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documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.

Though he accepted a full pardon from President Gerald Ford, Nixon insisted that he had not participated in any crimes. In his 1977 television interviews with British journalist David Frost, he said that he had “let the American people down” but that he had not obstructed justice. “I didn’t think of it as a coverup. I didn’t intend a coverup. Let me say, if I intended the coverup, believe me, I would have done it.”

What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.”

Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.

Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.

Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.

China Formally Arrests U.S. Citizen Accused of Stealing State Secrets

Under Mr. Xi, the Chinese government has been more vocal about its fears that the country is vulnerable to political and commercial spying.

Her background left her particularly vulnerable to arrest in China, he added, noting that previous cases of spying charges against Americans have often involved ethnic Chinese.

The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed

The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.

[A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?

“War is not this pretty thing that the United States has come to believe it to be,” said Britt Slabinski, a retired senior enlisted member of Team 6 and veteran of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It’s emotional, one human being killing another human being for extended periods of time. It’s going to bring out the worst in you. It’s also going to bring out the best in you.”

Like the C.I.A.’s campaign of drone strikes, Special Operations missions offer policy makers an alternative to costly wars of occupation. But the bulwark of secrecy around Team 6 makes it impossible to fully assess its record and the consequences of its actions, including civilian casualties or the deep resentment inside the countries where its members operate. The missions have become embedded in American combat with little public discussion or debate.

For the record: I am not Muslim. My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad “studying” Zoroastrianism. But most of the extended Khakpours are Muslim and, culturally, it’s a part of me insofar as I am a Middle Easterner.

Now, when I look back on ages 23 to 32, every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again. But what was once simple apprehension and mortification and trepidation has become increasingly entangled with feelings of exhaustion and marginalization and even indignation.

were certain things better in the George W. Bush era? Was it easier to be Middle Eastern then?

octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at the University of California/ San Diego, “challenges historians to either refute the Tripp thesis or to rewrite Lincoln’s biography. Hanchett believes that Tripp is correct at least in the broad outline of his work and finds it frustrating that most historians, rather than confronting this pioneering study, choose to ignore it,” as the Lincoln Herald’s editors put it in introducing Hanchett’s revealing, carefully footnoted essay on Lincoln’s same-sex affinities.

Hanchett in particular breaks new ground when he deconstructs what we know of the much-ignored secret Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon as he spent a quarter century intensively researching his massive “Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life,” published in 1889. The UC/ San Diego scholar details how he believes that the otherwise thorough Tripp missed the evidence there that backs up Hanchett’s view that “Lincoln’s secret” was homosexuality.

the overwhelming concern of the super-rich—mentioned by nearly every parent who participated in the survey—is their children. Many express relief that their kids’ education was assured, but are concerned that money might rob them of ambition. Having money “runs the danger of giving them a perverted view of the world,” one respondent writes. Another worries, “Money could mess them up—give them a sense of entitlement, prevent them from developing a strong sense of empathy and compassion

Enormous wealth takes care of so many day-to-day concerns, that the remaining ones grow that much more frustrating. The rich “want their children to make wise choices,” says Schervish, “because that’s what they can’t control.”

Many wealthy parents structure their children’s inheritances such that the money arrives only in discrete packets, timed to ensure that during their formative years they have no choice but to find a vocation. But Kenny hasn’t seen the strategy work, he says, because the children always know that the money is out there, and usually their friends do too.

European economies, France in particular, get very bad press in America. Our political discourse is dominated by reverse Robin-Hoodism — the belief that economic success depends on being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed, and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have no alternative. And according to this ideology, Europe — with its high taxes and generous welfare states — does everything wrong. So Europe’s economic system must be collapsing, and a lot of reporting simply states the postula

Northern European nations, France included, have done far better than most Americans realize. In particular, here’s a startling, little-known fact: French adults in their prime working years (25 to 54) are substantially more likely to have jobs than their U.S. counterparts.

France’s prime-age employment rate overtook America’s early in the Bush administration; at this point the gap in employment rates is bigger than it was in the late 1990s, this time in France’s favor. Other European nations with big welfare states, like Sweden and the Netherlands, do even better.

“When you use a public office, pretty shamelessly, to vouch for a private party with substantial financial interest without the disclosure of the true authorship, that is a dangerous practice,” said David B. Frohnmayer, a Republican who served a decade as attorney general in Oregon. “The puppeteer behind the stage is pulling strings, and you can’t see. I don’t like that. And when it is exposed, it makes you feel used.”

