STEEPED IN TIME

FANFAIR

Tall, silver-maned, Lewis Lapham classically cuts an increasingly distinctive figure in the world of magazine publishing. He'd fill out a toga with conviction, as befits a patrician scold of a dying republic. In a previous life he was surely Cato. In this one he has twice re-invented Harper's magazine (1976-81 and 1983-2006) in his own image—acerbic, urbane, pessimistic, impatient, prescient. But editor emeritus is not Lapham's idea of a job. Now he has launched a new journal, Lapham’s Quarterly. It's about history, and each number will be devoted to a single topic—money, sex, fame, nature, Utopia. The first thick issue is about war. There are scores of excerpts from contributors like Thucydides and Shakespeare, Patton and Eisenhower, Whitman and Twain—no pesky agents to deal withl— but also full-dress original articles (Fritz Stern on the phenomenon of "imperial hubris," for instance). Small sidebars offer precious nuggets. Here's one, taken from White House tapes, in which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger discuss the bombing of North Vietnam in 1972:

NIXON: I think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people? KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand. NIXON: No, no, no... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry? KISSINGER: That, I think, would just be too much.

CULLEN MURPHY