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...

Ironically, Jack Nelson died in the week that a documentary depicting the history of the Los Angeles Times began making the rounds in theaters across the country. The film is about the Chandler family and how one newspaper had an impact on greater Los Angeles. It also is the story...

By now, every journalist, official, professor and think tank guru within sight of Afghanistan has had an explanation for coping with the war. They've analyzed every aspect of the problem. But most of the solutions have been as clear as mud. Get out, stay in -- no wonder that the...

Not in many years has television given the American viewing public an example of as impressive a documentary as Home Box Office did Monday evening with the airing of "The Last Truck: the Closing of a GM Factory."

It was absent the voice and presence of a prominent network...

The United States has never before had a Foreign Legion like the hired guns the French used as enforcers during the days when the tri-color flew over their colonial empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were soldiers of fortune, cherry-picked from some of the most ruthless military resources...

One of the lessons a political reporter learns early in life is never to underestimate greatness. Case in point: Ted Kennedy. I'm sure that none of my colleagues covering his early emergence on the national horizon in the 1960s bet on him as a promising young star, even when the...

I knew Don Hewitt when he was up and down, mostly up. It was before I joined CBS News. I was an AP reporter on home leave and passing through Manhattan, Sandy Socolow invited me to watch a broadcast of a mid-day news program with a relatively unknown anchorman named...

Time is running out before we're robbed of our sanity. Long ago in World War II, there used to be a patriotic poster that hung on many walls. It read, "loose lips sink ships." Today, our ship of state is in mighty danger of being sunk because of the reckless...

I had dinner with Walter Cronkite the first night he arrived in Saigon on what was his personal fact finding trip "into country" after the Communists' 1968 Tet Offensive. He was a hawk, a supporter of the conflict in Vietnam like so many Americans of his generation.

Walter clearly was...

Judge Sonia Sotomayor and I can never forget the mutual experiences we endured as children of the Bronx and fans of the New York Yankees. We both grew up in modest circumstances, the difference being she was blessed with dedicated parents who were inspirational models. I was raised in three...

It has taken me nearly a week to reflect on how figures like Robert McNamara contributed to the erosion of the American people's trust in so many of their institutions. It was his arrogance and self-confidence that so diminished whatever he had to say about Vietnam from the time...

When we think of the Washington Post, we accord it a special place in journalism's

pantheon of great newspapers. Who can ever forget the role it played in exposing the Watergate scandal? But what now, what now are we to think of the Post that almost has sunk into...

Those were the dying words uttered by Colonel Walter Kurtz, the half-crazed Special Forces officer portrayed by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, the classic war film about Vietnam. It could have been a precursor to Afghanistan or Pakistan. From my encounters in all three countries going back more than 50...

Shocked as we may be by the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the momentary reaction of anger, shame or remorse still does not deal with the gut issues raised by James von Brunn's murder of the security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

Just how was this hate-filled neo-Nazi...

For years, Washington has turned the other cheek while Israel pursued a policy of unflinching resistance to any compromise or outright withdrawal from the West Bank. However, the lesson learned from unilaterally pulling out of the Gaza Strip may be affecting continued reluctance to deal with the status of the...

This has been a tough time for Porky. Not content to let the animals wallow in their mud, the world is in a frenzy over an alleged epidemic that may have nothing at all to do with a life-threatening influenza.

According to the latest accounts about so-called swine flu,...

If you wonder what you'll be missing when newspapers vanish, consider two stories that appeared in morning newspapers that have yet to make it to the online geniuses who will decide the content of alternative journalism in the near future.

Both examples deal with the infuriating decisions rendered by the...

Beware, this gets complicated and outrageous...

An account of how Lawrence Summers enriched himself handsomely before coming to the White House was not exactly new news. But when Frank Rich dug it up and repeated the details last Sunday in the New York Times (4/12), it packed quite a...

For those of us who have lived abroad for many years and despaired of the way the image and reputation of the United States had been tarnished during the past eight years, it was a welcome relief to hear the message delivered by Barack Obama in Turkey. From the podium...