Steven Stark

WITH all the media coverage occasioned by the thirtieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's death, Joe McGinniss’s biography of Edward Kennedy, The Last Brother, rather got lost.

Patrick J. Buchanan—iconoclastic pundit, former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, challenger to George Bush in 1992, and self-styled rabble-rouser—is not going to win the Republican nomination in 1996, much less the presidency.

The reason, of course, was Ronald Reagan himself—the first President to talk openly of government as "the enemy" and of dismantling the protections of the modern welfare state that both parties had endorsed almost since women had gotten the vote. At the same time, certain trends had been crystallizing as a result of the so-called second wave of feminism, which had begun with the promise of making men and women equal.