Clyde Haberman

In America’s most storied political family, Rosemary Kennedy was the first in her generation to die of natural causes. Before then, a brother had been killed in war, a sister in a plane crash and two other brothers in assassinations. Not much of Ms. Kennedy’s life qualified as natural, though. Intellectually challenged from birth, she […]

As details trickled into print and pixels about Russian tampering with the election that put him in the White House, a snappish President Trump lashed out in his favored medium. On Feb. 15, he wrote on Twitter: “The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!” […]

Over the last three decades, nominees to the United States Supreme Court have been made keenly aware that the moment the president taps them on the shoulder they are effectively Mirandized. Anything they say may be, and almost certainly will be, used against them. It wasn’t always thus. But an imperative to say as little […]

The advent of the Trump administration brings a designated head of the Environmental Protection Agency whose commitment to the E and P of E.P.A. is widely suspect. In Scott Pruitt, President Trump settled on a man who reflects his own skepticism about climate change, which has included assertions that global warming is a hoax. The […]

“The West Wing,” Aaron Sorkin‘s television series about a fictional White House, had a knack for crisply summarizing complex real-life issues. In an episode from 2000, pharmaceutical executives and leaders of an AIDS-plagued African country are summoned to the White House. The purpose is to see if reluctant businessmen can be persuaded to sell the […]

It did not take long for school safety agents in New York to find their first gun of the new school year. Day 1 had barely begun at a Brooklyn high school last month when the officers stopped a 15-year-old student who had stowed a loaded .22-caliber pistol in his backpack and thought he could […]

Forty years later, a moment in the annals of presidential debatesremains a classic, worth recalling as Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump prepare to go head to head on Monday. “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” President Gerald R. Ford declared when he went up against Jimmy Carter in 1976, “and there never […]

Should your ZIP code determine your future? Not according to American ideals of social mobility. American realities, however, tell a different story: Where people grow up goes a long way toward shaping how well they will be educated, how stable their families will be, how high their dreams can soar. Perhaps no group knows this […]

The passage of time had in no way eroded life’s certitudes for Phyllis Schlafly. “It was a tremendous victory,” she said in May about her greatest triumph, stopping the Equal Rights Amendment in its tracks four decades ago. “And, of course,” she added, “we assumed that God was on our side.” Mrs. Schlafly — no […]

In combat, lives can be erased in an instant. Military men and women accept that as a given. But what if peril stalks them as civilians, long after the guns have fallen silent? As the years pass, does the nation bear an abiding obligation to them when they find they face death on the installment […]