If he hasn't already, Al Gore should reread David McCollough's majestic biography of Harry Truman, get off his ample rump and start running openly for president.

Truman's 1948 "Give 'em Hell, Harry" campaign against Republican Tom Dewey, Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (yes, that Strom Thurmond) and Henry Wallace, the...

Bill Clinton is the best politician the Democrats have produced since John F. Kennedy, maybe the best since Roosevelt. Over the past forty years, no Democrat has matched Clinton's skill for framing issues and his deftness with language. He's the master.

Clinton conducted a master class earlier this...

Just as I was leaving Beirut on a Newsweek trip nearly thirty years ago, armored personnel carriers began taking positions at intersections in that beautiful city--the first sign of the civil war that soon engulfed the country. That fight was between Christians and Palestine Liberation Organization zealots backed by...

I've just been reading books about Shakespeare in 1599 and Henry V at Agincourt written by scholars who have massaged the available documents (a lot in Henry's case, not so many reliable ones for Will) to reimagine their times. Then I came across the latest issue of US Weekly...

Think of America's two political parties as two big overlapping circles with most of their space in common. Then think of independent voters as a substantial circle within that shared center. Strangely enough, the "base"of the Democratic and Republican parties turns out to be on the outer fringes of...

There are basically only two slogans in American Presidential politics, and you hear them--or their variants--every four years: "You Never Had It So Good" and "Time for a Change." Sometimes, the first is inverted into "Don't Let Them Take It Away," and George McGovern managed to morph the second...

When Hillary Clinton visited The New York Daily News while I was running the paper, she always put on a dazzling show: Seated at the head of the table, she'd fold her hands primly before her and effortlessly answer every question for the next hour and a half. Every fifteen...

In our squeamish times, it's almost impossible to find an unalloyed villain suitable for unrestrained abuse. There are, of course, the three stooges of the Axis of Evil -- Saddam, Ahmadinejad of Iran and wacky Kim of North Korea -- and Osama bin Laden. But here at home, today's rainbow...

I caught The Devil Wears Prada in a tiny sixplex on a barrier island off the Florida coast -- in a galaxy far, far away from the Conde Nast death star. It was fun to watch Meryl Streep as a faux Anna Wintour -- a younger Julie Christie would...