Publicity Secretary Quotes

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

I realized that every healthcare professional — every single doctor, nurse, midwife, pharmacist, physical therapist, and paramedic — need to shout out about the reality of their work so the next time the health secretary lies that doctors are in it for the money, the public will know just how ridiculous that is. Why would any sane person do that job for anything other than the right reasons, because I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I have so much respect for those who work on the front line because, when it came down to it, I certainly couldn’t.

His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. ‘Tragedy excites the soul,’ he later told one of his secretaries, ‘lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.’24

The president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense were lying to the American public—there was no evidence of any attack, and the American destroyers were not on “routine patrol” but on spying missions.

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line, 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries - each of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style - recognise him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church; a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma, that it is, always, a Good Morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not real? They can be unsought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can ve made to be good. Very well then, it is good.

In 2015 one of the most powerful jobs in the bureaucracy, that of cabinet secretary, went to a public relations executive, Matthew Stafford, who thus had access to cabinet meetings.

About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination; and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calyxes is due to the same cause... This discovery seems to me one of the most interesting that has been made since Stahl and since it is difficult not to disclose something inadvertently in conversation with friends that could lead to the truth I have thought it necessary to make the present deposit to the Secretary of the Academy to await the time I make my experiments public.

Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan, foreign policy advisor to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, famously wrote to his boss via email on February 12, 2012. The US public was unaware of this.

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down… All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple. Families are indoors. The soldiers are back in barracks. The Chief Priest grows hoarse with singing. The governor plays chess with his secretary and dictates letters. The free bread the temple distributed to the poor has gone stale by midday, but tastes all right dipped in water or broth. Death has interrupted life only as much as it ever does. We die one at a time and disappear, but the life of the living continues. The earth turns. The sun makes its way towards the western horizon no slower or faster than it usually does. Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone. Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision. That’s enough now, she thinks. That’s more than enough. Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know. She is weeping. The executee helps her to stand up.

It seems entirely possible to me that by the 2016 election, the public will be ready to entertain a much bolder set of ideas about creating a more shared prosperity,” said Robert Reich, who was labor secretary under Clinton.

Robert Rubin, a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, one of those who sign their names on the banknote you just used to pay for coffee, collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.” Nor did Rubin acknowledge that he transferred risk to taxpayers: Spanish grammar specialists, assistant schoolteachers, supervisors in tin can factories, vegetarian nutrition advisors, and clerks for assistant district attorneys were “stopping him out,” that is, taking his risks and paying for his losses. But the worst casualty has been free markets, as the public, already prone to hating financiers, started conflating free markets and higher order forms of corruption and cronyism, when in fact it is the exact opposite: it is government, not markets, that makes these things possible by the mechanisms of bailouts. It is not just bailouts: government interference in general tends to remove skin in the game.

Are you sure you want these things done? Because you won't want me for secretary of labor if you don't. I'd be an embarrassment to you, because when I start on a thing, I round up cohorts. I whip up public demand. You wouldn't want me if you didn't want that.

Many of Trump's former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president MIke Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, former chief of staff John Kelley; former chief of staf Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

The operations of General Hancock," Black Whiskers Sanborn informed the Secretary of the Interior, "have been so disastrous to the public interests, and at the same time seem to me to be so inhuman, that I deem it proper to communicate my views to you on the subject…For a mighty nation like us to be carrying on a war with a few straggling nomads, under such circumstances, is a spectacle most humiliating, an injustice unparalleled, a national crime most revolting, that must, sooner or later, bring down upon us or our posterity the judgment of Heaven.

I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

For secretary of education there was Betsy DeVos, a fierce promoter of privatized schools and a wealthy lobbyist who raised ungodly amounts of money for Trump. Her post would put her in charge of America’s public education despite her record of effectively destroying Michigan’s educational system.

General Sebastian will be at the reception,” his personal secretary said. “Remember not to ask after her husband.” “Why? I didn’t kill him, did I?” “No, sir. He’s having a very public affair, and the general’s a bit touchy about it.” “So she might want me to kill him.” “You can make the offer, sir.

At the top of the Queen’s Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in. That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions.

In her only departure from her prepared text, Heckler added, “We must conquer AIDS before it affects the heterosexual population and the general population…. We have a very strong public interest in stopping AIDS before it spreads outside the risk groups, before it becomes an overwhelming problem.” The statement infuriated organizers from AIDS groups who considered AIDS already an “overwhelming problem” and did not consider it a priority of AIDS research to stop the scourge only “before it affects the heterosexual population.” Moreover, many gay leaders wondered who had determined that homosexuals were not part of the “general population” that so concerned the Secretary.

That is the greatest sin of all. You can make money under the table and move ahead, but you are forbidden to make secretaries under the sheets. He has dumped several party members for violating his personal moral standards. If something is leaked to the press, the bigmouth will be tracked down and punished. Scandals aren't public scandals if you get there before you enemies do.

The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually non-existent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public. His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination. It did note, however, that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.” To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.

On August 5, he sent Stanton a one-sentence letter: “Public considerations of a high character constrain me to say, that your resignation as Secretary of War will be accepted.”5 Johnson knew that if Stanton resigned, instead of being sacked, the troublesome legislation would be a dead issue. That same day, in a tart response, Stanton lectured Johnson that “public considerations of a high character . . . constrain me not to resign the office of Secretary of War before the next meeting of Congress.

Television didn’t attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen two inches high by three inches wide—roughly the dimensions of a modern credit card—the broadcast consisted of a brief speech of encouragement from Washington by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, followed by some entertainment from the AT&T studio in Whippany, New Jersey—a vaudeville comic who first told some Irish jokes and then changed into blackface and told some “darky” jokes.

It is truly wonderful," he said, "how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its shortcomings with a little bit of clap-trap. The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective—and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found, and what conclusion do you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you generally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build up your comfortable moral maxim that Crime causes its own detection! Yes—all the crime you know of. And what of the rest?

Foolish people practice politics, not by serving as generals, secretaries, or popular leaders, but by inciting the mob, giving public speeches, fostering discord, or performing public service out of obligation; and, conversely, those who are civic-minded, philanthropic, devoted to the city, attentive, and truly political are always practicing politics by the promotion of those in power, the guidance of those needing direction, the support of those deliberating, the correction of those causing harm, and the reinforcement of those who are sensible.

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

on 26 January 1944 that ‘The Cardinal Secretary of State sent for me today to say that the Pope hoped that no Allied coloured troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned at Rome after the occupation. He hastened to add that the Holy See did not draw the colour line but it was hoped that it would be possible to meet the request.’ 32 The role of Pius xii in the Second World War remains highly controversial, because he took the deliberate decision not to denounce publicly the Nazis’ war against the Jews, despite having detailed information about its nature and extent (and indeed that of the persecution of the Catholic Church in

The gestures of models (mannequins) and mythological figures. The romantic use of nature (leaves, trees, water) to create a place where innocence can be refound. The exotic and nostalgic attraction of the Mediterranean. The poses taken up to denote stereotypes of women: serene mother (madonna), free-wheeling secretary (actress, king’s mistress), perfect hostess (spectator-owner’s wife), sex-object (Venus, nymph surprised), etc. The special sexual emphasis given to women’s legs. The materials particularly used to indicate luxury: engraved metal, furs, polished leather, etc. The gestures and embraces of lovers, arranged frontally for the benefit of the spectator. The sea, offering a new life. The physical stance of men conveying wealth and virility. The treatment of distance by perspective – offering mystery. The equation of drinking and success. The man as knight (horseman) become motorist. Why does publicity depend so heavily upon the visual language of oil painting? Publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself. There are several reasons why these images use the language of oil painting. Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art-form it derived from the principle that you are what you have.

I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

...the founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected {George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson}, not a one had professed a belief in Christianity... When the war was over and the victory over our enemies won, and the blessings and happiness of liberty and peace were secured, the Constitution was framed and God was neglected. He was not merely forgotten. He was absolutely voted out of the Constitution. The proceedings, as published by Thompson, the secretary, and the history of the day, show that the question was gravely debated whether God should be in the Constitution or not, and after a solemn debate he was deliberately voted out of it.... There is not only in the theory of our government no recognition of God's laws and sovereignty, but its practical operation, its administration, has been conformable to its theory. Those who have been called to administer the government have not been men making any public profession of Christianity... Washington was a man of valor and wisdom. He was esteemed by the whole world as a great and good man; but he was not a professing Christian... [Sermon by Reverend Bill Wilson (Episcopal) in October 1831, as published in the Albany Daily Advertiser the same month it was made]

In a memoir of her tenure as secretary of state, published in June 2014, Hillary Clinton gave her most detailed account of her actions to date. She denounced what she called “misinformation, speculation, and flat-out deceit” about the attacks, and wrote that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya.” She wrote: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow. As Secretary I was the one ultimately responsible for my people’s safety, and I never felt that responsibility more deeply than I did that day.” Addressing the controversy over what triggered the attack, and whether the administration misled the public, she maintained that the Innocence of Muslims video had played a role, though to what extent wasn’t clear. “There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives. It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were.” Clinton’s account was greeted with praise and condemnation in equal measure. As Clinton promoted her book, a new investigation was being launched by the House Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi. Chaired by former federal prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, the committee’s creation promised to drive questions about Benghazi into the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond.

The longer the government went on creating policies that conflicted with the scientific evidence, the more harm those policies would do, not least because they undermined our ability to give a consistent public-health message, especially around the dangers of alcohol. The more hysterical and exaggerated any Home Secretary was about the harms of cannabis, the less credibility they would have in the eyes of the teenagers binge-drinking themselves into comas every day. If we’re going to minimise harm, we have to have a way of measuring it, and a policy framework that can respond to this evidence. Yet even comparing the dangers of cannabis and alcohol was considered a “political” act that overstepped my remit as a scientist and physician.

In the report’s final section, Hamilton reiterated that a well-funded debt would be a “national blessing” that would protect American prosperity. He feared this statement would be misconstrued as a call for a perpetual public debt—and that is exactly what happened. For the rest of his life, he was to express dismay at what he saw as a deliberate distortion of his views. His opponents, he claimed, neglected a critical passage of his report in which he wrote that he “ardently wishes to see it incorporated as a fundamental maxim in the system of public credit of the United States that the creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment.” The secretary regarded this “as the true secret for rendering public credit immortal.

traveled in those days with a cheap tape recorder. (I had written to my alma mater, Columbia University, which had an oral history project, suggesting that they take time off from interviewing ex–generals and ex–secretaries of state and send someone south to record the history being made every day by obscure people. One of the nation’s richest universities wrote back saying something like, “An excellent idea. We don’t really have the resources.”) I recorded Gregory’s performance with my little machine. He spoke for two hours, lashing out at white Southern society with passion and with his extraordinary wit. Never in the history of this area had a black man stood like this on a public platform ridiculing and denouncing white officials to their faces. The crowd loved it and applauded

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party. Always something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr. Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner. Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures: ‘Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!’ still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine. You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them. You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye. You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion. You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be concordant. You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names. Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account. You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist. Then, you were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what the sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the Vice-Secretary said. And this was usually said in the unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: ‘That this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing abhorrence’—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts.

Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on his way to work seem more like rocks rising out of the earth than like products of human hands. He considers the work he does in his office or factory as essential to the har­monious functioning of the world. The clothes he wears are exactly what they should be, and he laughs at the idea that he might equally well be wearing a Roman toga or medieval armor. He respects and envies a minister of state or a bank director, and regards the possession of a considerable amount of money the main guarantee of peace and security. He cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and chil­dren play, and start catching passers-by with his lasso. He is accustomed to satisfying those of his physio­logical needs which are considered private as dis­creetly as possible, without realizing that such a pattern of behavior is not common to all human so­cieties. In a word, he behaves a little like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, bustling about in a shack poised precariously on the edge of a cliff. His first stroll along a street littered with glass from bomb-shattered windows shakes his faith in the "naturalness" of his world. The wind scatters papers from hastily evacuated offices, papers labeled "Con­fidential" or "Top Secret" that evoke visions of safes, keys, conferences, couriers, and secretaries. Now the wind blows them through the street for anyone to read; yet no one does, for each man is more urgently concerned with finding a loaf of bread. Strangely enough, the world goes on even though the offices and secret files have lost all meaning. Farther down the street, he stops before a house split in half by a bomb, the privacy of people's homes-the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds-cut open to public view. The house itself, no longer a rock, but a scaffolding of plaster, concrete, and brick; and on the third floor, a solitary white bath­ tub, rain-rinsed of all recollection of those who once bathed in it. Its formerly influential and respected owners, now destitute, walk the fields in search of stray potatoes. Thus overnight money loses its value and becomes a meaningless mass of printed paper. His walk takes him past a little boy poking a stick into a heap of smoking ruins and whistling a song about the great leader who will preserve the nation against all enemies. The song remains, but the leader of yesterday is already part of an extinct past.

When Camilla and her husband joined Prince Charles on a holiday in Turkey shortly before his polo accident, she didn’t complain just as she bore, through gritted teeth, Camilla’s regular invitations to Balmoral and Sandringham. When Charles flew to Italy last year on a sketching holiday, Diana’s friends noted that Camilla was staying at another villa a short drive away. On her return Mrs Parker-Bowles made it quite clear that any suggestion of impropriety was absurd. Her protestations of innocence brought a tight smile from the Princess. That changed to scarcely controlled anger during their summer holiday on board a Greek tycoon’s yacht. She quietly simmered as she heard her husband holding forth to dinner-party guests about the virtues of mistresses. Her mood was scarcely helped when, later that evening, she heard him chatting on the telephone to Camilla. They meet socially on occasion but, there is no love lost between these two women locked into an eternal triangle of rivalry. Diana calls her rival “the rotweiller” while Camilla refers to the Princess as that “ridiculous creature”. At social engagements they are at pains to avoid each other. Diana has developed a technique in public of locating Camilla as quickly as possible and then, depending on her mood, she watches Charles when he looks in her direction or simply evades her gaze. “It is a morbid game,” says a friend. Days before the Salisbury Cathedral spire appeal concert Diana knew that Camilla was going. She vented her frustration in conversations with friends so that on the day of the event the Princess was able to watch the eye contact between her husband and Camilla with quiet amusement. Last December all those years of pent-up emotion came flooding out at a memorial service for Leonora Knatchbull, the six-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Romsey, who tragically died of cancer. As Diana left the service, held at St James’s Palace, she was photographed in tears. She was weeping in sorrow but also in anger. Diana was upset that Camilla Parker Bowles who had only known the Romseys for a short time was also present at such an intimate family service. It was a point she made vigorously to her husband as they travelled back to Kensington Palace in their chauffeur-driven limousine. When they arrived at Kensington Palace the Princess felt so distressed that she ignored the staff Christmas party, which was then in full swing, and went to her sitting-room to recover her composure. Diplomatically, Peter Westmacott, the Wales’s deputy private secretary, sent her avuncular detective Ken Wharfe to help calm her.

...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.

Flouting federal laws governing record-keeping requirements. Failing to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts, as required by law. Circumventing the Freedom of Information Act. Instructing her aides to send classified materials on her unsecure network. Running afoul of the “gross negligence” clause of the Espionage Act (which meant prosecutors would not have to prove “intent” to find her guilty). Pretending she didn’t know that Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) was classified. Transferring classified material that originated at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence sources, to her unsecured network. Authoring hundreds of emails with classified information to people who did not have security clearance. Inducing aides to commit perjury. Lying to the FBI. Engaging in public corruption by using the office of secretary of state to feather the nest of the Clinton family foundation.

