Jackson Lears is the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His most recent books are Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street and Conjurors, Cranks, Provincials and Antediluvians.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a difficult man. As a child, he stood out from his three brothers in being ‘emotionally detached and hard to please’, according to his sympathetic biographer, Edward Luce. He slept on hard floors to feel the discomfort experienced by the less fortunate. In his high school yearbook photo, ‘the eye is drawn to his hawklike nose and piercing...
Six weeks after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews. Cheney, and by implication ‘we’, had...
Afew days after Ronald Reagan died in 2004, I was hurrying through Newark airport when I spied his smiling countenance on the cover of the Economist, accompanied by a caption in big block letters: THE MAN WHO BEAT COMMUNISM. This preposterous tribute succinctly summarised the conventional wisdom regarding the end of the Cold War. The Good Guys had won, led by the genial but implacable Cold...
The story of smoking in the United States is usually presented as a struggle between heroic scientists and activists on the one hand, fighting to get the truth out to the public, and mendacious tobacco industry executives on the other, manipulating members of Congress. Eventually truth and health prevail. In The Cigarette: A Political History, Sarah Milov provides a more interesting and...
FDR’s capacious style of leadership has vanished from the scene. In the shadow of the Pentagon, no one dares to reassert a sceptical perspective. This is a major loss. Despite his attraction to missionary diplomacy, FDR remained committed to a traditional notion of international law, which allowed nations to respond militarily only if their own or others’ territorial boundaries had been violated. Not even his most expansive formulations included ‘regime change’. How he would have responded to the militarist posturing that passes for foreign policy debate in Washington today, who can say?
Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left the United States a far...
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