McGeorge Bundy

David Halberstam’s title The Best and the Brightest was steeped in irony. Did these presidential advisers earn it?

Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended.

A new book's insistence that the bomb was necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender is largely contradicted by its own evidence.

On the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, we should remember that deploying the bomb wasn’t necessary to win the war.

The "father of the atomic bomb" has long been misunderstood. Will the new film finally get J. Robert Oppenheimer right?

Real democratic participation in foreign policy is almost unimaginable today—but this wasn’t always the case.

Two centuries of New England intellectual history through the lives and ideas of people who are memorialized there.

The rise and fall of the WASP.

For more than three centuries, something has been going horribly wrong at the top of our society, and we’re all suffering for it.

A new history of the Cuban missile crisis emphasizes how close the world came to destruction—and how severe a threat the weapons still pose.

How not to learn about the American past.

The systematic mass murder and assault of accused communists in Indonesia by US-backed military forces has left a mark on the country and the world.

A trio of books depict the true narrative of the massacres within Indonesia in 1965.

On the 50th anniversary of RFK's death, a glimpse inside one of his closest relationships.

The war opened the credibility gap. What we’ve learned since has only widened it.