Jon Meacham

Sixty years ago this week, when Franklin D. Roosevelt passed away in Warm Springs, Ga., his doctors attributed his death to a cerebral hemorrhage linked to high blood pressure and congestive heart failure.

To the end, he was true to the words he spoke in the beginning. On Sunday, Oct. 22, 1978, at his inaugural mass as the 264th Bishop of Rome, John Paul II prayed: "Christ, make me become and remain the servant of your unique power, the servant of your sweet power, the servant of your power that knows no eventide." To reassure the oppressed, the poor and the lonely, the new pope evoked the words of Jesus: "Be not afraid!"Fearless and serene, John Paul II died last week after years of overt...

HOW DID A JEWISH PROPHET COME TO BE SEEN AS THE CHRISTIAN SAVIOR? THE EPIC STORY OF THE EMPTY TOMB, THE EARLY BATTLES AND THE MAKING OF A GREAT FAITH.

In his office in Houston, still on an antimalarial- pill regimen from his trip to tsunami-ravaged Southeast Asia, former president George H.W. Bush turned from his desk to his credenza to find a note that had just come in. "Here's a fellow who wants to give us $2 million," Bush says. "This cause has really hit people's hearts." With former president Bill Clinton--the two traveled together to the region last month--Bush 41 has led fund-raising efforts for the victims; private donations now total...

Sitting in his office in Houston, still on an anti-malarial pill regimen from his trip to tsunami-ravaged Southeast Asia, former president George H.W. Bush turned from his desk to his credenza to find a note that had just come in. "Here's a fellow who wants to give us $2 million," Bush said. "This cause has really hit people's hearts." With former president Bill Clinton--the two traveled together to the region--Bush 41 has led fund-raising efforts for the victims; private donations for relief...

On the day he turned 50, a week before Americans went to the polls to choose his successor as president, Theodore Roosevelt claimed he had no regrets. "When I am through with anything," he said, "I am through with it, and am under no temptation to snatch at the fringes of departed glory."For all Roosevelt's many virtues, self-awareness was not among them: he was never through with anything, much less the pursuit of power.

The inauguration was a quiet affair. Sixty years ago this week, on Jan. 20, 1945, Europe had been at war for nearly six years, America for just over three.

He was, as he put it, "a nervous, out-of-control dad." By Election Eve 2004, George H.W. Bush, a friend said, had turned into a "nervous wreck." To calm himself the 41st president of the United States first tried to give up caffeine and then his nightly cocktail, but he failed, and on the morning of the voting Bush was so anxious that he was reduced to eating saltine crackers to soothe his churning stomach. "We live in interesting and difficult times," he told me on the telephone that day. "I...

Faith, wrote the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Yet the stories of the three great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--unfolded in real time, in real places, and there is much evidence about ancient civilizations buried in the sand and soil of the Middle East.

"The real causes of obesity," Jerry Adler presciently wrote in NEWSWEEK 22 years ago, "may be locked away deep in the chemical infrastructure of the body." Adler, our science writer, was right, and in this week's cover story he and Anne Underwood take an original look at an American obsession: fat.

In the grim months after Pearl Harbor, when the Allied war effort was going badly, Winston Churchill faced a vote of confidence in the House of Commons. After the prime minister dictated and delivered a 10,000-word speech defending himself, the attacks evaporated.

She was grace itself, smoothing the flag that draped her husband's coffin, whispering a few words over the remains of the man she loved so well and so long, and, as the sun set on Friday, weeping, surrounded by her children. "I can't imagine life without her," Ronald Reagan once remarked of his wife, and, blessedly, he never had to.

A CAPTIVATING AND ELUSIVE MAN, RONALD REAGAN ROSE FROM LIFEGUARDING IN ILLINOIS TO HOLLYWOOD--AND BECAME ONE OF OUR GREATEST PRESIDENTS. AN INTIMATE LOOK AT HOW HE PLAYED THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME.