Some judicial officials began to notice the unusual frequency of deaths among the inmates of institutions and some prosecutors even considered asking the Gestapo to investigate the killings. However, none went so far as Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg who specialized in matters of wardship and adoption. A war veteran and a member of the Confessing Church, Kreyssig became suspicious when psychiatric patients who were wards of the court and therefore fell within his area of responsibility began to be transferred from their institutions and were shortly afterwards reported to have died suddenly. Kreyssig wrote Justice Minister Gortner to protest against what he described as an illegal and immoral programme of mass murder. The Justice Minister's response to this and other, similar, queries from local law officers was to try once more to draft a law giving effective immunity to the murderers, only to have it vetoed by Hitler on the grounds that the publicity would give dangerous ammunition to Allied propaganda. Late in April 1941 the Justice Ministry organized a briefing of senior judges and prosecutors by Brack and Heyde, to try to set their minds at rest. In the meantime, Kreyssig was summoned to an interview with the Ministry's top official, State Secretary Roland Freisler, who informed him that the killings were being carried out on Hitler's orders. Refusing to accept this explanation, Kreyssig wrote to the directors of psychiatric hospitals in his district informing them that transfers to killing centres were illegal, and threatening legal action should they transport any of their patients who came within his jurisdiction. It was his legal duty, he proclaimed, to protect the interests and indeed the lives of his charges. A further interview with Gortner failed to persuade him that he was wrong to do this, and he was compulsorily retired in December 1941.

fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. The words that Churchill used in these short, punchy sentences were all but two derived from Old English. ‘Confidence’ derives from Latin and ‘surrender’ comes from the French. In November 1942, the Conservative minister Walter Elliot told Major-General John Kennedy that after Churchill had sat down he whispered to him: ‘I don’t know what we’ll fight them with – we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles – empty ones of course.’50 Churchill’s public insistence on continuing the struggle represented a victory for him inside the five-man British War Cabinet, which for five days between 24 and 28 May discussed the possibility of opening peace negotiations with Hitler, initially via Mussolini.51 The proponent of this course, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, nonetheless always made it clear that he would not countenance any peace that involved sacrificing the Royal

The disaster was the first major crisis to occur under the fledgling leadership of the USSR’s most recent General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. He chose not to address the public for three weeks after the accident, presumably to allow his experts time to gain a proper grasp of the situation. On May 14th, in addition to expressing his anger at Western Chernobyl propaganda, he announced to the world that all information relating to the incident would be made available, and that an unprecedented conference would be held with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in August at Vienna. Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else. In addition, although the Soviet delegation’s report was highly detailed and accurate in most regards, it was also misleading. It had been written in line with the official cause of the accident - that the operators were responsible - and, as such, it deliberately obfuscated vital details about the reactor.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

So now George has arrived. He is not nervous in the least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building toward the Department office. He is all actor now—an actor on his way up from the dressing room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line: "Go od morning!" And the three secretaries—each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style—recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply "Good morning!" to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)

Navy Secretary Adams, a wealthy, polo-playing yachtsman, sent for Butler and delivered a blistering reprimand, declaring that he was doing so at the direct personal order of the President of the United States. Butler saw red. “This is the first time in my service of thirty-two years,” he snapped back, “that I’ve ever been hauled on the carpet and treated like an unruly schoolboy. I haven’t always approved of the actions of the administration, but I’ve always faithfully carried out my instructions. If I’m not behaving well it is because I’m not accustomed to reprimands, and you can’t expect me to turn my cheek meekly for official slaps!” “I think this will be all,” Adams said icily. “I don’t ever want to see you here again!” “You never will if I can help it!” Butler rasped, storming out of his office livid with anger. Just two days after his attack on the government’s gunboat diplomacy, which provoked a great public commotion, Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark privately submitted to Secretary of State Stimson the draft of a pledge that the United States would never again claim the right to intervene in the affairs of any Latin American country as an “international policeman.” The Clark Memorandum, which later became official policy—for a while at least—repudiated the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that Smedley Butler had unmasked as raw gunboat diplomacy.

It was a difficult time to be a Minister. The war went from bad to worse and the Government was universally detested. As each fresh catastrophe came to the public's notice some small share of blame might attach itself to this or that person, but in general everyone united in blaming the Ministers, and they, poor things, had no one to blame but each other - which they did more and more frequently. It was not that the Ministers were dull-witted -- upon the contrary there were some brilliant young men among them. Nor were they, upon the whole, bad men; several led quite blameless domestic lives and were remarkably fond of children, music, dogs, landscape painting. Yet so unpopular was the Government that had it not been for the careful speeches of the Foreign Secretary, it would have been almost impossible to get any piece of business through the House of Commons. The Foreign Secretary was quite peerless orator. No matter how low the Government stood in the estimation of everyone, when the Foreign Secretary stood up and spoke -- ah! how different everything seemed then! How quickly was every bad thing discovered to be the fault of the previous administration (an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose). As for the present Ministry, the Foreign Secretary said that not since the days of Antiquity had the world seen gentlemen so virtuous, so misunderstood and so horrible misrepresented by their enemies.

Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said in 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, that ‘the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its twentieth-century history.’ Funny, because Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history. During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden. The Foreign Office were forced to admit in court about having hidden documents, then were unforthcoming about the scale of what was hidden, to the point that you’d be a fool to trust anything that is now said. But from what we know, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were destroyed and over a million hidden, not just starting in the colonial period but dating all the way back to 1662. This operation was only exposed to the public in 2011 as part of a court case between the survivors of British concentration camps in Kenya and the government.

Ultimately, more than eighty arms control specialists signed a letter defending the Iran deal as a “net plus for international nuclear nonproliferation efforts” and warning that “unilateral action by the United States, especially on the basis of unsupported contentions of Iranian cheating, would isolate the United States.” But that message didn’t penetrate the Trump administration, which continued to publicly excoriate Iran. The time of specialists playing a formative role in foreign policy, some career officials feared, may have passed too. Just days after assuming power, the new administration had, of course, fired its top in-house expert on nonproliferation. SO IT WAS THAT, on a cold Sunday in January 2017, Tom Countryman found himself clearing out his office at the State Department. It was the end of thirty-five years of service, but he was unsentimental. “There was so much to do,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not sure I pondered it.” On most Sundays, the Department was eerily empty. But on this one, Countryman wasn’t alone. Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy, after forty-four years in the Foreign Service, was cleaning out his desk as well. The two graying diplomats took a break from their boxes of paperwork and family photos to reminisce. Kennedy had been in the thick of the Iraq War as chief of staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Countryman had been in Egypt as that country joined the Gulf War. It was an improbably quiet end to a pair of high-stakes careers: memories and empty desks, as the State Department stood still.

Back in America, Donald Trump had, as a candidate, preached the virtues of withdrawal. “We should leave Afghanistan immediately,” he had said. The war was “wasting our money,” “a total and complete disaster.” But, once in office, Donald Trump, and a national security team dominated by generals, pressed for escalation. Richard Holbrooke had spent his final days alarmed at the dominance of generals in Obama’s Afghanistan review, but Trump expanded this phenomenon almost to the point of parody. General Mattis as secretary of defense, General H. R. McMaster as national security advisor, and retired general John F. Kelly formed the backbone of the Trump administration’s Afghanistan review. In front of a room full of servicemen and women at Fort Myer Army Base, in Arlington, Virginia, backed by the flags of the branches of the US military, Trump announced that America would double down in Afghanistan. A month later, General Mattis ordered the first of thousands of new American troops into the country. It was a foregone conclusion: the year before Trump entered office, the military had already begun quietly testing public messaging, informing the public that America would be in Afghanistan for decades, not years. After the announcement, the same language cropped up again, this time from Trump surrogates who compared the commitment not to other counterterrorism operations, but to America’s troop commitments in Korea, Germany, and Japan. “We are with you in this fight,” the top general in Afghanistan, John Nicholson, Jr., told an audience of Afghans. “We will stay with you.

Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality: “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements are respected and trusted, while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.”The proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as money—and it was the scarcity of money, Hamilton observed, that had crippled the economy and resulted in severe deflation in the value of land. America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency. The secret of managing government debt was to fund it properly by setting aside revenues at regular intervals to service interest and pay off principal. Hamilton refuted charges that his funding scheme would feed speculation. Quite the contrary: if investors knew for sure that government bonds would be paid off, the prices would not fluctuate wildly, depriving speculators of opportunities to exploit. What mattered was that people trusted the government to make good on repayment: “In nothing are appearances of greater moment than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.” Hamilton intuited that public relations and confidence building were to be the special burdens of every future treasury secretary.

