David Wallis is the opinion editor of the Forward.
Wallis, who has contributed to The New Yorker, Slate, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is known for interviewing world leaders, including Jimmy Carter, Vaclav Havel and Manuel Noriega. He has edited two critically acclaimed books, “Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print” (Nation Books, 2004) and “Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression” (W.W. Norton, 2007).
Ronald Reagan had it. But both his predecessor and his successor, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, respectively, didn’t. Bill Clinton had it in spades, so did George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And the current president decidedly lacks it. “It” is the political talent to deploy humor to make a point, connect with a…
Following President Trump’s public kneecapping of James Comey and his subsequent tweeted threat that the ousted FBI director “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations,” many Washington insiders are likening the growing scandal to Watergate faster than you can say Archibald Cox. The Atlantic’s James Fallows, for instance, argued Comey’s firing is…
For weeks after September 11, 2001, police cordoned off the West Side of Manhattan below 14th Street. You could bypass the barricades only if you lived in the area, as I do, or if you worked as a first responder or as a reporter. At a time when a giant plume of dark, acrid-smelling smoke…
Wallkill Senior High School just censored my lecture about censorship. Several months ago, the school in an upstate New York community known for its prisons and apple orchards invited me to participate in its annual “Author’s Day” event on April 4 and 5. Published writers gab to administrators, librarians and educators over a buffet dinner…
Jimmy Breslin was an enemy of the people — at least those people who abuse their power to dash the American dream. I first encountered Breslin, who died last week at age 88, in December 2000. I had just launched an online syndication marketplace, Featurewell.com, to fight the effort by many publishers to seize the…
Like many parents, I wanted my 7-year-old son to witness the Women’s March to protest the new Trump administration. Aside from the historic value of the extravaganza, I imagined he might not have the opportunity to see many mass protests once our dictatorial, thin-skinned president stifles dissent in the name of “law and order.” But…
New presidents routinely suffer through hiccups, flubs and faux pas. Remember when Barack Obama mishandled the Henry Louis Gates arrest not long after his election? The president publicly charged a Cambridge, Massachusetts, cop who arrested the esteemed African-American historian for disorderly conduct w for acting “stupidly.” It may have been true, but Obama’s ill-advised comment…
Just months before the 2002 election, Danny Goldberg, the music industry macher who shells out big bucks to progressive causes, received an invitation to a Democratic Party fundraiser. It featured the following Franklin Delano Roosevelt quote: “Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major political parties stood out in such…
