The New Republic

This is a hell of a time, I know, to seek attention for a fresh approach to the problem of inflation. Who is interested? READ MORE >>

During his US tour last spring Leonid Brezhnev heralded a fresh era in Soviet-American friendship as he embraced Wall Street bankers, hugged Hollywood actors and flattered Richard Nixon. Now, by encouraging and aiding the Arabs against Israel and thereby raising the spectre of renewed superpower confrontation, the Russians have moved from grins to grimaces. Their turnabout, it seems to me, can be explained in a single word—priorities. READ MORE >>

Continuing American participation in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) militates against prospects for any effective reassertion by Congress of its foreign policy role in Southeast Asia. Yet the Senate still displays a remarkable complacency toward the survival of SEATO. Though recently dormant, that old treaty is still alive, operative and available as an instrument for further presidentially initiated intervention. READ MORE >>

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If the members and staff of the Senate Watergate committee were smarter than they have been up to now, they would be preparing to make the President sorry that, at his August 22 press conference in San Clemente, he mentioned Clark MacGregor and thereby drew attention to a deposition that MacGregor gave under oath in a civil suit last July 20. MacGregor was the second and last director of Mr. Nixon's Committee for the Re-election of the President. READ MORE >>

The Ervin committee, while concentrating on the planning, execution and coverup of the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Office Building, is instructing us on other matters having to do with politics, government and the mores of Washington. The fine art of misleading the press and the public. READ MORE >>

Trying to evaluate the foreign policy of the Nixon administration during its first term, one must, as always in foreign policy, distinguish between rhetoric and policy. Rhetoric and policy may by and large coincide, one reflecting the other, or a wide gap may separate the two. In the latter case, what governments do is more important than what they say they are doing or are going to do. However, even here the kind of rhetoric used, in conjunction with the kind of policy pursued, can give a clue to the government's intention.   READ MORE >>

The signs and chants and songs said "Four More Years" and "Nixon Now, More than Ever," and in their idiotic way they provided a depressing indication of the kind of presidency that Richard Nixon is likely to give us in his second term. It predictably won't be very different from his first-term presidency unless more of the same, perhaps marked with a confident sense of rightness that was missing at the start of the Nixon tenure, is thought to constitute a meaningful difference. In the weeks between his renomination and his reelection, Mr. READ MORE >>

A commission on party structure and delegate selection and a commission on rules were set up by the 1968 Democratic national convention in the hope of avoiding a repetition of itself; and everyone immediately began to fear that the two commissions, particularly the first, would help bring about exactly what they were meant to forestall, and more of it even than in 1968. New requirements would be imposed on the process of delegate selection, the state parties would not yield to them, and the 1972 convention would be a shambles of credentials contests and little else. READ MORE >>

Here we have proof, if any be needed, that really good books about Presidents in mid-term are not possible. The modern standard for such books remains Robert J. Donovan's Eisenhower (1956). Written by a first-rate reporter with maximum help from the incumbent President, even it was flawed by the necessary reticence of the subject and his associates. READ MORE >>