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Presidency
Republican senators who have conveniently forgotten the events of January 6 should be made to watch to videos of every moment of the attack on the Capitol.
Trump is the most transformative one-term President in 175 years, but historians will not be kind.
What is this latest impeachment gambit really about? Of course, it is meant to discredit President Trump’s supporters and perhaps stop him from running for president again.
Donald Trump was impeached again, a week before leaving office, in one of the great travesties of modern politics.
Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.
In this issue, 30 historians provide a detailed look at presidential misdeeds — from inattention to “high crimes” — over the last 230 years.
Partisan political differences mushroomed into a battle over the conduct of Barack Obama and other administration officials.
In
When Abraham Lincoln became president, America was even more divided than it is today. But he refused to inflame passions by playing to a political base.
The Capitol riot seemed hauntingly familiar to the author, who as a student at Ole Miss watched demagogues incite a deadly riot to prevent integration.
The cause of Donald Trump’s poor behavior may be “a severe case of bad manners,” says the author.
It is probably lost to mind who first said that “in the American presidency, character is destiny.” But whoever coined the adage must have been thinking of Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, in whom the salience of personal qualities was so great as to be historically determinative – Was
The young nation was lucky to have the only candidate on Earth who could do the job.
There were no primaries back then to select presidential candidates, no organized political parties, no orchestrated campaigns, not even any established election procedures.
The struggles and triumphs of our presidents have been central to shaping our nation, even though they operated under a Constitution that didn’t grant them unilateral power.
Editor's Note: Portions of this essay were written by the distinguished Presidential historian Michael Beschloss for our book,
Built in Dublin in 1778 by a member of the British Parliament who admired George Washington, the vandalized monument stands on an old estate now in ruins.
After becoming president, George Washington undertook an extraordinary journey through all 13 colonies to unite – and learn from – a diverse population of citizens. His quest to unite the nation and discover the "temper and disposition" of its people are an inspiration to us today.
The claim that “Washington slept here” is so ubiquitous in the historical community that it has become something of a running joke.
In his second term, George Washington faced a crisis that threatened to tear apart the young republic. His wife Martha later thought that the bitterness of the debate may have hastened the president’s death, but Washington gave America the gift of peace, and an important precedent in leadership.
An impetuous and sometimes corrupt Congress has often hamstrung the efforts of the president since the earliest days of the republic.
On a little-remarked, steamy day in late June 1973, a revolution took place in Washington, D.C., one that would transfer far more power and wealth than did the revolt against King George III in 1776.
Why have our presidents almost always stumbled after the first four years?
An interview with the president and his wife in the Oval Office
A recent presidential edict will make it harder for historians to practice their trade.
Richard Brookhiser has spent four years trying to capture for the television screen the character of one of the greatest Americans.
Jack Kennedy came into the White House determined to dismantle his Republican predecessor’s rigid, formal staff organization, in favor of a spontaneous, flexible, hands-on management style. Thirty years later, Bill Clinton seems determined to do the same thing. He would do well to remember that what it got JFK was the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.
In early October of 1963, Representative Clement Zablocki, a Wisconsin Democrat, led a House Foreign Affairs Committee fact-finding delegation to South Vietnam. Invited to the White House when he returned, Zablocki told President John F.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
The disputed election of "His Fraudulency" Rutherford B. Hayes ended the era of Reconstruction.
Last February, the White House was jubilant over the outcome of the election held in Nicaragua, where voters turned out the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, which has run the country since 1979, as well as its president, Daniel Ortega.
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