From: Gail Hawley [ghawley@whitehouse.gov]
To: Jinnie Doherty [jdoherty@whitehouse.gov]
Subject: Private WH Halloween Party
Hi Jinnie –
Just wanted to touch base on the plans for tomorrow. POTUS has decided on the Lincoln costume, so Mrs. Bush will arrive as Mary Todd and change into her Catwoman outfit later. (I know, I know, but she says she’s worn it every […]
My Friend the Spy is a Great Whatsit serial. It is a true story (save for the author’s pseudonym), told in weekly installations. Part I. Part II.
From last week’s episode: “Anyway,” he went on, “I’m lucky I didn’t end up like the Rosenbergs. Really. I mean, that very easily could have happened to me.”“So, […]
John Cale’s 1971 album Vintage Violence includes a sweet little sleeper of a song called “Amsterdam.” In it, the singer’s lover has just returned from a trip there, and “it seems the journey did her well.” Her face has softened; if it’s lost its touch, it’s also lost its telltale signs of loneliness. Maybe this is because while there she […]
I had an eye appointment today.
I drove to the strip mall optical boutique that happens to employ an eye doctor. I reminded myself that this annual routine is mundane, less stress than getting my car tuned. I rarely hear bad news, nothing but a few tweaks here or there to the lens prescription. I buy […]
From James Carroll’s House of War, a history of the Pentagon:
The very week of [Strategic Air Command’s General Curtis] LeMay’s retirement [in February 1965], President Johnson ordered the commencement of Operation Rolling Thunder, the air war against North and South vietnam, which began — in secret from the American public — when warplanes struck a […]