The Brady Offensive

By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair January 1991 “A hostage situation”—that’s what the cops are calling it—has James Brady rolling rapidly in his wheelchair through the dimly lit third-floor corridor of the Capitol building. At his side—tight-lipped, nervous about being late...

Dangerous Jane

By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair November 1988 She can’t stop talking about that gun. The anti-aircraft gun, the one in Hanoi, the one she posed with in 1972, the one she seemed to flirt with in a ten-second stretch of silent newsreel that has become her most famous...

The Essential Ron Rosenbaum: Part Two

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader March 2, 2020 Picking up where we left off with The Essential Ron Rosenbaum: Part One, here’s another (baker’s) dozen from Rosenbaum—from lunches with power brokers in the 1980s, to literary appreciations of Shakespeare, Catch-22, and...

War of Remembrance

By Stephen Fried Philadelphia Magazine January, 1994 When she decided to tell her parents that they couldn’t come to her home for Christmas, Jennifer Freyd hoped she was just having a nervous breakdown. It was the 18th of December, 1990, and the 33-year-old psychology...

The Passions of Mario Cuomo

By Ron Rosenbaum Manhattan Inc. September, 1985 Who is that tall, spectral figure haunting the gloomy halls of the state capitol building today? Who is that silver-haired, patrician wraith with the lines of a shattered past engraved on his face? Could it be—yes—it’s...

In the Eye of the Storm a Year Later

By Gary Smith Life September 1990 “There are significant moments in the life of a human,” a significant man in Charleston, S.C., once told me. “Moments in our lives when we need to act right. It’s crucial that we recognize them when they come, that we gather the...

The Most Hated Lawyer in America

By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair March 1992 It’s a quiet Sunday morning in the nearly deserted Greenwich Village town house of attorney William Kunstler. In the stillness, the answering machine clicks on and there’s a quiet woman’s voice speaking, calmly, patiently...

Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post”

By Ron Rosenbaum LARB February 5, 2017 TRUMP/HITLER?   [This article was first published just weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration.]    The Trump-Hitler comparison. Is there any comparison? Between the way the campaigns of Donald Trump and Adolf...

Hitler Continued

By Ron Rosenbaum LARB June 10, 2014 RON ROSENBAUM’S 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, is a critique of “Hitler studies,” the term coined by Don DeLillo, and it remains for me a key experience in my life-long reading about the Third Reich. In the book Rosenbaum assessed...

Law and Order at Night

By Dan Wakefield From Between the Lines 1966 Beneath the gold draperies that canopy the long, high-ceilinged stage of the Montgomery, Alabama, City Hall sat the officers of the local White Citizens Council and their honored guests—the top officials of the city,...

The Connoisseur of Scoundrels

By Ron Rosenbaum Manhattan Inc. May, 1987 The scene: an informal dinner party on the rooftop of a brownstone in the East Seventies. The people (with one exception): congenial, civilized, charming. The conversation: charming, civilized, congenial. Until … until someone...

In the Bloom of Life

By Marilyn Johnson Life April, 1995 If you take her out of history and plant her in the wilderness, it’s easy to see the person she is. During a dry spell in 1984, she was driving around the Texas hill country with a friend, hunting for fields of wildflowers in bloom....