"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
While some trumpet Al Gore for the Nobel Peace Prize, the NY Sun nominates the American soldier, specifically Gen. Petraus:
It has seemed to us that the American GI is the greatest force for peace in the world today, and we say that without the slightest bit of irony. GI Joe and GI Jane always go overseas for reasons not of conquest but of liberation, to secure the hope of democracy, and always with the intent of returning home.
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Elsewhere in the Sun, Paul Greenberg describes the Harry Truman style, conveyed in the presidential library in Independence, Mo.:
While aware of the impression he was leaving — he was, after all, a politician of some note — the man had no airs, certainly not intellectual ones. He'd been there, done that, and didn't need to philosophize about it.
He was an earnest student of history — the old-fashioned kind with heroes and villains, right and wrong. None of this Toynbeean murk for him. He knew what he knew, the rest he would learn — if he thought it worth learning.
Truman never did have much patience with the pretentious. At a particularly low point in his presidency, his party having just lost the midterm elections, a distinguished senator from Arkansas on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that he resign the presidency in the best British tradition. Much like a prime minister leaving office after a vote of no confidence.
Harry Truman didn't think much of that idea. And as for the senator who'd come up with it, he dismissed the Honorable William Fulbright as someone who'd been "educated above his intelligence." And that was one of his milder descriptions of the gentleman from Arkansas. #
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