]]> http://thenewnixon.org/2010/05/14/wwnd-3/feed/ 0 http://thenewnixon.org/2010/05/11/tom-shachtman-writes-about-barack-obama-sr/ http://thenewnixon.org/2010/05/11/tom-shachtman-writes-about-barack-obama-sr/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 18:53:16 +0000 Robert Nedelkoff http://thenewnixon.org/?p=24018 There has been considerable discussion in TNN about The Forty Years’ War, Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman’s book about foreign policy in the Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush eras. But it was not the only book Tom Shachtman published last year. St. Martin’s Press also published his Airlift To America, which tells the story of how Kenyan labor and independence leader, Tom Mboya, arranged with the help of American friends to sent many young East Africans to study in the United States between 1959 and 1963.

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.)

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.

The late Dr. Ambrose {1936-2002} was the author of some 25 books during his 40 year career.  He was one of the most popular World War II historians, the writer of Band of Brothers (2001), and the technical adviser to “Saving Private Ryan” Steven Spielberg’s D-Day blockbuster.  Ambrose’s three volume biography of Richard Nixon: {The Education of the Politician [1913-1962](pub.1983), “The Triumph of the Politician [1962-1974](pub.1987)”, “Ruin and Recovery [1974-1990](pub.1991)”} stand out as almost required reading for Nixon scholars.

Towards the end of his prolific career, Ambrose was accused of by his critics, and excused for being a virtual “history factory.”  A Stephen Ambrose Inc. who employed his children as research assistants.  {See: Plotz, David, “The Plagiarist: Why Stephen Ambrose is a Vampire”, Slate Magazine, January 11, 2002.}

The current controversy centers on the beginnings of Ambrose’s association with Ike in 1964.  Ambrose’s account, last stated in To America (2002), was that Eisenhower sought out Ambrose after reading his first book, Halleck: Chief of Staff (1962).  The recently retired Eisenhower was especially interested in Lincoln’s Chief of Staff’s story because Eisenhower was interested in writing a book about George Marshall, the Chief of Staff during the Second World War.  Eisenhower wanted Ambrose to work with him on his papers and finally his biography because he figured that Ambrose would be fair.  {See To America pp. 153-154}

Seven years later a different version of events emerged.  Last year, the deputy director of the Eisenhower Library, Tim Rives was looking for documents and the like for his exhibit on Ambrose’s writing on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Eisenhower’s biography.  Rives discovered letters in the archives of Stephen Ambrose soliciting contact with Eisenhower.  It was Ambrose who sent the Halleck book along to give Ike “the opportunity to see some of my writing.”  Another letter was more forward.  “It therefore seems to me that the time has come to begin the scholarly biographies of the leaders of World War II, I would like to begin a full scale, scholarly account of your military career.”  The New Yorker article strongly states that Eisenhower never approached Ambrose, but the editor of the Eisenhower papers, Alfred Chandler, took Ambrose to see Eisenhower at Gettysburg.

This isn’t the most serious charge in the article. Although having boasted about hundreds of hours of interviews with Eisenhower, a recent search of the historical record might suggest otherwise.  Rives states that records of Eisenhower’s schedule for the years of 1964-1967 show that Ambrose met with Eisenhower three times, for a total of five hours.  These records show that Eisenhower was somewhere else or in other meetings, during some of the times Ambrose has listed as having an interview with him.

However, to read Ambrose’s writing through his biographies and in his account of his relationship with Eisenhower in Ambrose’s last book, it is difficult to discount Ambrose’s familiarity with his subject.  Eisenhower did write the foreword to Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, (1966).  “To America” also describes discussions about more mundane things, such as Ike’s recommendations of restaurants in the area.  {p. 161.}   The New Yorker also brings up the point of just how much of Eisenhower’s career in the military and as President could be discussed in five hours.  Perhaps the author relied more on his knowledge of Eisenhower’s papers, and interviews with other principals than his five hours with Eisenhower.  The record only shows a difference in accounts, without displaying the motivation behind it.  Ambrose, like most biographers, never detailed what historical documentation he valued over others.

It is interesting to note that while Dr. Ambrose has dates for the interviews in the book in question Supreme Commander (1970); in subsequent books on Eisenhower such as the two volume biography and the consolidated Eisenhower: Soldier and President (1991), Ambrose only mentions “Interview with DDE” and doesn’t specify a date.  Maybe it is merely a mistake of a young historian who quietly learned his lesson.  We truly cannot know for sure, since the professor isn’t here to tell us.

