Government & Politics

In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy asked the nation to disregard his religion; in 2000, George W. Bush stated Jesus was his favorite philosopher. How did faith become such an important criterion for the presidency? Religion professor and evangelical newspaper columnist Randall Balmer explains.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a new film by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, follows two women trying to arrange an illegal abortion in the repressive days of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship.

Slate magazine editor Jacob Weisberg has a few things to say about the presidency of George W. Bush. He's assembled his thoughts in a book called The Bush Tragedy, which Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein calls a "scorching, powerful and entirely plausible account" of an administration whose "epic collapse" Klein has lately been writing about.

The National Guard's Fighting 69th infantry, based in New York City, had been neglected until the events of Sept. 11, 2001. That day's terrorist attacks, and the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq, drove the unit to transform itself into a battle-ready force.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular Fresh Air analyst, joins Terry Gross for an update on Pakistani politics after the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

On HBO's The Wire, actor Michael K. Williams plays Omar Little, a stick-up guy who robs only drug dealers. Omar has a scar running down his face. That's not a prosthetic scar; it's real. Williams tells Terry Gross the story behind his scar — and lots of other stories about himself and Omar.

Fresh Air's TV critic previews the new series Breaking Bad, about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who decides that cooking crystal meth is the best way to support his family after he's gone. The show premieres on the AMC cable channel on Jan. 20.

Editor and cofounder of the conservative Washington-based political magazine, The Weekly Standard, and an opinion columnist for The New York Times, William Kristol is a neoconservative voice on the Iraq war; he was among those who advocated for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power before Sept. 11, 2001.

Carl Conetta co-directs the Project on Defense Alternatives, a defense-policy think tank. Earlier, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies; he served for three years as editor of their journal, Defense and Disarmament Alternatives, and of the Arms Control Reporter.

Baghdad-born activist Yanar Mohammed directs the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson was chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell; he became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration after leaving the State Department in January 2005.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He sits on the Council on Foreign Relations, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

A former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and a senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Peter Galbraith is author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End.

Gen. Sir Michael Rose was best known as the commander of the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia in the 1990s. In 2006, he called for the impeachment of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair for leading England into war in Iraq under false pretenses.

Ali Allawi served as minister of trade and minister of defense under the Interim Iraqi Governing Council from 2003 to '04, then was minister of finance in the Iraqi Transitional Government between 2005 and '06.

Iraqi-born professor Kanan Makiya teaches Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University, outside Boston. He is one of the leading Arab intellectuals who called for the removal of Saddam Hussein; he also advised the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq.

Lt. Col. John Nagl commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kan. He served in Operation Desert Storm and was the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He helped author the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

David Kirkpatrick is a correspondent in the Washington bureau for The New York Times. He covered the politics of the conservative Christian movement in the 2004 election, and has been following the presidential campaign of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

Julia Preston, national immigration correspondent for The New York Times, discusses the unintended consequences of the U.S. border crackdown — and how the battle over immigration is affecting communities across the country.

Historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes that Civil War deaths — both their number and their manner — transformed America. Her new book is This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.