Subscribe To The New Nixon Podcast Via I-Tunes

November 2, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Media, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

You can now subscribe to The New Nixon Podcast via I-tunes, enabling you to listen to the current one and all future editions on your I-Pod or similar device. Here is a direct link – or you can go to I-Tunes and search in Podcasts for The New Nixon.

The New Nixon Podcast Is Up And Running

October 31, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Advertising, Foundation News, Interviews, Media, New Media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Center, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Podcast, Popular Culture, Richard Nixon, Social Networking, Technology, The National Interest, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

During a recent visit to the Nixon Library, I had a discussion with several people about the potential for a podcast, something designed to highlight the events at the library, as well as the larger work of the Nixon Foundation.

We determined to use the recent visit of Sonny West and his talk about the day Elvis came to see President Nixon in the Oval Office for the premier production of the podcast.

This podcast is being registered with I-Tunes and will be available through them by the end of today. This, of course, makes the podcast portable. It can be downloaded to I-Pods and other such devices. In the meantime, here is a link to the first episode of what we hope will be a regular feature.

A couple of provisos: First, the theme music is from “VICTORY AT SEA” at the recommendation of Sandy Quinn. He told me how much Mr. Nixon enjoyed it – so it was an obvious choice. Second, some of the audio during Sonny’s remarks is a little difficult to hear and I suspect he pulled a Fran Tarkenton and scrambled out of the pocket, straying from the microphone, at times. These technical difficulties will be addressed and corrected for future events and podcasts.

But even with a few “glitches” – this podcast will be, I think, a welcome edition to the wonderful media expressions of the Nixon Foundation.

It is my privilege to host and produce this and I look forward to working on new editions about once a month – so, stay tuned! My special thanks to Philip Bassham, on my staff in Fairfax, for his vital help with this project.

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Download on iTunes

5000….And Counting

October 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

In the Milestone Department: Over the weekend, the five thousandth post was uploaded to The New Nixon.

Have Purpose

August 3, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Richard Nixon, The New Nixon | 1 Comment 

Emig And Stokes Talk The “Kitchen Debate”

July 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Russia, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

On WAVA radio, TNN’s very own David Stokes (a minister and radio talk show host) and David Emig discussed today the 50th anniversary  of Vice President Nixon’s tour de force (chronicled here by Frank Gannon) against Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev at the American Exhibition in Moscow. For Emig, it was a great “preview” and “foreshadowing” of RN’s foreign policy. Listen below (the conversation starts roughly halfway into the audio track):

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John Dean And The Tapes

July 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, TV News Personalities, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, Yorba Linda | 5 Comments 

No, not those tapes.

A little over two weeks ago I posted about one of the webpages of the groundbreaking and very informative nixontapes.org site run by Luke Nichter, an assistant professor of history at Tarleton State University in Texas. This page, at the time I posted, included links to two audio files in which John W. Dean III, White House counsel during the Nixon administration, was featured.

In one file, from a recording of a telephone conversation made in 1989, Dean could be heard explaining that when writing his book about Watergate, Blind Ambition, “I never actually went back and re-read my [Senate Watergate Committee] testimony.” This was by way of explaining why some passages in the book described events in a way somewhat different from what Dean told the Committee two years earlier. A second audio file was an excerpt from a recording made of Dean’s appearance last month at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, to promote the reissue (with a lengthy new afterword) of Blind Ambition.

However, if anyone goes to that part of nixontapes.org now, he or she will find a notice from Professor Nichter stating that these sound files have been removed as a result of a notice from Dean threatening legal action if they remained on the site. (However, the 1989 conversation can still be heard at watergate.com, the site founded by Silent Coup co-author Len Colodny.)

An article at FoxNews.com by Joseph Abrams delineates the situation further. “I merely wanted to bring these contradictions to light and thought I was doing a service, but Dean was absolutely mortified when he found out that I had these materials,” Professor Nichter explains, and notes that his modestly funded site does not have the resources to contest Dean in court.

Indeed, Dean’s previous legal actions against the authors and publisher of Silent Coup and Watergate figure-turned-radio host G. Gordon Liddy have made some journalists nervous. Jim Hougan, whose 1984 book Secret Agenda was the first work to raise substantial questions about Dean’s role in Watergate, refused to comment to Abrams at all about Dean.

But Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen, author of the 2008 biography of John Mitchell The Strong Man, which contains the most meticulously documented and groundbreaking research into Dean’s role in Watergate to see print thus far, has not been cowed. He told Abrams:

“My book speaks for itself, and I think it’s noteworthy that Dean has entirely avoided engaging its substance. Dean himself is well aware that his historical reputation has suffered enormously in the last two decades, and so he resorts to frivolous litigation and bullying tactics to rehabilitate himself. Not since Albert Speer [Hitler's architectural and technological mastermind] has a historical figure so assiduously used his post-prison writings to muddy and distort the historical record of the events in which he was culpable.”

Although Dean was one of the younger figures to be involved in the Watergate scandal, he is 70 now, so one wonders for how much longer his story of what happened will continue to go unchallenged by many journalists and historians.

Scapegoat Making Himself Scarce

April 25, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under The New Nixon | 9 Comments 

Since TNN’s WordPress software keeps swallowing the comments I leave at the bottom of posts, here’s my response to historian and former archivist Maarja Krusten:

MK:

You provide fascinating insights on the iron law of political change and retribution via a glimpse at the Bush team’s changing perspectives on NARA now that they are out of office. Sauce for the gander indeed! And yet I wonder how much effect it would have on the torture debates if VP Cheney had accomplished the attitude adjustment you recommend. Here your observation about the delayed gratification of RFK’s ‘68 supporters may come in. Along with all that idealism, passion, and inspiration also seems to have come plenty of anger. I’m not sure President Obama, having confidently proclaimed the ’60s culture wars over, was ready for it.

On leaving office, GWB obviously decided to play it old school, letting his successor have his 100 days and assuming, no doubt, that Obama would give him the same cover that RN gave LBJ by not overtly scapegoating him. The preponderance of Obama’s public comments makes clear that this is where his heart is. But with the left (significantly abetted by the world’s most influential blogger, Andrew Sullivan) defying him and demanding torture prosecutions, I think Cheney heard the rumble of footsteps heading for the Bastille and decided that he was not about to sit meekly and wait for the knock on the palace door.

Have his sometimes aggressive-sounding interviews encouraged his critics? Maybe just a little. And yet by the same token, by essentially saying, “You want a piece of me?”, he’s rallied both the right and the pragmatic middle (including people such as I, not that anyone’s listening) and thus increased the political danger to Obama if he permits a witch hunt. Right now I hear official Washington — government and media elites alike — concurring 1) we need to get to the bottom of torture but 2) without legally scapegoating individuals in the prior administration, which would tear the country apart.

The link below is to works by some authorities on scapegoating from a theological perspective. I’m not sure yet how it fits in with all this, but since I’ve just been reminded of them by a mention in “The Christian Century,” I thought I’d stir it in. Richard Nixon ended up being a perfect scapegoat for Vietnam. In a way, his resignation helped us avoid ever having to come to terms with the war. My guess is that Cheney has decided he doesn’t want to go gently into the San Clemente sunset.

http://www.justpeace.org/justpeacebooks.htm#Rene%20Girard%20and%20Gill%20Bailie

TNN On HNN

February 26, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Richard Nixon, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The recent post by TNN’s Jack Pitney on the Nixonian resonances in President Obama’s SOTU address was picked up by the History News Network.

2.18.09

February 18, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Nixon Foundation, The New Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

On 18 February 2008, the first edition of The New Nixon was uploaded.  The rest is history.

 

Oh, To Be A Fly On That Train

February 16, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Presidents, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

TNN’s David Stokes is featured in this look back at the first Nixon-Kennedy debate — in McKeesport, Pennyslvania in 1947, when the freshmen congressmen were invited to talk about the Taft-Hartley Act:

About 100 people attended the April 22, 1947, debate in McKeesport. Kennedy and Nixon were close when they were first elected to Congress. After the debate, Nixon, 34, and Kennedy, 29, made their way to a diner to eat hamburgers and talk about baseball.

Sharing a compartment on the train back to Washington, they drew straws to see who got the lower berth. Nixon won that one, Stokes said.

Nixon later told an interviewer that the sleeping arrangements didn’t matter, because they talked all night.

Hat tip to Jack Nesbitt

J.D. Salinger At 90

January 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Culture, Media, Movies, The New Nixon | 1 Comment 

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 certainly a very private affair – as has been his entire life since he moved to New Hampshire in the early 1950s.

