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Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

Ben Wattenberg — the gloriously unclassifiable public intellectual, journalist, television host, amateur demographer, and loving student of America — passed away yesterday at the age of 81. Among Wattenberg’s many gifts to his country, his unwavering refusal to abide any simple narrative of American decline always struck me as the greatest.

Senator John Kerry has been comparing the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and indicating that they are very similar; his conclusion is its time to get out. Not for the first time, Kerry is dead wrong. There are indeed similarities, but — not withstanding what we read and see in the media — there are important differences as well. Let me offer a blunt appraisal. It is not regarded as polite to mention it — almost no one does — but most of the grunts in Vietnam were draftees; in Iraq, they all volunteered. On the Vietnam Memorial in Washington...

The Commanding Heights BEN WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. When Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin coined the phrase ’the commanding heights’ he was referring to the locus of national economic power. That is, the major enterprises and the major industries. The epic struggle between the government and the marketplace to control those commanding heights has profoundly altered human history since the close of World War II. Joining us to explore that history and its consequences are Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Yergin, co-author with Joseph Stanislaw of The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That is Remaking the Modern...

  Arthur Herman    Coordinator of the Smithsonian’s Western Heritage Program, and author of "How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It"   Robert Galvin    Retired Chairman of the Board of Motorola and author of America’s Founding Secret: What the Scottish Enlightenment Taught Our Founding Fathers Great Scots!Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Only three centuries ago, Scotland was a primitive country still home to savages living in huts, barbaric wars, and witch trials. But not long after, Scottish philosophers created a common sense approach to the study of political...

Richard Perle: The Making of a NeoconservativeBen Wattenberg: Hello. Richard Perle, the infamous and famous Richard Perle, thank you for joining us on Think Tank.Richard Perle: It’s a pleasure to be with you Ben.Ben Wattenberg: Well, why don’t we pick up the Perle story at that swimming pool. Whose swimming pool was it and what were you doing there?Richard Perle: It was Albert Wohlstetter’s swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills. Albert’s daughter, Joan, was a classmate at Hollywood High School. We sat next to each other in Spanish class. She passed, I didn’t, but she invited me over for a...

Ivo Daalder    Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, member of the National Security Council during the Clinton Administration, and co-author of "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy"  Karl Zinsmeister    Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, editor-in-chief of The American Enterprise magazine and author of "Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq." Iraqi Hearts and MindsTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERGTTBW 1128 PBS feed 10/9/2003“Iraqi Hearts and Minds” Funding for Think Tank is provided by: At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists...