MacArthur, John R.
John R. (Rick) MacArthur is president and publisher of Harper's Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in America. He has served in this role since 1983. Mr. MacArthur is also an award-winning journalist and author. In 2008, he published his third book entitled, You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. Mr. MacArthur writes a monthly column for the Providence Journal and, in French, for Le Devoir (Montreal) on a wide range of topics from politics to culture.
Mr. MacArthur's first book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, was a finalist for the 1993 Mencken Award for books and won the Illinois ACLU's 1992 Harry Kalven Freedom of Expression award. His critically acclaimed follow-up, The Selling of “Free Trade”: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy, was published in the spring of 2000.
Mr. MacArthur initiated the foundation-sponsored rescue of Harper's Magazine in 1980. Under his stewardship the magazine has received numerous awards and the support of advertisers and readers alike. Since 1994 the magazine has received 18 National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest recognition.
Before joining Harper's Magazine, Mr. MacArthur was an assistant foreign editor at United Press International (1982) and a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times (1979-1982), Bergen Record (1978-1979), Washington Star (1978), and the Wall Street Journal (1977). He received the 1993 Mencken Award for best editorial/op-ed column for his New York Times expose of “Nayirah,” the Kuwaiti diplomat's daughter who helped fake the Iraqi baby-incubator atrocity.
A tireless advocate for international human rights, Mr. MacArthur founded and serves on the board of directors of the Death Penalty Information Center and the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center. Along with members of his family he founded Article 19, the International Center on Censorship, based in London, and in 1989 he initiated and helped organize the PEN/Article 19/Author's Guild rally for Salman Rushdie. He is also on the board of directors of the Author's Guild, and he is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Born on June 4, 1956, in New York City, Mr. MacArthur grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, and graduated in 1978 from Columbia College with a B.A. in history. He lives with his wife and two daughters in New York City.
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur They say America is the land of the second chance -- the chance to make good on a promise, a project or a virtuous deed that might lead to redemption. But in the case of Henry Kissinger, the chances never seem to run out, no matter how much harm he d |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur A few days after I voted in the first round of the French presidential election, I dropped by the French Cultural Center on Fifth Avenue to attend a reception in honor of the American novelist Paul Auster—and to gather some political intelligence. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Given my dissident politics, I should be up in arms about the
Israel lobby. Not only have I supported the civil rights of the
Palestinians over the years, but two of my principal intellectual
mentors were George W. Ball and Edward Said, both severe c |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur With talk at last turning seriously to a possible pull-out of American troops from Iraq, my thoughts run immediately to the fall of Saigon in 1975. That was the last time the United States had to face on a large scale a grave moral question: Whom amo |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur I know I was supposed to love it, but when I was a kid I was scared of the circus. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Whenever liberals moan about the sorry state of American print journalism, I'm reminded of A.J. Liebling, the great New Yorker press critic of the 1950s and '60s, who remarked that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Sometimes it's great to be wrong. When the Democrats took the House and the Senate—contrary to my published expectations—I breathed a sigh of relief. So what if James Webb is a pulp-fiction-writing former Reaganite. The senator-elect from Virginia an |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur WATERBURY, Conn. It might seem unfair to the citizens of this worn-out jewel of New England's industrial past, but come Nov. 7, Waterbury voters could well determine the future conduct, not only of the Democratic Party, but of the war in Iraq. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Ever since George Bush's take-it-easy response to Hurricane Katrina, the chattering classes have been trumpeting Republican “vulnerability” and the likelihood of the Democrats' retaking one, if not both, houses of Congress. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur I'm what you might call a train buff—not the obsessive camera-toting variety who hangs around stations and crossings snapping “action” shots, but nonetheless a passionate devotee of railroad travel. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur If you're having trouble understanding why America has been sitting on its hands while Israel devastates Lebanon and Hezbollah fires missiles at Haifa, I refer you to the fall of 1990, when American diplomacy attained a new level of cynicism in its d |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Last month, when the White House attacked The New York Times for revealing a secret Treasury Department surveillance program, it was tempting to conclude that the thieves were falling out among themselves. The Times, according to Bush and his congres |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur I don't consider myself naive about war, but then I've never been in the military and certain childish notions die harder than others. So when I read more confirmations of the apparent U.S. Marines' massacre of 24 civilians in Iraq, I felt as though |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur If you want to know why the Democrats are unlikely to retake the majority in either house of Congress this November, you need look no further than the boilerplate party platform, just published, entitled America Back on Track and allegedly written by |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Usually I give The New York Times's right-wing columnist John Tierney a pass in the morning. I like my ideologues witty—or at least outrageous—and Tierney, like his stablemate David Brooks, almost never delivers on either count (except, perhaps, in h |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur It's hard not to chuckle at the Democratic Party cash-in on “Portgate,” the proposed sale of big East Coast port operations to Dubai Ports World. (The company is owned by the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a part.) The other day a Washington |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Every time I take my kids to the Tecumseh Playground, at 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, in Manhattan, I'm troubled by a political paradox. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur The last time I saw Eugene McCarthy was in July, and we didn't have much of a conversation. Parkinson's disease and old age had dimmed the witty and philosophical voice that always left me feeling ahead of where we'd started out. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur Football aphorisms and analogies usually leave me cold—such “life lesson” clichés seem designed to pacify an already somnolent population of television-addicted zombies. |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur New York — It's been dreadful, these past three years putting up with George Bush's fraudulent rationales for invading Iraq. And there's no respite in sight — the phony justifications keep coming, no matter how many corpses pile up, no matter how bad |
| WEB ONLY | By John R. MacArthur
A commencement address delivered to the graduating class of Eastern Connecticut State University on May 23, 2004.
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| JULY 2009 BARACK HOOVER OBAMA
LABOR’S LAST STAND
WAIT TILL YOU SEE ME DANCE
Also: Mark Slouka and Paul West |