Jon Meacham

Last Thursday morning in North Carolina, after we had finished a pleasant hour of conversation on the air, Charlotte radio host Mike Collins handed me printouts of a few e-mails from listeners.

It is the truth of the hour: Washington—or, if you prefer, "the system"—is in extremis, trapped in a depressing cycle of partisan dysfunctionality. There is something to this, but the broad indictment of the capital and its culture too often fails to include the government's co-conspirators: We the People.

I am generally skeptical about the likelihood of rapid wholesale political or cultural change. Perhaps my reservations that the world can suddenly reform and redeem itself comes from a habit of seeing things historically, a perspective that suggests life improves only after much work and strife.

History can be a problem. if you spend a lot of time thinking about the political past, you tend to see the events of the present time differently than you do if you are consumed by the passions of the hour.

Five hundred and fifty miles and two days apart, two political rituals with deep roots in American life unfolded last week: the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., and the tea-party convention in Nashville.

They knew it would happen. "I told the president a year ago that, given the economic forecasts, his standing would be less in about a year," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod told me in the aftermath of the Democrats' losing Edward Kennedy's Senate seat for the first time since 1952.

Obama is accused of being too radical, but he's been governing from the middle for a year. So why all the anger? Because he's leading with his head, not his heart.

At noon last Wednesday in Sewanee, Tenn., in a 19th-century Gothic hall dominated by a sandstone fireplace and decorated with portraits of somber bishops, the University of the South—my alma mater—elected a new leader, John M.

Perhaps it was the economy, or maybe it was our mindlessly divided (an altogether different thing from being intelligently divided, which is the natural state of a democratic republic) political climate.

From his vantage point as a global philanthropist, the former president talks about the 21st century's interdependent world as it is—and as it could be, if we do the right things.

Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger talk about presidents, priorities­--and the difficulty of winding down wars.

In the White House, John F. Kennedy offered Ben Bradlee one of the finer definitions of our craft. "What makes journalism so fascinating and biography so interesting," JFK remarked, is "the struggle to answer that single question: 'What's he like?' " I have never come across a clearer mission statement, and the spirit of Kennedy's point informs this special edition of the magazine, our first Interview Issue.

Speeches have a terrible time with middle age. In the moment, a powerful address can move a crowd or a wider audience. In the long run, too, oratory often offers insight into the mind and motives of those who came before us.

The left wanted a messiah, and the right believed it had found the perfect foil: a Democratic president with an exotic name and an alleged disdain for the largely mythic rural world of God-fearing gun owners.

Gallup is not asking about him in its prospective polling, and his daughter Liz's recent Fox News Sunday allusion to a presidential run provoked good-natured laughter, as though the suggestion were just a one-liner.

They warned him not to talk. When Maziar Bahari was finally freed after 118 days in an Iranian prison on phony espionage charges, he was instructed never to speak of what had happened in jail.

Richard Nixon sensed trouble. seated in the cow palace in San Francisco at the GOP convention in 1964, he listened as Barry Goldwater said: "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty—is—no—vice." A 41-second ovation ensued.

Napoleon was not a particularly philosophical man, but an observation of his that has come down to us bears thinking about. "What is history," he once asked rhetorically, "but a fable agreed-upon?"Well, it is lots of other things, chiefly a story of nuances and near misses.

Shortly after the 2004 presidential election, I was chatting with a senior figure in the Democratic Party when, inevitably, the talk turned to why John Kerry had lost.

Obama is a lot more like Bush 43 than anyone involved would readily admit.

Coming from Robert Gates—the epitome of the soft-spoken, buttoned-down public servant—the rebuke was particularly striking. Military officers, Gates said last week, should give their advice to America's civilian leadership "candidly but privately," an allusion to Gen.

On Nov. 2, 1945—All Souls' Day in the Catholic tradition—J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke to scientists at Los Alamos. "It is clear to me that wars have changed," he said. "It is clear to me that if these first bombs—the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki—that if these can destroy 10 square miles, then that is really quite something.

For several weeks now—beginning in the last days of August—people inside the Obama administration, the military, and the diplomatic community have been unusually unanimous on the subject of Afghanistan.

The wars of the Obama presidency—the tea parties, the heckling, the charges of racism—are covered breathlessly, but they are, sadly, all too familiar.

Though I did not realize it on either occasion, I have twice served on death panels. The first was more than two decades ago, when my grandmother was ill and there was little hope of recovery.

The answer came quickly, and clearly. in may president Obama gave NEWSWEEK an interview on what he had learned in his first months in office. When asked what had been his most difficult decision, Obama answered without hesitation: the order to send 21,000 more American troops to Afghanistan in this, the eighth year of the war there.

In the 1950s, Charlottesville, Va., was—as it largely remains—an idyllic place of Jeffersonian architecture, Blue Ridge vistas, and seemingly endless white horse-country fences.

The biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William Buckley on a dying movement.

It fell to him, the youngest, to tell his father. On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, Edward Moore Kennedy was in Washington, presiding over the U.S. Senate—a ceremonial chore assigned to junior lawmakers—when word came that the president had been shot in Dallas.

Churchill should have known better. Campaigning in 1945, he delivered a speech suggesting that an unchecked Labour government would impose a socialist regime whose survival would require "some form of Gestapo." The British people had just finished nearly six years of war with Nazi Germany—the campaign fell between VE and VJ days—and recoiled at their prime minister's comparison of an opposition party with what he had once called "all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule" in the noble days of...