News
Leonard Bernstein’s 1972 Counter-Inaugural
I recently posted a piece about Alex Ross' three New Yorker articles based on the material released as a result of his Freedom of Information Act requests regarding the government's interest in Leonard Bernstein. The bulk loyalty investigations were earlier...
Pat Nixon’s Influence: An Historical Reflection
PN - pictured at the Miami Beach Convention Center in August 1972 - was the first Republican First lady to have a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention. (Photo Credit: Life Magazine) In 1984, First Lady Nancy Reagan addressed the Republican National...
More On Ted Kennedy, Nixon, And Health Care
The story of how President Nixon's plan for comprehensive health care for all Americans fell by the wayside in 1974 because Sen. Ted Kennedy thought it possible to get a plan more to his liking enacted after a Democratic President entered the Oval Office has been the...
The Way It Is — And Almost The Way It Was
Robert Nedelkoff has noted ---here and here--- the remarkable revelation ---first by Senator George McGovern in a 2008 New York Times op-ed, and, more recently elucidated, by Frank Mankiewicz in the Washington Post--- that candidate McGovern had considered offering...
One Of The Stories He Told
60 Minutes devoted its entire hour on Sunday to its progenitor and long-time executive producer Don Hewitt, who died a week ago today. In typical 60 Minutes style, the program was informative, provocative, and entertaining. Hewitt always said that his editorial...
Nixon, Cancer, and Serious Medicine
President Nixon launched the War on Cancer, which he considered a key initiative of his presidency. When Frank Gannon asked him if he had enjoyed more victories than defeats, he said: "That will depend on what happens. If, for example, there's a breakthrough in...
Change We Can Believe In
From a profile of uber lobbyist Heather Podesta ("the Insider's Insider") by Manuel Roig-Franzia in today's WaPo: In a glum economy, the lobbying business feels kind of bubbly. Every new Obama proposal comes with acres of fine print for corporate powers, interests...
WWNHD?
I'm always hesitant to speculate on What Would Nixon Have Done? --- partly because who really knows, and partly because such speculation too easily becomes an exercise in what the speculator wants done. But I can, unreservedly and without any hesitation or shadow of a...
We Have Ways Of Making You Laugh
Leave it to a German academic ---Helga Kotthoff of the Frieburg University of Education--- to conduct research establishing that, as a headline in the Telegraph puts it, "Humor is an act of aggression." (Which, as headlines go, is in the category of "Dog Bites Man.")...
Unworthy Of Trust, Confidence, Or Being Read
On 2 August the New York Post ran a long excerpt from Ronald Kessler's new book In the President's Secret Service. Mr. Kessler has an impressive record as a responsible journalist, a serious author, and a go-to blogger, so I was surprised at the titillating and...