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Ireland Diary: Dublin and Kilkenny

December 1, 2016 by Linda Gasparello 1 Comment

By Linda Gasparello

“But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.” — James Joyce, “Dubliners”

Ireland is always an adventure.

My husband, Llewellyn King, and I have traveled there frequently since the early 1980s. Our first trip, on which we drove with friends from Dublin to Dingle, gave us some of our most memorable impressions of the country.

Nearly every summer from 1989-2010, we traveled to Ballina, Co. Mayo, in the west of Ireland, to participate in the Humbert Summer School (named after one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean Joseph Amable Humbert), founded by journalist John Cooney for “the study of Ireland and Europe.” It was a Brigadoon-like event, attracting academics, politicians, musicians, writers and many faithful regulars – who Cooney called “Hubertians” — from all over Ireland and abroad.

The school’s sessions took place in many Mayo venues, from Moyne College and Murphy Brothers Bar & Restaurant in Ballina to the Golden Acres pub in Kilalla and Bessie’s Bar in Kilcummin — a beachead on the county’s northern coast, where a French expedition commanded by Gen. Humbert landed on Aug. 22, 1798, in an attempt to assist Irish rebels during the 1798 Rebellion.

During those summers Humbertians did a lot of thinking, heightened by a lot of drinking.

Shortly before the election, Llewellyn and I traveled to Ireland to attend the Association of European Journalists’ (AEJ) annual meeting, held in Kilkenny this year. The association skirts the high cost of holding meetings in Europe’s big cities by holding their annual in small ones, like Maastricht, Netherlands, Burgenland, Austria and Sibiu, Romania.

In addition to its serious purpose, the AEJ annual meeting has much of the fun and good fellowship as did the Humbert School. A few of its members were also Humbert regulars, including our friends David Haworth, who lives in Brussels and writes for The Irish Daily Mail, and Joe Carroll, who covered Washington and the Clinton White House for The Irish Times.

“There’s no friends like the old friends,” Joyce also wrote in “Dubliners.”

Two Celebrations in Dublin

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The 12th-century Kilkenny Castle from the porch of the Rivercourt Hotel. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Christmas is nearing in Ireland. The shops on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare — and one of the widest in Europe — are brimming with decorations and merchandise. But even as the Irish start celebrating the holidays, they have not yet finished celebrating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, which set Ireland on the path to its independence in 1922.

The holiday light vines on the lamp posts in front of the General Post Office on O’Connell Street illuminate banners that say, “Dublin Remembers 1916.” Walk down the street to Eason and you’ll see the bookstore’s front display tables laden with 1916-23 histories, from Fearghal McGarry’s “The Rising Ireland: Easter 1916 to Tim Pat Coogan’s “DeValera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow.”

Abeba, an Ethopian woman visiting Dublin, leafed through Sinead McCoole’s “Easter Widows: Seven Irish Women Who Lived in the Shadow of the 1916 Rising.” She told me, “ I took the 1916 bus tour. Now I want to read about women of the time.”

She had taken Dublin Bus’s “The 1916 Tour — Beyond Barricades,” in which on-board actors and film immerse passengers in the rebellion. “Dublin was in flames, and you really felt like you were there,” Abeba said.

The previous day, a bank holiday, my husband and I had taken the hop-on-hop-off bus tour. One loop included Kilmainham Jail, where the seven signatories to the declaration of The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic were executed from May 3-12, 1916.

Our driver told us that he had named his daughter Grace, after Grace Gifford, a gifted artist and cartoonist who was active in the Republican movement. Gifford married her fiance Joseph Mary Plunkett in the jail’s chapel only a few hours before he was executed for being a leader of the rebellion.

As we neared the jail, our driver sang a refrain from “Grace,” often sung by the late Jim McCann of The Dubliners folk band fame:

Oh, Grace just hold me in your arms, and let this moment linger,
They take me out at dawn and I will die.
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger,
There won’t be time to share our love, so we must say good-bye.

