If you look at the history of Scouting, you find that it is a culture perhaps most vividly represented in the life and works of Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the cross-dressing British general who won the Boer War.

Remembering Gore Vidal's 1982 Senatorial campaign, in which he repeatedly devoured Jerry Brown's political lunch.

How Ben Bradlee started battling Roy Cohn -- and McCarthyism.

A battle between America's 31st and 32nd presidents survives Roosevelt's 1945 death and Herbert Hoover's 1964 passing.

In 1961, the AMA helped kill a forerunner to Medicare. The campaign, featuring Ronald Reagan, made the idea of government-supported healthcare exceptionally hazardous-to-your-political health over the next five decades.

The bottom-line of snide TV advertising is a kind of Darwinian "survival of the snappiest" requiring that you get the last word in any exchange, and that it be a 'gotcha.'

The office of Mayor proves not to be a stepping stone to the Presidency, but rather an absolute disqualifier from it.

The concept of Zero Tolerance has helped transform American justice into an incarceration machine largely free from human interference or humane inference.

Many things have changed in Gore Vidal's life, yet it's easy to imagine him grumpily surveying the scorched earth of modern American politics.

In the realm of music, cribbing has long been a necessary and often honored survival tactic.

What might be called The Age of Commemoration is upon us, and many vets would not, for example, have liked the overblown coverage of the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

The Bushes, father and son, will find their historic place as the belligerent bookends bracing the peace, prosperity and monumentally under-appreciated foreign policy of Bill Clinton.

Award Havana with a Major League Baseball franchise and watch Castro's control unravel like a hardball without its cover.

Why California Senator Dianne Feinstein is the Democrats' best hope to win the White House in 2004. presidential election