At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen. By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55 The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56

[T]hat afternoon, Sergei Lavrov called me for the second time during the crisis. [...] “We have three demands,” he said. “What are they?” I asked. “The first two are that the Georgians sign the no-use-of-force pledge and that their troops return to barracks,” he told me. “Done,” I answered. [...] But then Sergei said, “The other demand is just between us. Misha Saakashvili has to go.” I couldn’t believe my ears and I reacted out of instinct, not analysis. “Sergei, the secretary of state of the United States does not have a conversation with the Russian foreign minister about overthrowing a democratically elected president,” I said. “The third condition has just become public because I’m going to call everyone I can and tell them that Russia is demanding the overthrow of the Georgian president.” “I said it was between us,” he repeated. “No, it’s not between us. Everyone is going to know.” The conversation ended. I called Steve Hadley to tell him about the Russian demand. Then I called the British, the French, and several others. That afternoon the UN Security Council was meeting. I asked our representative to inform the Council as well. Lavrov was furious, saying that he’d never had a colleague divulge the contents of a diplomatic conversation. I felt I had no choice. If the Georgians wanted to punish Saakashvili for the war, they would have a chance to do it through their own constitutional processes. But the Russians had no right to insist on his removal. The whole thing had an air of the Soviet period, when Moscow had controlled the fate of leaders throughout Eastern Europe. I was certainly not going to be party to a return to those days [688].

In March, at HHS’s request, several large pharmaceutical companies—Novartis, Bayer, Sanofi, and others—donated their inventory, a total of 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine and 2 million of chloroquine, to the Strategic National Stockpile, managed by BARDA, an agency under the DHHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.56 BARDA’s Director, Dr. Rick Bright, later claimed the chloroquine drugs were deadly, and he needed to protect the American public from them.57 Bright colluded with FDA to restrict use of the donated pills to hospitalized patients. FDA publicized the authorization using language that led most physicians to believe that prescribing the drug for any purpose was off-limits. But at the beginning of June, based on clinical trials that intentionally gave unreasonably high doses to hospitalized patients and failed to start the drug until too late, FDA took the unprecedented step of revoking HCQ’s emergency authorization,58 rendering that enormous stockpile of valuable pills off limits to Americans while conveniently indemnifying the pharmaceutical companies for their inventory losses by allowing them a tax break for the donations. After widespread use of the drug for 65 years, without warning, FDA somehow felt the need to send out an alert on June 15, 2020 that HCQ is dangerous, and that it required a level of monitoring only available at hospitals.59 In a bit of twisted logic, Federal officials continued to encourage doctors to use the suddenly-dangerous drug without restriction for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme and malaria. Just not for COVID. With the encouragement of Dr. Fauci and other HHS officials, many states simultaneously imposed restrictions on HCQ’s use.

EARLY IN 1986, I learned of a rumor that Kurt Waldheim, a former United Nations secretary-general and a candidate for Austria’s presidency, had a file as a Nazi war criminal—in the United Nations no less! There were always whispers about Waldheim’s past but a UN file was something new. “Do you have such a file?” I asked the United Nations Secretariat. “We don’t know,” came the answer. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re not allowed to open the archives.” During World War II, Churchill had established a tribunal of the sixteen Allied governments (some in exile) to document Nazi war crimes for future prosecution. The tribunal’s findings were handed over to the United Nations when it was established. The files were stored in one of the UN buildings in New York. I asked once more to see them. “You can’t,” a UN official explained. “When the archives were deposited in the United Nations, it was agreed they will be opened only with the unanimous consent of all sixteen countries.” “What the…” I muttered, outraged. In the face of such obstinacy I set out on a yearlong public and diplomatic campaign to convince these sixteen governments to give their consent. In this I was greatly helped by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress. It was like peeling a diplomatic onion. One layer led to another, and then to another, until at last all the countries had agreed. We had opened the padlock. When I walked into the unlocked storeroom, I saw rows and rows of cardboard boxes containing yellowing files. Picking up a box marked with the letter W, I started going file by file. Sure enough, there was a file marked WALDHEIM KURT. It detailed acts of wanton murder that this Austrian Nazi officer’s unit carried out in the war. Declassified documents later showed that the CIA had been aware of some details of Waldheim’s wartime past since 1945. They didn’t publish the information and Waldheim was able to assume the august post of United Nations secretary-general, in which he was warmly welcomed around the world.

This new surge in morale had nothing to do with Churchill’s speech and everything to do with his gift for understanding how simple gestures could generate huge effects. What had infuriated Londoners was that during these night raids the Luftwaffe seemed free to come and go as it wished, without interference from the night-blind RAF and the city’s strangely quiescent anti-aircraft guns. Gun crews were under orders to conserve ammunition and fire only when aircraft were sighted overhead and, as a consequence, did little firing at all. On Churchill’s orders, more guns were brought to the city, boosting the total to nearly two hundred, from ninety-two. More importantly, Churchill now directed their crews to fire with abandon, despite his knowing full well that guns only rarely brought down aircraft. The orders took effect that Wednesday night, September 11. The impact on civic morale was striking and immediate. Crews blasted away; one official described it as “largely wild and uncontrolled shooting.” Searchlights swept the sky. Shells burst over Trafalgar Square and Westminster like fireworks, sending a steady rain of shrapnel onto the streets below, much to the delight of London’s residents. The guns raised “a momentous sound that sent a chattering, smashing, blinding thrill through the London heart,” wrote novelist William Sansom. Churchill himself loved the sound of the guns; instead of seeking shelter, he would race to the nearest gun emplacement and watch. The new cacophony had “an immense effect on people’s morale,” wrote private secretary John Martin. “Tails are up and, after the fifth sleepless night, everyone looks quite different this morning—cheerful and confident. It was a curious bit of mass psychology—the relief of hitting back.” The next day’s Home Intelligence reports confirmed the effect. “The dominating topic of conversation today is the anti-aircraft barrage of last night. This greatly stimulated morale: in public shelters people cheered and conversation shows that the noise brought a shock of positive pleasure.

In conclusion, the American century is not over, if by that we mean the extraordinary period of American pre-eminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods. Contrary to those who proclaim this the Chinese century, we have not entered a post-American world. But the continuation of the American century will not look like it did in the twentieth century. The American share of the world economy will be less than it was in the middle of the last century, and the complexity represented by the rise of other countries as well as the increased role of non-state actors will make it more difficult for anyone to wield influence and organize action. Analysts should stop using clichés about unipolarity and multipolarity. They will have to live with both in different issues at the same time. And they should stop talking and worrying about poorly specified concepts of decline that mix many different types of behavior and lead to mistaken policy conclusions. Leadership is not the same as domination. America will have to listen in order to get others to enlist in what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a multipartner world. It is important to remember that there have always been degrees of leadership and degrees of influence during the American century. The United States never had complete control. As we saw in Chapter 1, even when the United States had preponderant resources, it often failed to get what it wanted. And those who argue that the complexity and turmoil of today’s entropic world is much worse than the past should remember a year like 1956 when the United States was unable to prevent Soviet repression of a revolt in Hungary, French loss of Vietnam, or the Suez invasion by our allies Britain, France, and Israel. One should be wary of viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses. To borrow a comedian’s line, “hegemony ain’t what it used to be, but then it never was.” Now, with slightly less preponderance and a much more complex world, the United States will need to make smart strategic choices both at home and abroad if it wishes to maintain its position. The American century is likely to continue for a number of decades at the very least, but it will look very different from how it did when Henry Luce first articulated it.

Unlike during the previous Gaza operation in 2012, the Iron Dome supply did not run out. After Operation Pillar of Defense I had instructed the army to accelerate production of Iron Dome projectiles and batteries. We accomplished this with our own funds and with generous American financial support. I now asked the Obama administration for an additional $225 million package to continue the production line after Protective Edge. He agreed, and with the help of Tony Blinken, the deputy national security advisor who later became Biden’s secretary of state, the funding provision sailed through both houses of Congress. I deeply appreciated this support and said so publicly. I was therefore very disappointed when the administration held back on the IDF’s request for additional Hellfire rockets for our attack helicopters. Without offensive weapons we could not bring the Gaza operation to a quick and decisive end. Furthermore, as the air war lingered, the administration issued increasingly critical statements against Israel, calling some of our actions “appalling”2 and thereby opening the moral floodgates against us. Hamas took note. As long as it believed that we couldn’t deliver more aggressive punches, and that international support was waning, it would continue to rocket our cities. Unfortunately, it was aided in this belief by an international tug-of-war. On one side: Israel and Egypt. On the other: Turkey and Qatar, which fully supported Hamas. I worked in close collaboration with Egypt’s new leader, el-Sisi, who had deposed the Islamist Morsi a few months earlier. Our common goal was to achieve an unconditional cease-fire. The last thing el-Sisi wanted was a Hamas success in Gaza that would embolden their Islamist allies in the Sinai and beyond. Hamas’s exiled leader, Khaled Mashal, who escaped the Mossad action in Jordan, was now in Qatar. Supported by his Qatari hosts and Erdogan and ensconced in his lavish villa in Doha, Mashal egged Hamas to keep on fighting. To my astonishment, Kerry urged me to accept Qatar and Turkey as mediators instead of the Egyptians, who were negotiating with Hamas representatives in Cairo for a possible cease-fire. Hamas drew much encouragement from this American position. El-Sisi and I agreed to keep the Americans out of the negotiating loop. In the meantime the IDF would have to further degrade Hamas’s fighting and crush their expectations of achieving anything in the cease-fire negotiations.

extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.