Our driver told us that Kilmainham is a very busy site, and prebooking tickets is essential, especially during this centenary year. However, he said, there is easy access to the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, where our tour ended and where the Rising began.

“It came under heavy bombardment for a week. You can still see the bullet holes on the pillars and walls. Gutted by fire, it did not reopen until 1929,” he said.

The Rising began on April 24, 1916, and lasted six days. Early Easter Monday, 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, under the command of Patrick Pearse, a Gaelic scholar, schoolteacher and poet, and James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, with others seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street (now called O’Connell). On the building’s front steps, Pearse read the declaration, addressed to “The People of Ireland” and signed by himself, Connolly, Plunkett and four others.

Almost 500 people were killed in the Rising, more than half were civilians. More than 2,600 were wounded during heavy British machine-gun fire, shelling and fires that left parts of inner city Dublin in ruins.

Ireland got its independence from Britain in 1922, amid much strife and bloodshed. But the Irish state has retained close ties with Britain and is the only European Union country that it shares a border with.

It is sad and ironic that Ireland is not only celebrating the start of the British exit from their country in 1916, but it is also concerned about the start of the British exit from the EU – Brexit — next year.

Kilkenny’s ‘Medieval Mile’

If you’ve ever been daunted by a walking tour of a medieval European city, say Prague, then Kilkenny’s “Medieval Mile” will delight you.

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The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 and named after the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. Photo/Linda Gasparello

“Good goods sometimes come in small parcels,” Colette Byrne, CEO of the Kilkenny County Council, told the Association of European Journalists.

Just a mile-long, circular walk in Kilkenny (Ireland’s capital in the Middle Ages), Byrne said, will take you past a number of its marvels, including the 13th-century St. Mary’s Church, whose graveyard has a rare and significant collection of tombs, and The Black Abbey, founded in 1225 by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, for the Dominican order of monks, known for their black capes. The abbey is famous for its five-gabled, stained glass Rosary Window.

Along the mile, there are plenty of non-medieval buildings, notably the limestone Thosel Town Hall which dominates the High Street. Its name comes from two old English words “toll” meaning tax, and “sael” meaning hall. Built in 1761, it served as a custom house and guildhall – today, it’s where Kilkennians pay their taxes.

Across the street from the town hall, there is the Hole in the Wall: a tiny tavern in the inner house of a Tudor mansion built in 1582, and Ireland’s oldest surviving townhouse. Around 1660, in order to gain access from the High Street to the rear of the inner house, a hole was punctured in a wall.

“It was a favored haunt of Captain Arthur Wesley, who was stationed at Kilkenny barracks before being seconded to the British army in Spain and India, and eventually becoming the Duke of Wellington and British prime minister. Later it developed a reputation of ill renown due to duels, arguments, highwaymen, etc., and this led to its eventual demise,” a Hole in the Wall brochure says.

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Standing in front of a pair of ghoulish murals, a visitor asks a local woman for directions to the High Street. Photo/Linda Gasparello

On St. Kiernan Street, behind the High Street on the circular walk, there is an inn with a notorious past: Kyteler’s. Ireland’s only witch trials took place in Kilkenny in 1324 – supposedly, they were Europe’s first witchcraft trials. Dame Alice Kyteler, an innkeeper and moneylender, was accused of using poison and sorcery against her four husbands, having amassed a fortune from them. Before she could be tried, Alice pulled strings and fled to England, but her maid was flogged and burned at the stake.

Down the street from Kyteler’s, there is long mural, commissioned by the Keep Kilkenny Beautiful Committee in 2013, with ghoulish images: ghosts, black cats with bared teeth, and a warning that “witches are amongst us.” Behind it, another is in the works: a blue-faced woman in a white dress, lying on her back, either asleep or dead. This mural seems to float above the one in front of it.

