[Image of the police killing of Tony Timpa] Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963. Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil,” entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that...
The Man Who Bankrupted a Legislature
My first choice for a headline for this article was “The Scoundrel Who Bankrupted a Legislature” but upon reflection, I think the legislature had it coming. So I changed “scoundrel” to a more neutral term. The name “William Sharon” meant nothing to me until I recently read Irving Stone’s 1956 masterpiece, Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900. The book has been appropriately lauded as “an unforgettable pageant of giants”—men who scaled the Rockies, made deserts bloom, dug deep for gold and silver and surveyed territories west of the Mississippi into 22 states in...