Nixon launched it, Carter killed it and Reagan resurrected it. In its infancy, the Air Force's B-1 bomber was a quick and dirty military metaphor — Republicans wanted to buy weapons to defend the nation from the Soviet Union, and Democrats didn't. Now it could become a different kind of symbol: the Air Force is thinking of retiring its total 66-plane B-1 fleet to hit budget targets set by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Top Air Force officials ...

Roe v. Wade. Sometimes those seem like the most contentious words in American law. Short and unassuming though they are, they connote other, more explosive terms: abortion and murder, morality and privacy, the right to life and the right to choose. Attached to those words are some of the most intractable passions in American life. Writing about medical advances that improve the chances for a fetus to survive outside the womb, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor once declared ...

"You will be visiting Berlin at a time of ferment," Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to his boss, Ronald Reagan, on May 11, 1987. The confidential memo was included in the briefing materials given to Reagan before a trip to Europe, which would include a speech in West Berlin. "Your address ... offers the chance to call for the lowering of East-West barriers and an improved situation in Berlin," a city that had been divided for ...

The tale sounded really too bizarre to be believed. The U.S. conniving at arms shipments to Iran? Sending a secret mission to palaver with the mullahs? Trying to keep the whole thing from Congress and most of the U.S. Government? And all over Iran, of all places! The country that held Americans hostage for 444 days beginning in 1979, the land whose fanatical leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, has never ceased to denounce America as the "Great Satan," the state widely ...

With an assist from Duarte, Reagan reassures Congress and critics The Reagan Administration wants to give billions of dollars to Central America, it says, to support liberty and political pluralism. Yet democracy in Central America is a patchy business at best. From among the few authentic democrats in the region, the U.S. has staked most of its money and hopes on Jos Napolen Duarte, who will assume El Salvador's presidency on Friday. Last week he came to Washington for four ...

Ronald Reagan preaches "a New Beginning," but Americans trying to envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially sane and minimalist White House presiding over a "normality" that the nation has not experienced for a generation. Even some voters who are chilled by ...

With its finely wrought balustrade, the Doric columns supporting its portico, the Villa Pietri looked like a Roman nobleman's villa that had somehow been misplaced on the edge of the African continent. It was the headquarters from which Gaddafi directed the global activities of his terrorist network. The Libyan leader himself had assigned those who went out from the villa to do his bidding their leitmotif: "Everything that puts an infected thorn in the foot of our enemies is good." ...

By Sunday morning they were back on station in the central Mediterranean north of Libya: the carriers America and Coral Sea, 14 escort warships and two other support vessels. Once again, as in the clashes around the Gulf of Sidra three weeks ago, the flattops were prepared to launch their 160 fighters and bombers against targets in the desert country of Dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But this time there was no pretext that the exercise was to assert the right of ...

Famously dubbed the "mad dog of the Middle East" by former President Ronald Reagan, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has a reputation that has run the gamut from eccentric revolutionary to international pariah over his long career. Often seen swathed in animal skins and surrounded by a posse of virgin female bodyguards, the colorful leader has become as well known for his unusual personality as for his controversial political moves, the latest of which included celebrating convicted ...