Iphigenia in Forest Hills
By Janet Malcolm

In “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of American journalists as persons of “low social status, [whose] education is only sketchy, and [whose] thoughts are often vulgarly expressed.” He went on to note that “the hallmark of the American journalist is a direct and coarse attack, without any subtleties, on the passions of his readers; he disregards principles to seize on people, following them into their private lives and laying bare their weaknesses and their vices.” Over the years, the social status and the education level of journalists have risen, and some journalists write extremely well. But the profession retains its transgressiveness. Human frailty continues to be the currency in which it trades. Malice remains its animating impulse.

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Sixty Years Later, the Bay of Pigs Remains a Cautionary Tale
By Max Hastings

Some years are so crowded with memorable anniversaries that it seems like the world once faced one damn sensation after another. So it is now, the 60th anniversary of 1961. That spring, French generals in Algeria attempted to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle through a military coup, including a planned Foreign Legion parachute drop on Paris. That summer, the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West. On April 12, it will be six decades since the launch into orbit of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, first human being in space.

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The Rise and Fall of Andrew Mellon
By Matt Stoller

Andrew Mellon had a quiet demeanor, rail-thin bearing, and beautifully manicured hands. His habit of taking long vacations, his age, his manners, and his soft-spoken shyness might have been mistaken for weakness and frailty in someone else. Mellon may have been born rich, but he was not soft. He was a hard man, a banker, an emperor of money, an owner of several companies later included in the Fortune 500. He would help lead the restoration of rule by private financiers.

President Warren G. Harding formally appointed Mellon under the pretense that a plutocrat like Mellon was so rich he couldn’t be bought. The real reason was that a Mellon Bank had lent $1.5 million to Harding’s campaign in 1920. Mellon had become bored with being a mere tycoon. As one of his enemies put it, “Mellon needed a change, and the Grand Old Party needed the cash.”

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Surveillance Blowback
By Alfred W. McCoy

The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.

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20 Years On, the War on Terror Grinds Along With No End in Sight
By Mark Landler

“If you had said on 9/12 that we’d have only 100 people killed by jihadi terrorism and only one foreign terrorist attack in the United States over the next 20 years, you’d have been laughed out of the room,” said Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism in the Obama administration.

“The fact that it had to be accompanied by two wars makes it hard for people to disaggregate how successful counterterrorism policies have been,” said Mr. Benjamin, now president of the American Academy in Berlin.

There are other explanations for the lack of a major foreign attack: tighter border security and the ubiquity of the internet, which has made it easier to track and disrupt jihadi movements; or the upheavals of the Arab Spring, which shifted the sights of extremists to their own societies.

Nor is it accurate to say that the West has been shielded from the scourge of terrorism. The 2004 Madrid train bombing; the 2005 London bus and subway bombings; and the 2015 attacks on a nightclub and stadium in Paris — all bore the hallmarks of the kind of well-organized attack that brought fire and death to Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon.

“The war on terror can only be assessed as relatively successful inside the Western world, more within the United States than with respect to Western Europe as a whole,” said Fernando Reinares, director of the Program on Violent Radicalization and Global Terrorism at the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid.

Still, in comparison to the comprehensive failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “other” war on terror has so far achieved its bedrock goal of protecting the United States from another 9/11-type attack.

The question is: At what cost?

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