Free Republic

“They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look, So You Can, Too…Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series. Could there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?” wrote Gal Beckerman in the The New York Times this month.“Subversive?” Ah! At least the term appears in connection with the docuseries. And considering that Ernest Hemingway eagerly joined Stalin’s KGB (technically the NKVD at the time), secretly contributed tens of thousands to the Cuban communist party and (literally) drank, as a spectator, to...

President Obama just gave the world a glimpse into his future foreign policy plans this week, should he win a second term. On tap for Obama II: more faith in our adversaries, more betrayal of our traditional allies and more unilateral indulgence in nuclear abolition fantasies. Monday, President Obama told Russian President Medvedev that “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Medvedev responded that he would dutifully report that tidbit to Vladimir Putin back in the Kremlin. The men apparently did not realize their discussion was being caught by a live microphone. Given that the...

Ernest Hemingway died by his own hand almost 50 years ago, on July 2, 1961. His fame rests on his evocative stories crafted in spare prose, his tragic romances of love and death, his vivid war reporting and his travel books. He was an uneven author, but wrote at least one great work in every decade of his career. His description of the Greek refugees retreating after a Turkish victory—"Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats"—appeared in his first and best book of stories, "In Our Time" (1925). The novelist Ford Madox Ford praised...

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life. There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life. Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his...

...[T]here is no greater Cold War icon than Alger Hiss, the once high-ranking State Department official who went to prison for denying that he'd passed government secrets to the Soviet Union. Nearly 60 years after he was exposed before Congress by Whittaker Chambers, a communist underground operative who later became a senior editor at Time magazine, belief in Hiss' complete innocence remains an article of faith for the political left. For anti-communists, Hiss remains the prime example of how the Kremlin infiltrated the highest ranks of the U.S. government.... Over the years, Davis remained unpersuaded by new evidence of Hiss'...