Approaching Guinness Book of Records territory as he files for his eighth divorce, 76-year-old Larry King still has a way to go before dethroning the champion of serial monogamy, Tommy Manville, who married 11 women 13 times in the last century. Heir to an asbestos fortune, Marrying Manville became a cultural icon, but in those days, money alone was enough to make him appealing to “gold-diggers.” During one divorce, he uttered the only memorable quote of his life, “She cried, and...

The ironic statistic du jour is that, despite Tea Party howling, 47 percent of American families are paying no federal taxes on their income this year. Most are households with young children and (pace the white-haired, red-faced ragers at rallies) the elderly, benefiting from Obama-sponsored stimulus measures, most notably a 2009 reprieve from mandatory withdrawals from their pension plans. As instant-gratification Baby Boomers begin to qualify for retirement, much older members of that group may...

An old wound reopens with news that a book of Jacqueline Kennedy interviews about her husband will be published next year, recalling a story of my naïveté that ended in disappointment and insight in how the Kennedys protected their legend. In 1965, I had asked Mrs. Kennedy to become a contributing editor of McCalls, but she seemed too deep in grief, musing, “If there were only some way to keep President Kennedy’s spirit alive…But it wouldn’t be natural for me to do it directly....

The golf at the Masters this weekend was as exciting as hitting a ball into a hole can be, but the morality play starring Tiger Woods was fascinating in more complex ways. The fallen hero did not achieve redemption with his clubs and came away unsatisfied, saying “I enter events to win–I didn’t get that done,” and now is taking “time off” to “reevaluate this.” “This” may be simply be the mechanics of his golf game, but a comparison of Woods...

The Empty Suit is back, winning a 2012 straw poll at the Southern Republican revival meeting, in absentia over Dr. No, Ron Paul; the Man of a Thousand Ideas, Newt Gingrich; and the Madonna of a Million Punch Lines, Sarah Palin. Mitt Romney, who went down in the 2008 primaries by contradicting himself daily, is going for the White House this time as a stealth candidate, hoping to ride a GOP tidal wave by crouching under the radar. Unseen, he prevailed by a single vote this weekend in New Orleans by...

The President’s choice to succeed John Paul Stevens on the Court may be less significant for the country than the ugly confirmation process that is sure to follow. A legal saint, if there were one, would only be the excuse for a Senate auto de fe to embarrass the Obama Administration and curry favor for Tea Party votes in November. “Justice Stevens,” the New York Times editorializes, “has been an eloquent voice for civil liberties, equal rights and fairness. Mr. Obama should...

Just as the two merry murderers were fated to team up for the finale of the musical “Chicago,” Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are together now for a doubles act to machine-gun any remaining sense in American politics. Ticket prices are higher, $10,000 a plate for a Bachmann reelection fundraiser, but the performances are pure Zellweger and Zeta-Jones parody. Palin does her signature number about real people “clinging to guns and religion like the rest of us,” and adds a...

She turns 92 today, a reminder of days in Washington when an honest, caring human being could command universal respect without the malice and spite that now infect everything. Isolated in infirmity since the death in 2006 of her husband, Gerald Ford, who was president for only two and a half years, Elizabeth Anne Bloomer is a woman for all time who made her mark in American culture by showing a human face in the White House. Betty Ford came there unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, unlike...

Barack Obama is trying to do something about the word George W. Bush couldn’t pronounce, but his revision to the US stance on nuclear weapons only underscores the near-impossibility of a neat solution to a problem that presidents have wrestled with for more than half a century. In one of his last interviews, John F. Kennedy pointed out that Eisenhower had tried to limit testing in 1959 and failed but that, soon after averting a nuclear exchange in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he himself had succeeded...

One of the economy’s Terminators is back, bringing Ayn Rand and memories of mid-20th century movies with him. Preparing to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Alan Greenspan reaffirms absolute faith in his mentor’s me-first market philosophy in “The Fountainhead” and adds a note from “Dr. Strangelove.” Asked if the meltdown disputes Rand’s theories, Greenspan says no, it was not the fault of free markets, that “the major mistake...

Today’s irresistible sports metaphor is the NCAA final, “Duke vs. Butler,” which sounds like a sequel to “Remains of the Day,” “Gosford Park” and all the upstairs-downstairs dramas juxtaposing lives of the privileged with those fated to serve them. On the eve of a confrontation between American biggies and little guys from nowhere, it’s tempting to translate that battle into the counterpart of Wall Street vs. Main Street but, in the real world, life...

On Good Friday, of all days, the Pope’s priest, of all people, stirs blood memories of hatred by invoking Jews as “victims of collective violence” to bewail his spiritual leader’s ordeal of criticism for failing to protect the victims of ordained pedophile predators. As quickly as the Vatican has moved to distance itself from this crackpot comparison, it reverberates in the mind of one who, as a child 80 years ago, was beaten by an enraged boy, never before seen, from a Catholic...