Last Wednesday Vince Cable, the UK business secretary, invited British cities to express their interest in being used as testing grounds for driverless cars. The hope is that the UK will gain an edge in this promising new industry. (German autonomous cars were being tested on German, French and Danish public roads 20 years ago, so the time is surely ripe for the UK to leap into a position of technological leadership.)

Some specialized types of administrative legislation require further attention—for example, determinations that make law. These determinations echo the old determinations of facts, in which an executive officer determined a factual question that was a condition of a statute’s application. Rather than being exercises of mere discernment or judgment, however, the newer style determinations often include overt exercises of lawmaking will. Such determinations arise under statutes that leave plenty of room for lawmaking. For example, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is required to specify the application of the EPA’s ambient air quality standards by publishing a list of air pollutants that “in his judgment, cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”9 Although statutes of this sort speak in terms of determinations and judgments, they provide for determinations of questions so abstract or loosely stated that the agencies inevitably must engage in policy choices—in legislative will rather than mere judgment. As put by Justice Thurgood Marshall in a 1970 dissent, “the factual issues with which the Secretary [of Labor] must deal are frequently not subject to any definitive resolution,” for “[c]ausal connections and theoretical extrapolations may be uncertain,” and “when the question involves determination of the acceptable level of risk, the ultimate decision must necessarily be based on considerations of policy, as well as empirically verifiable facts.” Thus, “[t]he decision to take action in conditions of uncertainty bears little resemblance to . . . empirically verifiable factual conclusions.”10 In such instances, factual determinations become exercises of lawmaking will.

persevering secretary of the Society for Providing Public Access to Places of Interest and Beauty,

THE LEWINSKY PROCEDURE: A STRATEGY GUIDE FOR MINIMIZING POLITICAL SCANDAL Deny -The necessary first stage, where you question the accuracy of the facts. It will take time for all the scandalous details to come out, and if you’re careful or lucky, they may never come out. Deny everything until the point that the facts against you can be substantiated. Delay -Take every action possible to stall, postpone, impede, procrastinate, and filibuster. The longer the time between the initial news of the scandal and the resolution of the scandal, the better. Diminish -Once the facts against you have been substantiated, either minimize the nature of the scandal or its impact against you. “At this point, what difference does it make?” Debunk -Have a helpful news organization or advocacy group develop a useful counter-narrative that explains away the scandal or contradicts the facts or generally does something to get progressives back on your side. “Explanatory journalism” is a great help here. Distract -Change the conversation by talking about something else. It doesn’t matter what that might be, because there’s always something else more important, even if it’s reminding people to drink more water. Suggest that the scandal itself is a distraction from the real issues. Deflect -When in doubt, blame the Republicans. All administrative failures can be blamed on the failures of the prior administration. All political failures can be blamed on Republican legislation or Republican intransigence in not passing progressive legislation which would have fixed the problem. All personal failures can be excused by either bringing up the example of a Republican who did something similar, or by pointing out that whatever was done wasn’t as bad as serving divorce papers on your wife when she’s in the hospital with cancer, or invading Iraq. Divide -Point out that the scandal is being driven by the most extreme Republicans, and that moderates aren’t to blame. This won’t help you with moderates that much, but it will give the moderates another reason not to like the extremists, and vice versa, and this can only be positive. Deploy -Get friends and allies to talk about your positive virtues in public, without reference to the scandal. If the scandal comes up, have them complain about the politics of personal destruction. Demonize -Attribute malign intentions to the conservatives trying to promote the scandal. This approach should also include special prosecutors, judges, and anyone else who is involved in the scandal to one degree or another. Defenestrate -When necessary, shove someone under the bus. Try not to make this a habit, or you won’t have anyone around to deploy. The target for defenestration can be small (rogue employees in the Cincinnati regional office) or large (Cabinet secretary) but it needs to be someone who won’t scream overly much as they sail out the window. ❄ ❄ ❄

Karl Giese seemed to supply all of Hirschfeld’s needs. He was his secretary, the guardian of the Archive and planner of new projects for the education of the public of homosexuality. His infinite knowledge of Hirschfeld’s work and ideas made him his natural confidant. In short, Giese had the unique position of being his lover and most trusted collaborator. He knew everything that could be known about the Institute, and, soon after he had taken up residence there, he guided visitors through its different departments. They were a mixed crowd—German and foreign doctors, other academics, writers, artists. and many members of the public. Giese was no academic, but he had native wit and considerable intelligence. He had been a brilliant autodidact. He was also an articulate speaker, and Hirschfeld entrusted him with lecturing to the general public on questions of sexual conflict and homosexuality. He fulfilled his many tasks with enthusiasm, and at the same time cared for Hirschfeld’s well-being like a mother.

Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87

After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues - the shorn women - were often paraded through the streets on the back of a lorry, occasionally to the sound of a drum as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789. Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half naked, some marked with swastikas in paint or lipstick. In Bayeux, Churchill's private secretary Jock Colville recorded his reactions to one such scene. "I watched an open lorry drive past, to the accompaniment of boos and catcalls from the French populace, with a dozen miserable women in the back, every hair on their heads shaved off. They were in tears, hanging their heads in shame. While disgusted by this cruelty, I reflected that we British had known no invasion or occupation for some 900 years. So we were not the best judges.

LIED-ABOUT WARS Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf. Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred. The dead did not revive. In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches. In the following elections, he won a second term. In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

Ever since The New York Times broke the news on March 2, 2015, that Clinton used a personal e-mail account and private server as secretary of state, risking exposure of classified documents to hostile foreign powers, the subject of her e-mails had stalked her campaign, fusing with the damaging Clinton Cash narrative to undermine the public’s trust in her. Clinton

The more things improve the more pessimistic we become. Violence-related deaths at the nation’s schools dropped to a record low during the 1996—97 academic year (19 deaths out of 54 million children), and only one in ten public schools reported any serious crime. Yet Time and U.S. News & World Report both ran headlines in 1996 referring to “Teenage Time Bombs.” In a nation of “Children Without Souls” (another Time headline that year), “America’s beleaguered cities are about to be victimized by a paradigm shattering wave of ultraviolent, morally vacuous young people some call ‘the superpredators,’” William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, and John Dilulio, a criminologist, forecast in a book published in 1996.11

Then you cannot have thought much either of your position or of mine.” “He is a gentleman, papa.” “So is my private secretary. There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman. The curate of the parish is a gentleman, and the medical man who comes here from Bradstock. The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to you in thinking of such a matter.

The reasons why Ngaba led the plateau in self-immolation were obscure. Ngaba was not the worst-off town under Chinese rule. Its residents were wealthier than some others. The public facilities and infrastructure were much better than in many Tibetan towns in Qinghai province where sewage ran through open gutters of the streets and former nomads had been resettled in concrete boxes. Testifying before a U.S. congressional commission in 2011, Kirti Rinpoche suggested the reason was that Ngaba was the first place where Tibetans encountered the Chinese Communists in the 1930s. “The people of this region have a particular wound causing excessive suffering that spans three generations. This wound is very difficult to forget or heal,” Kirti Rinpoche testified. Daniel Berounský, a scholar who contributed a paper at the Paris conference, also pointed to the high level of political awareness at the monastery. “When taking into account the historical outline concerning the kings of Ngawa [Ngaba] and the Kīrti masters, it becomes apparent that the monks are strongly affected by their past history, which is seen as a golden time.” “A Tibetan Party official who penned a rare open letter published (and quickly removed) on a public forum blamed Shi Jun, the Party secretary for Ngaba prefecture. “Some called him the Lord of Demons, because he escalated small incidents into huge confrontations in order to secure his own advancement and to try to win brownie points,” wrote the official, who used his Chinese name, Luo Feng. He complained that Tibetan-speaking officials were excluded from promotion and that out of six hundred Party officials who had been recently promoted, only twenty spoke Tibetan. If you were Tibetan, you were an object of suspicion, Luo Feng wrote.

