Whom can we trust? Who has the credibility to lead? Integrity still matters, and there are examples worth remembering. In The Buying of Congress, Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, highlights two: Senators Philip Hart and John Williams. I’ll share Williams’ story on Friday. “An infantryman wounded on D-Day during World War II, Philip Hart had earlier...

In 1998, at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Secret Service Director Lewis Merletti was driving to work when a radio report stopped him cold. President Bill Clinton had been accused of having a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. When Merletti arrived at his office, his deputy informed him that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr wanted to question...

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things—not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” When John F. Kennedy stood at Rice University in 1962 and said those words, he was not merely talking about rockets, astronauts, or beating the Soviets into space. He was speaking to something larger in the American...

Conclusion: The Words That Made Us and Still Must.  In December of 1776, the Revolution was not moving toward triumph. It was close to collapse. Washington’s army was exhausted. Enlistments were running out. Men who had already given much were being asked to give more. Then Thomas Paine’s words were read aloud… …  “These are the times that try men’s...

For the most part, my high school history classes consisted of names, dates, documents, and battles. What I’ve learned since then — through historians like Doris Kearns-Goodwin, David McCullough, Ken Burns, and others — is that history comes alive when we discover the human stories behind the events. One of those stories belongs to John Hart of New Jersey, a...

What does leadership require when decisions send others into harm’s way, and uncertainty is shared not just by those in command, but by the nation itself? General Dwight D. Eisenhower once observed that “the supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity.” Not confidence. Not control. Integrity. And it is precisely that quality that is tested when clarity is hardest to...

There’s a moment in every uncertain time when loyalty stops sounding like a virtue and starts sounding like a test. Not the healthy kind of loyalty: steadfastness to community, shared purpose, and a set of obligations we freely accept. I mean the kind that demands a simple answer to a complicated question: Are you with us, or against us? The...

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that if forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,” he would prefer the latter. The statement was not an attack on government; it was a recognition that transparency is the lifeblood of liberty. In a democracy, the press asks questions. The government answers them. And the public, armed with facts,...

The day after her fall in the women’s downhill at the Winter Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina, Lindsey Vonn posted a message on Instagram. Not just a medical update,  but a reflection: “I dreamt, I tried, I jumped.” No polish. Just truth. “Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying....

It’s just a photograph: a wartime dog sitting alert, ears up, wearing a military harness. But the story about a World War II sentry dog named Chips turns out to be less about lore than about something rarer and more unsettling: courage without calculation. In July 1943, in Sicily, Chips, without hesitation, ran straight at a machine-gun nest, scattering the...