Kilkenny is a haven for muralists. Cast your eyes up on the High Street, and you’ll see a cheery pink wall of the Smithwick’s Brewery. Cast them down, on a corner of Friary Street, and you’ll see a black cat with a curled tail, waiting to cross your path.

On all our trips to Ireland over the years, Llewellyn and I don’t know how we missed this magical little city.

→ See more photos from Kilkenny in our photo gallery here.

kilkenny-ireland-november-2016-019_fotor

A man pushes a stroller down the High Street, as a painted black cat waits to cross their path on the corner. Photo/Linda Gasparello

Filed Under: Gasparello's Articles, Random Features Tagged With: 1798 Rebellion, 1916 Easter Rising, Association of European Journalists, Ballina, Brexit, Dublin, Dublin Bus, Fearghal McGarry, Gen. Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, Grace Gifford, Humbert Summer School, Ireland, James Connolly, John Cooney, Joseph Mary Plunkett, Kilalla, Kilcummin, Kilkenny, Kilmainham Jail, Medieval Mile, Patrick Pearse, Sinead McCoole, Smithwick's, Tim Pat Coogan

Europe Faces Winter on the Edge of the Abyss

November 3, 2014 by White House Chronicle 1 Comment

BURGENLAND, Austria –There is another world crisis brewing – and one for which President Obama cannot be blamed. The Europeans and have made a mess of things, and now the wolves are at the door.

The first snarling wolf is deflation. Europe’s economies are so weak, so close to recession, that the very real danger of deflation – falling prices – has its economists petrified. It ought also to have its politicians in anguish, but whether it does is less clear.

Europe’s big-driver economy, Germany, as well as France and Italy, are on the edge. The German miracle is ailing, and Berlin may have been writing the wrong prescriptions for the rest of the 18 countries that share the euro as their currency. It has been aided in this effort by the International Monetary Fund.

That prescription, which often seems to harm the patient, as in Greece and Spain, is for austerity – which appears to work better on paper than in the real world. Germany worries about profligate borrowing throughout the European Union. But if the German economy is to escape recession, Chancellor Angela Merkel may have to borrow some money herself and inject it into infrastructure spending to keep Germany competitive and its workers on the job.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has been slow to institute a badly needed program of buying qualified bonds, known as quantitative easing. In the United States, the Federal Reserve, in a program that is now ending, has pumped more than $1 trillion into the economy and helped pull the economy out of recession. But ECB has been timid because it has no clear direction from the European political establishment — pointing up how cumbersome and directionless the European Union structure has become. It has a parliament, which has no power, and is increasingly attracting members who are actually opposed to the European project.

The European Commission has arguably too much power centered in the bureaucracy in Brussels, but no clear direction form its controller, the Council of Ministers. Trouble is the ministers can disagree and veto needed courses of action.

The economic crisis points up the ungovernable nature of Europe and its present institutions. If Washington is gridlocked, Europe is by structures that cannot deal with crisis and what often appear to reflect as many policies as there are members (28) in the EU.

But it is not just the economic wolf that is at Europe’s door. The Russian bear is there, too. Already there is an undeclared war raging in Ukraine.

At the Association of European Journalists' meeting here, a spokesman from the Ukrainian government, who asked not to be identified by name, expressed the sense in Ukraine that it has been betrayed by EU bungling.

“Europe sees Ukraine as its European neighborhood partner. But in Ukraine, the truth is different: Ukraine’s view is that Europe let us down. We are hurt, bleeding. We have been betrayed by a neighbor that, six months ago, we saw as a brotherly nation,” he said.

What was not said was that Europe may freeze this winter if the Putin regime — a growling wolf — wants to punish Ukraine and its neighbors. Europe is hopelessly dependent on Russian gas, which is used mostly for heating. Germany gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia, and Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia get 90 percent. Russian gas makes its way — largely through Ukraine — down into Italy, and even the United Kingdom has some small exposure.

