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Agreed 100%. Cronkite was not a reporter, he was a propagandist whose pernicious pronouncements about and during the Vietnam War could not have been more pernicious to the U.S. war effort if they had been drafted in Hanoi. He spearheaded what amounted to a ‘fifth column’ in the U.S. press corps during the 1960s and 1970s, who dedicated themselves to making a mockery of JFK’s inaugural claims that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden ... to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

You're not alone in your perception. I'd guess, based on the photos I've seen, that Obama has a condition that used to, and maybe still does, go under the name of gynecomasty. There is an amusing incident in Ben Bradlee's book about his conversations with JFK in which, after Bradlee took a photo of the bare-chested JFK, Bradlee was told to get rid of it, or, in the immortal words of John Ehrlichman,to 'deep six' the photo because it revealed that JFK had what you refer to as 'man breasts.' My memory on this point fails me at the moment, but I believe, in keeping with Bradlee's reportorial zeal, he may have included the 'forbidden' photo in the aforementioned book. Why Bradlee would do so, knowing JFK's wishes that it should be kept out of public view, I would have to attribute to a customary lack of gentlemanly sensibility and restraint in his genus (professional reporter). The condition isn't, of course, all-that-unusual, but it isn't a condition most men who are concerned to project a virile masculine image (e.g. JFK) are pleased to put on display. What is unusual is that in spite of the immense coverage given to the subject of Obama's chest development in the media, your post in this thread is, so far as I know, the first one to make this explicit comment.

Anything is possible, but the only polling that matters is the state-by-state polling, i.e., there are 50 different weighted polls, one for each state, and Zogby provided no evidence to suggest that anything has changed to diminish Obama's electoral-vote prospects. If McCain wins, he will he caught in the vice of a vengeful Democrat Congress, just as Nixon was -- a Congress that will likely cut off funding for the Iraq mission, just as the vengeful Democrat Congress, under the influence of the McGovernites, did in the case of Vietnam between 1972 and 1975. Nixon, then Ford, had to stand by and watch the Democrats vacate the commitments (and investment of U.S. lives) that they themselves had made to Vietnam in the first place! Ironically, Obama is more likely to extend the Iraq mission than McCain ever could in the grip of a vengeful Democrat Congress. A President McCain would be like a prisoner obliged to report to his parole board (the Democrat Congress) once a day.

My Googling of PUMA indicates that it IS an acronym and has the following meaning:"

".... websites have sprung up to denounce Democrats for picking Obama. One - called PUMA, an acronym for the sentiment "Party Unity My A**" - features postings by Clinton supporters saying they will never vote for Obama, even if it means electing McCain."

There is no suggestion they will vote for McCain. They should certainly be included in the data analysis that prompted my first post in this thread, BUT if, as seems to follow from the above quotation, they simply will not vote at all, I guess they will not be included in 'exit polls' and will not register in the "expanded" likely voters group I pinpointed in my first post.

Granting that they might vote for McCain, they should certainly be included in the sort of analysis I mentioned in my first post. They constitute a 'sore loser' group and it will be of interest to know if such a group could have significant influence. For example, if McGovern had not been nominated in 1972, the 'sore losers' would still have voted against Nixon in all likelihood. It will be of interest to know what proportion of the 'sore loser' group that supported Hillary would vote against Obama, in which case, if the Dems lose, they might, in a close election, be accused of scuttling a Democratic victory (cf. Nader) and Hillary would likely be toast in 2012.

Thanks for your reply to my second post in this thread. I admit to complete ignorance about this and thank you for your information. Is PUMA an acronym? My understanding is that they are largely motivated by their feminist leanings and would ONLY have found Hillary to be an acceptable Democratic nominee.

By many, Stevenson was viewed as the Oscar Wilde candidate, an image that was encouraged when Nixon described Stevenson as Sidesaddle Adlai, adding that "like all sidesaddle riders his feet hang well out to the left." However, the overwhelming reason Stevenson lost in 1952 and 1956 was Ike's enormous popularity. I cannot recall that Stevenson was seen as a Dukakis-type policy wonk. Unlike Dukakis, Stevenson was, in my reading of history, most widely remembered as the wittiest man who ran for the U.S. Presidency in the last half of the 20th century. He was, on the occasion I mentioned, when he held out the prospect of Ike's dying during his second term (and Nixon succeeding him), thought to have been altogether too serious. As Ambrose noted in this connection, "What most people found distasteful, however, was what Stevenson said, and the way he said it."