In what turns out to have been no April Fool’s joke, Hamid Karzai blames fraud in Afghanistan’s recent elections on “foreigners,” and President Obama’s national security adviser is not amused. Brushing off such allegations, retired Gen. Jim Jones tells Jim Lehrer that that the Afghan president’s progress against corruption is “very embryonic,” citing the people’s need “to pay bribes to do business, or pay off officials, or pay police for...

From a fertile week for pop psychology comes news that social trust is declining at a time when personal connection is more important than worldly success. As always, David Brooks draws on arcane research to prove that “countries with high social trust have happier people, better health, more efficient government, more economic growth, and less fear of crime.” But where are those countries? Worldwide acting-out of rage and hatred, from Washington to Moscow, suggests a new Age of Anxiety,...

The glaring area in which this Administration has been Change-challenged is up next, and the question is whether the President will direct his new-found audacity at the money manipulators who have been wrecking the economy. Unlike health insurers, the financial industry has little public support after the meltdown, but obfuscation is rife and will get worse as lobbyists pour tons of money into pressuring Washington lawmakers already on their payroll, running ads and petition drives. What’s...

“Winning isn’t everything,” football coach Vince Lombardi famously said, “it’s the only thing.” Half a century later, as Republicans adapt that gridiron philosophy into a threat of political gridlock, Barack Obama is signaling it may not be a winning strategy. As Congress left town this weekend, the President did an end run around their blocking of his executive choices by making 15 interim appointments. “The United States Senate has the responsibility to approve...

The two feistiest figures in politics today are doing it without a Y chromosome. On the PBS News Hour, the Speaker of the House evoked that old Feminist slogan to sell cigarettes, “You’ve come a long way, baby” as an energized Nancy Pelosi took a victory lap on health care. Meanwhile, in the era when a woman couldn’t make it to the White House, Sarah Palin is one of the few Republicans actually winning anything, her latest triumph a million-dollar-an-episode contract for a...

Senate Republicans have sent David Vitter out to do to health care what he was caught doing with minions of the DC Madam almost three years ago. By this logic, John Ensign should be up next instructing employers on better ways to cover their workers in good faith. Even strait-laced Tom Coburn is getting into the spirit of the thing with an amendment barring coverage of Viagra for sex offenders. If the GOP’s last stand is taking on the look of a Feydeau bedroom farce, it’s only fitting...

According to pundits, Americans will be marking time for eight months, waiting to vote next fall in “a referendum on the most significant social legislation enacted in half a century.” But like most conventional wisdom, that’s too simplistic a view of the political landscape in a confused, angry and volatile time. As the President prepares to sign an interim bill and the Senate girds for its bound-to-be-ugly vote, the health-care battleground with all its smoking wreckage has only...

The Democrats celebrated an overtime victory in the health care Super Bowl in subdued fashion–no champagne corks popped in the Oval Office, no one dumped Gatorade on Nancy Pelosi–a suitable response to winning by not losing. When the cry of “baby killer” at Bart Stupak had faded and the last vote was counted, the significance of a year-long struggle was that Republicans had failed to bring down the Obama Administration with a crushing defeat. In our cut-your-losses age, this...

Without advance text or notes, the 44th president of the United States did yesterday what he should have done a year ago in the struggle that will decide the fate of his tenure. On the eve of their vote on the unholy mess that health care reform has become, Barack Obama took moral leadership of his party and, in a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment, invoked Lincoln for his theme: “I’m not bound to win, but I’m bound to be true. I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound...

Rep. Steve King calls Sunday’s health care vote sacrilegious “to take away the liberty that we have right from God,” and Glenn Beck agrees that it is the work of “a group of people that have so perverted our faith and our hope and our charity, that is a–this is an affront to God.” Just the kickoff for a foaming-at-the-mouth festival in Murdochland as Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal applauds Brett Baier’s sassing of the President on Fox News, while...

As health care fever spikes up, the body politic in woozy Washington is showing symptoms of a breakdown. Democrats are struggling with parliamentary paralysis, Republicans are having apoplectic fits and Barack Obama is laying hands on everyone in sight with pleas to help a presidency on life support. His agitation brought him to Fox News last night for a Tourette’s Syndrome interview with someone named Bret Baier, who sat in the White House constantly interrupting the President with what the...

After President Kennedy was killed in 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” Growing up in the Bronx of the 1930s, almost everyone I knew was Jewish. In our apartment building, there was one Irish family whose men sat on the front steps in summer, drinking beer and joking. As the evening went on, their smiles got wider, their talk louder. They seemed to be breathing some other air. They were as poor as the...

Personalizing an issue is an old ploy, but Barack Obama has reminded so many of us why we put him in the White House. Rallying support for health care, the President pressed the case of Natoma Canfield, a 50-year-old Ohio cancer patient. He had used her letter to him at a meeting with health insurers, and now he was telling a crowd: “She’s self-employed, she’s trying to make ends meet, and for years she’s done the responsible thing…bought her health insurance through the individual...