It’s strange interviewing a friend who is dying, but Karl Zinsmeister is at peace. I met Karl in Washington, DC, in the spring of 1981, when we two Upstate New York hicks were new to the staff of Senator Pat Moynihan. The first thing I learned about him was that he and his girlfriend (and later wife) Ann, while on some do-gooder mission in Africa, had wandered into Tanzania and been held on suspicion of being spies. (They weren’t.)

Karl threw himself into both intellectual and manual labor with fierce enthusiasm, doggedness, even hard-headedness. Over the past 45 years he has edited magazines, renovated ruined tenements, been embedded in Iraq, raised three kids, lived with Ann on a houseboat, served as White House chief of domestic policy and produced more than 20 books. Now, he has Stage 4 cancer.

How West Midlands Police became a tool of the anti-Jewish mob

What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?

The German army’s drones disaster

Karl is one of the most physical writers I have ever known. He rowed crew at Yale but he could just as easily have been a hod carrier or stevedore. And when he was into something, he was........

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