season starts with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. In the city’s heart, “Miracle on 34th Street” lives on.

For me, the Christmas season starts more modestly. It begins when the Christmas tree stands start showing up on the street corners. Wreaths, sprigs of holly, and a small forest of evergreens transform the otherwise drab sidewalks near my apartment. On windy days the smell of pine carries from block to block.

But for the men and occasional woman who sell the Christmas trees, it is a different story. In rain and snow, they watch t... More

Everyday America

IN 1976 the Museum of Modern Art celebrated the nation’s bicentennial with an exhibit it titled, “The Natural Paradise: Painting in America, 1800-1950.” At the core of the MoMA exhibit was the image of America as a modern Eden. The MoMA’s curators insisted that American landscape painting, with its emphasis on light and space, was at the root of what the country was about. Thirty-three years later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915” offers a far different vision. America, the curators argue, is defined by its day-to-day life.

A... More

The American Rodin: Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the Met

FOR VISITORS to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Augustus Saint-Gaudens is a familiar figure.  His “Diana,” a gilded bronze version of the 1894 nude archer that served as the weathervane on top of Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, dominates the sculpture garden of the Met’s Charles Englehard court. On the east wall of Englehard court, Saint-Gaudens is represented by the two caryatids, “Armor” and “Pax” that he sculpted in the 1880s for the gigantic mantelpiece of Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New York.

But in the Met’s new Saint-Gaude... More

Dangerous Game

WITH THE opponents of health care reform getting noisier and more violent since Congress began its summer recess, President Obama has decided that he will take a more personal role in the health care debate.  His decision increases the likelihood of health care legislation passing, but it also puts the president at risk.

The latest attacks on the president and his health care proposals are not merely about policy differences.  In combination with the claim of the “birther” movement that the president was not really born in the United States, they are attacks on Obama’s rig... More

Remembering Ted Kennedy

There are politicians whose deaths make you sad.  There are others whose deaths make you cry.  Ted Kennedy belonged with those who make you cry.

His record in the Senate was extraordinary.  The current struggle over the health care bill shows how essential he was to getting key legislation passed.  But what made Kennedy stand out from other liberals of his time—such as Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern—was that he grasped, in a way they did not, what pain meant.

Forty-one years ago, at a time when my family lived in Cleveland, I watched Bobb... More

Winging It At the Met

When New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its new American Wing in May 1980, its most impressive asset was the spacious Charles Englehard Court, which featured the Greek Revival limestone façade of Martin E. Thompson’s 1822 Branch Bank of the United States.  The glass-enclosed and roofed court, always filled with light, was a welcoming place where large-scale sculpture, mosaics, and architectural elements were never forced to compete with each other for attention.

The sculpture in the center of the court were limited in number and surrounded by plantings. At the souther... More

It Happens Every Spring

THIS YEAR marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the funniest baseball movies of all time, It Happens Every Spring.  But it’s hard to imagine TV stations re-showing the 1949 film, which made its New York debut at the Roxy along with a stage bill that featured the Andrews Sisters. The recent steroid problems of Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez, among others, have guaranteed that It Happens Every Spring will not be seen with the lightheartedness it requires.

The film tells the story of a mild-mannered, college chemistry professor who accidentally discovers that a ... More

The Nuremberg Precedent and the Obama Admnistration

WE NOW have what the Central Intelligence Agency wanted kept secret: memos showing the Bush Justice Department authorized the CIA use of interrogation techniques ranging from waterboarding to facial slapping in order to get information from senior Al Qaeda operatives.

The CIA’s fears about the damage that could be caused by the memos are understandable. The memos with their “doublethink” read as if they were taken from George Orwell’s 1984. 

Waterboarding:  According to the Bush Justice Department, waterboarding by the CIA was per... More

John Updike's Goodbye

IT IS hard to think of two American writers more different than Ernest Hemingway and John Updike.  Hemingway was a man who couldn’t seem to pass up a war, a bullfight, or the chance to go hunting.  When given the opportunity by the New Yorker’s Lillian Ross to assess his writing career, he answered her with a boxing metaphor, observing. “I beat Mr. Turgenev.  Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. De Maupassant.  I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one.”