Thanks for troubling to reply to my post in this thread. The operative part of my mention of defections from the Democratic ranks was the part that is highlighted in boldface italics below:

"no prominent centrist Democrats have openly defected from Democratic ranks on the basis the 'Obama threat.'"

In the historical precedents I cited, and in connection with any attempt to find a basis for the differential defection rate, it was/will be necessary to inquire of voters if the Goldwater, McGovern, Nixon, Palin or Obama 'threat' was the specific reason for their defection. In the case of the Republican defectors I named, the cause of the defection was specifically cited as Palin. I cannot recall that Lieberman ever indicated that the basis for his defection was Obama, i.e. he would have defected whether the nominee was Obama, Hillary or any other of the Democratic primary contenders. Have any of the other Democratic defectors you have named specifically attributed their defections to the fact that Obama, rather than any other Democratic primary nominee, was chosen for the Presidential contest? For purely PR reasons, it would seem unlikely that they would have done so because to have done so would have put them on the spot with respect to a charge of racism -- however many other reasons (e.g., his liberal-left politics) they might have cited.

In the first instance I cited, it was widely believed that Stevenson's candidacy was seriously weakened by the public's association of Stevenson with public jesting. Stevenson was a genuinely witty individual who knew how to deliver a humorous line regardless of who wrote it. The arguments given in support of the perception that this was a handicap for Stevenson generally focused on the notion that the issues of the day were too grave to allow for public jesting. It will be interesting to observe whether or not this same perspective re-surfaces in connection with Palin's appearance on SNL. Democrats are nothing if not foxy: it was Nixon's ability to finesse them at their own game that led to his occupying a unique place in their hall of infamy.

Newport did not mention that the "expanded" likely voters in this election will also include those who wouldn't ordinarily vote except in the rare instance when there is a broad national concern that one of the tickets contains a nominee whose possible election to office is so frightening that it must be blocked. This sort of situation has occurred twice in the past 50 years: in the case of Goldwater in 1964, when the Democrats convinced large numbers of voters that Goldwater was too dangerous to be President and might use 'the bomb' (the famous 'daisy ad'); and in 1972, when McGovern was seen by the public, including centrist Democrats, as too radically leftwing to hold the office of the Presidency. Both LBJ and Nixon won in 1964 and 1972, respectively, by the largest pluralities that one of the major parties ever held over the other major party at the time each election took place. The same factor had been put in play by Adlai Stevenson on the eve of the 1956 Presidential election when he reminded the public that "a Republican victory tomorrow would mean that Richard M. Nixon would be President of this country within the next four years." This was a not-so-cryptic suggestion that, if elected, Ike, who had suffered a serious coronary in his first term, would die before his second term expired, and Nixon would succeed to the Presidency, a consequence that Stevenson seemed to think would chill the blood of the U.S. public as much as it would chill the blood of the murderers' row in the Kremlin. In this case, the threat of a Nixon Presidency fizzled and Dick & Ike sailed to a landslide victory. This time around, in 2008, the threat of an Obama Presidency is pitted against the threat of a Palin vice-presidency leading to a Palin Presidency. So far, judging by the polls, the former is not as threatening to the public as the latter, and if the gap begins to narrow, the question is: Which threat will bring out more of the "expanded" likely voters who respond to 'armageddon-type' threats. The only clue we have is that so many prominent Republicans (e.g., Christopher Buckley, Noonan, Brooks, Will) have 'felt the chill' and have openly defected from Republican ranks on the basis of the Palin candidacy, whereas no prominent centrist Democrats have openly defected from Democratic ranks on the basis the 'Obama threat.' Only careful analysis of the Nov. 4 electorate, based on asking the right questions, will give us the answer.

