Curtis Roosevelt

What if the president proposed something big -- something that really focused on a broader question, such as the fundamental inequality in America? Well, surely, if he did so, he would be labelled a socialist! Not socialist as defined in the academic sense, or as the rest of the world...

Who is Barack Obama? I don't mean what is his personal history such as he wrote in his autobiography, but who is he as a person? The Audacity of Hope, Obama's second book, gave me many insights into this man who wanted to be president and was then engaged in...

During my twelve years in the White House, circulating within that hot house of bustling politics, I met a lot of people. By the age of fifteen I was pretty jaundiced; I had met "everybody" -- from U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill to Broadway star Mary Martin. It wasn't that...

Should we make a deal with Barack Obama, as Robert Reich suggested in a recent column? Reich set out some of the steps the president would have to promise to take in his second term so that we, the legion of disenchanted voters, can wholeheartedly support his re-election....

These protesters -- who are not identified with either political party, who have, as yet, no agreed upon program, no manifesto, are not particularly "left" nor "right" and are dedicated to being peaceful (if given a chance by the police) -- must have given Washington's politicos pause. A movement without...

For many days the media ignored the Occupy Wall Street movement, but they finally had to give in and report on it. The excessive actions of the NYPD helped put the movement on the map, and then, as the demonstrations spreading to other cities across America, the anger and frustration...

What a set up for being one-upped!

Your advisers think they are clever to have you address a joint session of Congress at exactly the same time that the Republican Party has scheduled a debate -- with Rick Perry joining in for the first time -- purposely...

Barack Obama is focusing on the wrong deficit. At the 1936 Democratic national convention Franklin Roosevelt, before going on to landslide re-election, said, "We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not...

During World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt was commander-in-chief, I observed the president quite closely. I once joined him and Admiral William Leahy (first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) for lunch at his desk in the Oval Office. Just before I left for boarding school, I had lunch...

Lust, anger, and greed. We all know how wicked these passions are. In any religion, these are the weighty ones -- what the church I grew up with calls "cardinal sins."

But thundering about sins from the pulpit distracts us from recognizing that we were all born with "lust, anger...

Richard Hofstadter made a big splash in his day with an essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (written in 1963 and then subsequently revised). The trouble with the title is that it moves us to thinking immediately of "them" -- rather than "us." In truth, we're...

Prominent in the move toward democracy for European countries was the feeling among their citizens that their governments had little or no tolerance for the opposition. Slowly, the rights of opposition parties became firmly defined, often leading to the ouster of the government in power. More recently, the citizens of...

When I was young -- or perhaps I should begin: Today, when the old community values no longer seem to exist...

Looking back, when I grew up, I absorbed from my family the notion that bankers and financial advisers were persons of integrity. One assumed they worked by professional...

When I write about Franklin Roosevelt, my grandfather, I generally avoid comparing him to President Obama. However, especially since the Democrats' debacle in last November's elections--a sharp contrast to FDR leading the party to substantial gains in his first mid-term election in 1934--I feel a searching comparison could be useful...