An Infamous Day Forty Years On

In the Telegraph (London), Czech-born British TV journalist John Tusa remembers forty years ago today, 21 August 1968, when the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the hopes raised by the Prague Spring. Sir John has prepared a series of four...

Culture War

On the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring, comes news of a Russian celebration, in occupied South Ossetia, of the rape of Georgia. Valery Gergiev, who is the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and who has conducted in...

Acceptance Speeches Can Actually Matter

In late July 1968, against the beautiful backdrop of Skipper’s Cottage at Gurney’s Inn in Montauk, Long Island, Richard M. Nixon worked on the acceptance speech he would soon be delivering to the Republican National Convention in Miami. Working on yellow legal pads,...

Hua Guofeng 1921-2008

Hua Guofeng, the Second Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, is dead at the age of 87. Born in Shanxi province, he joined the Red Army when he was fifteen. He became a full Party member in 1938 and was assigned to Hunan province after the Communists took it over....

Ralph And Mort

This weekend, while being interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN’s Q&A, former Nixon White House speechwriter Ben Stein announced that he planned to vote for Ralph Nader; his main reason for doing so, from what I could gather, is that he disapproves of Sen....

Plus Ca Change Etc.

Michael Barone looks at today’s headlines —an Olympics in Beijing, an invasion in Georgia, a speech in Berlin—and is reminded of 1936 and 1948 and 1963 and 1989. His excellent column  —“Echoes of Berlin”— draws parallels...