But such may not be the case, as recounted in Alex Pappas’s article about President Nixon’s grandson, GOP congressional candidate Chris Cox. Recalling the time he spent with his grandfather, he says:

“I remember we went to lots of baseball games together and played basketball together. I tell you, he had a mean shot from the top of the key.”

And from a story by the Associated Press:

The aspiring politician says his grandfather, who mostly talked with him about the Mets and Giants before his death in 1994, when Cox was 15, did provide advice that may come in handy between now and November.

“What he would tell me is the only way you lose is if you stay on the floor,” Cox said. “You’re going to get knocked down time and time again, but keep coming back. And keep trying. The only time you lose is when you stop trying.”

Most of the students came over on aircraft chartered by the African American Students Foundation, a group organized by Mboya and William X. Scheinman, with the help of both white and black sponsors, including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Jackie Robinson. Although the late Barack Obama Sr., father of the forty-fourth President, did not travel to Hawaii on one of these flights (he came to Honolulu on a commercial flight, financed by two American teachers he’d met in Kenya), his stay in the Aloha State, where he met and married Stanley Dunham and fathered the future President, was made possible in large degree by scholarships from the AASF (at the recommendation of his mentor Mboya).

David Remnick’s recent bestselling biography of President Obama, The Bridge, has stirred up interest in this program again, and Shactman has a short article at the New York Times’s website discussing it. (See also this letter to the Times Book Review by Cora Weiss, who was executive director of the AASF.)

With Governor Hickel’s passing, George P. Shultz (Secretary of Labor, 1969-1970) and Melvin R. Laird (Secretary of Defense, 1969-1973) are now the last living members of the Cabinet that entered office with RN.

The deaths of the students were preceded by the burning of a building used by Kent State’s ROTC chapter. One member of the chapter was William Schroeder, one of the students who died. Another was David Rust, who at the time was planning a military career and took a job maintaining the chapter’s rifles. The events of May 4 changed his mind and made him decide to go into journalism. He’s been a cameraman with CNN for nearly thirty years, and at the channel’s website he writes about the events of that day:

As I watched the four days unfold, I was struck by the images I saw in person and the stories on the national news.

I heard news reports of “thousands” of student protesters, but I had only seen a few hundred in the protests before May 4. Many were like me, just watching what was going on.

It amazed me that the events unfolding at this small university could affect people’s opinion of their country and their government.

I was also impressed by the dramatic photos that captured the events, including one shot by John Filo, a Kent photojournalism student.

It showed a 14-year-old girl kneeling beside the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of the dead students. The photo earned a Pulitzer Prize for Filo. It also had a huge impact on the American public.

The power of the media coverage of the Kent State protests opened a whole new world for me.

For the first time I began to think about journalism. Six week later, when school reopened, I began to take my education more seriously. My grades dramatically improved, and I started focusing on a profession. I returned home to California and started taking writing and photography classes at Pasadena City College. The more I learned, the more obsessed I became with the news business.

With the help of friends working for televisions stations in Los Angeles, I learned to operate a television news camera.

Two years later, I heard about Ted Turner’s new experiment in 24-hour news, and I started working for CNN’s bureau in Los Angeles.

It all started with an unexpected lesson learned from a tragedy 40 years ago.

And at Time.com there’s an article about “Ohio,” Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s song, recorded later in May 1970.

Some of you may be saying, “But wait, wasn’t Bill Buckley an elitist, the ultimate patrician, the man with a New York City maisonette and a limousine and driver? Wouldn’t he dismiss the tea party people as a bunch of ignorant emotional backwoods yahoos?”

Well, according to a New York Times/CBS survey, supporters of the tea party are wealthier and better educated than the general public. More than 90 percent of them think the country is heading in the wrong direction. An overwhelming majority say that President Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and does not understand their problems.

Bill Buckley would be very comfortable with such yahoos. After all, it was he who said in a debate at Harvard University: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty.”

It wasn’t until recently, though, that I learned that it was President Nixon who standardized observance of Arbor Day by proclamation in 1970, fixing it on the last Friday of April. Here’s an article about the ways in which the day is observed.

