Jon Meacham

From 1776 to Sumter, from Selma to Obama, we've been shaped by the fights for freedom.

We have a new president. But he, too, has a new nation to lead, one that's changing almost beyond recognition.

In November 1940, after Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term, an embattled Winston Churchill, still holding out alone against Hitler's Germany, cabled the White House.

Rush Limbaugh was on the phone. Ten days before Christmas, Dick Cheney was at his desk in the West Wing, talking about the past and the future with the dean of conservative radio hosts.

He still remembers the chocolates. As a former Jerusalem bureau chief, Dan Klaidman, who is now the magazine's managing editor, is particularly well qualified to write this week's cover on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Gaza and what we can expect from President Obama on the issue as he arrives in Washington to take office.

The study of power is not only diverting (which Homer and Shakespeare knew), but illuminating. A biography of an ancient human impulse.

He hardly seems suited for the role. As a toddler, Thomas M. Tamm scampered around J. Edgar Hoover's desk. The son and nephew of top FBI officials, Tamm grew up to become a lawyer with the Justice Department, a man whose code, he believed, was in the tradition of the bureau motto his uncle is said to have coined in 1935: "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity."He appeared, in other words, an unlikely candidate to do what Michael Isikoff details in this week's cover: duck into a Metro station near the...

On the campus of Wheaton College in Illinois last Wednesday, in another of the seemingly endless announcements of splintering and schism in the Episcopal Church, the Rt.

More than a decade ago, when Fareed Zakaria was still managing editor of Foreign Affairs and only an occasional contributor to our pages, he wrote an essay for us arguing that the Clinton administration was in danger of conducting "foreign policy by CNN"—that post-Cold War Washington, without a defining struggle, might veer from crisis to crisis according to whatever unfortunate event happened to capture the world's popular imagination.Everything old is often new again, and this week Fareed,...

Obama will need the spirits of Kennedy, FDR and Lincoln, and also a patient public.

Daren Briscoe, a correspondent in our Washington bureau, was puzzled. He had come home one day in mid-2006 to discuss a possible assignment with his wife, Rochelle.

Our politics are rooted in the grand, complicated presidency of Andrew Jackson.

In his new book, "The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence," NEWSWEEK columnist Robert J. Samuelson makes a compelling case that the current crisis is only one of a series of complicated issues that could slow American economic growth in a deep and fundamental way. "America's next president," Samuelson writes, "takes office facing the most daunting economic conditions in decades: certainly since Ronald Reagan and double-digit inflation, and perhaps since...

Free advice is often worth what you pay for it, and it is funny how people who do not have a particular job are full of wisdom about how to do it. (You can apply the same point to, say, in-laws, marriage and child rearing.) In moments of impatience in the Oval Office, George H.W.

America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril.

As usual, Ronald Reagan had the best line. Whenever he was asked whether he was going to win an election, he demurred with that duck of his head, saying, "I always call President Dewey to ask about the polls." The message: surveys and commentators can be woefully wrong, which we all know and which nevertheless fails to stop us from surveying and commenting.

When he had been written off early in the primary season, John McCain liked to cite a quotation often attributed to Mao: "It is always darkest before it is totally dark." For the country, the words seem more apt than ever this autumn.

Yes, she won the debate by not imploding. But governing requires knowledge, and mindless populism is just that—mindless.

Let us stipulate this right off: Sarah Palin won her debate with Joe Biden. She won, it is true, by not imploding, but a win is a win. Though the polls have given the evening to Biden on substance, Palin, after her unimpressive interviews with Katie Couric of CBS, had the fate of the presidential election in her hands in St.

John McCain's impetuosity is either thrilling or disturbing. Barack Obama's cool is either sober or detached. It's clear now how each would govern.

Last Thursday, I had to make a brief excursion to Philadelphia for lunch. It was Day Four of the market turmoil, and the numbers were bad. As I settled into some reading aboard the train south, the man behind me—who clearly worked in finance—made a cell-phone call, apparently to a colleague. "How am I doing?" the man said, his voice—as all voices tend to do—carrying across the car. "How am I doing?

I hate stories about blocs of voters. Whether it is the Catholic Vote or the Black Vote or the Evangelical Vote or the Whatever Vote, most political journalism that attempts to force a unifying frame on large numbers of disparate people is, to me at least, unsatisfying.

All of us have a cancer story— that moment, so sharp in recollection, when we learned that we, or someone we love, had been diagnosed with the disease. We can remember the sterility of the hospital corridor, the ensuing terror and clarity, the forced good cheer, the complaints about the unfairness of it all.

A chat with Laura Bush and Cindy McCain.

The scion of a family of warriors, John McCain seems easy to venerate—or caricature. But he is more complex than you may think.

The first time NEWSWEEK's Karen Breslau saw Sarah Palin, she was calling on the governor in Palin's Anchorage office. "As a journalist, and a female one at that, I am embarrassed to admit that the first thing that struck me about her was that she's so, well, striking," says Karen, our San Francisco bureau chief. "Her stern librarian's bun and the thick glasses did little to obscure the fact that she is an exceptionally attractive woman." Palin's tireless pace was also striking, and now the...

McCain on his father's great strengths—and vulnerabilities.

Obama's mom was an idealist, his stepdad a hardheaded realist, his father a myth. How all this shaped him.

Political conventions have been an obsession of mine since my parents made the spectacularly unwise decision to dispatch me to summer camp in the midst of one.

Cerebral and cool, Obama is also steely, and his strength comes from the absence of a father. The making of a self-reliant man.