My Pivotal Role in Iran Contra
To understand why Paul Manafort, formerly a peripheral chairman of the Trump campaign, has volunteered to testify in closed session before the House Intelligence Committee, it’s instructive to recall...
View ArticlePumphrett and the Tangled Web
My friend and former Choate classmate Pumphrett has always embraced ignorance. He argues that ignorance is empowering because it vastly expands one’s options. “Why, if you’re ignorant enough,” he has...
View ArticlePumphrett and the Promulgation of Piffle
“I’ve cooled on Steve,” confided Pumphrett, my old friend and fellow Choate “Wild Boar” as we sipped our lattes on the bottom step of the Lincoln Memorial. I had been glad when he suggested meeting on...
View ArticlePumphrett in Trump’s Labyrinth
The anonymous instructions on a folded piece of pink paper pushed beneath my condo door specified a one a.m. rendezvous at a parking garage on K Street. If I agreed, I was to move a pot of geraniums...
View ArticleThe Back Channel Delusion
In 1991, when I was Ambassador to Jordan, King Hussein became convinced that the deterioration in his relations with the United States was the fault of an unsympathetic Department of State. It was...
View ArticleComey’s Brain: An Insider’s Perspective
I don’t know either James Comey or Donald Trump. Each says the other is lying, but only one is compulsively dishonest, so Comey’s version is likely closer to the truth. But is it the whole truth?To...
View ArticlePumphrett Finds Work for Idle Hands
“It was all the fault of that damned dog,” declaimed my friend and former schoolmate Pumphrett as we walked on the Virginia side of the Potomac opposite the Jefferson Memorial. I had always preferred...
View ArticleThe Great Transformer
What does a book written during World War II by a Jewish refugee from Austria-Hungary tell us about the 2016 election, the abiding threat of fascism, the retreat from globalization and how, in the past...
View ArticleWill the State Department Rise Again Under Pompeo?
My old colleagues at the State Department are all a-bubble with the thought that a new dawn of relevance is coming to Foggy Bottom. Secretary-designate Mike Pompeo has Trump’s ear—or so it is said—in a...
View ArticleThe INF Treaty Was Built on Fantasy—But It Was Useful Fantasy
Word of the demise of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces reawakened many happy memories for me. I was in the UK in 1982 as principal diplomatic representative for the deployment of Pershing and Ground...
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