Stephen Ambrose was no stranger to controversy about his scholarship.  In the recent piece in the History News Network, entitled “How the Ambrose Story Developed,” the articles cites seven Ambrose books that are in possible question for plagiarism.  According to an article in Forbes Magazine, this habit dates back to his Ph.D dissertation, Upton and the Army (1964). {See: Lewis, Mark, “Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis,” Forbes Magazine, May 10, 2002.}  Must we factor in these tendencies in our assessment of his historical analysis?

A few famous historians have been called on insufficient citation.  Most notably Doris Kearns Goodman, who had the remaining copies of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987) destroyed, made corrections to future editions, and owned up to the mistakes.  (See: Goodman, Doris Kearns, “How I Caused That Story,” Time Magazine, January 27, 2002.)

What is plagiarism?  According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, (as quoted in Wikipedia) it is the “use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”  My definition is simple.  It is the lifting of another person’s words, then representing them as your own.  When you describe a event in someone’s life that has been described by different authors…then one reaches a grey area of interpretation. How can there not be similarities?  This is illustrated when comparing Ambrose’s account of RNs hospital experience in 1975 in “Ruin and Recovery,” with a similar account 16 years earlier in Robert Sam Anson’s book, “Exile.”  {See Lewis, Mark, “More Controversy For Stephen Ambrose,” Forbes Magazine, January 9, 2002.}  While the examples in the article might be a case of insufficient citation, they do not reach the level of plagiarism.

However, making up dates for interviews is a different plateau of error.  While corrected quietly in future works; the sin of creating interviews in “The Supreme Commander” give the reader a false impression that he was writing with Eisenhower’s perspective. As mentioned earlier, for this latest controversy, Dr. Ambrose isn’t here to offer a defense, reason or excuse.

This whole Ambrose controversy should serve as a cautionary tale for all of us.  It is a reminder to tighten one’s craft.  Plagiarism, insufficient citation, and other errors can be taken care of in the cases of established historians like Goodwin, and Ambrose.  After all, the great publishing houses can repair the damage by correction.  While the established historians would be assessed by the totality of their work; these errors would be fatal to the career of the beginning historian and his or her first book.

Great care and attention must be put towards citation.  In my other vocation in the legal profession, proper citation is a given.  There are legal consequences for failure.  During the plagiarism charges regarding The Wild Blue (2001), Dr. Ambrose wrote on his website, “I tell stories.  I don’t discuss my documents.  I discuss the story.  It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take?  I am not writing a Ph.D dissertation.”  (Quoted from Kirkpatrick, David, “As Historian’s Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources,” New York Times, January 11, 2002.)

Fair enough.  While histories and biographies shouldn’t turn into dissertations; we as biographers and historians do write for two audiences.  One is the casual reader of history – who is looking for a good, interesting read without the distraction of footnotes within the text.  Current biographers such as Edmund Morris, Richard Reeves, and David McCullough use source notes at the back of the book rather than footnotes.

The other audience is fellow historians and students of history.  Accurately quoted and cited source materials; whether it is from a secondary source, or an interview, or letter is essential.  Doris Kearns Goodwin put it best when she said: “The writing of history is a rich process of building on the work of the past with the hope that others will build on what you have done. Through footnotes you point the way to future historians.”  (See: “How I Caused That Story.”)  After all, no writer of history or biography wants to jump in the abyss…

For the modern historian without Professor Ambrose’s reputation; the making up of interviews of their main subject would be an unpardonable offence.  With modern technology, there is no excuse for not accurately accounting for all interviews with your subject.  They must be treated and cited like any other document or secondary source material, with the date and place of interview listed.  This includes the extra step of transcribing of all interviews, a process that is invaluable for documentation.

The historical jury is still out on how Professor Ambrose’s scholarship will finally be judged.  In the end, after the author is long gone….the work must defend him.  As our work as historians and biographers must defend us.

Whenever I visit the Nixon Library, I always stop by President and Mrs. Nixon’s gravesite to pay my respects.  Once there, I sense an overwhelming responsibility.  The voice that tells me…  “Get It Right.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

And President Nixon is featured in several dozen different programs on the site, including excerpts from White House tapes; an interview conducted by Frank Gannon; a lengthy conversation with Lamb from 1992; footage of RN’s 1972 trip to China; and much else. Just put his name in the search box.

March 9, 1960: Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Vice President Richard Nixon lead their parties in the New Hampshire primary.  The Associated Press story noted that although the Republican candidate usually runs a 2-1 ratio to the Democratic candidate in New Hampshire, the difference between Kennedy and Nixon was much closer, 53,111 to 38,012.