For those who want more than a selective, superficial Drudgeland ‘take’ on the voting trends, the 49-47 edge is based on the so-called “traditional” analysis of “likely” voters. The more reliable “expanded” analysis shows a much larger edge (51-45) and the standard poll, based on registered voters, shows an even greater edge (50-43) for Obama, with an across-the-board range of 4-7% undecided voters. All rationalizations beyond these findings are of little significance until the state-by-state, electoral college estimates become available.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2108196/posts

Thanks for this post. It is a useful reminder that the U.S. mass media have been guilty of a Soviet-style rendering of a truly great and historic American into a non-person ... or worse. As historian Stephen Ambrose once wrote, Nixon was the one, the only one, who could have pulled off the peaceful and constructive U.S. opening to China. The emphasis of the opening on the economic liberation of China (by granting them economic privileges equal to those then granted to the old Soviet Union by the U.S.) has brought more people (ca. 400,000) in a shorter time (less than 30 years) out of poverty than ever before in human history. This was largely owing to Nixon who, in his last message as U.S. president (his resignation speech) eloquently appealed for the maintenance of peaceful relations between the U.S. and China at all costs. As noted by the U.S. ambassador to China at the time, the Deng-Nixon relation during Nixon’s post-presidential years were every bit as important as the Mao-Nixon relationship had been, in getting the U.S. and China past the Tienanmen Square impasse, and allowing Deng’s economic reforms to continue. The U.S. has played its post-1972 relations with China strictly according to Nixon’s playbook (through the Carter, Reagan, both Bush and Clinton administrations) and that’s why it is the only U.S. foreign-policy initiative that has thrived with almost uninterrupted buoyancy in the past four decades.

"It was Bobby Kennedy who gave Dobrynin the ultimatum to the Soviets to remove the missiles the Cuba."

Not quite. Dobrynin's memoirs are the most reliable source on this subject. He says, clearly, that Bobby Kennedy offered a quid-pro-quo -- NOT AN ULTIMATUM -- that the U.S. would remove its missiles from Turkey if the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, BUT would insist on deniability, i.e., the U.S. would deny they offered to remove missiles from Turkey if the Soviets revealed this publicly. It was a political powerplay unparalleled in U.S. history: a coverup intended to re-elect JFK to the Presidency in 1964 and RFK to continue a Kennedy dynasty for another two terms after JFK. Of course, if the quid-pro-quo had been known, as a fact, to the U.S. public, the exercize would have had no political advantage for the Kennedys, who would, as in the Bay Of Pigs, have been seen as 'soft'. It makes the Watergate coverup look like what it was: the thinnest scandal in U.S. history. Notably, David Mark did not even include Watergate in his article on the 'The Ten Worst Political Scandals In U.S. History', but he should have included the Kennedy/Dobrynin one.

The notion that the U.S. and the Sovets were eyeball-to-eyeball and that the "Soviets blinked", as Dean Rusk famously said, was Democrat hogwash. The quid-pro-quo deal, in which the U.S. carried out its part of the bargain, was speculated at the time, but the unequivocal evidence only came with Dobrynin's memoirs. Another false front (coverup) at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, about which the U.S. public had no idea, was that the U.S. then, in 1962, had an enormous strategic advantage over the Soviets in ICBMs. It was not until years later that the U.S. public learned JFK had lied through his glistening white teeth when he spoke of the missile gap in the Soviets favour under Ike, a false charge that no doubt got him enough additional votes to defeat Nixon in 1960. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. had about 125 - 200 ICBMs and the Soviets had 5, maybe 10 at most, and they were much less accurate than the U.S. missiles. It was a David (Soviets) and Goliath (U.S.) situation.

Khrushchev would have been delighted to see JFK continue in office. The last thing he wanted was to face down Nixon or Goldwater, and if Nixon had won the Presidency in 1960, there never would have been a Cuban Missile Crisis. The Russians would never have dared to undertake such a "hare-brained scheme" with Nixon in office, and if Khrushchev had met Nixon at Vienna, he'd have confirmed the opinion he had already formed after VP Nixon's visit to the USSR, when he addressed the Soviet public on TV and he convinced Khrushchev in their 'kitchen debate' that Nixon was the bad, bad Leroy Brown of U.S. politics, someone not to be trifled with.

