Imagine Looking Back fondly on Nixon?

44 men have served as President of the United States. Each came to office with unique ambitions, desires, and skills, or lack thereof. Few sought the office as passionately and as desperately and came so far to achieve it as Richard Nixon.

The real tragedy is that in that passion, that desire, that ambition ...coupled with his upbringing and his setbacks along the way, he sowed the seeds of his own destruction.

Perhaps if Nixon had been elected in 1960, both Vietnam and Richard Nixon might have evolved differently, and the world today just might be a different place. Such is the power of character, of the people we place in that office. As the late journalist Richard Ben Cramer explains, what it takes it win has not always given us Presidents we may want to govern us.

This is the story of Richard Nixon. So much has been written about Nixon. Much of it has come in waves. There was the period after his resignation, of the bad Nixon. Then after his death, the better Nixon. Now writers, journalists and historians are trying to tie all the threads together.

Perhaps Bill Clinton put it best in his eulogy for Nixon, when he said that “the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career must come to a close.”

John Farrell gives us that overview in Richard Nixon: The Life

My conversation with John Farrell:

Is our long national nightmare over yet?

For journalists, for historians, and for political junkies, Richard Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving. There are over 3700 hours of Nixon tapes and only a portion have been released and deconstructed.

Even as we mark this 40th anniversary of Nixon's resignation, most of us have only heard a few minutes here or there. For Luke Nichter, a Professor at A & M University, and one of the preeminent experts on the Nixon tapes, it paints a picture of a cunning and controlling President, and sometimes a country astride the world. But mostly it captures the White House, America and the world, in a particular place and time that bears very little resemblance to the world today.

The latest collection of Nixon tapes, assembled by Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley, is The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972.
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My conversation with Luke Nichter:

Washington's Scandal Culture

The history of muckraking journalism is very much the history of America. Our founders clearly understood the importance of a free press in a free society. Often times though, the work of the press has not served the interests of those in power and we’ve seen powerful push back as that power is threatened. We all remember The Pentagon Papers, the work of Sinclair Lewis, Walter Winchell, Woodward and Bernstein and today Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Back in the days of Richard Nixon, another powerful newspaperman, Jack Anderson, would seek to tear down the wall of censorship that surrounded the Nixon administration. As you might expect, Nixon sought to retaliate and in so doing was born new chapters in the scandal culture of Washington. University of Maryland Professor and award winning journalist Mark Feldstein takes us inside a conflict that defined modern political warfare in his book Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture.


My conversation with Mark Feldstein:

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