President Bush and first lady Laura Bush hosted an Oval Office ceremony on Thursday to honor authors, historians and others with the National Humanities Medal. I was fortunate enough during my short career as a Middle East observer to get to know two of the honorees, Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis. Fouad was my houseguest when he first arrived in DC from Princeton back in late '79, early 1980. He was reading the famous Raj trilogy and Freud and a number of other books not directly related to the Middle East. We actually were going to invest in a couple...