In the words of Jaurès, ‘there was in the history of the red flag an ambiguous period in which its meaning oscillated between the past and the future.’ It seems that it takes its current significance from a sort of semiotic reversal: deployed by the royal authorities during the executions of sans-culottes, the latter appropriated it and began to make of it their emblem (this occurred with the insurrection of 10 August 1792, when the revolutionary crowds stormed the Tuileries Palace, put an end to the monarchy and established the National Convention, which proclaimed the Republic in September). It reappeared in 1830 and, like the barricade, became the symbol of the insurgents in all the revolutions of 1848. After the violent repression of June 1848 and the ‘bloody week’ that crushed the Paris Commune in May 1871, counterrevolution made the red colour an object of fetishistic demonization; nothing red could be tolerated, and burning red fabrics became a ritual of purification and a practice of public safety. In 1849, Léon Faucher, the state secretary of the first conservative republican government, issued a circular letter directed to the prefects that contained very precise instructions: ‘The red flag is a plea for insurrection; the red cap recalls blood and mourning; bearing these sad marks means provoking disobedience.’ Therefore the government ordered the immediate banishment of those ‘seditious emblems’. After the Paris Commune, a witness wrote in his memoirs that the city was seized by ‘a crazy rage against all that was red: clothes, flags, ideas, and language itself …’ The colour red, he explained, had become ‘a mortal disease’ whose return should be avoided absolutely, as we do ‘the plague and the cholera’.

9.] Query, whether the following be fit to be published. The governor, Mr. Bellingham, was married, (I would not mention such ordinary matters in our history, but by occasion of some remarkable accidents). The young gentlewoman was ready to be contracted to a friend of his, who lodged in his house, and by his consent had proceeded so far with her, when on the sudden the governor treated with her, and obtained her for himself. He excused it by the strength of his affection, and that she was not absolutely promised to the other gentleman. Two errors more he committed upon it. 1. That he would not have his contract published where he dwelt, contrary to an order of court. 2. That he married himself contrary to the constant practice of the country. The great inquest presented him for breach of the order of court, and at the court following, in the 4th month, the secretary called him to answer the prosecution. But he not going off the bench, as the manner was, and but few of the magistrates present, he put it off to another time, intending to speak with him privately, and with the rest of the magistrates about the case, and accordingly he told him the reason why he did not proceed, viz., being unwilling to command him publicly to go off the bench, and yet not thinking it fit he should sit as a judge, when he was by law to answer as an offender. This he took ill, and said he would not go off the bench, except he were commanded.

Single-issue voting on abortion makes white evangelicals complicit on a whole range of policies that would be anathema to nineteenth-century evangelical reformers, not to mention the Bible itself. How is a ruthless exclusionary policy toward immigrants and refugees in any way consistent with scriptural mandates to welcome the stranger and treat the foreigner as one of your own? How does environmental destruction and indifference to climate change honor God’s creation? One of evangelicals’ signature issues in the nineteenth century was support for “common schools” because they provided a boost for the children of those less fortunate; Trump’s secretary of education (who professes to be an evangelical) spent her adult life seeking systematically to undermine, if not destroy, public education.

Haste made waste and Grant knew it, but in this case the haste was unavoidable — unavoidable, that is, unless he was willing to take the right of having another general win the prize he was after — because he was fighting two wars simultaneously: one against the Confederacy, or at any rate so much of its army as stood between him and the river town that was his goal, and the other against a man who, like himself, wore blue. That was where the need for haste came in. The rival general's name was John McClernand. A former Springfield lawyer and Illinois congressman, McClernand was known to have political aspirations designed to carry him not one inch below the top position occupied at present by his friend, another former Springfield lawyer and Illinois congressman, Abraham Lincoln. Moreover, having decided that the road to the White house led through Vicksburg, he had taken pains to see that he traveled it well equipped, and this he had done by engaging the support and backing of the President but also the Secretary of War. With the odds thus lengthened against him, Grant — when he belatedly found out what his rival had been up to — could see that his private war against McClernand might well turn out to be as tough, in several ways, as the public one he had been fighting for 18 months against the rebels. In the first place, he had not even known that he had this private war on his hands until it was so well underway that his rival had already won the opening skirmish. (p. 60).

Vienna's reputation as a city of luxury, merrymaking and indulgence actually lies much further in the past, in the time of the Babenbergs at whose courts the Minnesinger were prestigious guests, similar to publicity-seeking pop stars of today. the half-censorious, half-envious comments of foreigners often reflect the ambivalence that so many have felt about a city that was both seductive and dangerous. Such was indeed how Grillparzer described the city he loved and hated in his "Farewell to Vienna"(1843) though he had more in mind than simply the temptations of the flesh. But if Vienna was insidiously threatening under its hedonistic surface for a Grillparzer, others have simply regarded it as cheerfully, even shamelessly, immoral. 'lhe humanist scholar Enea Silvio Piccolomini, private secretary to Friedrich III and subsequently elected Pope Pius II, expressed his astonishment at the sexual freedom of the Viennese in a letter to a fellow humanist in Basel written in 1450: "'lhe number of whores is very great, and wives seem disinclined to confine their affections to a single man; knights frequently visit the wives of burghers. 'lhe men put out some wine for them and leave the house. Many girls marry without the permission of their fathers and widows don't observe the year of mourning." 'the local equivalent of the Roman cicisbeo is an enduring feature of Viennese society, and the present author remembers a respectable middle-class intellectual (now dead) who habitually went on holiday with both wife and mistress in tow. Irregular liaisons are celebrated in a Viennese joke about two men who meet for the first time at a party. By way of conversation one says to the other: "You see those two attractive ladies chatting to each other over there? Well, the brunette is my wife and the blonde is my mistress." "that's funny," says his new friend; "I was just about to say the same thing, only the other way round." In Biedermeier Vienna (1815-48), menages d trois seem not to have been uncommon, since the gallant who became a friend of the family was officially known as the Hausfreund. 'the ambiguous status of such a Hausfreund features in a Wienerlied written in 1856 by the usually non-risque Johann Baptist Moser. It con-terns a certain Herr von Hecht, who is evidently a very good friend of the family of the narrator. 'lhe first six lines of the song innocently praise the latter's wife, who is so delightful and companionable that "his sky is always blue"; but the next six relate how she imported a "friend", Herr von Hecht, and did so "immediately after the wedding". This friend loves the children so much "they could be his own." And indeed, the younger one looks remarkably like Herr von Hecht, who has promised that the boy will inherit from him, "which can't be bad, eh?" the faux-naivete with which this apparently commonplace situation is described seems to have delighted Moser's public-the song was immensely popular then and is still sung today.

Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward. Many of Trump’s former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president Mike Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats; former chief of staff John Kelly; former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Without getting into too much detail,” Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said in a public briefing on January 14, “we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion. “We’ve seen this kind of thing before out of Russia,” Kirby said. “When there isn’t an actual crisis to suit their needs, they’ll make one up.

Whatever actually happened or was said, McChystal's refusal to defend himself - to give me any ammunition to use on his behalf - made it impossible for me to save his job. But to this day, I believe he was given the bum's rush by Biden, White House staff, and NSS who harbored deep resentment toward his unyielding advocacy the previous fall of counterinsurgency and a huge troop surge in Afghanistan; who interpreted his public comments back than as "boxing in" the president; and who continued to oppose the strategy approved by the president and the way McChrystal was implementing it. I am convinced the "Rolling Stone" article gave the president, egged on by those around him in the White House, and himself distrustful of the senior military, and opportunity he welcomed to demonstrate vividly - to the public and to the Pentagon - that he was commander in chief and fully in control of the military.

One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.