Your assailants are the same group of people, or their descendants, who wanted to see Nixon impeached for having visited China in February of 1972. They were led at that time by Wm. F. Buckley Jr., recently deceased. His brother, James Buckley, later led the Senate charge to impeach Nixon over Watergate, which was one of the thinnest scandals ever put over on the U.S. public. As the years passed and he saw how wrong he had been about Nixon's 'opening to' China, Wm. F. Buckley, with great stealth, increasingly implied he had not objected to Nixon's approach to China, but rather, that he had only objected to Nixon's having been civil towards Chairman Mao -- as if diplomacy could be conducted with the sort of mailed fist approach that some of your critics have used in this thread in addressing your posts. As a member in good standing in Free Republic forums for a decade or so, I welcome your views. Unlike most of your critics, I have a fine Tibetan rug as the showpiece in my living room. Cheers.

Thanks for troubling to give a thoughtful response to my post. It seems to me that you have sublimated the degree to which, throughout its existence, the U.S. has been ruled by a single dominant majority (now a minority) of white Protestant Christians, i.e., in the Presidency, there have been no blacks, no Jews (far more influential in U.S. life than their numbers would otherwise be expected to dictate), no Muslims, no agnostics, no atheists, no Hispanics, only one white Roman Catholic in a nation in which Roman Catholicism is a dominant religious group, and in which Hispanics are a burgeoning (seriously under-represented) racial group (Hispanics) in the U.S. Executive branch of government (cf. Canada has had, before its present Prime Minister, an almost unbroken string of Roman Catholic Prime Ministers extending back to the 1950s, coinciding with the ascendancy of Roman Catholicism and accommodation of French privileges enshrined in that were in that confederation).

Moreover, the current massive Hispanic immigration into the U.S. is no doubt, in the minds of these immigrants, redressing the historic absorption of huge parts of the North American land mass by the U.S. at the expense of Mexico. To the extent that these U.S. minorities/majorities have been and continue to be unrepresented or grossly under-represented in the U.S. Executive branch of government, they create "rift zones" that easily rival any that exist in China, suggesting that the "difference between a democratic republic and a race-based dictatorship" is not at all obvious. The minorities you mention in and on the borders of China are in no position to seriously challenge Han-Chinese dominance -- and they have had the good sense (until the current ill-advised disruption of the Olympic preliminaries) to tred very carefully on Han-Chinese sensitivities -- as, so far, have the Hispanics and Blacks in the U.S. However, as Pat Buchanan has been warning for years, it takes no great imagination to envision how these latter subpopulations could become more fractious than any of those that you mention in and on the borders of China.

The behaviour of China in this situation is no different from what it would be if it existed under precisely the same Constitution as the one that the U.S. aspires to adhere to. The notion of American exceptionalism, often wrongly thought to have been coined by de Tocqueville during his examination of America in The Age of Jackson, had existed in analgous form in China for tens of centuries, when the only human inhabitants of the Americas were the New World Indians. Chinese exceptionalism is no different in quality from American exceptionalism, is independent of political systems, and as this columnist correctly notes, it is rooted in nationalism. Just as the rest of the globe has had to 'live with' the concept (and reality) of American exceptionalism, so it will have do the same with Chinese exceptionalism, which is no less justified and justfiable than American exceptionalism now that it has shaken its colonial past, before which, Tibet always was and will forever in the future, subject to China's dominance. As that old Nazi, Valter Kronkite, used to remind us on a regular basis, "That's the way it is."

Romney made a goof. To disparage McCain by using Nixon's name as a pejorative in a GOP primary was terminally 'dumb'. Notwithstanding the degree to which Nixon is reviled by some in the FR (and in this thread), a far greater proportion in the GOP rank-and-file still think well of Nixon -- and will not be pleased to hear Romney take his name in vain. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll the U.S. public was surveyed with respect to the presidential career of their 37th U.S. President (Nixon) by asking "When you think back to the high and low points of his term in office, do you think, on the whole, that it was good for America or bad for America that Richard Nixon served as President? Fully 73% replied that it had been good, which is an even higher percentage than the landslide vote (61%) Nixon received in the 1972 presidential election, in which he won by a larger margin (about 18 million votes) than the leader of one major party ever defeated a leader of the other major party in the history of the Republic.

As I recall, Arnold dared to mention Nixon for the first time since Nixon resigned in 1974 at the GOP Convention in 2004. It got the loudest cheer of anything Arnold said. I can understand why Mitt has a 'thing' about Nixon: Nixon easily defeated Romney's father in the 1968 runup to the GOP nomination and found him to be an utter bore in cabinet meetings. I think Mitt's dad had one hell of a time getting through his 'higher' education and it looks as if Mitt could profit by returning to school to learn a little more about Politics 101. He probably lost as many voters by that slam at Nixon as he will gain from millions of dollars of advertising he's about to launch. Just dumb. And I was one of those who, independently of all other factors, including McCain, had been supportive of Romney's candidacy, but to make such a dumb political move means he'd likely have screwed up before long, even if he had won the nomination.

Doesn't Mitt know that Nixon still had the rank-and-file support of most of the GOP on the day he resigned? It was only the 'loudness' of Nixon's GOP opponents (both in the press and in Congress)(e.g. the Buckley brothers, Wm. and Jim, Goldwater etc.) who obscured this truth.

The LOL you can plainly hear wafting over the country from the general direction of Yorba Linda CA is instructing Dan to "Always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." [Richard Nixon's Farewell To The White House Staff]

To any who thought the former churl of Saddle River, New Jersey, was speaking of himself, he was not. He was adressing the Press, Dan in particular. Nixon first made very similar remarks to Rabbi Korff on May 13, 1974, months before he resigned, and long before his farewell to the White House staff.

In the context of the interview with Rabbi Korff, Nixon said:"I know in the press room that my policies are generally disapproved of, and there are some who hate my guts with a passion [are you listening Dan?]. But I don't hate them, none of them. An individual must not return hatred for hatred.

What really destroys an individual when he is under attack is if he allows the hate against him to become part of himself and then the fury that arises within him will destroy him....To the extent that they allow their own hatreds to consume them, they will lose the rationality which is the mark of a civilized man.

Dan must set aside his present course and serve his nation and former network faithfully. Only then, Tricky Dan may one day also have 5 (Network) Presidents attend his funeral and have one of their numbers (Les Moonves?) eulogize him. Any other course will, I fear, lead to Tricky Dan's complete and utter destruction.

I was very pleased to read what you had to say about Nixon and how and when you came to know of his worth. Rest assured the length of your post was brief when compared with that of some of those I have entered in the FR forum -- mostly in defence of Nixon. I hope, some day, to publish a slim volume about Nixon (A Nixon Reader) that will strip away the sanctimonious claptrap that has been written about him by those who were, and still are obsessed with hatred for the man -- and most of all, for the sheer magnitude of his achievement, in Nixon's words, "of giving history a nudge".

I'm quite sanguine about the prospect that Nixon will rank among the greatest U.S. presidents when this era becomes the subject of genuine historical appraisal, say 25 years from now. The team of Nixon and Reagan was the best setup and closer combination in U.S. history -- they were, in presidential terms, what Duane Ward and Tom Henke were to closing out ball games in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I don't know if you have read it, but the timely publication of Nixon's The Real War during the spring of the election year (1979) that saw Reagan displace Carter from the presidency not only helped to oust Carter, but it set the stage for Reagan, and served as 'the Bible' for the Reagan Presidency.

No other President's speechwriters had it as easy as Reagan's did: everything Reagan thought and believed is contained in The Real War, including the notion that the Cold War struggle was a contest between "good" and "evil", using those words in their soundest, least polemical sense.

I was gladdened to read in the recently published Reagan Diaries that Reagan was pleased to acknowledge Nixon's assistance in remodelling his approach to the Soviets -- and that he continued to send a birthday greeting to Nixon each year of his presidency. It was of course Nixon, not Thatcher, who convinced Reagan that talking to Gorbachev would have productive results: the INF Agreement and the legitimation of a path-of-no-return for a Soviet implosion under the pressure of U.S. economic might.

It is intriguing that Reagan and Nixon, being such different personality types, did not find each other's company especially congenial, but as recorded in Mitchell's Tricky Dick And The Pink Lady, the two men had such an identity of viewpoint that Reagan, even while Reagan was still a registered Democrat, switched his vehement support for The Pink Lady to Tricky Dick, and he proselytized vigorously in behalf of Nixon's election to the U.S. Senate. That is the stuff of real history.

Not having read the book myself, I allow that Leslie Stahl may have distorted what Greenspan said. In her 60-Minutes interview of Henry Kissinger a few years ago, Stahl tried to goad Kissinger into saying Nixon was an antiSemite and Kissinger would have none of it. However, this is not the first time Alan Greenspan has shown himself to be the proverbial Merchant Of Venom.

Nixon brought Greenspan and several other Jews from private business into government service in his administration, e.g., Arthur Burns, Herb Stein, Ben Stein, Henry Kissinger, Leonard Garment, Bill Safire. In some instances, Nixon rescued them from an obscurity they richly deserved, e.g., Burns urged wage-and-price controls on Nixon.

As for Nixon and the Jews, all that need be said on this subject was concisely said by Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin: "Clinton's not the best friend Israel ever had. Bush was OK, Carter was God-awful, Reagan was wonderful to us, but Israel's life was endangered only once and the man who saved us was Richard Nixon. Thank God for Richard Nixon."

As for the relative intelligence of the U.S. Presidents of the 20th century, most objective analysts conclude that Nixon was likely the most intelligent of the group. If anything else need be said on this subject, it was said by another, more gifted economist than Greenspan, namely, Milton Friedman who, when asked his opinion of Nixon by Charlie Rose in a PBS interview, replied:

"Nixon was one of the most intelligent men I have ever known."

Amen.

Apologies. When citing #92 in my most recent post I erred. It should read #90

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my enquiry. Your comment that "In spite of his foreign policy achievements, he was awful on the economy, and let political conflict get way out of hand." is unarguable -- although I'm ever-mindful that Milton Friedman said 'Nixon was one of the smartest men I ever met.' and that Nixon's temporizing with wage & price controls, as a short-term measure, did work; and abandoning the Gold Standard prevented most of the U.S. Gold Reserves from being shipped to the U.K. Although I'm sure we could get into an argument about the appropriateness of Nixon's having acted on expediency rather than on principle (as Friedman thought he had), I think our principal point of disagreement is with respect to the way in which public assessments of U.S. presidents will or will not change in a time-dependent fashion. Again, I can't disagree with your view that the rating for Nixon, if it continues to be measured the way it is now done by Gallup, is unlikely to change, or to change only slowly in the short term: at 32% now, it might approach 50% in a few years time, when the GOP finds it necessary to support a nominee who has 'moderate' credentials and, like Arnold, is unafraid to mention Nixon's name at a GOP Convention. We'll see.

What I do expect will change, but only in the longterm, is the way in which the assessments are made, i.e., not using the words Approval and Disapproval, but using the words Job Performance, Policy Competence or Accomplishment. As Gallup now structures its poll in this era when annual retrospectives on Watergate continue apace (but will eventually peter out), the Gallup poll question is the equivalent of asking a respondent if he/she approves of their President being a crook. I'm a bit more optimistic than that. If you have the patience to read further, I would outline what I think is wrong with both 'populist' (Gallup, Harris etc polls) and 'elitist' (by professional historians) polling.

In time, I think Gallup assessments, like the Lovenstein Presidential I.Q. polls and the Arthur Schlesinger & Son polls of expert opinion, will be viewed as laughable anachronisms from a bogus era in U.S. journalism-cum-history. Insofar as I can determine, the renaissance of Truman's reputation came in the midst of Watergate when HST's alleged 'plain speaking' reputation came to the fore [Were there ever any hints of this renaissance in HST's reputation in the intervening years between 1952 and 1972? -- not as far I can determine]. However, as in the case of the 'Saddam 911' effect I mentioned in my earlier post (#92), the public was, by 1972, almost totally oblivious of the fact that HST lied his way shamelessly through the Alger Hiss scandal. Truman proclaimed to his death that he wasn't sure Hiss was guilty even though all of Bradley, Marshall, Hoover and the Canadian Prime Minister (via Gouzenko) had privately told him what decoding of Venona [and later the GRU files of the former Soviet Union] would later reveal to the public: Hiss was a Soviet agent code-named ALES who pocketed his Stalin Medal during the Yalta Summit.

