Monday, June 11, 2018–I am glued to the coverage of the summit between Donald Trump and Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. We can have no idea what this will mean six months from now or six years from now. But it is a great moment in history no matter what. The Korean war […]
The Jefferson Watch: Conflict of Interest
Thomas Jefferson had many opportunities to speculate in western lands. Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, were engaged in land speculation beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Jefferson quietly refused, because he knew that at some point he might have to “legislate” for the public domain, and he did not want to be guilty of […]
The Jefferson Watch: Big Military Parades
President Trump wants a big military parade, the kind one saw in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the kind one sees today in North Korea. It might be useful to compare that notion with the republican dignity of the third president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson broke with the habit of his two predecessors and sent his annual messages […]
Poor John Adams: Right and Wrong As Always
Basic chronology. –June 7, 1776: Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee presents resolution of independence to the Second Continental Congress. –June 11: Committee of five appointed to draft a declaration explaining America’s right to secede: Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson. The others drop out in the following order: Sherman, Livingston, Franklin, and Adams. […]
Driving the Yellowstone River Valley at the Time of the Solstice
I was out in western Montana helping my mother get her wee Thoreavian cabin ready for the summer. We had a couple of sweet days together. She is 85 years old, still strong and autonomous, but just beginning to exhibit signs of elderliness. It bothers me to see her in even modest decline. I’m […]
Sad Lessons from the Nixon White House
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 […]
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