This week, the disaster that released enormous quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, near southeastern Louisiana, is threatening the fishing and shrimping industries of five states. This has been the big story, at a time when the Gulf region, like the rest of America, is trying to get on the road to economic recovery. But the environmental aspect also looms large, as Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation points out in the New York Times:

Oil, however, is too complicated for simple solutions. Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

Although environmental awareness has been a long-running theme in American culture from Henry David Thoreau’s books like Walden to the present, and while Theodore Roosevelt’s initiatives to preserve the beauty of large portions of the American wilderness increased this awareness, concerns over environmental pollution are of more recent origin. Warnings about the dangerous effects of chemicals and other pollutants on wildlife began to be sounded when industrial production increased as part of the effort to fight and win World War II, and it was just after that war that the legislation now administered by the EPA and other Federal agencies began to be enacted, or, in some cases, replaced earlier bills restricting pollution. It is worthwhile to note that such legislation as the Water Pollution Control Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act emerged from a Republican Congress.
But it was with the serialization of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the New Yorker in the summer of 1962, and its publication in book form that fall, that public awareness of the adverse effects of chemicals in the environment gained momentum. The following year, Congress enacted the Clean Air Act; in 1964, the Wilderness Act; and during the days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in 1964-1968, a half-dozen more major bills addressed these concerns.

A leading figure in Congress in pushing such legislation through was Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. In late September 1963, Nelson had accompanied President Kennedy on a five-day, 11-state trip intended to raise public awareness of pollution and environmental issues. Although that effort had failed to produce the impact intended, because the press was more interested in questioning Kennedy about foreign policy and the economy, Nelson continued to push for more legislation through the 1960s. In this effort, he was strongly supported within the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

During the 1968 campaign, Richard Nixon devoted comparatively little time to speaking on environmental issues, focusing his speeches more on foreign policy and how to deal with the increase in crime and violent radicalism. But eight days after he took the oath of office and became the 37th President, on January 28, 1969, an event in California nearly swept all other news off America’s front pages and suddenly put environmental questions into the forefront of America’s consciousness to an almost unprecedented degree.

This event was a rupture of one of Union Oil’s platforms, off the Pacific coast, eight miles from Santa Barbara. 100,000 barrels of oil flowed out in the spill, polluting a 60-mile stretch of coastline from Goleta, just northwest of Santa Barbara, to Ventura in the south; disrupting the natural balance of the Channel Islands offshore; and wreaking havoc on fishing and other activities which formed an important part of the local economy.

The public’s reaction to the oil spill spurred Sen. Nelson and a group of like-minded colleagues to quick action. Just three weeks after the spill, Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington introduced the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. Initially, President Nixon had some reservations about the sweeping nature of the bill, which called for action on a far broader scale than anything undertaken by the Federal government before.

But broad action, in the wake of the Santa Barbara spill and other much-publicized environmental mishaps like the Torrey Canyon tanker disaster of 1967 in England, was what the electorate wanted, and the Senate responded by passing the NEPA unanimously on July 10. Two months later, the House passed the bill by 372 votes to 15.

In June 1969, President Nixon set up the Environmental Quality Council by executive order to address the public’s concerns on these issues. During this time, Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel and Undersecretary of the Interior Russell E. Train (who had headed the environmental task force in Nixon’s 1968 campaign) were the leading White House figures discussing such issues in the media. Later that year, Nixon asked John Ehrlichman, at that time White House counsel, to head a White House committee examining the current status of environmental policy in the executive branch.

At the time, such policy was the responsibility of various offices, particularly in the Interior and Agriculture Departments, although other Cabinet departments, such as Health, Education and Welfare and Transportation were also involved. The lack of efficient coordination and the expensive overlap between these departments convinced Ehrlichman, a man with strong feelings about nature and ecology (to use a word rapidly becoming familiar to Americans in 1969), that the White House needed to consolidate these efforts into one strong unit to administer environmental initiatives.

