Where do we go from here? First, I cannot as a historian put Mr. Donald Trump’s indictment into context because this has never happened before in our 247-year history. That’s the context. It’s unprecedented. The classified documents case will play itself out in the federal court system. On a grave occasion like this, I don’t want to write about politics per …
The House of Representatives Jan. 6 select committee began what is billed as up to six televised hearings this past week, some of them in prime time, hoping that it can convince the American people of the gravity of the conspiracy that led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol weeks after the 2020 election and just 15 days before …
Growing up in the 1980s in a family of journalists, Garrett Graff’s sense of Watergate was shaped by the on-screen exploits of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men,” in which they portray Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, respectively. But when the recent impeachment of Donald Trump prompted him to take a fresh look back at the Nixon administration, Graff stumbled …
Public impeachment hearings began in the House this week in Washington. They weren’t just seen on the cable news networks this time. Daytime game shows and soap operas gave way to the first public testimony on the major broadcast networks as well. Some of us of a certain age recall another set of Washington hearings, the Watergate hearings. By some …
Given where things are headed, I’m preparing the way a humanities scholar prepares. I’m reading accounts of the life and presidency of Richard M. Nixon. I’ll place a short bibliography of books worth reading at the bottom of this essay. The constitutional crisis we are now descending into is either much less grave than Watergate or much, much more serious. …
The press is in a pickle. By their own guidelines for what constitutes news, journalists have to report on Donald Trump, aka The Donald, or, as I like to think of him, Big D. But every time they do, he gets more free exposure for his message. Even so, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States has been beating up …