Richard Nixon

“This is not your father’s Watergate,” said James Rosen.

Mr. Rosen, an on-air D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News was speaking to NYTV on Monday afternoon. Next month, Doubleday will publish Mr. Rosen’s first book—a revisionist history of Richard Nixon’s downfall, called The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.  read more »

Donald Trump shares how he won the battle to build the Trump SoHo condo-hotel at Varick and Spring streets in his new book, Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success (out about six weeks ago from Wiley).

Mr. Trump recounts how he marched against a rabble-rousing minority:  read more »

Now some might say Richard Nixon was a dark man—Drew and Witcover and Dallek and that crowd—but not Conrad Black. And he would know.  read more »

It has taken over four decades, but the time may once again have come for the Democratic Party to run on defense and foreign policy. They have good reason to do so.  read more »

As I was saying, there’s no one like Frank Langella in American theater—unless, of course, it’s Marian Seldes. Mr. Langella is a star actor who would be at home on a 19th-century stage.  read more »

There is some discrepancy between Newsday's Glenn Thrush and Barack Obama accounts of whether Obama ducked the "immorality" question.

Dan Janison thinks Hillary Clinton is the new Richard Nixon.

Roger Stone thinks Al Gore is the new Richard Nixon.

The son-in-law of the real Richard Nixon, Ed Cox, will be John McCain's state chairman.

During this stage of budget negotiations, certain committees meetings are sort of pointless.

Mayor Bloomberg has a new plan to fight poverty.

Councilman Dennis Gallagher's anticipated removal of three Community Board members gets noticed.

Excelsior Racing Associates may have hurt their chances of winning the state's horse racing franchise.

And pictured above is a protester at City Hall.

-- Azi Paybarah

I'm all for impeaching George Bush for staggering incompetence and intransigence (let the lawyers figure out the language), but if I get my wish that means that 3/4 of our recent 2-term presidents will have been impeached, or close: Nixon, Clinton, and Bush. Only Reagan goes unscathed, and maybe he shouldn't have. (Iran-Contra). All four two-termers have suffered second-term miseries. They're bored, they know the job too well; they get into deep doo-doo. They become overweening and try and crush their opponents (Nixon and Clinton).

Maybe we should limit presidents to one term. We'd get the most of their imaginative capabilities in that interval and save ourselves the long hangover of 8 years. The world moves too fast to give one guy (or one gal) such an important job for so long.

The most interesting thing about Gerald Ford is that he was the only President that no one ever vote  read more »

So here's a new wrinkle in the guessing game of who will replace Stephen Minarik as state Republican chair.

Along with the usually mentioned names - Nassau County Leader Joe Mondello, President Nixon's son-in-law Ed Cox, and Joe Bruno's aide Ed Lurie - comes another one from a Republican consultant who swears it's not a put-on:

Jeanine Pirro.

Me: Isn't she damaged goods?

Consultant: She did better than anybody else did on Tuesday.

This consultant said that if the FBI investigation into Pirro's alleged wiretapping of her husband goes nowhere, she would be able to play the victim more credibly than she was ever able to during the campaign. The consultant pointed out that she hasn't wasted a second getting her face on Fox News as a commentator. And after her crucible of an attorney general campaign, how hard can a party chairmanship be?

I suppose all this really shows is that there is no clear front-runner for the job of cleaning of the mess that is now the state Republican Party. Any additional nominations are welcome.

-- Azi Paybarah

Ned Lamont's campaign started off saying Joe Lieberman was too close to George Bush. Now they're trying to make the case that he really has much more in common with Richard Nixon.

In a new video, culled from last night's debate and stock footage, they have the Connecticut Senator morphing into Nixon and echoing his words on war.

"Lieberman is engaging in Nixonian deception when he says in 2006 that he wants to end the Iraq War, as he has opposed every single effort to end the war," says the Lamont Campaign.

The strategy here is debatable. Lamont won the Democratic primary, and now, presumably, has to figure out a way to win over some of the independents and Republicans who've been telling pollsters that they plan to vote for Lieberman.

Maybe Lamont's advisors figured it would be more resonant with those voters to cast Lieberman as a dishonest dissembler (by using Nixon imagery) than an out-of-touch conservative (by using Bush). More likely, they're just casting around, at this point, for a message that works.