After the House and Senate versions of NEPA were reconciled in committee, and President Nixon signed the finished bill on January 1, 1970, the Council on Environmental Quality, as provided for by NEPA, replaced the Environmental Quality Council. Russell E. Train became the chairman of the new Council and it set about examining the question of how to put together a high-level agency to deal with ecological and pollution issues. The public demand for increased education and awareness about ecology was answered when Sen. Nelson proposed Earth Day, an occasion for “teach-ins” (a favorite concept of the counterculture of that day) and promotion of environmental awareness. The first Earth Day was scheduled for April 22, 1970.

By this time, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Massachusetts, who had become the front-runner for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, had made dozens of speeches focusing on ecology, and it was evident that the issue would be a major one in the 1970 congressional and gubernatorial elections. President Nixon, well aware that before the 1960s nature and wildlife issues had been ones where Republicans had taken a strong initiative, decided to support Train and Ehrlichman’s recommendations, sent Reorganization Plan No. 3 to Congress on July 9, 1970.

This plan followed up on several important initiatives launched by the White House, particularly its 37-point action program which had been announced on February 10. The plan called for the establishment of an Environmental Protection Agency which would “set and enforce standards for air and water quality and for individual pollutants,” and would have as its “principal roles and functions:”
The establishment and enforcement of environmental protection standards consistent with national environmental goals.
The conduct of research on the adverse effects of pollution and on methods and equipment for controlling it, the gathering of information on pollution, and the use of this information in strengthening environmental protection programs and recommending policy changes.

Assisting others, through grants, technical assistance and other means in arresting pollution of the environment.
Assisting the Council on Environmental Quality in developing and recommending to the President new policies for the protection of the environment.

One natural question concerns the relationship between the EPA and the Council on Environmental Quality, recently established by Act of Congress. [From the text of the President's Special Message to Congress concerning Reorganization Plan No. 3.]

This plan was received with much enthusiasm and praise not only by legislators of both parties, but by many enviromental activists and the general public. On November 9, William D. Ruckelshaus, Assistant Attorney General, was nominated by the President as the EPA’s first Administrator, and was quickly confirmed by the Senate. On December 2, 1970, the EPA started operations.

During its early years in Nixon’s first and second terms, the EPA quickly established itself as an agency that worked with an authority and effectiveness that met the expectations of its supporters, and in the forty years since it has continued to be regarded among President Nixon’s finest contributions to American life. Today, as the Internet and other forms of mass communication make Americans even more aware of the sometimes fragile nature of life on the planet than was the case in 1970, the EPA is an essential part of the effort undertaken to preserve our natural resources.

EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus with Julie Nixon Eisenhower and assistant Richard Fairbanks. Ruckelshaus will participate in a panel at the Nixon Library on the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day.

Although Richard Nixon’s pre-presidential speeches and writings sometimes had passages referring to his love of the varied landscape of his native state of California, it still came as a surprise to many when, in his State of the Union address on January 22, 1970, he outlined the first steps in the series of programs that made his presidency the most significant in the history of environmental affairs since Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1965, a Gallup poll found 25 percent of Americans citing pollution and other environmental matters as constituting as an important national issue. By the end of 1969, this figure had increased by 75 percent. There were a number of reasons for the rise. Concern over the indiscriminate use of pesticides had loomed large in the national consciousness since the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Environmentally minded writers and champions of “small is beautiful” such as Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold formed part of the curriculum of the “counterculture.” The nation’s embrace of suburban development and new technology in the 1950s had been replaced by apprehension about the effects of untrammeled growth on wildlife, the waterways, and the atmosphere.

As these concerns came to the fore, a movement arose which sought to address them. In the early days of 1970, plans were fully underway to celebrate the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. This event was intended by its organizers to be a moment calling for new laws to guarantee clean air and water and to safeguard the integrity of natural landscapes, like forests, seas, and lakes.

Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.

President Nixon, in his First State of the Union Address, January 22, 1970.

