While Graham retained authority over the use of his voice, it is unclear how much control he exercised. Graham’s appeal seems closer to that of a capable politician than a shrewd marketer in that his greatest coup was getting people from strikingly different walks of life to believe that he both represented their views and could serve as their moral guide.
Hughes gives us a pleasantly dense tale of the shadows in Richard Nixon’s mind that might have been there even without the Chennault Affair—assuming he would have been elected without the Chennault machinations. We can never know if it determined the election outcome, but one major consequence of the Affair that we do know was Watergate.
Franzen’s strength is probing concepts we have been raised to emulate or strive for. The question of how secrets can either fester or come out is treated on practically every page of the novel.
Absent the convention of an “Introduction,” the reader of Debi and Irwin Unger’s new biography of George C. Marshall must get well along in the narrative before its purpose is grasped. From then on, clarity about what the authors are about intensifies: an attempted take-down of the historical reputation of the man generally regarded as America’s finest public servant in the 20th century.
There are a multitude of ways to shock an audience, but it is not every day that a news item causes fear, disdain, and skepticism all with one headline. Yet somehow the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) managed to do just this on Oct. 26 by announcing…
The reign of Frank Rizzo was also the era of the rising black political power in Philadelphia. Nowhere was the clash of racial interests more intense than the police department.
Two new biographies reveal that police work is not so simple and straight-forward—cops versus robbers, order versus chaos—as many might think. Those enlisted in the job of enforcing the law are more complicated in their impulses and motivations, more conflicted or contradictory as human beings about the meaning of what they are doing, than partisans of either side willing to concede.
“Wyatt Earp is one of the few men I personally knew in the West in the early days, whom I regarded as absolutely destitute of physical fear. I have often remarked, and I am not alone in my conclusions, that what goes for courage in a man is generally the fear of what others will think of him."
One of the first African American special agents for the FBI, and a veteran of the bureau's Hoover years, reflects on the past and future of law enforcement's engagement with minority communities. "The practice of community policing has, I believe, been a factor in the improvement of relations, but there is still a continuing battle to establish trust," says retired agent Wayne Davis.
On August 9, 2014, people had worried that Michael Brown would be forgotten. By September of that same year, it was clear no one would ever forget Brown, but what legacy his death would leave was in question.