But Mr. Pruitt’s ties with industry are clear. One of his closest partners has been Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire chief executive of Continental Resources, which is among the biggest oil and gas drilling companies in both Oklahoma and North Dakota.

“It is quite new,” said Paul Nolette, a political-science professor at Marquette University and the author of the forthcoming book “Federalism on Trial: State Attorneys General and National Policy Making in Contemporary America.” “The scope, size and tenor of these collaborations is, without question, unprecedented.”

You could blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman says. It’s not clear exactly what Haldeman has in mind, but Nixon perks up. He suddenly remembers that he signed off on a proposal by White House aide Tom Charles Huston to use wiretaps and break-ins to protect national security. “Bob, you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” Nixon says. A staffer objects, and Nixon explodes, “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

In the lead-up to the election, Johnson had offered peace negotiations in exchange for the halt in bombing. For years, historians have tried to get to the bottom of allegations that Nixon, using a pro-Nationalist Chinese lobbyist named Anna Chennault as a go-between, tried to get the South Vietnamese government to torpedo the proposal. The evidence remains a little sketchy. In a recently released oral history, Huston, who looked into the bombing halt at Haldeman’s request, suggests Nixon was culpable, but there is still no smoking gun. Nonetheless, Hughes shows that we still have much to learn by connecting the dots of Nixon’s angry venting and the shadowy world of national-security spying

fellow Nixonologist Luke Nichter, who is a professor at Texas A&M and runs an excellent website called nixontapes.org in addition to co-authoring The Nixon Tapes, is already following this trail. He recently told me that he is looking for evidence of other Nixon-era break-ins conducted in the name of national security. This sort of deep-cover spying hardly started with the cybersleuthing disclosed by Edward Snowden

Denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under occupation, a group of veterans from an elite, secretive military intelligence unit have declared they will no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians” in required reserve duty because of what they called “our moral duty to act.”

In a letter sent Thursday night to their commanders as well as Israel’s prime minister and army chief, 43 veterans of the clandestine Unit 8200 complained that Israel made “no distinction between Palestinians who are and are not involved in violence” and that information collected “harms innocent people.” Intelligence “is used for political persecution,” they wrote, which “does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict.”

“After our service we started seeing a more complex picture of a nondemocratic, oppressive regime that controls the lives of millions of people,”

The problem is that soccer dominance is an important part of Brazil's sports identity, and this loss cut to the core of it. As Eric Simons, author of The Secret Lives of Sports Fans, explained in an email, "If you're Brazilian, your identity is based on self-concept that you're always the best soccer team in the world, and you know that everyone else knows it, so you're proud." So the pain of losing isn't, in this case, that of an underdog happy to be there, and for the Brazilians to lose in this manner is to collide violently against all sorts of national expectations and self-conceptions.

"What happens when your pride, self-concept, and identity are suddenly obliterated in front of the entire world?" said Simons. "I don't know. I don't know if anyone does; this is, in sports, something of an unprecedented self-esteem catastrophe. Has anyone that good, with that much expectation, every lost that badly before, with so many people watching?" The answer to that question may be no, which would mean we're in somewhat uncharted sports-trauma territory.

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The effort was run out of the C.I.A. station in Baghdad in collaboration with the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion and teams of chemical-defense and explosive ordnance disposal troops, officials and veterans of the units said

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

merican troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs

The friendship and mutual respect that had marked Jefferson’s first days as Washington’s secretary of state in 1790 had slowly vanished as the two men realized the depth and intensity of their disagreements. The Revolution of 1800 was Jefferson’s way of announcing that he had no intention of changing his mind about any of the issues that had led to their mutual alienation.

He seemed to be saying: So you’re famous for winning the American Revolution – eight wearisome years of living dangerously? I intend to be even more famous for a revolution that does not shed any blood, that settles once and for all the spiritual and political superiority of my Republican party to the mean-spirited arrogant secret king worshippers who flaunted the name Federalist with your secret approval. That is the real meaning of the Revolution of 1800.

It was – or seemed to be – a call for political peace. Listening to these words was a Jefferson cousin who knew they were nonsense -- Chief Justice John Marshall, who had administered the oath of office. He described Jefferson’s political party as an uneasy compound of “speculative theorists” and “absolute terrorists” who wanted revenge for the years of political defeats under Presidents Washington and Adams. Jefferson would have to satisfy both branches of the party or he would soon be in trouble, Marshall predicted.