Since 2013, when Hillary stepped down from her position as secretary of state, $262 million has come in from foreign entities. The largest share of donations from the financial services sector has been from those contributors with close ties to Wall Street. A third of foundation donors who have given more than $1 million are foreign governments or other entities based outside the United States, and foreign donors make up more than half of those who have given more than $5 million. “The role of interests located in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Argentina may spur questions about the independence of a potential commander in chief who has solicited money from foreign donors with a stake in the actions of the US government.”569 This, of course, ignores the fact that these Islamic nations brutally oppress women denying them the right to vote, drive a car, get an education, choose their own husbands, or show their face in the public square.

SCANDALS AND MISMANAGEMENT If Secretary Clinton’s political career had ended with her defeat for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, her skills as a manager would have been judged by her disorganized and drama-filled campaign for the presidency and her disastrous Health Care Task Force as First Lady. President Obama, who defeated her calamitously run campaign, should have been wary of nominating Clinton to a post that was responsible for tens of thousands of federal employees throughout the world. While her tenure in Foggy Bottom didn’t have the highly publicized backstabbing element that tarnished her presidential campaign, Secretary Clinton’s deficiencies as a manager were no less evident. There was one department within State that Secretary Clinton oversaw with great care: the Global Partnerships Initiative (GPI), which was run by long-time Clinton family aide Kris Balderston. Balderston was known in political circles for creating a “hit list” that ranked members of Congress based on loyalty to the Clintons during the 2008 presidential primaries.[434] Balderston was brought to Foggy Bottom to “keep the Clinton political network humming at State.”[435] He focused his efforts on connecting CEOs and business interests—all potential Clinton 2016 donors—to State Department public/private partnerships. Balderston worked alongside Clinton’s long-time aide Huma Abedin, who was given a “special government employee” waiver, allowing her to work both as Secretary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, and for other private sector clients. With the arrangement, Abedin would serve as a consultant to the top Clinton allied firm, Teneo, in a role in which, as the New York Times reported, “the lines were blurred between Ms. Abedin’s work in the high echelons of one of the government’s most sensitive executive departments and her role as a Clinton family insider.”[436] Secretary Clinton and her allies have placed great emphasis on the secretary of state’s historic role in promoting American business interests overseas, dubbing the effort “economic statecraft.”[437] The efforts of the GPI, Abedin, and Balderston ensured that Secretary Clinton’s “economic statecraft” agenda would be rife with the potential for conflicts of interest reminiscent of the favor-trading scandals that emanated from her husband’s White House. While the political office and donor maintenance program was managed with extreme meticulousness, Secretary Clinton ignored her role as manager of the rest of the sprawling government agency.[438] When it came to these more mundane tasks, Secretary Clinton was not on top of what was really going on in the department she ran. While Secretary Clinton was preoccupied with being filmed and photographed all around the world, the State Department was plagued by chronic management problems and scandals, from visa programs to security contractors. And when Secretary Clinton did weigh in on management issues, it was almost always after a raft of bad press forced her to, and not from any proactive steps she took. In fact, she and her department’s first reaction in certain instances was to silence critics or intimidate whistleblowers, rather than get to the bottom of what was actually going on. The events that unfolded in Benghazi were the worst example of Secretary Clinton neglecting her managerial responsibilities. This pattern of behavior, which led to the tragedy, was characteristic of her management style throughout her four years at Foggy Bottom. “Economic Statecraft” A big part of Secretary Clinton’s record-breaking travel—112 countries visited—was her work as a salesperson for select U.S. business interests.[439] Today, her supporters would have us believe her “economic statecraft” agenda was a major accomplishment.[440] Yet, as always seems to be the case with the Clintons, there was one family that benefited more than any other from all this economic statecraft—the Clinton family.

Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, to say the least, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. A year after Fisher opened his store, the league launched a magazine, Good Roads, that became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn’t even own bikes; at the group’s peak, Fisher and more than 102,000 others were on the rolls, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. Yes, the demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893. A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon’s debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to “make inquiry regarding public roads” and to investigate how they might be improved.

Grauman died of heart failure in the spring of 1950, died a bachelor, aged seventy-one, and the only people at his deathbed were his doctor, his secretary for the past twenty-one years, and the publicity chief of 20th Century—Fox. Long

And then, after publication of Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars

Ned Sherrin Ned Sherrin is a satirist, novelist, anthologist, film producer, and celebrated theater director who has been at the heart of British broadcasting and the arts for more than fifty years. I had met Diana, Princess of Wales--perhaps “I had been presented to” is more accurate--in lineups after charity shows that I had been compering and at which she was the royal guest of honor. There were the usual polite exchanges. On royal visits backstage, Princess Alexandra was the most relaxed, on occasion wickedly suggesting that she caught a glimpse of romantic chemistry between two performers and setting off giggles. Princess Margaret was the most artistically acute, the Queen the most conscientious; although she did once sweep past me to get to Bill Haley, of whom she was a fan. Prince Edward could, at one time, be persuaded to do an irreverent impression of his older brother, Prince Charles. Princess Diana seemed to enjoy herself, but she was still new to the job and did not linger down the line. Around this time, a friend of mine opened a restaurant in London. From one conversation, I gathered that although it was packed in the evenings, business was slow at lunchtime. Soon afterward, I got a very “cloak-and-dagger” phone call from him. He spoke in hushed tones, muttering something like “Lunch next Wednesday, small party, royal person, hush-hush.” From this, I inferred that he wanted me and, I had no doubt, other friends to bring a small party to dress the restaurant, to which he was bringing the “royal person” in a bid to up its fashionable appeal during the day. When Wednesday dawned, the luncheon clashed with a couple of meetings, and although feeling disloyal, I did not see how I was going to be able to round up three or four people--even for a free lunch. Guiltily, I rang his office and apologized profusely to his secretary for not being able to make it. The next morning, he telephoned, puzzled and aggrieved. “There were only going to be the four of us,” he said. “Princess Diana had been looking forward to meeting you properly. She was very disappointed that you couldn’t make it.” I felt suitably stupid--but, as luck had it, a few weeks later I found myself sitting next to her at a charity dinner at the Garrick Club. I explained the whole disastrous misunderstanding, and we had a very jolly time laughing at the coincidence that she was dining at this exclusive club before her husband, who had just been elected a member with some publicity. Prince Charles was in the hospital at the time recuperating from a polo injury. Although hindsight tells us that the marriage was already in difficulties, that was not generally known, so in answer to my inquiries, she replied sympathetically that he was recovering well. We talked a lot about the theater and her faux pas some years before when she had been to Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and confessed to the star, Penelope Keith, that it was the first Coward play that she had seen. “The first,” said Penelope, shocked. “Well,” Diana said to me, “I was only eighteen!” Our meeting was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and as we were both working a lot for AIDS charities, we had many notes to compare and friends to mourn. The evening ended with a dance--but being no Travolta myself, I doubt that my partnering was the high point for her.

appearing in such publications as Aviation Week (McGraw - Hill) and professional notes prepared twice weekly (by Aviation Studies International Ltd, London)

Assistant Secretary for Health of the Department of Health and Human Services—a long and rather unimpressive title, Raymond Markey thought. But he knew better. His office was in charge of the U.S. Public Health Service, controlling such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health—hardly an unimportant or ceremonial post. Markey

it was not yet true what Dorothy Boyd, the secretary played by Renée Zellweger in the movie Jerry Maguire, tells her son about flying first-class: “It used to be a better meal, now it’s a better life.” I grew up in a time and place where the word “public” had deep resonance and engendered the highest respect as a source of innovation—as in public schools, public parks, public deliberations, and public-private partnerships. I grew up at a time and place when I was anchored in concentric communities and where the American Dream—“my parents did better than their parents and I will do better than mine”—seemed to be as certain as spring following winter, and summer following spring. And I grew up in a time and place where Jews were the biggest “minority” but gradually integrated themselves and were integrated by the dominant white, non-Jewish society and culture, and while it wasn’t always easy or pretty, somehow it happened. So where was this place over the rainbow and when was this time? The Land of Oz that I speak of was the state of Minnesota, and, for me, its Emerald City, where I grew up, was, as I said, a small suburb/town just outside of Minneapolis called St. Louis Park. The time (I was born July 20, 1953) was the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Growing up in that community at that time was a gift—a gift of enduring values and optimism—that has kept on giving my whole life. Three decades of reporting from the Middle East tried to leach that out of me. So, today, mine is not a naïve optimism that everything will turn out well; I’ve learned better. But it is an enduring confidence that things can turn out well, if people are ready to practice a politics of compromise and pursue an ethic of pluralism.

