Steve Vogel's Clippings

To Chris Wallace: You’re to be forgiven if you’re having bad dreams about what could occur in the first Trump-Biden debate you’re about to moderate. I’ve refereed several broadcast debates over the years—but none so laden with so many perilous potentials. But I do want to help. Just for practice, let’s address some nightmarish scenarios …

Among the many interesting people I interviewed in my 22 years as host of a radio talk show were Ed and Lorraine Warren, sometimes referred to as the “grandparents of paranormal investigation”. Their story is featured in a new two-hour documentary, “Devil’s Road: The True Story of Ed and Lorraine Warren”, on The Travel Channel, …

I worked my way through undergraduate school (and got much of my journalism education) by being a sportswriter for a pretty good smaller-city newspaper, The Bloomington, Ill., Pantagraph. Mostly I covered high school sports. But in October of 1967 I got the chance to cover a single World Series game between the St. Louis Cardinals …

There’s a group of former members of Congress who now label the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate as dysfunctional institutions incapable of meeting the needs of our troubled nation. The report by the Association of Former Members of Congress is available at https://www.usafmc.org/congressxroads It’s worth a look. But I have to say that …

It’s not that I didn’t find things to laugh aloud about in Christopher Buckley’s new political satire, Make Russia Great Again. It’s that so much of what he conjures up in his imitable style is, well, just so plausible. The book is set in the present moment and in the voice of a Roger Stone-like …

In 1983 central Illinois was shocked by the killings of a young mother and her three children, a case that became the subject of my book, Reasonable Doubt. The husband and father, David Hendricks, was convicted and later acquitted of the murders. They were members of an almost primitive fundamentalist Christian group. Prosecutors claimed Hendricks’s …