The first mainstream politicians to embrace the Earth Day message were mostly Democratic, such as Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Senator who took the initiative among his colleagues in helping to organize events connected with the day. Soon Sen. Edmund Muskie from Maine, the 1968 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, was calling for quick legislative action in the field of the environment. Liberal columnists and commentators, at the time, seemed to take it for granted that the Nixon White House would drag its feet on the matter.

But in his first annual address to Congress, RN took note of the nation’s worry over the future of its resources, and called for the passing of laws to protect the environment, pledging to use $10 billion to ensure clean air and water for Americans.

Six months later, in July 1970, RN set up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This was a Cabinet-level agency; its head reported directly to the President. $1.4 billion was redirected from other Cabinet departments for its budget (primarily the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Health, Education and Welfare), and it started operations with 5,650 employees. Within a short time the EPA, under its first director William Ruckelshaus, launched a series of important initiatives. In the same year, the passage of the Clean Air Act, with the support of the White House, marked the most comprehensive antipollution legislation to date.

The President followed this with another far-sighted idea. Having grown up in a family of modest means, he was aware that visiting major national parks such as Yellowstone or Yosemite was beyond the financial reach of many Americans. He therefore promoted the idea of creating new national parks from Federal land unused for other purposes, and during his Administration 642 such parks were created. He also made it a point to confer on a regular basis about the environment with two of his staffers with strong interests in the subject, chief domestic advisor John Ehrlichman and aide John C. Whitaker.

In April 1971, the President marked the first anniversary of Earth Day with a proclamation establishing Earth Week, an event which helped further education and awareness of environmental issues, especially among schoolchildren.

From 1970 until the end of his Presidency, Nixon made 36 different environmental proposals, including ones addressing such issues as noise pollution and oil spills. One matter to which he devoted considerable attention, and which was close to his heart as a Californian, was the cooperation of federal and state agencies in maintaining the integrity of coastlines.

Two events marked a divergence between the President’s views and those of many environmentalists. In 1971, the EPA recommended standards for the Big Four automakers (at that time General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and AMC/Jeep) to decrease fuel emissions. Nixon felt that the requirements were too stringent, and agreed with automakers who feared that manufacturing cars to conform to these standards would raise car prices and considerably decrease sales.

And, in 1972, Nixon vetoed the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments. Again, this action was motivated by concern that to enforce the legislation as written would put American manufacturers at a disadvantage compared to their overseas counterparts.

But while keeping American business competitive, the Nixon White House was also able to lay the groundwork for the effective environmental infrastructure Americans rely on today to ensure clean air, clean water, preservation of wildlife and plant life for future generations, and a safer, healthier environment.

Below is an interview with John Whitaker, conducted by former RN Special Assistant Frank Gannon, on the environmental initiatives of the Nixon years:

In the critical weeks leading up to India’s involvement in Pakistan’s civil war from which the nation of Bangladesh emerged, Nixon decided to arrange a quick meeting with McMahon to confer about developments in the subcontinent. This led to plans for a state dinner for the Prime Minister and his wife, which were put together so rapidly that Sonia McMahon, who had already worn some outfits remarkable even by 1970s standards, had little time to select a suitable dress. One day she spotted one in a window, designed by a fellow Australian, Victoria Cascajo, that seemed distinctive enough for the occasion. It was black, but she opted to have it done in white.

And the dress was, indeed, distinctive. It was slit on both sides nearly up to the waist, and from just above the waist, nearly to the shoulder, was vented again, as were the sides of the sleeves. The sides of the vents were connected at intervals by rhinestone-studded straps, between which was a sheer pantyhose-type fabric. If a guest at one of President Obama’s state dinners were to wear it now, in a Washington far less formal and sedate than the one of 1971, gossip sites like Gawker.com would have enough material for at least a fortnight.

“You’ll be in every paper in the country tomorrow,” said the President as Mrs. McMahon walked with him down the staircase. That proved to be true. Luckily, Dr. Henry Kissinger was on hand to demonstrate his diplomatic skills at their most sublime when he remarked: “Mrs McMahon was beautiful enough to change any dull old routine into something special.”

While the dress raised quite a few eyebrows in America, the Australian media happily emblazoned it on front pages from Brisbane to Perth, and the original is now proudly displayed in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. In 2005, when Lady McMahon’s son Julian received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Christian Troy on the Nip/Tuck series, Australian journalists expressed the hope he would take his mother for the awards, and that she would once more wear the dress. He did bring her to the Globes and she did wear a replica of it – and, as the photos attest, wore it quite well.

Some of the earliest material dates from 1969, when investigators did a background check on Safire, who was joining the Nixon White House as a speech writer. The FBI’s investigators learned that Safire, then 39, had been an “honor senior” at the Bronx High School of Science and served as circulation manager of the newspaper. As a student at Syracuse University between 1947 and 1949, he had an average “just short of a B” before quitting the school. Later, while running his own public relations firm, he had clients such as The Good Humor Corporation and Ex-Lax Inc. in Brooklyn.

The bulk of the file is only partly related to Safire, however, and includes an investigation into the wiretapping, which lasted from 1969 into 1971 and was apparently started because of leaks surrounding Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The talks between the U.S. and Soviet Union were on the subject of arms control. The documents show Safire was among more than a dozen people, including some at the White House and four journalists, whose phones were tapped. The wiretap on Safire lasted four months and found nothing.

“I have a thing about wiretapping,” Safire said on “Meet The Press” in 2006, describing what had happened to him and referencing wiretapping during the Bush administration. “I didn’t like that … it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who was not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home.”

Not long after that, Neil Young, recording “Campaigner,” reminded the world that “even Richard Nixon’s got soul.”

But it turns out that at the same time, another rock’n'roller was starting his career with songs referring to RN – a musician who, though he is not yet in the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame with Bowie and Young, is sure to join them sometime after 2013, when his eligibility starts 25 years after his recording (as opposed to performing) career began.

During his final live shows with Nirvana, in the fall and winter of 1993-1994, Kurt Cobain sometimes brought out an Epiphone Texan guitar for the acoustic portion of the show, which he had found in a store in Los Angeles. It sported a “Nixon Now” bumper sticker from 1972, and is now renowned among students of the Nirvana oeuvre as the best-sounding acoustic Cobain ever used. (At the end of 1994, eight or so months after the deaths of Cobain and Nixon, a blowup photo of Kurt playing this guitar was displayed in the Nixon Library exhibit “Rockin’ The White House.”)

But it turns out that this was not the first time that President Nixon entered Cobain’s musical world. From RTTNews.com comes this article:

Early recordings from a young Kurt Cobain were recently discovered at a garage sale in Aberdeen, Washington.

Producers Jack Endino and Butch Vig [the producers of Nirvana's first two albums] both verified that the tapes are self-recordings of Cobain, who is believed to have been 8 or 9 years old at the time. According to reports, it sounds as though he is playing an acoustic guitar and ukulele, sometime around 1974 or 1975, based on the content of songs about Richard Nixon. [Note: Cobain was born on Feb. 20, 1967, so he may have been as young as 7 when he recorded this material.]

Several cassettes labelled “KDC” – believed to stand for Kurt Donald Cobain – in black magic marker were found at the sale. The tapes are estimated to be worth millions.

He has a new book coming out in July, Getting It Wrong, published by the University of California Press. It focuses on ten major myths about the Fourth Estate that have arisen in the last century or so. The Washington Post website’s “Political Bookworm” discusses three of these: that the Spanish-American War was mainly the creation of William Randolph Hearst; that Edward R. Murrow, when he criticized Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy on his TV show See It Now, was the first major journalist to criticize McCarthy’s tactics (when several reporters and columnists were already doing so regularly); and that the thirty-seventh President was removed from office entirely through the efforts of Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and the late Jason Robards Jr:

Katharine Graham, The Post’s publisher during the Watergate period, said in 1997: “Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon's] resignation were constitutional.” She was right, but the complexities of Watergate are not readily recalled these days. What does stand out is a media-centric interpretation that the dogged reporting of Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought Nixon down.

Few diplomats served as long in Washington as Dobrynin. (One who served longer was Ernest Jaakson, who was the representative of the Estonian government-in-exile in Washington, then of the revived nation of Estonia, from 1965 until 1993, and who replaced Dobrynin as dean of the capital’s diplomatic corps in 1986, rather to the latter’s irritation.) During those three-plus decades, he served five Soviet leaders (Khruschchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev) during six Administrations (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan).

The two most significant achievements of Dobrynin’s tenure in Washington came in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and ten years later, when he played a central role on the Soviet side in negotiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. The Cuban crisis came six months after his arrival in DC, following a period serving as United Nations Undersecretary-General under Dag Hammarskjold. During the months before President Kennedy learned of Soviet missiles on Cuban territory, Dobrynin managed to establish contacts with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that proved to be the basis of the back-channel negotiations that ultimately defused what, to date, has been the most dangerous military situation the world has faced since 1945. None of Dobrynin’s predecessors as Soviet Ambassador had shown anything approaching his diplomatic poise and skill; had he not been on the scene, events might have taken a tragic turn.

A decade later, Dobrynin, negotiating with National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger, helped to assemble the ABM treaty, which, for nearly forty years, has been the cornerstone on which the disarmament agreements between the US and USSR (and later Russia) have been built. He also considerably facilitated the process which led to the SALT I agreement of 1972, and helped further the meetings between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev which resulted in full-scale detente between the superpowers.

It should be emphasized that Dobrynin, despite his willingness to steep himself in American culture and his genial persona, was always a loyal representative of the Soviet regime and its ideology. When faced with the human-rights stance of President Carter, he gave no ground, and, in the years before Mikhail Gorbachev gained power, took many a hard-line position where Soviet actions abroad were concerned, especially in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. In his 1995 autobiography, In Confidence, he made it clear that he was unhappy to see the Soviet Union disintegrate. But it should be remembered that as a diplomat, he was committed to dialogue over confrontation, wherever and whenever he thought it possible, and that commitment helped the process which ultimately decreased and finally ended the dangerous tensions of the Cold War.

The Russian site RT.com offers these tributes from Dr. Kissinger, who so many times faced the Ambassador across a negotiating table, and Donald Kendall, a close friend of President Nixon’s:

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remembers Dobrynin when, during the Cold War, he was working in Washington DC, heading the Russian Embassy there. “First he was my professional partner,” says Kissinger, “and then gradually, he became my friend.” Even though, he says, the Soviet politics of those times which the ambassador was standing by, often went against the US policies, “he was always trying to achieve peace, to reduce tensions and to stand by a more peaceful life on the planet,” says the former US Secretary of State. “I think of him with respect and warm-hearted feelings,” concludes Kissinger.

“I hope Dobrynin will get the memorial that he deserves,” said Donald Kendall, former head of the PepsiCo in an interview to ITAR-TASS news agency. He suggested that both Russia and the United States should put a monument to Dobrynin, as a sign of honor and respect for his achievements.

Kendall is convinced that Dobrynin’s “fantastic diplomatic skills” have several times “saved the relationships” between Moscow and Washington. “I have stressed this many times, that if in those times there would have been a different ambassador in Washington, then there could have been a real war between the two countries.”

The Justice’s decision to retire presents another challenge to the Obama White House, of finding a nominee who can be confirmed by a majority of the Senate with no more debate and controversy than that which surrounded the comparatively smooth progress of Justice Sonia Sotomayor through the nomination process. As the Washington Post notes today, the candidate who seems most favored by the President at the moment is his Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, previously the dean of Harvard Law School. Ms. Kagan was confirmed for the Federal post by a Senate vote of 61-31 in March 2009, which might seem to augur well for her appointment to the Court. But quite a lot has changed in thirteen months, and the process may well be a tougher one for such a selection now.

Allen traveled with President Nixon on the historic visit to Romania in 1969, the first time a President had visited the Communist world in peacetime, and shortly before his retirement he, along with his wife, had the honor of attending a state dinner for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl as Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s guests. After two decades of quiet retirement, Allen gained national prominence in November 2008 when he was the subject of a fascinating and moving article in the Washington Post by Wil Haygood.

