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Although I haven't yet seen Watchmen (and almost certainly won't until it's on DVD and works its way up my Netflix queue), I unhesitatingly confer the ultimate accolade of 5 Checkers on the film simply on the basis of its basic premise: The events unfold in 1985 when,...

Seventy-six years ago today:

As I've written before, one of my favorite quotations from RN is: “Politics is battle, and the best way to fire up your troops is to rally them against a visible opponent on the other side of the field.  If a loyal supporter will fight hard for you, he will fight...

The new issue of The American Spectator has a column by Jonathan Aitken (former British cabinet minister and author of the one biography of President Nixon published in the post-presidential years that enjoyed RN's full cooperation) discussing Frost/Nixon. It turns...

If, like me, you find the following funny, then you'll probably enjoy the several other "More Apocryphal Stories of the Presidents" by Yoni Brenner in last week's New Yorker: On a rainy night in 1793, the Van Buren family ox slipped in the mud, fracturing its foreleg....

Clive Crook, whose column from and about America in the Financial Times usually has something interesting to say, yesterday tendered an apology to his Republican readers. As you recall, in the debate over the fiscal stimulus, Republicans accused the president of...

Once again, a  Happy St. David's Day to TNN readers. (In case you're wondering: Wales 23 England 15.)

Somehow, I should have known that a movie with a nuanced and more or less sensitive portrayal of the 37th President, Frost/Nixon, would soon be counterbalanced by one trading on the Evil Nixon archetype favored by so many of popular culture's tastemakers. Such a film...

The recently released C-SPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey is an interesting, if predictable, snapshot of scholarly opinion about past chief executives. Honest Abe towers over the list, his position secured by history and his frequent postmortem...

Edwin Trinka, the doorman at New York's fabled Plaza Hotel 46 years, is about to retire. In his decades there he's met countless folks who were rich, famous, or just looking for a good room for the night. His favorite guest of them all? "Richard Nixon was my favorite...