Search Results for John Lewis

The SpeechwriterOne summer morning, seven months after he had turned 80, my husband, Dick Goodwin, came down the stairs, clumps of shaving cream on his earlobes, singing, “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” from the musical Oklahoma!“Why so chipper?” I asked.“I had a flash,” he said, looking over the headlines of the three newspapers I had laid out for him on the breakfast table in our home in Concord, Massachusetts. Putting them aside, he started writing down numbers. “Three times eight is 24. Three times 80 is 240.”“Is that your revelation?” I asked.“Look, my 80-year life span occupies more than a third of our republic’s history. That means that our democracy is merely three ‘Goodwins’ long.”I tried to suppress a smile.“Doris, one Goodwin ago, when I was born, we were in the midst of the Great Depression. Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941, my 10th birthday….

The Man Who Died for the Liberal ArtsPhoto-illustrations by Gabriela PesqueiraChugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack. A young ensign—“real eager to get off that ship and get into action,” in the recollection of an enlisted Navy man who encountered him—sat down and wrote a letter to his younger brother, who one day would be my father.Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he…

No perjury charges for British soldiers accused of lying in Bloody Sunday probeFifteen British soldiers who allegedly lied to an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, one of the deadliest days of the decades-long Northern Ireland conflict, will not face perjury charges, prosecutors said Friday.There was insufficient evidence to convict the soldiers or a former alleged member of the Irish Republican Army about their testimony before an inquiry into the 1972 killings of 13 civilians by Britain’s Parachute Regiment in Derry, also known as Londonderry, the Public Prosecution Service said.An initial investigation into the slayings on Jan. 30, 1972 concluded the soldiers were defending themselves from a mob of IRA bombers and gunmen. But a 12-year-long inquiry concluded in 2010 that soldiers unjustifiably opened fire on unarmed and fleeing civilians and then lied about it for decades.FORMER BRITISH SOLDIER TO STAND TRIAL FOR 1972 ‘BLOODY SUNDAY’ KILLINGS IN NORTHERN IRELANDFamilies of the…

Gavin Newsom Is Getting Antsy“We don’t need magazine profiles,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told me. “We don’t need any problems.”We were sitting on opposing couches in his Sacramento office, a makeshift space across the street from his usual suite in the state capitol, currently being renovated. Newsom, leaning his head back into his intertwined hands, looked every bit the sleek pol he plays on TV—the big smile, the suit, the hair gel. He had just led me on a tour of this sterile habitat that he likens to a “dentist’s office.” Everything about it felt slapdash and temporary. “People know they’re not here for very long,” said Newsom, who is 56 but emits the frenetic energy of an upstart.  This aura can invite distrust. So can participating in magazine profiles when you don’t want to be seen as buffing your national image at the expense of being a team player—the team…

Democrats’ Unproven Plan to Close Biden’s Enthusiasm GapOn Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up.“We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballot—including the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislature—as well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.The message isn’t meant as…

Sen. Rick Scott Says He’s a China Hawk. But He’s Made Lots of Money With China-Related Investmen…In November, ahead of President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued a press release casting himself as a fierce opponent of China. It declared, “Since being elected to the U.S. Senate, Senator Scott has introduced dozens of bills to punish Communist China for its increased military aggression, continued cyberattacks on both private companies and U.S. government agencies, unfair trade practices and stealing of data and intellectual property from American citizens and businesses.” Several months earlier, Scott, who is up for reelection this year, called on Americans to boycott products manufactured in China and to demand that US companies halt doing business there. Last year, he declared that the United States had to “Stop buying [Chinese] stuff. Stop helping them. Stop investing in China.” And he tweeted, “You…