In the first days of the Bush Restoration in 2001, Karl Rove, the new president's senior adviser and in-house history buff, was dining at the British Embassy in Washington with the then ambassador, Christopher Meyer.

Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins are not exactly household names in New York City, where much of the national press lives and works. Given the cultural influence these two men have over a huge part of the country, however, they should be, which is one reason we decided to profile the authors of the wildly best-selling novels about the Apocalypse, the "Left Behind" series. ("Left Behind" refers to the people who many Christians think will remain on earth after born-again believers are summoned to...

MEL GIBSON'S POWERFUL BUT TROUBLING NEW MOVIE, 'THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST,' IS REVIVING ONE OF THE MOST EXPLOSIVE QUESTIONS EVER. WHAT HISTORY TELLS US ABOUT JESUS' LAST HOURS, THE WORLD IN WHICH HE LIVED, ANTI-SEMITISM, SCRIPTURE AND THE NATURE OF FAITH ITSELF.

The American South, where I come from, has long been a region of secrets and contradictions. Defenders of freedom, we protected and perpetuated slavery; deeply religious, we are prone to violence.

He always loved superlatives--being the lifeguard who saved the most swimmers back home in Illinois, pushing for the lead parts in his beloved Westerns, driving himself from a fading career hosting TV shows to the presidency of the United States.

The light was fading. late on the afternoon of Sunday, February 4, 1945, in the Crimean coastal town of Yalta, the three most powerful men in the world--Franklin D.

Roosevelt and Churchill first met, very briefly, in the summer of 1918. FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy, on a tour of England and the European front; Churchill was minister of munitions.

Since we will soon mark the 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, what book would you recommend as the best and most insightful about that day in Dallas?There are two essential works on the assassination.

Late last Tuesday afternoon, Joshua Hammer had just returned to our bureau in Baghdad from a visit to a power plant--he had been reporting on Iraq's electrical problems--when the telephone rang. "I think a bomb just went off at the U.N.," one of our photographers, Geert van Kesteren, told Hammer, NEWSWEEK's Jerusalem bureau chief on assignment in Iraq.

Acting and politics have always been intimately linked. "You know, Orson," Franklin Roosevelt once said to Orson Welles, "you and I are the two best actors in America." Watching himself in a newsreel one day, FDR proudly remarked: "That was the Garbo in me." Ronald Reagan was asked late in his presidency whether his years in Hollywood had helped him in politics. "There have been times in this office," Reagan answered, "when I've wondered how you could do the job if you hadn't been an actor."...

The new mayor wanted the COLORED and WHITE signs to come down--immediately. It was 1962, the beginning, really, of the worst of the violence in the South over civil rights, but in Atlanta a white businessman, incoming Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., thought it was time to move beyond Jim Crow.

An exasperated Walker Percy once said that he thought he would leave the country if people kept asking him about his native South. "I'm sick and tired of talking about the South and hearing about the South," the novelist remarked.

It was just a quick stop, at a store on a campaign trip through the Northeast more than a dozen years ago. Trent Lott, then a Mississippi congressman about to make his move for the Senate, was visiting a state for a Republican candidate.

Cracking Down On Predators Is Long Overdue. But Beyond The Scandal, It's Time To Rethink Sexuality And The Sacraments

The White House, Christmas Eve 1941. In the twilight, thousands gathered for the lighting of the Christmas tree on the South Lawn. America had been at war for a little more than three weeks, pulled into a global struggle by the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

In the downstairs grill of the Mountain Brook Club in Birmingham, Ala.--a room, Diane McWhorter writes in "Carry Me Home," "soothingly dark, as if it had been designed with the hangover in mind"--the white elite of Birmingham were tucking into their luncheon buffet on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963.

A scene from mid century new York: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is giving a book party for a friend, who asks the historian to invite Alger Hiss. As it happened, Richard Nixon was then living in a house behind Schlesinger's on Manhattan's East Side.