Jon Meacham

It was nearly noon on an over-cast August day in Beaver Creek, Colo., in 1998, and former president Gerald R. Ford, wearing a pressed golf shirt and seated on a flowered sofa, was revisiting the past.

It was 1988, and the governor of Arkansas and his wife were in Atlanta for the Democratic National Convention that nominated Michael Dukakis. One day that week, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton came to lunch with NEWSWEEK reporters and editors, and Jonathan Alter met her for the first time. "She was already a formidable political player," Jon recalls, "and even then people were saying that maybe the governor's wife would go into politics herself." Beginning in 1992, Jon got to know her...

Raised in a secular Jewish household in Connecticut, Lisa Miller rarely went to temple as a child, but she remembers savoring the great stories of the Hebrew Bible. "I loved them," she recalls. "They were so full of magic and adventure and families and inexplicable events." Later, in college at Oberlin, she took a course with the scholar L.

As he tells it, James A. Baker III was as surprised as anyone when George W. Bush became president. "I always liked him," Baker writes in his new memoir, "but I wouldn't have taken a bet in the late fifties or early sixties that he might ever be a governor, much less a candidate for president." Baker was not invited to be part of the younger Bush's presidential bid in 2000 until the campaign needed a good lawyer in Florida. "The reason you didn't see him in my campaign was not because of a...

There was a time, in the spring of 2003, when a relatively smooth transition from tyranny to democracy in Iraq did not seem an outlandish prospect. Baghdad had fallen; Saddam Hussein was on the run; soon the president of the United States would announce the end of "major combat operations." A new era was at hand.Even in those early days, however, the reality on the ground could feel very different.

For a time, Susan and Jeff Hudkins thought they knew what they were up against. First in 1997 and again in 2000, their two little boys were diagnosed with very different forms of autism.

George Herbert Walker Bush is a proud father; tears easily come to his eyes when he thinks of his children, all of them, and there is gracious deference in his tone when he talks about the son he calls, with emphasis, " The President." He is not given to boasting about or bragging on his family; he still hears his mother's voice warning him to avoid "the Great I Am," but several times over the past few years the 41st president has mentioned to visitors that the 43rd president has read the Bible...

On an April morning earlier this year, sitting in an armchair in his office on the campus of Texas A&M, George H.W. Bush was drinking coffee and talking--reluctantly, but still talking--about history.

Thirty years ago, almost to the week, NEWSWEEK published a cover story calling 1976 "the year of the evangelical." In the presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter's born-again faith was bringing new attention to theologically conservative Christians.

On a Saturday in mid-October, Air Force Airman 1/c Lee Bernard Emmanuel Chavis--he was Lee to friends, and "Nard" to family--was on patrol with the 824th Security Forces Squadron in Iraq.

The way Harold Ford Jr. tells the story, our Jonathan Darman was walking alongside the Memphis congressman in the annual Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., interviewing him about his prospects as an African-American Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in a Southern state.

On a Wednesday afternoon 67 Octobers ago, Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to see Alexander Sachs, a New York economist and occasional adviser. The topic: weapons of mass destruction.

A decade ago, my wife and I spent a long, lovely--and, if memory serves, rather liquid--evening in Atlanta with Bill Emerson, a charming bear of a man who had covered the civil-rights movement for NEWSWEEK.

On the publication of "State of Denial," Bob Woodward spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jon Meacham about the new book, the perils of wartime leadership, and the lessons of history.

The setting was familiar, the occasion, the speaker thought, fitting. At 3 in the afternoon last Tuesday, after a quick ride from lunch in the Popemobile, Benedict XVI began a lecture in the Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg in Germany.

It was September 1934, and a skinny 29-year-old former Rhodes Scholar from tiny Guthrie, Kentucky—a little fellow, blind in his left eye (the legacy of a childhood accident) and strikingly red hair—was driving a green 1931 Studebaker south from Tennessee to Louisiana.

Early in the 20th century, scientists were on the hunt for a theoretical "Planet X," which they believed lay beyond the known boundaries of the solar system.

History has a way of happening in August. It is the month World War I began, Richard Nixon resigned, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Soviet Union began its slide into oblivion and Katrina struck.

In the twilight, Billy Graham shares what he's learned in reflecting on politics and Scripture, old age and death, mysteries and moderation. A NEWSWEEK exclusive.

On a humid afternoon in Manhattan earlier this summer, a group of NEWSWEEK editors and writers had just finished an early screening of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center." With characteristic cinematic skill, Stone re-created the crash of the planes, the rain of rubble and the gloom that enveloped those trapped in the debris.

America's first fight was over faith. As the Founding Fathers gathered for the inaugural session of the Continental Congress on Tuesday, September 6, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Thomas Cushing, a lawyer from Boston, moved that the delegates begin with a prayer.

In New Orleans to preach to 1,000 clergy gathered at the First Baptist Church there--his first sermon in eight months--the Rev. Billy Graham toured the hard-hit city last week.

The book Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was working on as Watergate began to unfold in 1972-73 was tentatively called "The Royal Presidency," but Schlesinger had a persistent feeling that the title was not quite right.

As current prophet of the LDS Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, 95, guides the religion that Joseph Smith established 175 years ago. Recently he talked with NEWSWEEK's Elise Soukup and Jon Meacham about the experience of "revelation," Smith's legacy and the appeal of the church.

For Catharine Skipp, the moment with the baby was one of the worst. Catharine, a Miami-based reporter of ours who spent last week in New Orleans, was watching a bus fill with refugees.

THE EDITOR'S DESKIf Thomas Jefferson was wrong, a 19th-century biographer wrote, then America is wrong--an overstatement, perhaps, but close to the mark when we consider religion and public life.

Twenty-four summers ago, when Ronald Reagan--still recovering from his gunshot wound and only weeks away from signing his historic tax cut into law--made Sandra Day O'Connor the nation's first female Supreme Court justice, the appointment split the conservative movement Reagan had used to win the presidency the year before.

As the shadows lengthened, he grew ever brighter. In a wooden pulpit adorned by a single, simple cross, Billy Graham--older, slower, unmistakably weakened in body--stood illuminated by a mass of stage lights in the gathering darkness of a New York night.

Even seated he seems to be standing. With a great mane of white hair and piercing blue eyes, the Rev. Billy Graham is waiting in a quiet room atop Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, moments away from meeting the press.

A POWERFUL NEW BOOK BRINGS AMERICA'S MOST REMOTE FOUNDER BACK TO VIVID LIFE.