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The World’s Most Important Spectator

David Bromwich: Obama’s World, 3 July 2014

... and the largest risk he had taken on any issue. The time to publicise the outlines of such a bill was during those December days when the grief of the parents overwhelmed the country. Obama’s solution was characteristic. He announced that Joe Biden would explore the legislative possibilities and report back in a month. As the weeks passed, various ...

Crowing

Michael Rogin, 5 September 1996

Imagineering Atlanta 
by Charles Rutheiser.
Verso, 324 pp., £44.95, July 1996, 1 85984 800 1
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... Day, the Olympic summer’s top-grossing movie, endorsed for promoting family values by President Clinton and Candidate Dole; and by the denial of benefits even to legal aliens in the welfare reform bill Clinton signed during the games. But if American self-advertisement openly targets aliens, chauvinism also ...

Imperial Graveyard

Samuel Moyn: Richard Holbrooke, 6 February 2020

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century 
by George Packer.
Cape, 592 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 1 910702 92 5
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... UN. ‘He called for human rights in foreign policy,’ Packer writes, ‘but not too much.’When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, Holbrooke glowered as his onetime best friend Anthony Lake became national security adviser, a position he coveted but was never given. Instead, the Bosnian war became Holbrooke’s long-sought tryst with destiny. It ...

Diary

David Bromwich: The Establishment President, 13 May 2010

... On Sunday 21 March the House of Representatives passed a healthcare bill that had been promoted for a year and brokered in many particulars by Barack Obama. This marked a victory for a substantial piece of social legislation, the first of its kind in more than three decades; and the result appears to have given the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive reform ...

Fue el estado

Tony Wood: Elmer Mendoza, 2 June 2016

Silver Bullets 
by Elmer Mendoza, translated by Mark Fried.
MacLehose Press, 240 pp., £14.99, April 2015, 978 1 85705 258 9
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... a small clique of well-connected tycoons, while Nafta, the free-trade deal signed by Salinas and Bill Clinton in 1994, blew away much of the Mexican agricultural sector, providing a cheap workforce for the maquiladoras – factories set up in increasing numbers to benefit from new tax breaks. The state that many Mexican intellectuals had identified as ...

Buchanan has it right

Edward Luttwak, 9 May 1996

... and not the other way around. True, the Secretary of Labour Robert Reich and other members of the Clinton Administration have rather suddenly taken to criticising the mass firings on the part of major corporations in general and of AT & T in particular (40,000 initially budgeted for, later reduced to 18,000). But at the same time, the ...

The Hagiography Factory

Thomas Meaney: Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 8 February 2018

Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian 
by Richard Aldous.
Norton, 486 pp., £23.99, November 2017, 978 0 393 24470 0
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... some thirty years before). In the 1990s, Schlesinger settled into a gentle scepticism towards Bill Clinton. While he never saw Clinton’s impeachment hearings as a welcome chance to deal a blow to the imperial presidency – ‘Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives’ – he was repelled by some of the ...

His Whiskers Trimmed

Matthew Karp: Robert E. Lee in Defeat, 7 April 2022

Robert E. Lee: A Life 
by Allen Guelzo.
Knopf, 585 pp., $27.99, September 2021, 978 1 101 94622 0
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... successes. Gerald Ford restored Lee’s American citizenship in 1975; as governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton joined other Southern politicians in merging the state holidays for Lee and Martin Luther King Jr. In the last five years, however, mass protests against racial injustice have engendered a more critical attitude. With the Confederacy now more ...

Diary

Clancy Sigal: Among the Draft-Dodgers, 9 October 2008

... One of them was Frank Aller, an extraordinarily nice boy who was the roommate and best friend of Bill Clinton, then scraggle-bearded, fattish and vaguely on our side. Frank, in his neatly pressed Brooks Brothers suit, looked (and was) so incorruptibly straight that on demos we often put him instead of volatile Harry in front of the TV cameras. Frank ...

Tax Breaks for Rich Murderers

David Runciman: Bush and the ‘Death Tax’, 2 June 2005

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth 
by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro.
Princeton, 392 pp., $29.95, March 2005, 0 691 12293 8
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... the repeal of the estate tax contributed only about a tenth. The compromises needed to get the bill passed meant that the estate tax could only be wound down in stages, with final repeal coming into effect in 2010. Moreover, the bill as a whole included a sunset clause, which requires all its measures to be revoked in ...

A Bear Armed with a Gun

David Runciman: The Widening Atlantic, 3 April 2003

Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order 
by Robert Kagan.
Atlantic, 104 pp., £10, March 2003, 1 84354 177 7
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... out of court. State-building, in the new world order, is a European idea, and one of the reasons Bill Clinton is thought to have flirted with being a ‘European’ President is his willingness to flirt with this idea as well (flirting, it might be said, is also opposed to the martial qualities of true American politics). But state-building is also the ...

The Clothed Life

Joanna Biggs: Linda Grant, 31 March 2011

We Had It So Good 
by Linda Grant.
Virago, 344 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 1 84408 637 5
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... stole, and he admires himself in it. Next he is on the boat to England, making friends with ‘Clinton of Univ’, who seduces the girls in first class and brings them to Stephen’s berth after dinner with a linen napkin of petits fours. And now he is in the Dyson Perrins lab in Oxford, making LSD from pages torn from a library book. He meets Andrea, his ...

Bill and Dick’s Excellent Adventure

Christopher Hitchens, 20 February 1997

Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties 
by Dick Morris.
Random House, 382 pp., $25.95, January 1997, 9780679457473
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... protean surface upon which one can grow tendrils like Mr Morris and, for the matter of that, Mr Clinton. The President is justly renowned for dropping old friends like hot bricks if they threaten him with embarrassment, but he clung to Morris long after he had been exposed as a sleazebag, and still speaks of him in terms of lip-biting regret. In ...

The Fastidious President

David Bromwich: The Matter with Obama, 18 November 2010

... of themselves as temperate and moderate-minded public men. He has shown no such signs with Hillary Clinton. In retrospect this makes her appointment as secretary of state all the more perplexing. There is no reason to believe that by appointing her, Obama removed a threat she would have posed as a senatorial counterweight against his authority. The idea that ...

Family History

Miles Taylor: Tony Benn, 25 September 2003

Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 738 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 09 179352 1
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Free Radical: New Century Essays 
by Tony Benn.
Continuum, 246 pp., £9.95, May 2003, 9780826465962
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... Labour is a different matter. Benn doesn’t like Blair, seeing him as a slick mannequin in the Bill Clinton or Felipe González mould – or even a mixture of Billy Graham and Prince Charles. Initially, he seemed prepared to give Blair a chance, comparing him favourably with Keir Hardie – a Benn family hero whose biography Caroline wrote in ...

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