When, early in his first term, President Reagan called the Soviet Union "the evil empire," right-thinking persons joined in an angry chorus of protest against such provocative rhetoric. At other times, Mr. Reagan has said that the United States and the Soviet Union "have different values" (italics added), an assertion that the same people greet at worst with silence and frequently with approval.
I believe Mr. Reagan thought he was saying the same thing in both instances. The...
They were "the most beautiful creations of man in America. With no extraneous ornament except a figurehead, a bit of carving and a few lines of gold leaf, their one purpose of speed over the great ocean routes was achieved by perfect balance of spars and sails to the curving lines of the smooth black hull. ...These were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon."
So wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison, recalling one of the early achievements of American technology: the clipper ship.
During...
pipeline, has won much of the heating-fuel market, but oil tanker traffic is still heavy, although gasoline was the dominant cargo on this day.
The port remains the nation's biggest in terms of cargo value ($49.9 billion in 1986); it also claims to lead in cargo weight (close to 55 million tons), although Los Angeles-Long Beach and Houston are close. But 40 years ago, half the nation's foreign trade passed through New York; now 10 percent does. During 1947, 10,806 ships called; this year, 6,000...
Men first went down to the sea not in ships, or even boats. They used what- ever expedients they could find to get themselves across deep water.
Some of these expedients are still in use, historian Lionel Casson notes in Ships and Seamanship in the An-cient World (Princeton, 1986). "A New Zealand aborigine today paddles over lakes astride a bundle of reeds, an Iraqi herdsman crosses streams on an in- flated goatskin, a Tamil native does his fishing drifting with a log under his arms while...
Steven S. Smith, in The Brookings Review (Winter 19871, 1775 Massachusetts Ave. NX, Washington,
D.C. 20036.
"He was nondoctrinaire, grandfatherly, tough-minded, shrewd, an activist, a partisan, a gut liberal, adaptable." That is how Smith, a Brookings Insti- tution Senior Fellow, describes the recently retired Speaker of the House, Thomas l? "Tip" O'Neill.
A man with such qualities, it seems, would have made a powerful Speaker of the House. But the Massachusetts Democrat's...