Erik Erlandson, a 2015 Silas Palmer Fellow and doctoral candidate in history at the University of Virginia, researches the political, legal, and economic developments that led to the White House becoming head overseer of regulatory policy. Using the James C. Miller papers at Hoover Archives, Erlandson is completing a dissertation that uncovers the first attempts by executive offices to affect bureaucratic decision-making, and shows how and why these new uses of executive power were legally ratified and politically institutionalized on the eve of the Reagan Revolution.

Governments of Europe, the United States, and now Japan—disposing as they do of enormous resources of all kinds and pressured as they are by their own populations—having failed to rescue their citizens held by the Islamic State that disposes of few resources of any kind, raises the question of what it is that that shields the latter and debilitates the former.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the British Government published its official history of the Second World War, edited by Sir James Butler. The fourth volume, covering the period from August 1942 to September 1943, was written by Professor Sir Michael Howard, then a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. It is a stupendous work of scholarship, the product of ten years working in what he called “the catacombs of Whitehall.” 

Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you give up your part of Germany, NATO will “not shift one inch eastward.”

Among the sound recordings recently digitized for access and preservation by Hoover's audio lab are the items listed below. To make an appointment to listen to the recordings at the archives or to purchase copies, click on Audiovisual Services.

Tuesday, September 2, 2003 STANFORD Hoover Institution fellows will speak at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California as they give featured lectures in September and October. Research Fellow Peter Robinson, author of the new ...

Vice-Admiral Stockdale was on active duty in the regular navy for thirty-seven years. As a fighter pilot aboard an aircraft carrier, Stockdale was shot down on his second combat tour over North Vietnam. As the senior naval prisoner of war officer in Hanoi for eight years, he was tortured fifteen times, put in leg irons for two years, and put in solitary confinement for four years.

During his naval career, his shore duty consisted of three years as a test pilot and test pilot instructor at Patuxent River, Maryland; two years as a graduate student at Stanford University; one year in the Pentagon; and, finally, two years as president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

When physical disability from combat wounds brought about Jim Stockdale’s early retirement from military life, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer in the history of the navy to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor (CMH). Besides the CMH, his twenty-six combat decorations include two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Distinguished Service Medals, four Silver Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts.

As a civilian, Jim Stockdale was a college professor, a college president, and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His writings have been many and varied, but all converge on the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity.

Glenn Hubbard, dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School, reviewed his recent book with Tim Kane, Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America. 

With the growth of the administrative state, much of Congress’s policy-making role has been usurped by executive-branch agencies. Adam White reviews ‘Congress’s Constitution’ by Josh Chafetz.