The Day RN Got Behind The Wheel

Silver Spring, Maryland, where I live, has a number of ties to the 37th President. A half-mile north of my house, two teenagers lived on Harvey Road in the 1950s and early 1960s, the best of friends. One was future Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein; the other, future...

J.D. Salinger At 90

Today, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, famed worldwide for his one novel The Catcher In The Rye (and, to a lesser degree, for such classic stories as “A Perfect Day For Banafish” and “For Esme With Love and Squalor”) reaches the age of ninety.  If...

The Barack Ballad of Abraham, Franklin, And John

With apologies to Dion and his now 40-year-old song – Abraham, Martin, and John – I see the ghosts of three past presidents standing slightly off stage as the nation watches the approach of inauguration day. The ancient Israelites tended to name-drop a...

RN Wishes Old Friends A Happy New Year

On 31 December 1971, RN was in the Lincoln Sitting Room working on the text of one of the most important —and still understudied— documents of his administration.  It was the strategic overview of his vision of foreign policy that would be sent to Congress...

The First Reader

It is hard to determine whether the number of books read by a President during his or her term, and which ones, have any real correlation to ability in leadership and governance.  Lyndon Johnson, famously, was reported never to have cracked open a book in his five...