History

‘We’ve Got to Kill and Kill and Kill’

As Francisco Franco’s reputation grows on the far right, a new history of his regime reminds us of its unrelenting violence.

December 4, 2025 issue

Spain Exhumes Its Painful Past

If Spain’s new Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has his way, El Valle will soon receive a radical makeover. In June, Sánchez announced his intention to move General Franco’s remains from El Valle and transform the site from a shrine to Francoism to a “memorial for the victims of fascism.”

August 24, 2018

Orwell: Homage to the ‘Homage’

“The newcomer spoke of a book he had written, about living as a tramp in England and washing dishes in Paris restaurants. But Orr had not heard of this or of the several novels this ‘gawky, stammering adventurer’ said he had published.”

December 19, 2013 issue

A Seemingly Ordinary Man

“Franco himself emerges as a colorless figure, a bourgeois family man, with no private vices and no civic virtues beyond a military sense of duty and honor, addicted like his subjects to TV and football, his mind inhabited by the ghosts of the past and snatches of stale Falangist rhetoric.”

November 17, 1994 issue

Clinton Agonistes

The Clinton impeachment was a situation in which a handful of people with something to gain (a book contract, a sinecure as a network “analyst,” or the justification of a failure to get either of the Clintons on Whitewater), managed to harness this phenomenon and ride it.

October 22, 1998 issue

Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

January 29, 1987 issue

A Special Supplement: Impeachment

There are two reasons for impeaching Richard Nixon. One is that this may be the only legal proceeding to determine the President’s complicity in the Watergate scandal. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from such abuses.

June 28, 1973 issue

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue