News

Yesterday, four men lunched at the White House at the invitation of President Bush. But not just any four. They were President-elect Obama and former Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. This was the very first time all present and former...

The answer is: Elvis (on right in photo above), born 8 January 1935. But tomorrow the correct answer will be: RN, born 9 January 1913.

"Someone has to be pretty fascinating, pretty enigmatic, pretty Nixonian to keep one fascinated for 28 3/4 hours." So says Sir David Frost about President Nixon in this CNN article (with accompanying video clip). Frost also discusses his visit to San Clemente with...

The initial wire-service reports this afternoon of  President-elect Obama's appointment of Leon Panetta to become director of the CIA made mention of his work in the Clinton Administration's first term as director of the Office of Management and Budget and as White...

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...

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 he's having a party, it's...

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 patriarchal hat...

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 on 9...

The interview conducted by David Halbfinger and Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times with Caroline Kennedy (who seems to have dropped the name Schlossberg permanently), as linked below in today's Featured Articles, did not have the headline "As A Candidate,...

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...