Steven Spielberg's recently released film “The Post” has generated a lot of interest in the Pentagon Papers and Mike Gravel, who wasn’t in the movie but played a role in making the top-secret government documents public. Alaskans elected Gravel to the U.S. Senate in 1968, almost a half-century ago. He now lives in California and will turn 88 in May.
Former Sen. Mike Gravel, D-Alaska, the lawmaker who entered the infamous Pentagon Papers into the public record, said lawmakers are cowards if they don't release a memo prepared by House Republicans supposedly detailing surveillance abuses by the Obama administration. (AP Photo/Jim Cole) The former Democratic senator who entered the classified “Pentagon Papers” into the Congressional Record, making
The Marshall Plan birthed a U.S.-led global order—now China is building a new world China is trying to build excitement around Xi Jinping's "One Belt, One Road" plan to expand trade with roads, railways and ports. Art installations like "Golden Bridge on Silk Road" and themed commercial products are supporting the campaign. Photo: Thomas Peter/Reuters (Originally published May 12, 2017)
Special Report: In the Watergate era, liberals warned about U.S. intelligence agencies manipulating U.S. politics, but now Trump-hatred has blinded many of them to this danger becoming real, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern notes. By Ray McGovern Russia-gate is becoming FBI-gate, thanks to the official release of unguarded text messages between loose-lipped FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and his garrulous
Jackson Lears American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual
A new Stigler Center working paper looks into the effects of referendums and public initiatives on public policy and finds that direct democracy better represents the will of the majority, and therefore might also be better able to counteract the power of special interests over policymaking. The rise of anti-establishment populist movements in the U.S. and Europe is one of
More and more conservatives and liberals, from the halls of Congress to people in communities across the country, are agreeing that the so-called "war on drugs" needs serious rethinking. First, we should define our terms. The "war on drugs" that was started by Richard Nixon in 1971 and persists to this day, refers to illegal "street drugs" -- cocaine, heroin,