Focusing on the public school system, former Secretary of Education, William Bennett explains the moral crisis in that institution by contrasting the concerns of teachers in two different eras: 'Over the years teachers have been asked to identify the top problems in America's schools. In 1940 teachers identified them as talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the hall; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asking the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.' During the thirty-year period of 1960 to 1990, 'there has been a 560 percent increase in violent crime; more than a 400 percent increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorces; a tripling of the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a 200 percent increase in the teenage suicide rate; and a drop of 75 points in the average SAT scores of high-school students.' We do not believe it is a coincidence that the increase of moral mayhem described by Bennett corresponds with an increased acceptance of moral relativism. In fact, relativism has been officially incorporated in the educational curriculum, known as values clarification.

he never perceived U.S. foreign policy as a campaign for American hegemony. In a mid-1947 talk to the Women’s National Press Club he expressed indignation at the charge. “There could be no more malicious distortion of the truth,” he declaimed, “than the frequent propaganda assertions . . . that the United States has imperialist aims or that American aid has been offered in order to fasten upon the recipients some sort of political or economic dominion.”6 In their quest for mid-American support, Marshall and his internationalist Cold War colleagues were not averse to underscoring the economic advantages to American business and agriculture of generous public funding of defensive measures against the advance of foreign Communism. But the secretary of state himself had no ulterior capitalist motives.

Israeli credibility is equally suspect, if not more so, in the Middle East, Europe, and maybe significant elements of the U.S. public. An act of war based principally on information provided by a third party is risky in the extreme. U.S. and Israeli interests are not always the same.

Perkins’s grandmother had told her that when somebody opens a door, you should always walk through. So Perkins confronted FDR with terms if she was to become his labor secretary. If she were to join the cabinet, FDR would have to commit to a broad array of social insurance policies: massive unemployment relief, a giant public works program, minimum wage laws, a Social Security program for old age insurance, and the abolition of child labor. “I suppose you are going to nag me about this forever,” Roosevelt told her. She confirmed she would.

Is there more to the Fatima secret not yet revealed? Well, before he later revealed the content of the 3rd Secret of Fatima in 2000, John Paul II spoke to a select group of German Catholics at Fulda during his 1980 visit to Germany. Here is an excerpt from his words: The Holy Father was asked, “What about the Third Secret of Fatima? Should it not have already been published by 1960?” Pope John Paul II replied: “Given the seriousness of the contents, my predecessors in the Petrine office diplomatically preferred to postpone publication so as not to encourage the world power of Communism to make certain moves. On the other hand, it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this: if there is a message in which it is written that the oceans will flood whole areas of the earth, and that from one moment to the next millions of people will perish, truly the publication of such a message is no longer something to be so much desired.” At this point the Pope grasped a Rosary and said: “Here is the remedy against this evil. Pray, pray, and ask for nothing more. Leave everything else to the Mother of God.” The Holy Father was then asked: “What is going to happen to the Church?” He answered: “We must prepare ourselves to suffer great trials before long, such as will demand of us a disposition to give up even life, and a total dedication to Christ and for Christ. With your and my prayer it is possible to mitigate this tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it, because only thus can the Church be effectively renewed. How many times has the renewal of the Church sprung from blood! This time, too, it will not be otherwise. We must be strong and prepared, and trust in Christ and His Mother, and be very, very assiduous in praying the Rosary.” In his book, The Last Secret of Fatima, Cardinal Bertone, (now former) Vatican Secretary of State, acknowledged that John Paul II did in fact say these words (p. 48). What clarity, for those who can see!

The speeches she is making with almost weekly regularity are a further satisfying feature of her royal life. Some she writes herself, others by a small coterie of advisers, including her private secretary Patrick Jephson, now a firm ally in the royal camp as she personally appointed him last November. It is a flexible informal group who discuss with the Princess the points she wants to make, research the statistics and then construct the speech. The contrast between her real interests and the role assigned for her by her palace “minders” was amply demonstrated in March this year where on the same day she was guest of honour at the Ideal Home Exhibition and in the evening made a passionate and revelatory speech about AIDS. There was an interesting symbolism to these engagements, separated only by a matter of hours but by a generation in personal philosophy. Her exhibition visit was organized by the palace bureaucracy. They arranged everything from photo opportunities to guests lists while the subsequent media coverage concentrated on an off-the-cuff remark the Princess made about how she couldn’t comment on her plans for National Bed Week because this was “a family show”. It was light, bright and trite, the usual offering which is served up by the palace to the media day in day out. The Princess performed her role impeccably, chatting to the various organizers and smiling for the cameras. However her performance was just that, a role which the palace, the media and public have come to expect. A glimpse of the real Diana was on show later that evening when in the company of Professor Michael Adler and Margaret Jay, both AIDS experts, she spoke to an audience of media executives at a dinner held at Claridges. Her speech clearly came from the heart and her own experience. Afterwards she answered several rather long-winded questions from the floor, the first occasion in her royal life where she had subjected herself to this particular ordeal. This episode passed without a murmur in the media even though it represented a significant milestone in her life. It illustrates the considerable difficulties she faces in shifting perceptions of her job as a Princess, both inside and outside the palace walls.

It is likely that L’Enfant’s appointment unsettled Thomas Jefferson. The secretary of state ranked himself as the grand arbiter of public taste and one of the preeminent designers in America. After all, he had studied the great buildings of antiquity as well as those in European cities; he had absorbed Andrea Palladio’s influential treatise The Four Books of Architecture, and was incorporating the principles Palladio had adopted from Roman architecture into the house he was building at Monticello. He had also designed Virginia’s neoclassical statehouse at Richmond. Now Washington, who had never lived in Europe, seemed to disregard his wealth of architectural knowledge, planning experience, and taste, entrusting the capital’s plan to a different designer.

At the same time, the Establishment and their media allies were in full cry. Lord McGregor, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, issued a statement condemning the hysteria that the book immediately generated as ‘An odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.’ In fact, this criticism was never made of the book itself; indeed, Lord McGregor has since told me that the issue was the ‘most difficult’ of his tenure. The Archbishop of Canterbury worried publicly about the effects of the publicity on Princes William and Harry; Lord St John of Fewsley condemned the book’s publication, while a pot-pourri of MPs were keen to see me locked away in the Tower; it was, too, a torrid time for Diana’s supporters. As loyalists rallied to the flag, ignoring the message while deriding the messenger, the public gradually began to accept the book’s veracity through statements by Diana’s friends, further confirmed when she visited her old friend Carolyn Bartholomew, who had spoken about the Princess’s bulimia. Unfortunately, that casual call upon an old and trusted friend had bitter consequences for Diana. Senior courtiers, including the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, pointed accusing fingers at Diana when they saw the front-page coverage of the visit. Aggrieved and hurt, the Princess flew by helicopter to Merseyside for a visit to a hospice, her first official engagement since Diana, Her True Story hit the headlines. It proved to be an emotional meeting between Diana and her public for, touched by the show of affection from waiting wellwishers, she burst into tears, overcome by the distressing echoes of her morning meeting with Palace officials, and by the underlying strain of the decision she and Prince Charles had taken. As she later told a friend: ‘An old lady in the crowd stroked my face and that triggered something inside me. I simply couldn’t stop myself crying.’ The public tears did not surprise her close friends, who knew only too well the private anguish of her lonely position, the strain she had borne for 18 months. As one remarked: ‘She is a brilliant actress who has disguised her private sorrow.

But revocation was not enough for the betrayed Georgians. They needed to actually set fire to the prior act: The feeling of the Legislature was so strong, that, after the Yazoo act had been repealed, it was decided to destroy all the records and documents relating to the corruption. By order of the two Houses a fire was kindled in the public square of Louisville, which was then the capital. The enrolled act that had been secured by fraud was brought out by the secretary of state, and by him delivered to the President of the Senate for examination. That officer delivered the act to the Speaker of the House. The Speaker in turn passed it to the clerk, who read the title of the act and the other records, and then, committing them to the flames, cried out in a loud voice, “God save the State and preserve her rights, and may every attempt to injure them perish as these wicked and corrupt acts now do!”8