--Jason Horowitz

If you accept that Al Gore is itching for an excuse to run for President again—a proposition n  read more »

If you accept that Al Gore is itching for an excuse to run for President again—a proposition no mo  read more »

I turned on Charlie Rose yesterday at lunch and had one of those frozen-to-the-table experiences. He was doing a three-part series on Warren Buffett, which concludes tonight. Rose gets access, and the access has been rewarded with an incredibly intimate portrait, which will be remembered in part for its exploration of Buffett's menage with his late wife Susan and the woman she chose to move in with him, Astrid...

Here as I gleaned them are the secrets of Buffett's genius:

1. Simplicity. He learned when he was young that he had a highly circumscribed "circle of competence," as he likes to say—basically, the love and study of good businesses. He stayed within that circle, forever. His judgments are filled with homespun simple analogies. "Leave yourself a margin of error. Don't try and drive a 9800 pound truck over a bridge that can only support 10,000 pounds."

2. Study, concentration. The thing Buffett likes to do most is read. He spends 80 percent of his time reading, company reports and journalism. He is a kind of luftmensch. Indeed, 45 years ago, his neighbor turned down an opportunity to give him $10,000 (a stake now worth $400 million) because he couldn't see giving money "to a guy who doesn't get up and go to work in the morning."

3. Humor. He loves to laugh at himself. He grabs every opportunity Rose gives him to do so.

4. Generosity. Many times Rose shows Buffett reaching out to others. He offered the neighbor an in on his investment company because he likes the guy's kids. He offered Katharine Graham companies he would have bought himself because he adored her so much. The third show, tonight, is about Buffett's recent gift to the Gates foundation. So brimming with generosity—and life has repaid him. "The gift is to the giver," as Whitman said.

5. The worship of women. Though psychologically incurious himself, he has, per the Jungian phrase, a "highly developed anima." He seems to respond to women more than men. This has led him to close relationships with some of the most sophisticated women on the planet. He seems to have fallen in love with Kay Graham, and made it his project to build her confidence as a manager—and his $10 million stake, picked up in the Nixon years, when the Republicans declared war, is now worth $1.5 billion. His late wife Suzie reveals herself—Rose says he got the only interview she ever did on TV, in 2004—as a woman of enormous depth and sensitivity (now reflected in her daughter) who had the wisdom to nurture Buffett when he chose to sit in his room and read all day long, and could make fun of him. The best line in the first show is when she tells Rose that her father told her when Buffett came a-wooing, "He has a heart of gold." Then she throws in, "No pun intended."

6. Pleasure-seeking. Buffett has always done what he most liked to do, and avoided all things that he disliked. "I knew what I enjoyed." Everything from delivering newspapers as a boy to hobbies of playing the ukulele and bridge and telling corny anecdotes.

Adding all this up, the one word I'd choose for Buffett is childlike. There is a naive and wondering quality to his statements. As his late wife says, he couldn't take care of himself. His humor is often cornpone, his psychological judgments seem credulous and boyish. And the joy he derives from his work, it's like a kid in a sandbox.

I want to say more about my literary evening at Makor the other night, and about the four authors who read from their contributions to the book Half-Life: Jew-ish Tales From Interfaith Homes.

Laurel Snyder ran the show. The book is her brainchild. She's a tall pretty woman, 32, with high strawberry-brunette coloring and a strong narrow face. She's a go-getter. She got the book idea at the Iowa writers' workshop, as she informed us, and it is a good idea (though she's not the first, my friend Wendy Marston got in on the HalfJew stuff years ago).  read more »

You'd think because this is a religious subject, Laurel Snyder might be a spiritual person, but you'd be wrong. She doesn't speak in spiritual terms. She's a busy networker— editors of collections often are—and her talk was full of her networking experiences.

I notice that rightwingers are upset about Arthur M. Sulzberger Jr.'s first commencement speech, a couple weeks back at New Paltz. In which he embraced liberal values. No!

I thought he made a pretty good point:

When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. Okay, that's not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace but maybe there were larger forces at play.

Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government. Our children, we vowed, would never know that.

So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way. You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land...

