Stories by Tucker Carlson
Book of the Week: Tucker Carlson on Heaven's Command
2:00 PM, Apr 15, 2011
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Best book I’ve read this year: Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress , by James Morris. Has any book ever come with a less gripping title or a more unappealing cover? But it turns out what say is true, at least in this case. It’s fantastic. This the first in Morris’s three-volume history of British imperialism, and no matter how much you thought you knew about the Sepoy Mutiny or the British Army’s horrifying retreat from Kabul in the winter of ’42, or the Jamaican rebellion of 1869, you’ Read more
When the Fun Stopped
Tucker Carlson remembers Hunter S. Thompson.
Mar 07, 2005
I FEEL LIKE I'VE KNOWN Hunter S. Thompson for most of my life. I first encountered him in 1981, when I was 12. A family friend had moved out after a long stay in the guest room, and I decided to find out what he'd left behind. On the nightstand I found a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . I liked the cover art, so I read it. It changed my life. The book made me want to drop everything (specifically, the sixth grade) and take up journalism. It made me want to travel the world with a pen Read more
Up in Smoke
Tucker Carlson, burned-out homeowner.
Oct 28, 2002
IT ALL STARTED with the squirrels in the ceiling. They've always lived there, between the rafters over my office at home. For years, the squirrels and I got along fine, until late one night a couple of months ago, when two of them got into an argument. I don't know what the fight was about, acorns probably, but it was incredibly loud. At first I barked at them to be quiet. Then I yelled. Finally, I took a tennis ball from the spaniel and bounced it off the ceiling as hard as I could. That shut t Read more
Cocktails in Pakistan
In the Muslim world, a drink is never just a drink.
Jan 28, 2002
RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN People often refer to Dubai as the Hong Kong of the Gulf, but it's really more like Vegas. A sparkling, semi-independent emirate on the Arabian Sea, Dubai is where rich Arabs go to gamble, meet hookers, and drink. But mostly drink. Dubai is drenched with booze. The airport alone probably has more liquor stores per square foot than any building on the planet. Which, of course, is the appeal. Certain Arabs love Dubai because it's not at all like where they live. Certain others Read more
Tater Tots
Tucker Carlson, Potato Head
Jan 14, 2002
EPIPHANIES are rarer in life than in literature. But they do occur, those moments when everything changes in an instant, when you know your understanding of the world will never be quite the same. I had one of those this summer, when I saw my first potato cannon. We were in Maine, visiting friends who live in a rural area up the coast. It was early evening, cocktail hour, and we were sitting on the back porch watching the kids play in the grass. "Hey," said my friend, "want to shoot the potato c Read more
THE WRITE STUFF
Mar 05, 2001
I got a new job a few months ago. It happened suddenly. One day, I was writing stories for THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The next day, I was doing a daily show for CNN. Virtually everything about my life changed dramatically. I did my best to ignore it. Finally, one night last week, I had to face the truth: I'm not a magazine writer any more. It hit me when I showed up at the STANDARD to clean out my office. The room was filled with junk. This wasn't surprising. I've been here a long time. When I firs Read more
WASHINGTON DIARIST
Nov 27, 2000
People in my Virginia neighborhood don't gather in bookstores on Sunday nights to talk about ideas. People in certain parts of Northwest Washington do, as I discovered last weekend when I attended a discussion of The Slate Diaries at Politics & Prose, a lefty bookseller on upper Connecticut Avenue. The Slate Diaries is just what it sounds like: a collection of diary entries compiled by Slate magazine and published in book form. (I am one of the contributors.) The people who came to disc Read more
"Win; One for the Groper"?;
Why Gore is right to be wary of Clinton's help
Nov 06, 2000
ASK A FEW prominent Democrats about the relationship between Al Gore and Bill Clinton and the word you're most likely to hear, probably more than once, is "psychodrama." According to those who know him, Gore has come to resent a lot of things about Clinton. He resents Clinton's lack of respect for him and for the vice presidency. He resents Clinton's secretive style. He resents the Monica business. He really resents Hillary. Clinton, meanwhile, didn't always resent Gore, but he does now. Gore Read more
How Bush Galluped Ahead
It don't mean a thing, that 19-point swing
Oct 23, 2000
EVEN BEFORE George W. Bush stomped Al Gore in the second presidential debate, there were signs that Bush's campaign was gaining ground. One big sign, actually. A Gallup poll commissioned by CNN and USA Today showed Bush ahead nationally by 8 points. A poll by Gallup released three days before had indicated that Bush was losing to Gore by 11 points. In 72 hours Bush had surged 19 points. That's a gain of more than 1 percentage point every four hours, including the hours when most of America is Read more
To Catch a Mole
How hard can it be to find out who leaked the Bush debate materials to Gore?