If the gas goes off, Europe freezes and its economies go south in an avalanche. The most hopeful thing for Europe this winter is that with the world oil price falling, Russia’s own fragile economy may dictate that it keeps the gas flowing — but it will force up the price where it can.

Washington, with a new Congress, might want to brace for Europe’s winter of crisis and disaster. If Europe goes into severe recession, can the U.S. economy escape major harm? The new Congress will be on a sharp learning curve. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Association of European Journalists, austerity, Europe, European Central Bank, European Commission, European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany, King Commentary, oil, Russia, Russian gas, U.S.Congress, Ukraine

Postcards from Maastricht, Netherlands

January 12, 2010 by White House Chronicle 2 Comments

 

 

 

A Frenchman, a Mercedes and a Morceau of Limburger

I had an encounter with the southern Dutch province of Limburg, long before my visit to its capital, Maastricht, last month. It was a close encounter of the rind kind—with Limburger cheese—in France.

As a teenager, I spent a couple of summers with a French family in Hossegor, a beach town located on the Basque Coast. Albert Barrieu, husband to Marie-Josee and father of seven, was a man of taste, especially for old things. For starters he had a collection of pre-Colombian and African artifacts, amassed in Peru and Africa after World War II and coveted by museum curators all over the world. At the family’s main residence in Pouillon, also a small town in the Basque Country, the commode in one of the bathrooms was encased in a heavily carved, dark-wood chair. Albert told everyone it was “the throne of the queen of Cameroon.”

Most of Albert’s antiques were displayed in the 18th-century stone house in Pouillon. The stucco villa in Hossegor (which he named Chasquitambo, after a town in northern Peru) was a museum under construction. During the summers I spent there, Albert filled it with antiques, mostly purchased from dealers in southwestern France. He could sniff out antiques like pig sniffing out a black Perigord truffle.

Albert was a regional sales manager for Gaston Jaunet, a women’s ready to wear firm. His oldest child, Dominique, and I accompanied him on some of his summer sales trips.

It was on one of those trips that I encountered Albert’s passion for old cheese—old Limburger cheese, to be precise.

One morning as I was finishing my breakfast at the long, pine table in Chasquitambo’s dining room, and was ready to hit the plage sauvage (a favorite with surfers), Albert asked Dominique and I to accompany him to St. Jean de Luz, a fishing port not far from the Spanish border.

I was thrilled to have a chance to see more of France’s Basque region. But Dominique, normally a dutiful daughter, refused to go.

Was it because Albert would be driving the black Mercedes sedan, and one of us would be peering at the scenery from the back seat, through the clothing samples? No, that was not why she refused to go.

Was it because her father threw a fit in just about every restaurant he took us to? Once, in Hendaye, he advised me that the best French food is served in restaurants with the shabbiest exteriors. He found a run-down restaurant, ordered poulet basquaise for lunch, took one mouthful and pronounced it to be “as filthy as the restaurant floor.” As we left the restaurant, Albert told me that very occasionally there were exceptions to his French restaurant rule.

No, Dominique did not care about her father’s restaurant rows. The reason she did not want to go with him was because of the Limburger cheese that he kept in the glove compartment of the Mercedes and ate as he drove the French national roads at Le Mans speed.

I volunteered to sit next to Albert. But Dominique insisted that even if she sat behind the clothing samples, they would not be a strong enough barrier to the smell of the cheese. “Deglas,” she said, which is a stronger word than “disgusting.”

Marie-Josee came to her daughter’s rescue, telling Albert that Dominque had to help the other children with their summer homework. Alas, she made no excuse for me.

Albert put on his misshapen Panama hat, stuffed more clothing samples onto the rack over the Mercedes’ back seat, and off we went to St. Jean de Luz.

Not 20 miles into the trip, Albert said he was hungry. I knew what that meant: time for the terrible, smelly cheese. He popped open the glove compartment, and I held my breath. He pulled out a crumpled piece of white paper, and I kept holding my breath. A small piece of cheese fell out of it onto the floor.

