Jules Witcover

When the storm of administration scandals first hit President Barack Obama, he offered a good impersonation of Claude Raines in "Casablanca," expressing shock that gambling was going on in Rick's saloon. His verbal outrage at the snooping of the IRS and...

I read with interest Jules Witcover's recent column regarding Vice President Joe Biden ("Could Biden benefit from Clinton's handling of Benghazi?" May 14). He infers that the Benghzai scandal could cost Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential...

In Hillary Clinton's farewell remarks in February on stepping down as President Barack Obama's secretary of state, she echoed one of her predecessors, Madeleine Albright, declaring America to be "the indispensable nation." "We are the force for...

Probing questions at presidential news conferences sometimes have a way of getting their principals to reflect on their state of mind -- and at the same time the state their presidency, particularly when things aren't going well. Back in 1995, when Bill...

Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska who survived a stormy confirmation hearing to become the new secretary of defense, had a coming-out party of sorts last week before the National Defense University, the government's graduate...

In a profession like politics and in a town like the nation's capital, the phenomenon of a U.S. senator voluntarily surrendering his seat for a think-tank job would have been unthinkable some years ago. The decision of Republican Jim DeMint of South...

As President Barack Obama nears the end of his first term, has he finally found an inner LBJ to channel? His recent words and actions suggest he has turned a corner from his earlier wishful thinking about playing nice with obstruction-minded Republicans...

An old reporter often begins his daily routine by turning to the newspaper's obituary page with mild trepidation, fearing another friend has gone to that great newsroom in the sky. So it was this week in reading of the death in Baltimore, at only 62, of...

It's sometimes said that a lame-duck president is a weakened leader from the first day of his last term. The two-term limit of the 22nd Amendment, imposed by wrathful Republicans in 1951 in response to FDR's breach of the George Washington tradition, is...

While Republican leaders console themselves that they salvaged control of the House from the defeat of Mitt Romney, they need to ponder the long-term future of the party of Lincoln and of Ronald Reagan. The course of the Grand Old Party from the Great...

Being a losing presidential candidate is like what Mr. Dooley said about vice presidents: "It isn't a crime exactly. You can't be sint to jail f'r it, but it's kind iv a disgrace. It's like writin' anonymous letters." So it has been, unfairly, for former...

Poor Mitt Romney. Even when he is handed the football with a clear path to the goal line, he seems almost unable not to fumble it along the way. In his majority opinion ruling the Affordable Care Act consitututional, Supreme Court Justice John G. Roberts...