Earl O'Garro

There is a moment in every father's life — a small, ordinary moment, perhaps over toast and homework, perhaps in the slow walk from a car to a schoolyard — when the country he lives in stops being an abstraction and becomes, suddenly and irrevocably, the thing his children will inherit. I have arrived at that moment more often than I would like, and never more sharply than in the slow, grinding, public revelation of what the men at the top of our republic did, knew, or refuse

On the first day of May, before an audience at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, the President of the United States stood at a podium in Florida and announced, with the easy cadence of a man returning from lunch, that his country would be "taking over" Cuba "almost immediately." He invoked the USS Abraham Lincoln by name, suggested its homeward course from the Persian Gulf could simply detour, and added, as if confirming an appointment on his calendar, "I like to finish a j

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that begins to bloom whenever a republic finds itself at war and would rather not say so. It does not announce itself. It comes dressed in idiom — in the casual phrase, in the smiling shrug, in the assurance that whatever just happened in the dark waters between two nations was hardly anything at all. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, after three United States Navy destroyers — the USS Truxtun, the USS Rafael Peralta, and the USS Ma

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans believed that a number meant a thing — that a price was a fact about the world and not the polished opinion of a committee, that a dollar earned in the morning was a dollar still in the evening, that the savings of a working life would meet a working man at the other end of it without having been hollowed out by the hand of an economist. That belief — and let us call it what it was, a belief, half-religion and half-republican