William Shakespeare had it right, when he wrote in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” that Limburger was “the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended a nostril.”

I stuck my head out the window and took a deep breath as Albert reached for the cheese on the floor and popped it into his mouth.

The boutique owner we were going to see in St. Jean de Luz was one of Albert’s best clients. She was as impossibly chic as she was frank.

As we pulled the samples out of the car, she implored, “Albert, please keep the cheese in the glove compartment. You are selling Gaston Jaunet, not the Limburger line.”

In Maastricht, where I attended the Association of European Journalists’ annual meeting in November, I learned two things about Limburger cheese: first, it is mostly made in Germany now; and second, there is a great benefit to its much-mocked odor. A 2006 study, which showed that the malaria mosquito is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger and to the smell of human feet, earned a Nobel Prize in the area of biology. Limburger has now been placed in strategic locations in Africa to combat the epidemic of mosquito-borne malaria.

A French Musketeer in Maastricht

In another French connection, Maastricht is where the captain of musketeers, Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, also known as Compte d’Artagnan, fell in battle in 1673. He is the person upon whom Alexandre Dumas based d’Artagnan, the hero of “The Three Musketeers” and other novels.

In June 1673, as part of the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-78, the French laid siege to Maastricht. As Compte d’Artagnan, commander of King Louis XIV’s First Musketeers Company, prepared to attack the city’s Tongerese Gate on the night of June 25, he was killed by a single musket shot. The night attack was portrayed in “The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later,” the third and last of Dumas’s D’Artagnan Romances.

Maastricht surrendered to French troops on June 30, 1673. The French occupied the city until 1678. It was subsequently restored to Dutch rule. The French again took the city in 1748, during the War of Austrian Succession, but it was restored to the Dutch that year.

The French would return once more in 1794, annexing Maastricht to what would become the First French Empire. The following year, it became the capital of a French province (departement de la Meuse-Inferieure).

In Maastricht’s city park (Stadspark) there is a cast-iron statue of d’Artagnan drawing his sword. Dumas wrote, “A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.”

That is what the statue of d’Artagnan looks like he is thinking. Or is he thinking, as Dumas also wrote, “I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.”

Floriade 2012

Once a decade a world horticultural exposition, Floriade, is held in the Netherlands. The sixth Floriade, themed “Living Nature,” will be held from mid-April until mid-October 2012 in Venlo.

“In addition to the most exquisite and exceptional flowers, plants, trees, fruit and vegetables, each day at the expo features a cultural program of music, dance, literature, theater and visual art from all over the world,” Sven Stimac, director of projects for Floriade 2012, told the Association of European Journalists.

Floriade 2012 aims to get visitors to use “all their senses, so they can experience the influence horticulture has on the quality of their daily lives; be part of the theater in nature, get closer to the quality of life,” according to its organizers.

Venlo, the site of the world expo, is located in the province of Limburg, close to the borders of Belgium and Germany. “More than 30 million people live within a two-hour distance by car,” Stimac said, adding, “The Greenport Venlo agrologistics area and the Lower Rhine Agrobusiness region together form the largest area of horticultural production in Europe.”

Besides the horticultural highlights, there is another reason to visit Floriade 2012: the green buildings and landscaping.

Exhibitions of this nature often leave a legacy in the form of spectacular buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Atomium in Brussels and, after Floriade 1960, the Euromast in Rotterdam, Stimac said.

“This Floriade will also have a number of imposing structures. The buildings and landscapes will leave a legacy by becoming the site of GreenPark Venlo: an innovative, sustainably developed business park where economy, ecology and knowledge transfer go hand in hand,” the organizers said.

Floriade 2012’s organizers anticipate more than 2 million visitors, and 35,000 peak-day visitors.