Also on the jump, jurors resume deliberations in the Finch case after listening to a nine-hour reading of Dr. R. Bernard Finch’s testimony.

In her thirty years on network television, Ms. Sawyer’s occasionally been asked, on the air and in newspaper and magazine interviews, about her years with RN. But I don’t recall any interview that’s focused completely on her work for him – until now.

Today, Parade magazine published a somewhat short but still highly interesting Q-and-A in which Ms. Sawyer speaks about her impressions of RN, and especially how he viewed journalists. Here’s a representative quote:

“I think he thought that, institutionally, journalists – and I think you can argue with some cause – were not going to be on his side, for a number of reasons, not just political ones. He just didn’t have the easily accessed charm that journalists love so. If you read his diaries, he writes at one point about John Kennedy and what it must have been like to be John Kennedy and walk into a room and take it over. He was much more of an interior person who had to will himself in some ways to be a public person. I don’t think it was about my having gone to join the dark side or the enemy. I think it was more than anything I was someone he knew and understood who could bring him word back about this other craft was like.”

RN refers to Mel Laird, who was Secretary of Defense, and General Haig refers to the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment that required complete withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam by 31 December 1971.  Although it had been defeated in the Senate in October 1970, it remained the subject of discussion and controversy through 1971.  He also mentions Clark Clifford, the ubiquitous Democrat who was one of the legendary Wise Men as well as one of Wasington’s most famous  fixers.  He  had succeeded Robert McNamara as LBJ’s Secretary of Defense.  After initially  deciding to support Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, he turned against the war.

Referring to Gen. Haig’s briefing, veteran Republican strategist Lyn Nofziger told the Strobers: “That will be the third paragraph of his obituary.”

Nofziger died in 2006, so this morning, when Gen. Haig passed away, he was not around to see his prediction be fulfilled on a number of websites. The New York Times was first – or tried to be first. The initial version of Tim Weiner’s obituary there mentioned Nofziger’s statement and said he had predicted the third graf (to use the old-time newspaper lingo) “would detail” the briefing – which he doesn’t say, at least in the Strober book. The obit’s third paragraph then mentioned the briefing, and the fourth described it in detail. Some wag at the paper pointed out this discrepancy and within an hour or so the article was reformatted so that the details were given in the third paragraph.

During the rest of the day, one obit after another told the story of the 1981 briefing in the third paragraph. Some of these, like the obits at Politics Daily, the BBC website and the Associated Press, didn’t refer to Nofziger’s prediction. Others, such as the one in the Times of London, did.

But several newspapers bucked the trend. The London Telegraph devoted the third paragraph of its obit to Gen. Haig’s effort to mediate the dispute between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands – probably a lesser chapter of his career, but obviously of interest to British readers.

And James Hohmann’s obit at the Washington Post also did not get on the briefing bandwagon. Instead, the third paragraph in the first online version discussed Gen. Haig’s efforts to keep the Nixon Administration on an even keel in the darkest days of Watergate. And, happily, this was replaced by what I think Gen. Haig would truly have been delighted to read as the third paragraph of his obituary:

In a statement, President Obama said Gen. Haig “exemplified our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.”

That said, the General had a prodigious sense of humor – it was no accident that he counted iconoclastic comedian Mort Sahl among his friends – so he probably would have been amused at the striving of so many media outlets to fulfil Nofziger’s prophecy.

(Another article worth reading is the AP’s account of reactions to Gen. Haig’s death, including a quote from the Post’s Bob Woodward in which he points out that the General was almost the only individual whom he made a point of ruling out as being “Deep Throat” before he identified Mark Felt as DT in 2005.)

Steve Lopez, the author of the article, nominated an “all-star cast of bigots, crooked business barons and dirty politicians.”

Under “M” for Murder, we have Hall of Famers like the Hillside Strangler, the Night Stalker, the Freeway Killer and Mr. Helter Skelter himself.

But don’t let me influence your vote. Let local historian Joe Scott of the L.A. County district attorney’s office do that.

“Frank Shaw,” said Scott, nominating as most disreputable Angeleno the L.A. mayor who, in 1938, was recalled in the midst of scandals that fueled the imaginations of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy.

Nobody beats former LAPD chief William Parker, said author and former Timesman Bill Boyarsky. “He was the most damaging Angeleno of all time” because of his “us-against-them, all-white, anti-minority attitude. That has done more lasting harm to the city than anything.”