There have been a dozen or two writeups about the birthday in recent days at various newspapers, all of them assuming that Salinger has published nothing since his novella “Hapworth 16, 1924″ appeared in The New Yorker in 1965.  But there’s still a lingering question as to whether that extremely unusual work of fiction in fact constituted Salinger’s final printed words to the world.

In 1985, the venerable magazine Saturday Review published its last ink-on-paper issue after a 61-year run. (It was briefly revived as an online journal in the 1990s, but that’s another story for another day.) The editor of that final issue – none other than TNN’s own Frank Gannon – included among its contents an article by a young writer named Mark Phillips.  Phillips described, in most fascinating detail, the process by which he came to the conclusion that it might well be possible that, in 1971, Salinger had seen fit to publish two very bizarre ruminations – that’s about the only way to describe them – under the name of “Giles Weaver” in successive issues of a long-since-defunct little magazine, The Phoenix.

The link above presents Phillips’s article and the texts of the Weaver pieces. Ever since I looked these up after reading that article more than two decades back, I’ve pondered this question.  The Weaver oeuvre bears very little resemblance to anything Salinger ever put between the covers of a book, but read in tandem with “Hapworth” some definite parallels start to emerge.  A few autobiographical details included by “Weaver” also intimate that the mind behind them was also the one that gave us Holden Caulfield and the Glass family; for one thing, the author refers to his father being born in the same year as Salinger’s own father (though the day of birth does not quite match).

There are also two books to consider: Joyce Maynard’s autobiography At Home In The World, which contains a lengthy account of her affair with Salinger in 1972 and 1973, and Dream Catcher, a memoir by the author’s own daughter Margaret Salinger.  In both these books, Salinger expresses rather cynical views about American society in the Nixon era which are quite similar to the opinions Giles Weaver articulates.  Could the two be the same? It’s a conundrum that, perhaps, will be solved one day.

And in other literary news, sad tidings from Mexico of the death of Donald E. Westlake, one of America’s finest (and frequently funniest, and, when he was writing as Richard Stark, most chilling) writers of crime fiction – though perhaps best known to a wider public for the 1970s films made from his novels The Hot Rock and Bank Shot.

Would Two Kennedys In London Make A Right?

December 26, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under History, Nixon Center, Obama administration, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Steve Clemons, distinguished founding executive director of The Nixon Center, has written to friends promoting his intriguing idea that the PE should end the awkwardness created by Caroline Kennedy’s senatorial ambitions by appointing her as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

One potential problem is that her grandfather Joseph served in the same post, from which he notoriously resisted Winston Churchill’s warnings about Nazi aggression, supported appeasement, tried to meet with Adolph Hitler without President Roosevelt’s permission, and opposed wartime aid to Great Britain.

Londoners of a certain age may still wish to give an Ambassador Kennedy a piece of their minds.

The Forgotten Carol of Christmas

December 25, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Faith, Religion, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

To all of my friends and colleagues at TNN – I want to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas with a thought or two about the sounds of the season.

What’s your favorite Christmas song? That’s a very subjective question. Some like to hear about “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” – others love to think about bells “jingling.” Yet, others tear up (with good reason) thinking about a “Holy Night” so long ago. They may even want to fall on their knees.

I think, though, that the greatest Christmas song ever written is one with no familiar music. The tune is no longer available to us. But, the lyrics – ah, those lyrics – well – they’re inspired!

When Paul was writing to Pastor Timothy about everything from order in the church to the dangers of greed, he gave us an easily overlooked Christmas nugget that endures. In his first letter to his young protégé, he slips in a profound Christmas song, sandwiched between practical admonitions.

It may be not be a toe tapper like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” – but it completely captures the essence of Christmas. That essence is incarnation.

We are not told the “style” of music – nor are we told the instrument or instruments used to express it (if any). We are just given the WORDS. They are inspired words – and they have endured. They are ancient words – yet ever new.

So – this season let us reach back for one of the forgotten “oldies” – a first century worship favorite. They likely sang it in places like Ephesus, Thyatira, and Philippi. You can make up your own music – but don’t mess with the words. They are an enduring Christmas gift.

And – one…two…three…

“He appeared in a body,
Was vindicated by the Spirit,
Was seen by angels,
Was preached among the nations,
Was believed on in the world,
Was taken up in glory.”
– I Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

Have a Blessed day!

Watergate Revisionism CREEPs Into Washington Post?

