' e are living in the midst of America's second great age of rights-or perhaps its first age of rights rhetoric. Scarcely a question now comes before the American public without some fundamental issue of rights being invoked. There is said to be a right to life and a right to die, and a right governing virtually everything that might occur between the exercise of these two prerogatives. There are said to be women's rights, gay rights, and handicapped rights, a right to work and a right to smoke, t...
THE BILL OF RIGHTS
since the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission opened for business in 1966. Americans have been benumbed by celebra- tions of big historical events. The indifference that one detects toward the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights is also evident in the scholarship on the origins of that document. Until the 1950s, scholars largely ignored the subject, with the result that, according to one expert, there is no good book on it.
What writing there has been on the birth of...
e was the dominant politi-
presidential performance from Franklin D.
cal figure of the 1960s. He
Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan showed that
challenged us to wipe out
Americans consistently ranked Johnson
poverty, to end racial seg-
near or at the bottom of every category.
regation, and to win a
Asked which of these presidents made
morally confusing war in
them feel proudest of being an American,...
amnath is a 51-year-old
man who owns a grocery
shop in the oldest part of
the city of Delhi. When he
took the unusual step of
coming to see me. a West- ern-trained psychoa~lyst, he w& suffer- ing from an unspecified anxiety which be- came especially acute in the company of his father. He did not call it anxiety, of course, but a "sinking of the heart." This condition was less than three years old, a relatively new development.
Ramnath had, on the other hand, long suffered from...
in Washing- ton on behalf of the elderly. 'Old-age interest groups ap- pear to be one of the great po- litical success stories of the last two decades," writes Day, a University of New Orleans po- litical scientist. Federal spend- ing on programs for the elderly rose from less than 15 percent of the federal budget in 1960 to about 27 percent in 1986, cut- ting the poverty rate among the elderly from 33 percent in 1959 to 12.5 percent in 1987.
Politicians, fearful of a back- lash from the "gray...
Robert A. Dahl, in Politi-cal Science Quarterly (Fall 1990), 475 Riverside Dr., Ste. 1274, New York, N.Y. 101 15-0012.
When Ronald Reagan swept into the Oval Office in 1980, politicians and pundits fell over one another declaring his 50.9 per- cent victory a "mandate" to govern-just as they had upon the election of most pres- idents chosen during this century. Indeed, writes Dahl, a Yale political scientist, "it has become commonplace for presidents and commentators alike to argue t...
John Heilemann, in The Washington Monthly (Dec. 1990), 161 1 Conn. Ave. N.W., Wash- ington, D.C. 20009.
Ask a classroom fall of college honors stu- dents where they hope to work after graduation, and they'll likely tell you IBM, or CBS, or Arthur Anderson. Ninety per- cent of them, however, never even con- sider working for the nation's largest em- ployer: the federal government.
Exactly the opposite was true six de- cades ago when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. "Washington was deluged...
"the best and the brightest," but "the best of the desperate."
Casualties of "Ending the Cold War at Home" by Morton H. Halperin and Jeanne M. Woods, in Foreign Policy (Winter 1990-91), 2400 NThe Cold War st.N.w., Washington, D.c., 20037-1 196.
The Cold War abroad may be over, but the murky underworld of espionage, state se- crets, and highly classified government projects is still operating at full tilt-right here at home.
So say Halperin and Woods, both of the...
Beverly Ann Bendekgey, in The G.A.O.Journal (Summer 19901, Rm. 4129, US. General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C. 20548.
During the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, a platoon of American military police ex- changed gunfire with Panamanian soldiers outside of Panama City. What made this firefight different from others, however, was that the platoon was led a woman.
Officially, American women shouldn't have been fighting in Panama at all. Women in a11 branches of the armed forces have been barred...
Steven L. Spiegel, in The National Interest (Winter 1990-91), 1112 16th st. N.w., Washington, D.C. 20036.
Even before Iraq invaded Kuwait on Au- gust 2, US.-Israeli relations were tense. Is- raelis worried that the United States would abandon them; Americans were dismayed daily reports of violence between Arabs and Jews in Israel's occupied territories. It appeared that the two allies might be nearing a major falling out.
But Spiegel, a political scientist at UCLA, argues that tension is the r...