News
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...
Getting Away From The —Oval— Office
Today's Daily Beast offers a "Media Gallery" of Presidential vacations. The slideshow includes TR's 1909 post-presidential African safari. HST vacationed aboard the presidential yacht USS Williamsburg, or at the Little White House in Key Biscayne --- where he relaxed...
All The Way The LBJ Way
Up close and very, very personal: newly nominated Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas receives the "LBJ Treatment" in July 1965 in this classic photo by Yoichi Okamoto. Over at the Daily Beast, former LBJ aide Tom Johnson addresses WWLBJD? --- how the 36th POTUS would...
If You’re Tired Of “Frost/Nixon”….
....then the Orlando Sentinel has an article that may tickle your fancy - about Bill and Sue Wills, a Maryland team of husband-and-wife actors who, for years, have been presenting two-person shows in which they portray a President and First Lady. So far they've...
Ted Kennedy’s Plea
The absence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy last week from the funeral of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, followed by the death on Tuesday morning of columnist Robert Novak, who was diagnosed with brain cancer not long after the lawmaker fell ill from the same cause,...