Book Review: Peter Baker And Susan Glasser's Excellent 'The Man Who Ran Washington' forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
by Jane Mayer
It’s a Washington axiom that when a power player dies, their influence and secrets do as well. One night this spring, my phone chimed with a text message that showed otherwise. Sally Atwater, the widow of the legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater, had died. She had been married to the bad boy of the G.O.P. during the Reagan and Bush years until his untimely death, thirty years ago. The Atwaters’ eldest daughter, Sara Lee, who lives in Brussels and is a Democrat, invited me over to her parents’ home to read through cartons of papers from her late father, whom I knew well when I covered the Reagan White House. They included seven chapters of Lee Atwater’s unpublished draft memoir, which had remained untouched since he succumbed to brain cancer, in 1991, at the age of forty, and at the height of his political career.
Republicans have a very good chance at regaining control of both the U.S. Senate and House in the 2022 midterm election. Traditionally, the party in the White House loses seats in Congress in the first-term midterm election. But Republicans are facing an
Asian flu vaccine being shipped by helicopter across the US
Credit: Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection
In 1957, writes Niall Ferguson, the United States was hit by one of the deadliest pandemics in history – Asian flu. More than a million died worldwide. Yet there was no state of emergency; no lockdowns; no school closures. Hospitals were cleared for the sickest, and the rest were told to stay at home and drink fruit juice. President Eisenhower asked Congress for just $2.5 million in aid to public health, a tiny sum compared with the several trillion spent in response to Covid-19. But the most striking thing about the pandemic of 1957 is that no one remembers it, that it left almost no mark on its generation. Why?