And, in North Carolina, Jerald F. terHorst died at age 87. He was the head of the Detroit News’ Washington bureau in the 1960s and early 1970s, and in that capacity was a member of the media delegation accompanying President Nixon to China in 1972. But he came to national notice just after Nixon’s resignation, when he was President Ford’s first major appointee as press secretary.

Thirty days later, he became the only major figure in the Ford Administration to leave office over the 38th President’s decision to grant a pardon to his predecessor. Several years later, terHorst co-authored The Flying White House: The Story of Air Force One with longtime AF1 pilot Ralph J. Albertazzie, which contains a lengthy opening chapter describing RN’s flight on the plane from the White House to San Clemente on August 9, 1974. It’s a fascinating account of that trip and the rest of the book is just as worthwhile.

On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong. North Vietnam agreed to an immediate cease fire, and South Vietnam was promised the same sort of freedoms guaranteed Americans under the First Amendment.

Officially, the war was over.

But, Herschensohn says, the U.S. wasn’t so naive as to believe there would be no more hostilities by North Vietnam after American troops went home. So, the accords promised piece-for-piece replacement of any military assets South Vietnam used to defend itself after the Americans left.

“We didn’t do it,” Herschensohn said flatly. “Congress saw a way that we could lose (the war) by not appropriating funds in the piece-for-piece provision.”

Editors note: Bruce Herschensohn will be at the Nixon Library on Monday, April 19, to discuss and sign copies of American Amnesia. For more information click here.

After publishing a book about 1970s America, How We Got Here (notable for many pages analyzing the impact of Richard Nixon’s presidency on the culture of the era), Frum became a speechwriter for George W. Bush, and, in that President’s first term, gained fame for coining the phrase “axis of evil.” (Although his original wording was “axis of hatred,” with the last word changed by Bush.)

In 2005, Frum left the Bush Administration to become a fellow at the America Enterprise Institute and a regular contributor to National Review. But in 2008, differences started to become apparent between Frum’s views and those of many conservatives when he published one blogpost and column after another criticizing Gov. Sarah Palin’s selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Although Frum declared his support for Sen. John McCain that fall, with the inauguration of President Obama (preceded by the journalist’s departure from National Review) it became evident that Frum’s thinking was closer to the accomodationism exemplified by Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death Of Conservatism that to that of the Republican establishment.

The debate over the health-care bill made it clear just how far Frum had moved from the GOP consensus. The bill’s passage by a handful of votes was taken by most Republicans as an encouraging sign. Frum wrote that he viewed the result as a Waterloo for the minority party. Soon thereafter, he parted ways with AEI.

However, he does have his defenders – notably in the land of his birth. In the Canadian magazine The Tyee, Crawford Kilian, an American who’s lived in British Columbia for almost a half-century, argues:

Rather than viewing the victory of Obama as the inevitable arrival of the Antichrist, Frum has respected Obama’s political skills and tried to draw lessons from his success — just as Nixon drew lessons from Jack Kennedy’s use of television. ([Rick] Perlstein [in Nixonland] tells us Nixon got his first training in this field from a young TV producer named Roger Ailes, now the head of Fox News.)

In effect, Frum was treating Obama intellectually, not morally. Hence his “Waterloo” rant, and the resulting uproar.

His onetime allies, however, are aggressively anti-intellectual, and enjoy moralizing about their enemies. Their world is clearly divided into good and evil, and only they are good. Apostates and heretics are doubly evil, deserving nothing but very loud contempt.

This may be as much fun as screaming at Emmanuel Goldstein during the Two-Minute Hate, as Winston Smith does in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it is no way to build and maintain a coherent framework for a revived conservatism.