I recall Frank Newport or one of his minions, on a network newscast, announcing, almost in tears, that recent polls suggested Nixon is better known for the China opening than for Watergate, and he -- a polling official yet! -- then volunteered that this was a very disturbing trend in view of the assault on 'our' Constitution by the Nixon adminstration. Surely there is a doctoral thesis 'out there', one that can be recycled into a Best Seller, which takes an appropriately mawkish view of the whole corrupted system of Presidential evaluation, and offers a vision-of-amendment that would elevate the quality of both 'populist' and 'elitist' polling by linking the results to some palpable knowledge (on the part of the respondent) of the notable achievements (job performance) that emerged from a given president's administration. As things now stand, one has to wonder if most respondents aren't about as informed as those charming airheads who are the subject of Jay Leno's 'man-in-the-street' type interviews. Thanks for your patience if you've come this far -- and thanks, also, for the tip about Kuklick's book, which I just ordered from AbeBooks.

I wasn't sure what you meant by "Don't know" not being a big factor in Nixon's case. Are you suggesting that judgements about Nixon are now fixed and will never change? In this context, and in the context of Kuklick's thesis, it seems noteworthy that there have been many quite positive 'takes' about Nixon in just this past year: Margaret MacMillan's 'Nixon In China', Conrad Black's 'The Invincible Quest' and the Broadway play (to be made into a movie), starring Frank Langella, who won a Tony Award for his performance in Frost/Nixon, to name just three. In the latter instance, even the inveterate Nixon-hater Frank Rich was moved to admit that he was led to have a measure of sympathy for the dreaded Nixon -- something he thought would never be possible.

In addition, I'd make a point that Kuklick seems to overlook, namely that, in the case of Nixon, it has become increasingly clear that there was an important 'Saddam 911' factor at work in public opinion in 1973 and 1974. According to Gallup polls throughout that period, and up to the day he resigned, nearly 50% of those who saw Watergate as a serious matter (almost the same percentage saw Watergate as "just politics"), believed Nixon had advance knowledge and took part in the planning of the breakin (much as a large block of the U.S. public believes Saddam had a direct role in planning 911). Even avowed Nixon critics such as Stanley Kutler and John Dean now concede that Nixon had no foreknowledge whatever of the DNC breakin.

Nixon aside, Truman, fewer than five years ago, was widely thought to have been an awful president, but he is now widely seen in a favourable light. It would have seemed almost unimaginable 5 years ago that Truman would approach Ike in a 'popularity contest'. Of course Truman's approval rating when he left office was lower than Nixon's was when he resigned. Nixon is the U.S. president in which most Americans currently have greatest interest and his 'popularity' is still a fluid commodity. I'm not saying there isn't merit in what Kuklick writes (there certainly is), but only that what he is writing about is a 'popularity contest' in 'real time' as opposed to a 'popularity contest' many years later. He is NOT dealing with duly considered judgements that are based on the best available sifting of fact from fiction, which is the proper role of historians.

The Roper use of 'Job Performance' as an index of presidential performance deserves to be respected, and indeed, Black, in his book, makes a strong and cogent case for his view that Nixon accomplished more than any U.S. president since Lincoln. I guess it boils down to what Mortimer Adler once referred to as 'expert judgement'. Whereas experts are as prone as others to making mistakes, their 'work product' is forced to undergo re-examination ad infinitum, and it is the strength of such a process -- so manifestly at work in the sciences -- that major breakthroughs in our understanding emerge. To be sure, the people have the political right to make the practical judgements, as to whether or not to impeach, but they are not necessarily right.

As self-proclaimed, onetime Nixon-hater, Stephen Ambrose, military historian and Ike's biographer, wrote in the last line of his trilogy of Nixon biography: "the country lost more than it gained when Richard Nixon resigned."