By contrast, John Updike always seemed more at home in a museu... More

More Than Bad Taste: The Chimp Cartoon and the N.Y. Post

IN 1964, Mississippi’s segregationist governor Paul Johnson campaigned against the civil rights workers who had come to his state to do voter registration with a stump speech in which he declared that the initials of the NAACP stood for “niggers, apes, alligators, coons, and possums.”

Forty-five years later the New York Post’s editors seem astonished that their paper should be plunged into a national controversy for running a cartoon, based on the police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticu... More

The Pragmatic Inaugural

BY COMPARISON with the soaring rhetoric he used to launch his presidential campaign and mark his election-night victory, the language of President Obama’s inaugural was subdued.  Nothing in it was comparable to Lincoln’s first inaugural appeal to “the better angels of our nature” or Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration in his first inaugural that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But there was nothing ordinary in the political or generational break that the president called for in his inaugural.  The historical roots for what he had to say lie deep within ... More

The Times--It is a Changing

This morning’s New York Times brings with it a shock.  Along the entire bottom of the front page, there is a two-and-a-half inch ad for CBS.  The “Gray Lady” has gotten the equivalent of a henna dye job.

The story behind the change is a familiar one.  Like papers across the country the Times has succumbed to financial reality. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times all run front-page display ads. Of the major American papers, only the Washington Post turns down front-page advertising.

The More

John Cheever and a Christmas Tale for 2008

IF THERE is a Christmas story that we can’t get enough of, it is Miracle on 34th Street.  In the 1947 film and book, the Christmas spirit triumphs over commercialism and doubt.  A Macy’s Santa Claus who thinks he is the one and only Santa Claus successfully fights the attempt to treat him as crazy and turns all those around him into better people.

But in today’s shaky economic climate, the Christmas tale that we ought to be paying attention to is John Cheever’s much neglected “C... More

The First 100 Days: A Flying Start

By the time he leaves office, President Barack Obama will be judged a success if he keeps the country from falling into a depression, successfully gets American troops out of Iraq, and makes national health insurance a reality.

Obama’s good fortune is that he starts with advantages that no president has had since Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933.  The country is sick of the Iraq War. The deregulation craze that began with Jimmy Carter’s presidency is over.  Government intervention in the economy, along with massive deficit spending, has, for the moment, become Republ... More

Beauty and Justice: Van Gogh at the MoMA

2008 has been a year of blockbuster art shows at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the New York show that promises to be the most memorable of 2008 is no blockbuster. It is the Museum of Modern Art’s “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.” With just 23 paintings and nine drawings hung in six small galleries, the van Gogh show is so small that MoMA uses special tickets to limit the number of people allowed in at one time.

Fifty years before van Gogh began doing his night paintings, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in the opening chapter of Nature: “If the stars should ap... More

The Day After: Relief

NOT UNTIL 9:30 p.m., when NBC declared that Barack Obama had taken Ohio, did I allow myself to feel that he was going to win the election.  But it was not joy that I felt, so much as relief, when at 11:00 p.m. the networks announced that Barack Obama had gotten the electoral majority he needed. The what-if-he-loses scenarios that had been running in my head since summer (and led me to avoid friends’ election parties) made joy seem frivolous—too close to cheering in church. 

Even as the October polls showed Obama pulling ahead, I was apprehensive ab... More

Ground Zero Seven Years Later

On the day after presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stopped campaigning to place flowers at the World Trade Center site on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I went there myself. Work has progressed since I visited Ground Zero a year ago, but when you look into the pit from which New York’s new World Trade Center will rise, you don’t get much of a sense of the future as you stare through the chain-link fence surrounding the construction.

Fights over design and money have made any progress difficult to come by. Foundation work dominates the activity at the... More

The Palin Family Album

In defending the privacy of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Barack Obama has been the model of decency.  “I think people’s families are off limits.  And people’s children are especially off limits,” he observed after the media pounced on the story that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter Bristol was five-months pregnant.

But Obama was wrong about Bristol Palin and wrong about Trig, Sarah Palin’s 5-month-old Down syndrome child. Sarah Palin has already made both a part of the 2008 presidential debate—and the Democrats ignore her politicization of her family alb... More