Through their enterprise and style, they set a journalistic standard When TIME last chose the ten best U.S. dailies, in 1974, it seemed a buoyant era for newspapers: by publishing the Pentagon papers and exposing the Watergate scandal, they had recaptured the role as journalism's leader, which TV had assumed during the Viet Nam War. They had shown a new zeal for investigating local corruption. And they had begun to adopt technologies to achieve crisp graphics and photos; a growing ...

MORATORIUM" was scarcely a household word a couple of months ago. The dictionary definition is "a period of permissive or obligatory delay," and to most people it meant a pause in paying one's debts or in talking. Now, suddenly, "moratorium" has become the focus of national attention in its special 1969 sense: M-day, Oct. 15, a movement intended by its organizers and supporters to show the Nixon Administration that large and growing numbers of Americans want out of the Viet ...

Word leaked out almost as soon as the giant U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane touched down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns ...

The budget compromise reached by the White House and Congress this weekend included a "historic amount of cuts," as House Speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in their joint statement announcing the deal. "The largest annual spending cut in our history," boasted President Obama. Media coverage of the deal hailed the "sweeping" and "across-the-board" nature of the cuts. The Republican leadership has "shifted the focus in Washington away from spending and toward austerity" ...

The Pentagon is the most formidable redoubt in official Washington. Squat and solid as a feudal fortress, it hunkers in a remote reclaimed Virginia swamp that used to be called Hell's Bottom, across the Potomac River from the spires, colonnades and domes of the federal city. Through its two tiers of subbasements and five aboveground stories, windowless corridors weave like badger warrens. The bastion of America's military establishment not only houses the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of ...

While much of the focus on Tuesday's unveiling of President Obama's revamped Afghanistan strategy will be on the number of U.S. troops he's expected to send, that decision is really a sideshow to the critical battle now under way on the ground. Far more important to prospects of victory in Afghanistan is jump-starting a moribund effort to woo nonideological Taliban fighters to switch sides in exchange for paying jobs. Pentagon officials are hoping to repeat the success of similar ...

The Pentagon on Tuesday identified four U.S. Marines who died in one of two helicopter collisions Monday in Afghanistan.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Thursday the coalition in the war-torn country is going to have to do things "dramatically differently, even uncomfortably differently" in order to succeed. "We must operate and think in a fundamentally new way," Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think thank. He stressed the importance of connecting with the Afghan people, who he said are "frustrated" that more has not been accomplished in ...

Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all-time low, according to a new national poll. A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Tuesday morning indicates that 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed to the mission. Support is down from 53 percent in April, marking the lowest level since the start of the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan soon after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The poll suggests that 23 percent of ...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to approve sending thousands of additional forces to Afghanistan to deal with the growing threat from roadside bombs, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Friday. Over the past two weeks, Gates has concluded that there are not enough forces or equipment in Afghanistan to protect U.S. troops from the threat of roadside bombs, Morrell said. The secretary, he said, wants to send these forces "as soon as possible." Morrell said the deployment would be separate ...