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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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On presidential statements in time of crisis

By James Fallows

Oct 10 2008, 11:05 AM ET

To follow up the item from a few minutes ago:

When a president speaks on live TV in a moment of crisis, he should be prepared to do one or both of the following things:

1) Announce some solution, plan, change, initiative, or other specific effort that will address the source of public concern.

2) Explain the problem, or set a mood for coping with it ("we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds.. we shall never surrender"), in a way that changes the public's outlook from what it was before the speech.

If a president doesn't have the ammo to do either of those things, he should not bother. Thus, unfortunately, President Bush should not have bothered to make his statement this morning, which essentially re-stated the arguments he has presented before that did not suffice to stop the panic. Let's hope for more real action over the weekend.



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