Oct 09, 2000
ON SEPTEMBER 15, Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush's campaign manager, got a call from the FBI. An agent informed Allbaugh that one of Al Gore's closest advisers, former representative Tom Downey, had received confidential information from the Bush campaign, including a book of internal strategy memos and a videotape of Bush engaged in debate preparation. The materials had arrived at Downey's office in an anonymous package postmarked Austin, Texas. According to Downey's lawyer, Downey looked at the t Read more
ONE MAN'S TREASURE
Oct 02, 2000
Summer houses are like time capsules. I remember this every June when we go to Maine, to the same place I've gone most of my life. My wife has been going with me every summer since we were in the 10th grade, so it always feels a bit like waking up back in high school when we arrive. In a dresser upstairs there are T-shirts I haven't worn since I took algebra. There are old letters in desks, matchbooks on the mantle from long-defunct restaurants, condiments in the kitchen I'm positive I recall fr Read more
The Secret of Gore's Success
Whether it's with Oprah, the voters, or the media, flattery works wonders
Sep 25, 2000
Chicago There are many reasons that Al Gore has been able to revive what until recently looked like a moribund campaign. But one of them, depressing as it is to admit, may be that he is the sort of politician who can do well on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Gore made the pilgrimage to Chicago last week to appear on Winfrey's show. While he and his staff made their way to the studio at Harpo Productions, the press was shunted to a restaurant across the street to watch the program on monitors. Read more
The Not So Great Debate Debate
The Bush and Gore campaigns engage in a ritual squabble
Sep 11, 2000
AS OF LAST WEEK, Al Gore had been invited to participate in 45 presidential debates. Gore has "accepted all of them," boasts aide Mark Fabiani, "legitimate and half-way legitimate," including an offer from would-be moderator David Letterman. Gore says he wants to debate as often as possible, and he has challenged George W. Bush to join him in all 45 forums. If Bush were to agree, television viewers could watch a new presidential debate every weeknight from Labor Day to the election. This is n Read more
The Democrats' Dilemma
Gore's instinct is to attack, but the convention hasn't provided many targets
Aug 14, 2000
IF YOU'RE a Democratic strategist, there are two ways you can look at last week's Republican convention in Philadelphia: You can be irritated. Or you can be dismissive. Al Gore's campaign team in Nashville has chosen the latter. More than a year ago, Gore's strategists decided to respond to talk of compassionate conservatism by ignoring it. George W. Bush, they argued, was a conventional southern conservative, his moderate language merely a clever cover for the usual right-wing agenda. Early Read more
The Well-Tempered GOP Platform
This year, the traditional pre-convention fight didn't happen
Aug 07, 2000
Philadelphia CATHIE ADAMS is one of the people who decide what the Republican party believes. Adams, who is from Dallas, is a delegate to the GOP platform committee. She has been to two previous Republican conventions, and she came to Philadelphia last week eager to meet with other members of her subcommittee and begin hashing out the details of the "conservation, agriculture and natural resources" section of the platform. Adams arrived at the meeting Friday morning ready to work. She exp Read more
Al Gore, Robo-candidate
The vice president is running a relentlessly weird campaign
Jul 31, 2000
Saginaw, Michigan IT'S 7:30 ON A RECENT WEEKNIGHT and the gym at Arthur Hill High School in Saginaw is not packed. There are maybe 200 people in the room, which, judging from the championship banners on the walls, is a smaller crowd than the school's basketball team draws. All have come at the invitation of local Democratic activists. They are here to participate in one of Al Gore's "open meetings." They are in for a long night. Gore stands at the end of the basketball court and addresses Read more
Pat Buchanan Loses a Press Secretary
The strange hiring and firing of Neil Bernstein