Within that mix Lopez included President Nixon, a decision that seemingly backfired when he opened the comments section for readers to publish their own rankings:

Here’s a column that appeared a week or so after the game in the San Francisco Chronicle by the late Charles McCabe, in which he remarks:

I knew the Veep when he was an inconspicuous Congressman from Whittier, and I was an inconspicuous Washington correspondent. In those days, before he hitched his wagon to the pumpkin in the Alger Hiss case, the Veep was an earnest, humorless freshman Congressman. He was known in the House Press Gallery as “The Boy Scout.”

He was a great talker, even then. I recall him talking on many subjects, but never sports. The last time I saw him was last summer, when he visited San Francisco. He was a changed man. His first question on getting off his plane, was: “Are the Senators still in the cellar?” And the funny thing is, he really knows sports. Funnier yet, he is one of those rare birds who is equally nuts and equally informed about baseball and football.

It is remarkable, is it not, the way public life enlarges a man’s horizons?

Appearances do not only matter in television debating: they are, in some ways, the only things that matter. The first TV debate in 1960 pitted a sweaty, unshaven Richard Nixon recovering from flu, against a tanned, youthful John F. Kennedy who had spent much of the previous week on the golf course. Those who heard the debate on radio reckoned Nixon the winner. But more than 80 million Americans watched it on television, and in that medium the victor was clear. It was not so much a measure of JFK’s abilities as a resounding tribute to the power of television.

Some corrections are in order.  RN was not recovering from the flu, but from an infected knee.  He was clean-shaven, though his complexion tended to give the impression of a five o’clock shadow.   While the recently-hospitalized RN did not look his best, he hardly had the death’s-door appearance of legend.  (When I show video of the debate to students, they wonder what the big deal was about.)  JFK was youthful, but so was RN, who was only four years older.  One poll did show that radio listeners scored Nixon as the winner, but that result has limited significance, since those who listened on radio were demographically very different from those who watched on TV.  The radio audience was predisposed to support RN to begin with.  To the extent that the first debate did affect the election, substance counted more than cosmetics. Trying to shake his attack-dog image, RN erred by being too deferential and defensive.

Even the leading lines of the article are misleading:  “On October 15, 1992, the first president Bush glanced at his watch, and lost the presidential election. At almost the same moment, Bill Clinton took three paces forward, and won it. 2 election.”   No, Bush’s watch glances looked bad but did not cost him the election.  Clinton was leading Bush before the debates.  Afterward, in fact, his lead narrowed.

But over at NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams found some time for the thirty-seventh President. He reported on a blog called Teqnolog, which this weekend examined the thousands of images at Time magazine’s site to determine whose face had appeared on that venerable newsmagazine’s cover more often than any other.

The winner was not a complete surprise. I recall reading in Time once or twice in the last fifteen years that Richard Nixon had been on the cover more often than anyone else. But Technoloq did a breakdown on the 15 others who had appeared on the cover ten times or more. Here they are:

RN – 48 covers
Ronald Reagan – 45
Bill Clinton – 33
George W. Bush – 31
Jimmy Carter – 27
Barack Obama – 24
Gerald R. Ford – 20
Lyndon B. Johnson – 19
George H.W. Bush – 18
Dwight D. Eisenhower – 18
Hillary Clinton – 16
John F. Kennedy – 14
Saddam Hussein – 12
Franklin D. Roosevelt – 11
Al Gore – 10
John McCain – 10

It should be mentioned that these figures include covers in which the sixteen mentioned appear with other people, such as Henry Kissinger, or Leonid Brezhnev, or each other. (In fact, in 1976 Reagan, Carter and Ford were on the same cover.) In Nixon’s case, he appeared by himself on 24 of his 48 covers, while FDR and Hussein were solo on almost all of their covers.

It may not be much of a surprise that the Secretary of State was the only woman on this list (though the former Governor of Alaska may catch up by 2012), but to have Saddam Hussein appear on more covers than, say, Stalin or Castro or Gorbachev or even Churchill is somewhat startling.

The blog pointed out that President Obama, in less than two years, or about 100 weeks, since he scored his first Time cover, has risen to sixth place on this list, while it took RN until the early Seventies, nearly two decades after his first appearance, to get to 24 covers. Teqnolog remarked that at this pace, it would take Obama only another two years to surpass RN, by which time he’d still be in his first term, and that if he were re-elected and featured as frequently as he is now, he could perhaps have his face on as many as 150 covers.

And even if the President failed to be re-elected, he’d still stand a good chance of building on such a number – FDR, JFK, Reagan, and of course RN were on the cover more than once after leaving office.