Suzanne Fields

SUZANNE FIELDS: Hillary Clinton’s money problems

We laughed at Jimmy Carter for carrying his suitcase into the White House. The government supplies aides to do that for presidents. Such humility is pretentious.

May 6, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Bruce Jenner and the tangled web of sexual sensation

In the age of the selfie, Bruce Jenner may be the icon of our time. He sustains two images of himself to mediate the feuding feminist and chauvinist attitudes at the center of today's battle of the sexes (should that be the "grind of the genders"?). At the age of 65, reflecting on his life as the athletic hunk who married three times and sired six children, he says he can now liberate a laid-back distaff self that is the "soul of a woman."

April 29, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: FBI uses Holocaust to understand evil within ‘good people,’ appreciate America

James B. Comey, the director of the FBI, at 6-foot-8 is the tallest man in the Obama administration. Despite his height and position, he emerged in sharp relief in the public eye only this week for a remarkable speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington about why he requires every new special agent and intelligence analyst to visit the museum.

April 22, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Selling the new Hillary Clinton

Joe McGinnis, a young writer who got access to the advertising agency with the Nixon account in 1968, changed the way we thought about electing presidents with his best-seller, "The Selling of the President."

April 15, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: ‘Mad Men’ sexual morals highlight current day sexual hypocrisy

Sometimes a rolling stone that gathers no moss picks up a lot of dirt, sticks and debris. That happened when one particular Rolling Stone published a slanderous and sloppy attempt to tell a story about a fictitious gang rape at the University of Virginia. The magazine "officially" retracted the story only after the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated how it failed at every level of responsible reporting and editing.

April 8, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Germanwings crash reminds us to be thankful

Tragedy never takes a holiday, and the days just overflowed with fear and grief. A German airliner crashes into the French Alps, and then three buildings in the East Village of New York collapse after a basement explosion, days after a hot plate left unattended to warm food sets fire to a house in Brooklyn, and six of eight children die. Suddenly there's no room in our hearts and minds to think about political tragedy that may be playing out in the Middle East.

April 1, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Hillary Clinton, Monica Lewinsky lessons in rebounding from adversity

Monica Lewinsky is back, and playing offense. The woman in the little blue dress is giving a Ted talk about the "culture of humiliation," scolding cyberbullies who wound innocents, and reclaiming a personal narrative in her own voice. She's burning the beret and the blue dress with a telltale stain, "giving purpose to my past" in the name of a softer feminism that she says begins with a "little f."

March 25, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Benjamin Netanyahu is bulwark against anti-Semitism

Foreign elections don't always interest Americans very much. But Benjamin Netanyahu has become a familiar name in America, almost pronounceable, since his speech to Congress. Many Americans, Democrats and Republicans, cheered him to the polls in Israel this week.

March 18, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Hillary Clinton sabotages her own ambitions

Hillary Clinton has been a reflection of the changing images of women in America for decades. She's had more reincarnations than Shirley MacLaine, more fashion makeovers than Cher, more comebacks from bad press than Madonna. The images always need updating. She's the life-size balloon toy, weighted at the bottom, that a child smacks over and watches with surprise and suspicion when it bobs back upright.

March 11, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Netanyahu’s Bible lesson from Queen Esther

Benjamin Netanyahu leavened his powerful account of what's really at stake in the nuclear negotiations with Iran with a little history and a little wisdom from the Bible. And why not? The war against the terrorists in the Middle East is a war against evil men peddling a violent perversion of a religion.

March 4, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: ‘Ida’ jolts Hollywood’s‘ glitzy celebration

Hollywood can't help itself. The glitteries inevitably use the Academy Awards to push their personal politics, sometimes cheap and occasionally not, rewarding razzle-dazzle over real life. This year the two most important Oscars, for best picture and best director, went to "Birdman," about razzle-dazzle, and not "Boyhood," about real life.

February 25, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Americans don’t know how government works

Another Presidents Day, like the presidents it was meant to honor, has come and gone and nobody remembers what it was all about, beyond another three-day weekend for federal employees and a little hype to sell automobiles and snake oil. Presidents Day replaces holidays to mark the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, and now, presumably, the catch-all honor is extended to William Henry Harrison, Chester Alan Arthur and Millard Fillmore as well.

February 18, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: England’s bewildering identity crisis

England is having an identity crisis — Scotland is just getting over one — and just in time to hover over national elections.

February 11, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Angela Merkel tangles with Alexis Tsipras over austerity

Angela Merkel, the no-nonsense leader of Germany and protector of the euro, has a fearless new rival. Alexis Tsipras, the newly elected prime minister of Greece, and the leader of the left-wing Syriza Party, offers a different understanding of economics: Spend money whether you have it or not, and get someone else to pay up. Eager to reduce a multitude of problems to caricature, the Greeks regard themselves as caught between a stern German disciplinarian, the "austerity dominatrix," and the man playful Greek women call "Sexy Alexi."

February 4, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: ‘Me Generation’ becomes ‘Look at Me Generation’

Heroes, real ones, are getting harder to find. One of the few remaining annual surprises in the typical State of the Union address is the president's introduction of his "mystery guest." President Reagan introduced the first one in 1982, celebrating one Leonard Skutnik for an extraordinary act of courage.

January 28, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: France’s deep history of anti-Semitism

A widely distributed political cartoon by Ranan Lurie, published after the massacre of four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, depicts a tiny shrub above ground and just below the surface, supporting the plant, is a web of thick twisted roots spread in the design of the swastika.

January 21, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: France’s anti-immigration National Front grows after Charlie Hebdo attacks

An atrocity is a terrible way to increase a magazine's circulation, but that's how Charlie Hebdo got its current run of 3 million copies or more, up from 65,000. Satire, once regarded on Broadway as "what closed on Saturday night," now sells, and this week in Paris it might sell out.

January 14, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: Bess Myerson, first Jewish Miss America, dies at 90

Bess Myerson, whose death at age 90 was revealed this week, was a Miss America who lived through nearly a century of change in the perception of "the ideal American woman." She paid for celebrity in the way many celebrities before and after her paid. She was crowned in 1945, when the Miss America Pageant was taken more seriously than it is today, and she was anything but the typical "queen of femininity."

January 7, 2015

SUZANNE FIELDS: New year wish to prevent old age

When that old man with a long white beard turns over the new year to a robust, round baby in diapers, they share framed edges of life, one at the end and one just beginning. With the help of science, an old man today passing the baton has a greater life expectancy than his predecessor did in 1840 when data began to show steady increases. The baby this year is lively and bouncing and need not worry as much about infant mortality.

December 31, 2014

SUZANNE FIELDS: Holiday warmth with family, friends can turn into heated debate

'Tis the season when we're supposed to be jolly, our lives brightened by lights on the Christmas tree, candles on the menora, gift giving and gift receiving, warming us, however frightful the weather outside.

December 24, 2014