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...

President Obama's swift response to the McChrystal interview in Rolling Stone avoided a disaster that could have crippled his Administration. That he did not was a sign, not of his weakness but his strength. It was his ability to evaluate the challenge and quickly recover with the imaginative choice of...

By the end of the day, the career of General Stanley McChrystal will be over. If not, President Obama will be sowing the seeds of even more confusion and disagreement over his policy in Afghanistan than he has had until now.

Following the emergence of the controversial interview...

It's difficult to realize how good Southern California had it back in the days when Channel Two -- then KNXT -- introduced television viewers every weekday night "from the mountain to the sea" to the Big News. It was the hour-long creation of Sam Zelman, then its...

The obituary page is the one I'd just as soon not read. It usually announces bad news. The latest obit certainly was one of them to me. The headline said, "Frederick C. Weyand, 93, Vietnam Commander Dies".

Having reported on more than a dozen wars, I've come in...

While the focus of the enormous rescue and assistance effort in Haiti has been on the part played by the United States, dozens of other countries and non-government agencies have made major contributions to a massive humanitarian gesture to relieve the suffering of the island's population. Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela...

Dear Mr. President:

You and many of your constituents shave been praising each other on this Thanksgiving, holiday season, so why not one more?

Those of us who voted for you last year and continue to believe that you are the best president we...

It is amazing how a presidential junket and the meanderings of a silly little woman with pretensions to the White House can bump a war off the front pages or as the lead stories of broadcast news. President Obama, for instance, was attempting to show the better side of our...