■ “World War III began before World War II ended, and it is going on today.” That’s a quotation from Richard Nixon’s new book, The Real War, out now. Strange. We thought we were living in the era of detente and the structure of peace. Or maybe World War III began in the 1940s, ceased between 1968 and 1974, and then resumed again, the Soviets having been insufficiently appeased by wheat deals, credits, computers, Pepsi, and SALT.
■ If you like to take the long historical view of things and are wondering whom to vote for, here are two helpful clues: “Mr. Reagan’s difficulty . . . [lies] in his grasp of American political history.”—Historian Henry Steele Commager, New York Times, April 12. Whereas Senator Edward Kennedy is “ever conscious that he is a successor to John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. . . . The whole of his senatorial career might rightly be read as an extensive commentary on the preamble of our Constitution, for it has been devoted to realizing a more perfect union, justice, domestic tranquillity, the common defense, the general welfare, and liberty.”—Historian Henry Steele Commager, in a preface to a collection of speeches by Edward M. Kennedy, edited by historian Henry Steele Commager.
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