Jun 26, 2000
PAT BUCHANAN likes to fight. But only on TV. Off the air, the bellicose talk-show-host-turned-third-party-presidential-candidate can be surprisingly meek, even timid, the sort of person who structures his life to avoid the mildest confrontation. This spring, Buchanan was booked for a live interview on Fox News Sunday. The day before the show, Buchanan learned that John McCain was scheduled to appear on the show as well. This presented a problem for Buchanan. Shortly before, McCain had attacked Read more
Rambunctious Rick
Lazio hits the ground running with a little help from the McCain team
Jun 12, 2000
Buffalo, N.Y. IT IS THE LAST WEEK IN MAY and representative Rick Lazio has come upstate to be ordained as his party's candidate in the Senate race against Hillary Clinton. Lazio is slated to speak at the GOP state convention in a few hours, but first he must address several hundred Republican women gathered in a hotel ballroom. Republican women's groups look pretty much the same everywhere, except in Buffalo the women drink Labatt's with lunch. Lazio spends the first 20 minutes wandering Read more
Will Keyes Go Fifth Party?
Howard Phillips's Constitution party romances its dream candidate
Jun 05, 2000
IN MARCH, the chairman of the Constitution party, a little-known but very conservative political party based in suburban Virginia, wrote a letter to Alan Keyes urging him to leave the GOP. "We encourage you to come and join with us," the letter said, "in firm reliance on God's divine providence and in pledging to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor for the cause of restoring health to our beloved Republic." Keyes did not immediately respond. Then, several days ago, he seemed Read more
A Handshake, Not a Hug
Without great enthusiasm, McCain throws his support to Bush
May 22, 2000
Pittsburgh THE FIRST CLUE that the Bush-McCain press conference will be more Bush than McCain comes at the front door, where a group of Bush staffers have set up an identification checkpoint. The 100 or so journalists who arrive are told to produce "credentials" before entering the ballroom of the William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. Once the ID check is complete, the weapons detection process begins. A burly man with an earpiece and an electromagnetic wand gives each reporter a full-b Read more
HO HO HO CHI MINH CITY
May 15, 2000
If there's one thing that Third World Marxist dictatorships seem to have in common, it's a high tolerance for reckless driving. I first discovered this in 1988 after a particularly long dinner party in then-Communist Nicaragua. A friend and I were headed back to our hotel in Managua, doing about 70 in a heavy rainstorm, when we hit a pot-hole the size of a bird bath. The left front tire popped like a balloon and shredded into long jagged strips. The car bounced sideways down the road. It came to Read more
On the Miami Barricades
The Little Havana community stands firm, while Janet Reno backpedals
Apr 24, 2000
Miami IT'S AROUND LUNCH TIME when someone in the crowd of protesters outside Elian Gonzalez's house thrusts a Fidel-on-a-stick into the air. It is a fatigue-clad dummy with a Castro mask taped to its head. The dummy is wearing a stuffed woman's bra and has a frayed cigar in its mouth. It floats above the crowd for an instant. Suddenly a man reaches up and grabs at the dummy. He is intent on hurting it. Within seconds he has ripped the Castro mask off and shredded the bra. The dummy comes dow Read more
The National Council of Castro Worshippers
The disgraceful behavior of the National Council of Churches didn't begin with Elian Gonzalez
Apr 17, 2000
In 1975, the National Council of Churches, an organization of about 30 mainline religious denominations, published an informational pamphlet entitled Cuba: People-Questions. Written in perfect irony-free Albanian-farm-report prose, the pamphlet offers church members a short history of U.S.-Cuban relations. "All through the 1960s," it begins, "the U.S. did its best to make Cuba buckle under." America used "cold war tactics," blackmailed Cuba's neighbors, "slapped a trade blockade around the Read more
Miami Virtue
