Jon Meacham

Every Day, In Every Corner Of America, We Are Redrawing The Color Lines And Redefining What Race Really Means. It's Not Just A Matter Of Black And White Anymore; The Nuances Of Brown And Yellow And Red Mean More-- And Less--Than Ever. The Promise And Perils Ahead.

By Jon MeachamIt didn't hit him until the end of the day. On June 6, 1944, Elmer Carmichael was a boatswain's mate on a landing craft heading for Omaha Beach.

He seemed placid, even becalmed, but Ronald Reagan swept over the nation like a wave. Was he, as so many of his detractors believed, an amiable dunce? If so, how did he change the course of history?

Dad was worried. In the summer of 1998, he had sons running in two of the most important governors' elections in the country--George W., seeking re-election in Texas, and Jeb, heading for victory in Florida. "Your mother tells me," Bush wrote them in a letter on Aug. 1, "that both of you have mentioned to her your concerns about some of the political stories--the ones that seem to put me down and make me seem irrelevant--that contrast you favorably to a father who had no vision...

On a recent bus trip through South Carolina, GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain said privately that he was leaning toward voting against the GOP pet $800 billion tax-cut bill. "The thing is full of special-interest outrages," he said. "Junk." The worst provision, he said, was a tax credit for turning chicken manure into energy. "So we're paying for chickens--t and giving chickens--t to the working middle class... " But on the morning of the Senate vote, Majority Leader Trent Lott and...

They may not have always been entirely happy, but they were never bored. Early in the courtship of Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier, the future prime minister was staying at a country house that caught fire.

IT WAS QUITE A PLACE, MIDCENTURY Washington. That's difficult to understand now, long after the struggles against Hitler and communism. The capital seems somehow sterile, its downtown hotels anonymous and its suburbs clogged with tract houses.

BARRING UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, I WILL HAVE just turned 30 as the next millennium begins. When my grandfather was that age, he had lived through the Depression in the South, enlisted in the navy and spent four years at war in the Pacific; the day the bomb was dropped, he was aboard the USS St.

FAULKNER, AS USUAL, HAD IT right. In the South, the Mississippian once wrote, the past is never dead.It isn't even past." Bill Clinton is the quintessential Southerner: a former El Camino owner, the president leers and preaches with equal agility.

ISHED control. In the White House and in exile, he would spend hours stewing over yellow legal pads, war-gaming geostrategy, memorizing his dinner guests' alma maters -and forever plotting the next campaign.

THE ATLANTA PITCH WAS A BOLD one: part Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing, part Chamber of Commerce flackery. In Tokyo in 1990, the Atlanta city fathers sold the International Olympic Committee on the proposition that the city Sherman burned was now a model of racial harmony.

On a quiet street in Columbia River valley, 180 miles east of Seattle, Pastor Robert (Roby) Roberson's East Wenatchee Pentecostal Church of God House of Prayer sits back from the road, its yard cluttered with old buses and vans.

JOHN KASICH WAS NEARly in tears. At a pep rally of GOP House freshmen last week, the deficit-hawk House Budget Committee chairman elicited the kind of cheers this crowd usually reserves for Speaker Newt Gingrich. "This is about saving the country," Kasich said, choking up. "This is about changing the culture of spending." Standing to his left, Rep.

Dessert -- a hockey-puck-size cappuccino torte in Grand Marnier sauce -- had just been served. As Newt Gingrich and 18 others at last week's $50,000-a-couple dinner for National Empowerment Television started in on the sweet, their hostess, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, raised her glass to propose holding another supper for the right-wing TV channel and other conservative causes -- at 10 times the price. "It started out as kind of a joke -- a $500,000-a-couple fund-raiser," one guest,...

When Bob Dole went on "David Letterman" last Friday night, things went so smoothly that the senator looked as if he'd been dropping by the Ed Sullivan Theater for years.

IN A SMALL CAPITOL HILL studio, on a set that looks like what you'd get if "The McLaughlin Group" did its thing in the "Wayne's World" basement. 6 twentysomethings are playing pundit.

Last week, while republicans bustled about on Capitol Hill, no freshman seemed busier than Tennessee's Sen. Fred Thompson, the folksy lawyer-actor who won Al Gore's old seat.