By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 30, 2001

When Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in 1901, he was tried before a civilian court, as was Giuseppe Zangara, the would-be assassin of President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.

When John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in 1981, he, too, was tried before a civilian court. But those who plotted the murder of Lincoln were tried by a military commission at Ft. McNair – with U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt presiding – and hanged.

By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 27, 2001

Five days after declaring war on terrorism, the president urged Americans to be patient: “This crusade … is going to take awhile.” Immediately, the cry arose, “How could he be so cruelly insensitive!”

Bush was scourged and admonished that he had insulted the Islamic world. Did he not know the Crusades were wars of criminal Christian aggression marked by pillage and massacre? The president apologized, and no one has since embraced the dreaded term.

By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 13, 2001

As President Bush hosts President Putin at his Texas ranch, Russia seems but a shadow of what she was only yesterday.

Since the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, Iceland, Russia has lost a worldwide empire stretching from Cuba to Cam Ranh Bay, including all of Eastern Europe. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine are gone, as are Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus, and the five republics of Central Asia. Smaller today than she was 150 years ago, Mother Russia no longer shares a border with Hungary, Rumania, Turkey or Iran. In the 1991 break-up, Moscow lost territory 10 times the size of France.

By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 10, 2001

In 1919, with President Wilson felled by a stroke, anarchists detonated a bomb outside the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. For the anarchists, not a wise move.

On January 2, 1920 there began what historians call “the Palmer Raids.” U.S. agents swooped down on immigrant enclaves, collared anarchists, roughed them up, and booted 3000 out of the U.S. The raids were led by 25-year-old John Edgar Hoover, who would later take over a corrupt federal agency and convert it into the most respected anti-terrorist organization on earth: the FBI.

By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 6, 2001

In “The Collapse of British Power,” historian Corelli Barnett savages the men and dogmas that brought his nation down.

In 1914, he writes, Britons believed theirs was the most powerful, productive, self-sufficient nation on earth. But already the rot was deep, as a free-trade cancer had eaten away at its vitals:

British industry had … changed its character from an army of conquest, mobile, flexible and
bold, into a defensive army pegged out in fixed positions, passively trying to defend what it
had won in the past. The fire of creative purpose flickered low in the blackened grate of
the British industrial regions.

By Patrick J. Buchanan – November 2, 2001

“The lamps are going out all over Europe. They will not be lit again in our lifetimes,” said Sir Edward Grey, as he watched the lamps being lit in St. James Park, the evening of August 3, 1914. At noon, the foreign minister had persuaded Parliament that the German violation of Belgian neutrality meant they must go to war.

Grey sensed it was the end of an era. Tears in his eyes, he said to U.S. Ambassador Walter Hines Page: “Thus, the efforts of a lifetime go for nothing. I feel that I have wasted my life.”