First, let's cleanse Washington of all those interventionists who can't wait until we get our hands bitten in Syria in another futile pursuit of nation-building. They linger in the hallways of Congress or nearby the White House, eager to advise each incoming president unfamiliar with foreign policy to their theoretical...

The trouble with history is time. Lost time. Too many people tinker with history and if they have no memory, the facts and remembrances of a significant event tend to get lost or twisted.

Take the anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to which...

The trouble with history is time. Lost time. Too many people tinker with history and if they have no memory, the facts and remembrances of a significant event tend to get lost or twisted.

Take the anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to which I was an...

We all know what the Academy Awards come to symbolize each year. But tonight should be different with agonizing doubt about it. That's why I believe for the first time in Oscar history, it should not be surprised if the best film of 2012 is handed both to Steven Spielberg's...

The fate of Susan Rice is, of course, in your hands. But allow me to offer my encouragement to remain deliberate in selecting her as the next Secretary of State. Do not buckle to the absurdities of Washington gossip.

While I do not know her personally, I am familiar with...

For Senator John McCain to call Ambassador Susan Rice ignorant or incompetent is a disgusting betrayal, coming from a onetime graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy whose test scores were among the lowest in his graduating class of 1958. Ambassador Rice, a graduate of Stanford University and Oxford,...

Weeks ago, President Obama was being held responsible for the economic doldrums that had engulfed the country. Today, some of the leading economists were on television this weekend, portraying a far more promising picture for the years ahead with the president being praised for some of the steps his administration...

I must confess: I don't like Newt Gingrich. He's an insufferable bore. He talks too much. He has an opinion about everything, none of it conciliatory. Most of it in fact is irrational. He is not what anyone might consider to be a deep thinker. While Barack Obama demonstrates leadership...

We seventh graders who lived on December 7, 1941 will always remember the Day that Will Live in Infamy, marking the day of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. I can never forget the time when several Los Angeles policemen escorted several of my Japanese-American friends in tears out...

Dear Mr. President,

After three hours of watching television Monday evening that began with another of your polite and reasonable appeals to the nation, it's clear that the talk, the debates, the interviews about the financial crisis engulfing most Americans assuredly is doing nothing to excite your supporters and in...

When Harold Evans was editor of the Times of London back in the early 1960s, he published a book (GoodTimes, Bad Times) about his tenure at the newspaper that described his years with Rupert Murdoch as the publisher. In reviewing that book, I was struck by one anecdote he included...

The recent death of Francisco Villagran Kramer in Guatemala was reported in the New York Times on the back page. It was not considered major news outside his country. But to me, as a journalist at the time reporting on the bizarre and bloody politics of his country...

At the presidential news conference earlier this week, Barack Obama soberly dismissed his Republican torturers in a way that reminded old White House watchers of President Harry Truman who once took to a campaign train to whistle-stop across the country, ridiculing his "do-nothing" adversaries in the Congress.

A week ago when I described the Emperor and Empress of Japan and their visit to victims of the tragedy that struck their country, I received an informative response from a Japanese friend; a widely-published writer.

My initial impression as a GI during the U.S. occupation...

Only those of us who served in the U.S./ Occupation of Japan in the 1950s might have shaken our heads after Thursday's frontpage photos in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times that showed Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko consoling evacuees from the debacle that struck Japan last...

No sooner than the mourning for Christina-Taylor Green had been put behind Tucson than we in Los Angeles were jolted by another incomparable episode of gun madness. The scene occurred on the grounds of Gardena High School, southwest of the central city.

Police helicopters flew overhead. Detectives...

I have seen too much human blood spilled in my lifetime -- of people I did not know -- mostly in wartime. I was trained to use a rifle and a handgun at Fort Ord, California before shipping overseas as a GI. In self-defense, I killed Chinese soldiers in Korea....

An obituary deep in the pages of the New York Times on Thanksgiving Day disclosed the death of Huang Hua, perhaps one of the most discreet, influential negotiators in China's contemporary history. He was unknown to most Americans. In the 1930s, he helped the American journalist Edgar Snow...

Some day, there will be a sharp awakening for the need to join those of us who have been arguing for years to launch a national railroad initiative. Unlike the dim-witted politicians in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Virginia and elsewhere, common sense dictates the need to get on the track and...

If public opinion polls in the past six months are to be believed, my fellow Americans seem to have lost their way. They have seemingly been bamboozled by agitators on the right. They are panicked by the loss of their homes and jobs, confused by a war over which they...