Jeff Greenfield

    Jeff Greenfield is a Yahoo! News columnist and the host of “Need to Know” on PBS. A five-time Emmy winner, he has spent more than 30 years on network television, including CBS News, CNN, and ABC News.

  • Last call for JFK's ‘New Frontier’: A celebration of endurance and recollection

    It's easy to overlook this stark fact: Of the 43 men who have served as president, only four served fewer days in office than John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  • Words can cause presidents self-inflicted wounds

    Compelling lines in speeches can become dangerous, memorable lines.

  • What if Kennedy lived?

    A Yahoo News columnist imagines a very different country had JFK not been assassinated 50 years ago.

  • A cautionary note about the GOP disaster

    When government fails, it may not matter in the long term which party gets blamed.

  • Default: Are there people in Congress who really would do such a thing?

    So, you ask, how could the wealthiest nation on earth, the linchpin of global financial stability, really be heading toward a default whose consequences range from the seriously harmful to catastrophic?

  • When up is down and down is up: the political paradoxes of Obamacare

    The Republican intraparty warfare over Obamacare is just one part of the confusion the health care law has triggered.

  • A breathless nation awaits. Or does it?

    Obama's speech is less portentous than those of past presidents, and not just because of the specifics of the Syrian dilemma. It's the diminished power of a president to persuade.

  • If only all we had to do was ‘Dream’

    If we really want to mark the meaning of the March on Washington of 50 years ago, we would do well to put aside the endless invocations of “the dream” and remember the harsher realities of race in 1963.

  • A welcome train of thought

    Why does the U.S. lead in one area of technological innovation but fall so far behind in another?

  • Sex and Character

    What does the behavior of political men tell us about their fitness for public office? Hint: if you can come up with a unified field theory, congratulations. I can’t.

  • Nelson Mandela's legacy — and its limitations

    Mandela's commitment to non-violence didn't solve South Africa's problems. But it may have saved the country.

  • Time is on my side

    If you have reached three-score and ten, as I have just done, you’re permitted, perhaps expected, to mourn the passing of a better time, when tomatoes were tastier, the air sweeter. As Burt Lancaster in “Atlantic City” says to a young man struck by his first sight of the ocean, “You should have seen it in the old days.”

  • In tragedy, consolation only goes so far

    When John Kennedy Jr., son of the former president, died with his wife and sister-in-law in a plane crash in 1999, I heard a well-known televangelist assured us that “this is all part of God’s plan.”

  • Weighing a candidate

    Maybe I’m just too naive to be writing and talking about politics.

  • How much crow can a president eat? Obama’s finding out

    So you wake up this morning and find you’re President of the United States. Pretty cool, no?

  • Setting an example

    After a lifetime immersed in American politics, perhaps it was inevitable that my reaction to the early days of the new papacy has been to conjure up memories….of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

  • Roger and me

    For millions, Roger Ebert will be remembered as a writer and television personality who brought a sense of passion and excellence to his craft. For me, he is a man who fused joy and courage as few others ever have. My life was enriched by having such a friend; it is poorer for losing such a friend.

  • When labels distort

    In the flood of commentary engulfing us about the gay marriage cases before the Supreme Court, be wary--be very, very wary--about how the labels “conservative and liberal” are thrown around.

  • 10 years since Iraq invasion: Delusion is worse than lies

    Next Tuesday, March 19, marks the 10th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq; a war propelled by the assertion that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the U.S.

  • Michael Bloomberg’s cross-country election shopping spree

    When I heard the radio commercial attacking a candidate for the Los Angeles School Board, it didn’t make much of an impression—until I heard the tag line.