About Craig R. Whitney
Craig R. Whitney spent his entire professional career as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at The New York Times, where he was assistant managing editor in charge of standards and ethics when he retired in 2009. Before that he was the night editor from 2000 to 2006.
He started working at The Times in 1965 as an assistant to James Reston in the Washington Bureau, after working part-time for two years at The Worcester Telegram in Worcester, Mass.
Unraveling Time
“Unraveling Time” is the story of how an American foreign correspondent and a news magazine office manager in Germany grew up on opposite sides of the Atlantic, met, married, and started a family in Bonn in the mid-1970s, and then experienced history in Moscow, New York City, Washington, London, Bonn and Paris before returning to Brooklyn in 2000. It was a turbulent, inspiring time, with the war in Vietnam, then the collapse of communism in Europe and the coming together of east and west in the European Union, followed by dementia: the 9/11 attacks, the disastrous American invasion of Iraq, and the unending worldwide war against terrorism. Dementia then struck this family in a personal way, an unraveling made bearable by enduring love and these memories.
Published November 2016.
AUTOCRACY vs DEMOCRACY?
Published February 18th, 2025
President Donald Trump, in his first two weeks in office, dismissed thousands of government employees involved in past prosecutions of himself or his supporters; cut off funding for foreign aid programs all over the world by shuttering USAID; threatened to “take back” the Panama Canal, and take over Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally; begun rounding up undocumented immigrants for forcible expulsion of millions of them from the country; and allowed agents of his mega-billionaire pal Elon Musk, few of them government employees, to access the U.S. Treasury Department system controlling trillions of dollars of payments for all kinds of government programs. Musk wasn’t elected to anything last November, but he’s wielding almost dictatorial powers with Trump’s blessing, and is now eyeing the Department of Education for possible closure.
Some of Trump’s most important cabinet appointments are people with no evident qualifications for their jobs. In his eyes, the only qualification they need is willingness to do whatever he wants them to do. He reassures skeptics that he’ll keep them under control – small comfort that is.
Trump acts as if he had the power to do whatever he wants -- absolute power. The Constitution of the United States, with its checks and balances, does not give the President that kind of power.
So what did Trump do? Continue reading...
Craig Whitney author of "All the Stops" plays Durufle at his church in Brooklyn [Full Article]