Press Freedom and ‘Jeans’ in Ukraine

There was much revelry at the Association of European Journalists’ meeting in Maastricht, notably at the dinner hosted by the Provincial Council of Limburg in the building where the Maastricht Treaty was signed on Feb. 7, 1992, and at the APG Group-hosted dinner among the ruins of an ancient Roman temple and forum.

But there was also much to dampen the spirits of the journalists, especially the presentations on media freedom in Europe and two former Soviet republics, Belarus and Ukraine.

In their report on freedom of speech in Ukraine, where the media benefited from the Orange Revolution, Arthur Rudzitsky, Diana Dutsyk and Mykhailyua Skoryk wrote that journalists are often pressured by media company owners. “Most owners of the media in Ukraine have political interests and partially implement them through the media,” they wrote.

Media companies are so cash-strapped that they mostly depend on “donations” for their operating capital. “The number of such media is increasing because of the advertising market’s fall by 40 percent for the first half of 2009, compared to the same period in 2008,” they wrote, adding, “The main donors for the media are Ukrainian businessmen and state and local budgets. This grant nature of media has led to mass layoffs in the media … and the closure of many television projects and programs.”

While the Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice opened access to the state register of print media and news agencies last December, “this information is still not enough to make a complete picture of the owners of Ukrainian media companies. In particular, owners of leading Ukrainian TV channels, according to the documents, are offshore companies; so it is difficult to determine who actually owns them,” they wrote.

In 2009, there was a spike in the number cases of violence against journalists. These appalling cases include:

  1. On Feb. 16, someone blew up a car owned by Valery Vorotnyk, owner of the Antenna media group, headquartered in Cherkasy.
  2. On March 16, unknown assailants beat up Anatoly Ulayanov, journalist, art critic and editor of the Kiev-based Prosa Web site, who has criticized the National Expert Committee on the Protection of Public Morals.
  3. On June 24, Kiev Pharmacy guards used tear gas against a TV crew attempting to film a stand-up in front of the company.

The saddest statement in their report was “most journalists rarely come to court in cases when the violation of their rights takes place because they do not believe in justice and do not consider it worth their time; and the rest of the journalists simply do not know how to do it. The cases that reach the court are not always resolved in favor of journalists.”

Not stated in their report was the corruption of journalists.

“ ‘Dschinza’, which means ‘jeans,’ is the name commonly used for the system of paid contributions, as the money vanishes immediately into the jeans pocket of the journalists. That this practice forms part of everyday journalistic life is an open secret among those working in the media in Ukraine,” journalists Cristoph Kersting and Dorthe Ziemer wrote in the latest edition of Kontakt, the newsletter of the social and cultural arm of the Erste Bank Group in Central and Eastern Europe.

“Volodymyr Mostovoj, editor in chief of the critical political weekly newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli, also complains about the dubious work methods of many of his colleagues. He believes that one reason for the attitude of many journalists to professional ethics lies in their poor training. ‘When I studied journalism, in what was still the Soviet Union, there were three faculties in the entire Ukraine where I could study. Today there are, believe it or not, 41 – of questionable quality,’ ” wrote Kersting and Ziemer, whose report has been picked up by Deutsche Welle and other media outlets.

Apple Park Hotel’s Polished Service

The Association of European Journalists’ meeting was held at the Golden Tulip Apple Park Hotel, located in a sports park area not far from Maastricht’s historical center.

The hotel’s Big Apple theme had a few sour notes, like the dark halls with shadow boxes filled with New York mementos hanging outside the guest rooms. The one outside my room contained pictures from the rowdy American television comedy of the 1960s, “The Three Stooges,” and Grand Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a child, I could not stomach the three knuckleheads. It was even harder to do so as a hungover adult entering a hotel room.

The hotel service was sweet and polished, especially at the front desk and in the Dreamz restaurant.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Alexandre Dumas, Apple Park Hotel, Association of European Journalists, Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, d'Artagnan, Floriade 2012, French Basque Country, Hossegor, Limburger cheese, Maastricht, the Netherlands, The Three Musketeers, Ukraine

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