The venerable British journal The Economist has a new article assessing the reasons for the Nixon surcharge (which was to a great degree the brainchild of then-Treasury Secretary John Connally) and showing why its purpose, and the effects it had on the world economy at the time, do not necessary show that a tariff on Chinese goods would benefit the American economy now:

China’s foreign-exchange reserves now total $2.4 trillion, of which about 70% are thought to be in dollars. In 1971 the central banks of America’s trading partners had amassed a rather smaller hoard, of about $40 billion. But that was enough to buy the gold in Fort Knox three times over, if America upheld its commitment to sell the metal at $35 an ounce. Britain’s request to exchange dollars for gold on August 13th 1971 was the last straw. “Although the US government attached no great importance to the gold as such, a run on this gold would have been a sorry spectacle,” wrote George Shultz and Kenneth Dam, two prominent economic officials in the Nixon administration, in their book “Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines”. On August 15th Nixon, in effect, announced that America was now unwilling to do what it would soon be incapable of doing—converting dollars into gold at the agreed exchange rate.

Messrs Shultz and Dam argue that the import surcharge was intended as “an attention-getter and a bargaining chip”. It allowed John Connally, Nixon’s treasury secretary and a Texan, to stride down the corridors of international finance “with both guns blazing”. In the face of this bravado America’s trading partners duly backed down. By December they agreed to let the dollar fall (by a trade-weighted average of 6.5%) and the surcharge was removed. Nixon was able to present the humbling of the dollar as a political victory. But were Barack Obama to emulate him, would he really enjoy the same result?

The obvious difference is that in 1971 America was locked into a system of fixed parities. By pegging to the dollar, a currency was automatically fixed to everything else. Since July 2008 China has pegged the yuan to the greenback. But over that period its currency has swung up and down against those of its trading partners and competitors. On a trade-weighted basis the yuan is back to where it was when the financial crisis started. Indeed, compared with China’s emerging-market competitors in its big export markets, the yuan is about 12% more expensive today than it was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to a measure (the “third-country” effective exchange rate) calculated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. By this indicator China’s currency is about 25% above its level in 2005.

The second difference is related to the first. Because everybody was pegged to the dollar in 1971, everybody had to pay the surcharge. Nixon dismayed everyone but discriminated against no one. China’s critics today, on the other hand, urge Mr Obama to slap a tariff on Chinese goods alone. This will reduce the demand for Chinese imports, which constitute about 15% of America’s total. But there is no guarantee that customers will switch from Chinese goods to American ones instead. They are more likely to buy from China’s rivals in Asia. The surcharge may change the composition of America’s trade deficit, without necessarily changing its size.

As many TNN readers know, Martin acquired his earliest showbiz experience in Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm near Garden Grove, the town in which he spent his teenage years, toward the end of Richard Nixon’s Vice Presidency. And RN figured in Martin’s struggling years as a standup; he mentions than when he played college campuses as an unknown in the early 1970s, he had only to mention the President’s name to be guaranteed a laugh. (In fact, the predictability of this response was one thing that led him to remove all political material from his act. Coincidentally or not, his career took off soon after.)

But I didn’t know that one of President Nixon’s decisions, toward the end of his Administration, led to one of the most celebrated episodes of Steve Martin’s comic career. It’s especially timely now, as the exhibition of the relics of Egypt’s King Tutankhamun finishes its run at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum and gets ready to go to Discovery Channel’s Times Square showplace in New York.

It was in 1974 that President Nixon decided that the United States should respond to the successful display of Egyptian art in the Soviet Union with a truly memorable exhibit to tour the United States. After bringing up the idea during his visit to Egypt’s President Anwar al-Sadat a few weeks before his resignation, he urged Secretary of State Kissinger to work on bringing such an exhibit to these shores. Dr. Kissinger got in touch with the late Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the process was begun which, a couple of years later, resulted in the spectacularly successful first visit of King Tut and his relics to the United States – a visit which inspired Steve Martin to write that immortal tune which was introduced to the world on Saturday Night Live.

More than thirty years after he last came for a visit, the boy king is generating some more memories to last a lifetime for countless Americans, continuing a process that started with President Nixon’s proposal for a tour to generate income to help Egyptian museums on that summer day so long ago.