The citizens of Miami are indignant, determined -- and right
Apr 10, 2000
Miami, March 30 According to the Miami police, there are 20,000 people lining the streets of Little Havana. The crowd is packed into about a dozen city blocks, and from the air, illuminated by thousands of flashlights, it can be seen forming the shape of a cross. It is probably the largest prayer vigil in the city's history, and it has been organized to protest the Clinton administration's plan to send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba. At the intersection of 8th Street and 19th Aven Read more
On the Road
From New Hampshire to California, a diary of the real McCain campaign
Mar 27, 2000
FRANKLIN, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- JANUARY 30 It's Super Bowl Sunday and John McCain is sitting on his campaign bus finishing off the second of two hamburgers. McCain has just given a rousing speech to a packed VFW hall, and he's hungry. An aide has arrived with an appliance-sized cardboard box of McDonald's food. As McCain eats, dripping ketchup liberally on his tie, the aide tosses burgers over his head to the out-stretched hands of reporters. One of the burgers comes close to baning George "Bud" D Read more
It's More Than Just a Campaign
There are a lot of ups and downs along McCain's high road
Mar 06, 2000
Phoenix, Ariz. THERE ARE FEWER THAN 24 hours to go before the South Carolina primary when Rep. Mark Sanford rises before a crowd in Litchfield Beach to introduce John McCain. Sanford, a 39-year-old member of the class of 1994, was one of the first members of Congress (and still one of the few) to support McCain's candidacy. Smart, charming, and conservative, he is affluent, popular in his district, and has a terrific-looking family. Mark Sanford has a lot of talents. Gauging the sensibilitie Read more
THE QUITTER
Feb 21, 2000
By the time this appears in print I will be -- my fingers freeze at the thought of typing the word -- a non-smoker. Someone who doesn't smoke. A smoke-free person. The guy who used to chain at his desk all day but doesn't anymore. I'm quitting for two reasons. First, I woke up the other day and realized that I've been smoking, heavily, for 17 years. I've had a wonderful time doing it, but it's getting easier to visualize what happens at the end. Second, and more pressing, I can't take the car Read more
Sleepless in South Carolina
Bleary-eyed and buoyant, the McCain campaign heads to Dixie
Feb 14, 2000
Greenville, South Carolina IT'S THREE IN THE MORNING and hundreds of people are dancing inside a hangar at the Greenville-Spartanburg airport. Thundering techno-pop-disco-soul music blasts from enormous speakers in the corners. Spotlights cut through a haze of smoke to project purple and blue psychedelic designs onto a back wall. There's a small hot-air balloon tethered near the door, a Greyhound-sized tour bus festooned with bunting parked across the concrete floor. The air smells like beer Read more
Retail Politics, Up Close and Personal
With Gore in Iowa and Bradley in New Hampshire
Feb 07, 2000
Des Moines, Iowa PERHAPS BECAUSE of some obscure government regulation, Al Gore's security guys aren't wearing coats. The temperature is hovering near zero in Des Moines, but the men in charge of securing the vice president's next campaign event have only thin polyester suits and mirrored sunglasses to protect them from the cold. Gore is supposed to arrive any minute and begin a short, very staged walk down a residential street, where he will knock on doors and meet voters. At the moment the Read more
Keyes to the Presidency?
If talking were all it took, Alan Keyes would be on his way to the White House
Jan 24, 2000
Council Bluffs, Iowa It's dinner time on Wednesday night in Council Bluffs and close to 400 people have gathered on the basketball court at Iowa Western Community College to hear presidential candidate Alan Keyes give one of his famous speeches. Keyes hasn't actually shown up yet (he's often late), so Chris Jones, the director of his Iowa office, takes the podium and does his best to describe what an Alan Keyes speech is like. Several months ago, Jones says, the Keyes campaign sent him a vid Read more
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