Harold Meyerson

Back when he was running for president, in 2000, Sen. John McCain routinely referred to Bill Clinton’s handling of world affairs as a “feckless photo-op foreign policy.” Four years later, Clinton’s foreign policy seems fairly filled with feck when contrasted with his successor’s. Has any official United States policy in recent memory been as feckless […]

As in a classic fairy tale or a not-so-classic game show, John Kerry finds himself in a closed room staring at three closed doors. One is labeled “Reduce U.S. Forces in Iraq.” The second door reads “Maintain Troop Levels”; the third says “Increase Them.” And here’s Kerry’s problem: The risk of opening any of those […]

In the course of the past week an odd double standard has emerged in the presidential campaign. Every sentence and gesture of the young John Kerry has been scrutinized — and often deliberately misinterpreted — for signs of insincerity, self-promotion, lack of patriotism and fledgling Francophilia. The sentences and gestures of the young George W. […]

Has John Kerry fully pondered the extent of the mess — or, more properly, messes — he will inherit from George Bush should he be elected president in November? The crystal ball for Iraq is necessarily more cloudy than the one for the home front. Still, the United States will almost surely still have a […]

Don’t look now, but is the Bush administration creeping toward John Kerry’s position on Iraq? I am writing this column hours before the president’s Tuesday news conference, so I have to allow for the possibility that he will stun us with some radical new departure — perhaps even articulating a coherent policy. But whatever the […]

So now the president’s war of choice has led to an occupation with no good options. The Bush administration’s plan is to hand over control of Iraq to the Iraqi Governing Council on June 30. Just how that council will sustain itself in power, however, is increasingly unclear after the upheaval of the past few […]

Behind every successful man, the old saying used to go, stands a supportive woman. No one has come up with an adage identifying who, exactly, stands behind a successful woman, so let me make a modest suggestion: Millie Jeffrey. Mildred McWilliams Jeffrey, who died last week at a Detroit nursing home at age 93, was […]

Just a few minutes after 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, with the bombs still falling on Pearl Harbor, Pacific Fleet intelligence officer Lt. Cmdr. Edwin Layton, who’d been predicting a Japanese attack for that very weekend, was scurrying through fleet headquarters when two of his superiors stopped him. “Here is the young man we […]