December 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, Frost/Nixon, Internet, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

It’s hard to resist capitalizing that that word when writing on this subject and this newspaper. That said, the reaction of Washington Post writers to the death of W. Mark Felt, who unveiled himself in 2005 as “Deep Throat,” has been, a little surprisingly, not completely a series of panegyrics.

It is true that the Post’s obit of Felt (the latest, much-expanded version, with Bob Woodward re-credited as a contributor rather than co-author, appears here) simply stuck to the basics of the DT story as Woodward has described it over the years.  And it’s true that the Post’s editorial on Felt’s passing stressed that, though his career was “ambiguous” when considered as a whole, where Watergate was concerned he had performed “an invaluable service” when he surreptitiously fed information from a criminal investigation to a reporter in an effort to undercut the position of FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.

But yesterday, in Slate.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) Tim Noah, while arguing that Felt had done his nation good by leaking to Woodward, also said that the G-man’s motives in doing so were comparable to those of “Scooter” Libby when he was involved in the events that led to the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, which is hardly seen as a patriotic act down at the Post building.

But Noah’s column might well have been topped for irreverence in the Post’s own pages this morning.  Hank Stuever, a reporter known for his insights into pop culture and his forays into questioning the conventional wisdom, devoted a column, somewhat deceptively headed “Appreciation,” to Felt and Deep Throat’s significance to what (Stuever hinted) may well be a dying era of investigative journalism.

In his column, Stuever quotes Carl Bernstein’s pious claim on CNN yesterday (but which he’s repeated, in one form or another, to hundreds or thousands of journalism students for a quarter-century) that Felt “had the guts to say: ‘Wait. The Constitution is more important in this situation than a president of the United States who breaks the law.’”  Stuever follows that with: “Cue trumpet solo,” and goes on to speak of the “swagger” of Woodward and Bernstein’s era of newspaper work.

He concludes by alluding to words Felt, famously, never spoke:

There is, in the end, plenty of money begging to be followed, the money we don’t know about and the money we do: stimulus money ($850 billion!); Madoff money ($50 billion!), automaker bailout money ($17 billion!).  The best way to appreciate Mark Felt is to work the phones, take notes and figure out how to get that which is off the record, on.

Am I wrong or is there just a hint that Stuever is aware that after January 20, there may well be as many questions about the direction of money as there were in the Clinton administration (especially its last years), and the Washington Times might just be a bit likelier than the Post to examine where it goes?

And in tomorrow’s Post the paper’s former executive editor Len Downie, who seems to have been the last person to be told the secret of DT’s identity before Felt’s family and John O’Connor approached Vanity Fair, has a long meditation about the question so often asked in recent years: Could there be another Deep Throat in the atmosphere of today’s Washington?

Downie says the big difference between 1972 and 2008 is that in those faraway days, the Post had the story to itself for many months; he argues that now, a similar scandal, if written about in one place, would instantly be taken up by bloggers, websites, and maybe even newspapers around the country within a matter of hours. “Of course,” he continues, “an administration under siege would also have more sophisticated resources for investigating leaks and marshaling counter-attacks in the news media and the blogosphere.”

But Downie also poses two other questions at the end of his article (and very significant ones, as TNN commenter Maarja Krusten observes):

In today’s cacophonous media world, in which news, rumor, opinion and infotainment from every kind of source are jumbled together and often presented indiscriminately, how would such an improbable-sounding story ever get verified?

As newsrooms rapidly shrink, will they still have the resources, steadily amassed by newspapers since Watergate, for investigative reporting that takes months and even years of sustained work?

Downie leaves these unanswered, signing off instead by describing the pride he felt when he watched Frank Langella (as RN in Frost/Nixon) calling reporters “sons of whores.”  But the questions are certainly worth thinking about while the Fourth Estate indulges itself in nostalgia about the good old days of underground garages and shifting flowerpots.

(And having mentioned John O’Connor I should also note that in today’s issue of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, he solemnly compares Felt to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.)

“A Dishonorable Distortion Of History”

December 15, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, China, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Media, Movies, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon, Watergate | 2 Comments 

“Tell me about the loneliness of Good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of Evil?”

- Frank Langella as Skeletor (in a line he personally wrote), to Dolph Lundgren in He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe

In a comment to my post about the Washington Post’s review of Ron Howard’s film Frost/Nixon, Ms. Maarja Krusten, formerly of the National Archives’s Nixon Project, most helpfully directed my attention to some remarks about this film, by former New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew, which appeared yesterday in the Huffington Post.

Ms. Drew’s opinion of the 37th President is abundantly documented across decades of articles and columns, not to mention a book-length study she wrote last year, which was one of the last volumes commissioned by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for Times Books’s American Presidents series.  She has eternally been vigilant when it comes to any effort to depict Richard Nixon as someone whose comprehensive understanding of world affairs and willingness to maintain at least part of the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society did not, in the last analysis, compensate for his being, in her view, a paranoid, savage miscreant who almost destroyed the American way as it is understood in some sectors of the Eastern seaboard and in Santa Monica.  Her post is therefore headed as I’ve quoted it above.

Ms. Drew’s remarks at the Huffington Post amplify on these views, concerning what she believes is the unwarranted sympathetic image of Nixon that she thinks Howard’s film (not to mention Peter Morgan’s script and Frank Langella’s portrayal of the ex-President) will generate among viewers.  As Ms. Krusten notes, the veteran journalist even went to the trouble of contacting Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, so that the latter could tsk-tsk over Morgan’s altering a line from the Frost-Nixon interview transcripts, something that the Bard would never have done given his well-known fidelity to the historical record, especially when it concerned opponents of the Tudor dynasty.

As I explained in a previous post, I thought that when Howard and Morgan took the “when the President does it, that means it is not wrong” line completely out of its original context in RN’s description of the circumstances that led to the proposal of the “Huston Plan” in 1970, and dropped it into his account of the events that followed the Watergate break-in, they were misleading viewers about the historical record in a big way.  But Ms. Drew does not mention this, so I would guess it doesn’t bother her much.  Instead, she’s rattled about the film taking RN’s response to a Frost question – “You’re wanting me to say I participated in an illegal cover-up. No!” – and altering it to a response more along the lines of the “mistakes were made” lines which form the climax of RN’s self-revelation in the play and film.

She also is not happy with the ways in which Frank Langella’s performance makes Nixon “sympathetic.”  Here, I should mention that Langella’s performance is rather more nuanced than that, and, as many reviewers pointed out, is a natural culmination of his variegated career, in which he has played complex heroes (Sherlock Holmes) to tragic villains (Dracula) to shadowy evildoers (Quilty in Lolita) to the arch-enemy of the clean-cut hero (the aforequoted Skeletor). Most recently he has portrayed Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons on Broadway, in which role, as he has pointed out in at least one interview, he’s been able to see parallels between that statesman and Nixon. (Although it must be acknowledged that in other chats with journalists, he seems willing to go along with the writer’s preconceived notion that More and Nixon were complete opposites.)

Langella’s vocal performance is quite noteworthy.  He can imitate RN’s vocal timbre, as Stacy Keach, in the traveling production of the Frost/Nixon play that I reviewed, could not.  This obliged Keach to substitute for it a very meticulous imitation of RN’s phrasing.  By contrast, Langella doesn’t need to exactly imitate the utterances of RN in the interviews or in the “off-camera” scenes.

So, just from the way he recites some lines (or raises an eyebrow or lowers a jowl), he can bring to the character something of his slippery writer in Diary Of A Mad Housewife, the avaricious but sympathetic protagonist of Mel Brooks’s The Twelve Chairs, as well as something of Sherlock Holmes, John Adams (the other President he’s played, despite being six-foot-four as opposed to Adams’s five-seven or RN’s five-eleven-and-a-half), and even Dracula or Skeletor.  (Although, as I wrote in TNN last week, Ron Howard does, in some scenes, appear to play up the Skeletor parallels just a little more than the others.) Rather amusingly, at a few points in the film the actor speaks slowly and with a drawl, to the point where he almost sounds like ex-Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein essaying an impression of RN.

Langella’s performance is, therefore, not one-dimensional – or, we can say, it does not contain enough of one particular dimension to appease Ms. Drew.  I should point out, though, that she is correct when she says that the film’s treatment of David Frost makes him out to be more of a lightweight that he truly was.

In the Frost/Nixon play as I saw it at the Kennedy Center, Alan Cox in the role of Frost spoke in a way so uncannily reminiscent of Eric Idle’s lampoon of Frost that it tended to make the character seem fatuous from the get-go.  (Here, it’s worth mentioning that Matthew Macfadyen, as producer John Birt in the film version, sounds from time to time rather like David Walliams of Little Britain, but not so much as to disrupt the attention of viewers.)

In the film, Michael Sheen seems to take considerable pains to add more gravitas to the role of Frost in the early scenes than Morgan’s script permits.  The film, more so than the play, aims for the conventional transformation of the hero from immature, untested tyro to seasoned professional through conflict, in the best Prince Hal/Henry V (or He-Man, for that matter) tradition.

This comes through rather explicitly in the scene where Frost, after receiving the half-comic, half-frightening phone call from Nixon, brusquely informs his girlfriend Caroline Cushing (played by Rebecca Hall) that it’s time to work.  Ignoring the historical facts (which involved James Reston Jr. locating a transcript of a conversation between Nixon and Chuck Colson, and Birt and Frost carefully hiding it away for several months until it could be used for maximum effect) the movie shows Frost poring over raw transcripts. He writes down his “discovery” on a tablet in spectacularly disorganized fashion; what’s on the paper looks like some mad-genius scribbling left over from Howard’s 1999 film about mathematician John Nash, A Beautiful Mind.

With this in hand, Frost abruptly becomes assured and authoritative, the playboy journalist no longer.  That’s one part of the movie that nearly made me laugh out loud at its implausibility – that, and Frost/Nixon’s closing titles, which suggest (in a prime manifestation of the Tinseltown mentality) that the journalist came out of the “test” a success because he throws a spectacular party in Britain every summer, while implying that RN came out a failure because he wasn’t invited to enough state dinners.

(But, as Richard Holbrooke, the guru of Democratic foreign policy, points out in a very interesting op-ed today about the 30th anniversary of the normalization of US-Chinese diplomatic ties, RN was present at the state dinners that mattered to him.  And the fact that the first of these occasions occurred in 1979, not very long after his conversations with Frost, demonstrates that the interviews, as I told TNN’s David Stokes on a recent radio show, helped bring him in from the wilderness, rather than keeping him out there as Morgan and Howard suggest.)

I may be writing more about the film later this week, but for now I’ll suggest the reader look at the comments following Ms. Drew’s post, which include some insightful rebuttals of her argument.

The Three Nixons

December 3, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Nixon Administration figures, The New Nixon | 6 Comments 

You’d think that one Nixon would have been quite enough for TNN’s Frank Gannon, who assisted the 37th President with the gargantuan task of organizing and writing his memoirs, RN: The Memoirs Of Richard Nixon. But here’s Frank flanked by two more — actors Stacy Keach, who plays RN in the traveling company of Peter Morgan’s “Frost/Nixon,” and Ed Gero, who did the honors in a recent production of Nixon’s Nixon.

The Episconixonian: Church And Political Pragmatism

November 25, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Episconixonian, The New Nixon | 2 Comments 

With apologies to Virginia Woolf, I’ve started a blog of my own, to avoid subjecting New Nixon readers to as many posts about the Episcopal Church. It’s on Google blogspots, and I can’t figure out how you get anyone to visit besides loved ones (and even that’s a crap shoot). So please come see me! 

Nixon In 2012

November 25, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2012, Republican Party, Sarah Palin, The New Nixon | 2 Comments 

Honey, The New Puppy Chewed My Striped Pants!

November 6, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Obama administration, Presidents, The New Nixon | 1 Comment 

In the Wall Street Journal, TNN’s Frank Gannon reviews Stephen Hess’s new book on Presidential transitions and inaugurations:

What do you wear to your Inauguration? Ike and JFK wore a morning coat and striped pants. (The general donned a homburg, and Kennedy sported a top hat.) Jimmy Carter inaugurated the new tradition — a plain business suit. What chapter and verse should the Bible be opened to as you are sworn in? Nixon chose the “swords into ploughshares” passage from Isaiah. Both Kennedy and George W. Bush, perhaps hoping to avoid interpretation, left the Bible closed. As for furnishing the Oval Office, you can be like LBJ and bring your own desk or select from four in the White House inventory: the Theodore Roosevelt, the Wilson, the Resolute (made from the timbers of a 19th-century ship) or the C&O (made in the 1920s for the railroad’s owners).

Richard Milhous Obama Indeed

October 21, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Democratic Party, Election 2008, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Randy Shaw examines the correlations between Sen. Obama ‘08 and RN ‘68 — as first noted in February by TNN’s own Jack Pitney.

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