The New Criterion
(Mobile Version)

Notes & Comments

November 2003

Harold Bloom reads Gibbon



Professor Harold Bloom, the famous Yale literary critic, has been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We know this because he took space on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal to tell us so. Professor Bloom’s reading of the great historian has led him to the surprising conclusion that what the United States needs now is “a military personage as president,” and one, moreover, “who is more in the mode of Dwight Eisenhower than of Ulysses Grant.” Now who do you suppose Professor Bloom has in mind? Yes, you got it in one try:  

In Wesley Clark, we have a four-star general and former NATO commander who is a diplomatic unifier, an authentic hero, wise and compassionate. That Gen. Clark saved tens of thousands of Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo is irrefutable …
Actually, that last proposition is eminently debatable, as even a glance at the bumbling ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase

Log in

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 22 November 2003, on page 3
Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com


E-mail to friend(s)