My Kingdom for a Horse

Now I understand why Pat Buchanan was so busy promoting his new book on Nixon. It was a preemptive strike (if you will) against a new book and documentary timed for release on the 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation August 8. Almost anyway, as the HBO documentary, Nixon on Nixon, premiers Monday, Aug. 11.

It seems more tapes have become available to the public, which cast the former president in an even more sinister light. Ken Hughes is the author of the most recent book on Nixon, Chasing Shadows. You can read an excerpt here. David Greenberg reviews both the book and the documentary for the Washington Post. Hughes apparently focuses largely on the Chennault Affair, in which Nixon used a friend of a friend to sabotage Johnson's attempt to end the Vietnam War in 1968, as Nixon feared it would give Humphrey a boost in the tight election. Eerily similar to Reagan's own efforts to sabotage Carter's attempt to end the Iran Hostage crisis in 1980, but the Gipper seemed to skate clear of this controversy. Hughes doesn't let Nixon off the hook.

It seems that this kind of skulduggery has become part and parcel of the Republican bag of dirty tricks. Of course, Nixon wasn't the first to resort to such nasty deeds to get what he wanted, nor are such dirty tricks exclusively Republican. Johnson was certainly no saint, and no doubt saw any kind of peace agreement in Vietnam as a way to undermine Nixon's candidacy. But, what sets Nixon apart from others is that he didn't seem to have a single altruistic bone in his body. He was perhaps the most cynical and duplicitous president ever, undermining the efforts of his own cabinet, notably Henry Kissinger, who the former president thought was straying from the path.

Nixon comes across as a later day Richard III. As much as Buchanan tries to point to the good Nixon did, the bad just piles up against him, made even worse by Nixon's copious tapes, which ultimately proved his undoing and still haunt his battered legacy 40 years after.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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