Could it be that the public apology has become the iconic new literary art form of our times?  read more »

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Gerald Johnson, a man with a Ph.D., an accurate eye and unstoppable hope, polls t  read more »

Years have vintages too: It doesn’t take a sommelier to recommend a 1776, an 1815, a 1989.  read more »

MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Gerald Johnson, a man with a Ph.D., an accurate eye and unstoppable hope, pol  read more »

Gerald Ford, now gravely ill, appears likely to be remembered more as a punch line than as a Preside  read more »

Gerald Ford, now gravely ill, appears likely to be remembered more as a punch line than as a Preside  read more »

She was Mary once, then Freya, Caroline now, and soon she will be Louise.  read more »

Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no plans t  read more »

Several weeks ago, former Vice President Al Gore told the Associated Press that he “had no pla  read more »

Ben, Jason and Nicole team up to explain why everybody is rooting for Hillary, including Republicans. GOP strategist Nelson Warfield explains that his party "gets a more contemporary devil-figure than Ted Kennedy." And speaking of devil-figures, Hillary's advisor Harold Ickes has an eloquent assessment of his old White House rival. "Dick Morris is a lying cocksucker."

In slightly less colorful language, Republican strategist Roger Stone pens a piece explaining why Al Gore is the new New Nixon. "He is more self-effacing, funnier, cooler, easier-going, yet articulate and firm." Just like Nixon...before Watergate. If Gore studies Nixon, "he could end up in the White House after all."

--Azi Paybarah

In this pungent and partisan book, John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University, com  read more »

Dear Santa,    read more »

Dear Santa,Oh, Santa, just admit it: After centuries of forcing your belly to jiggle and shake while  read more »

Remember the old Herblock Watergate cartoon?  read more »

When Harriet Miers was announced as the latest nominee to the Supreme Court, George W.  read more »

Conservative intellectuals have made a virtue of loyalty, and their rebellions are like plagues of l  read more »

I, obviously, wasn't the only one puzzling over the rather subtle tag line to Freddy's latest TV spot: "It's a great city. It could be greater."

Anyway, as close as I could come to an explanation was the opening statement John F. Kennedy gave in his first debate with Richard Nixon in 1960:

"This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country," Kennedy said, listing the national flaws that left him dissatisfied and concluding, "I think it's time America started moving again."

It's a subtle thing Freddy's trying to do: To convince people to revise upward their expectations of a city that many consider on the right track. And television advertising is a tough medium for communicating subtlety.  read more »

(via John Kerry. Really.)

The Clinton Global Initiative, Bill's big conference, was held in midtown last week with an unlikely prime sponsor: Tom Golisano.

The Rochester mogul, and likely contestant for the Republican nomination for Governor, writes in the event's program: "Although my philanthropic efforts to date have been concentrated primarily in my community in Upstate New York, I have long desired to enter the global arena of giving but was waiting for the right opportunity."  read more »

He continues: "I believe wholeheartedly in President Clinton's vision of bringing together this group..."

Actually, Golisano is one of a number of Republicans seeking statewide office who have reasons to be, at least, cordial to the Senator: there's her old Watergate friend Bill Weld, for one; and Ed Cox, a famously loyal Nixon son-in-law who has talked about how valuable Bill Clinton was to his father-in-law's political rehabilitation.

In the latest in a string of process-related announcements, Ed Cox will be rolling out an exploratory committee on Wednesday for his Senate challenge to Hillary Clinton. The advisory didn't say who would actually be exploring the possibility of putting Richard Nixon's son-in-law in the Senate, but the M.C. named for Wednesday's event at the Women's National Republican Club in midtown is Theodore Roosevelt IV.  read more »

Say what you will about Richard Nixon, he doesn't disappoint, even from the grave.When the story bro  read more »

It was grimly unsurprising that the usual suspects lined up to condemn Mark Felt, a.k.a.  read more »

I don't want to spoil the party, but while everyone's celebrating Deep Throat as if he "solved" Wate  read more »

Likely Hillary challenger Ed Cox, the Nixon son-in-law we profiled recently, is playing around with a prototype website, a conservative blogger has discovered.

Take a look at the site here. The message centers on "real solutions" for "high taxes and a failing upstate economy." No mention of links between Hillary and Satan.  read more »

We were kind of amused to see his political consultant, Lynn Mueller, listed among his top "friends" at the bottom of this page.

On June 13, 1971, it would have been hard to find a young man with better political prospects than E  read more »

We take a long look at Ed Cox, the likely GOP nominee for Senate next year and Richard Nixon's son-in-law, who gets high marks in filial piety.

Also, Niall Stanage notes that New York's politicians, by national standards, get along quite well.  read more »

And David Mamet and Paul Giamatti have a deal to write and take the leading role, respectively, in a biopic on the colorful, fallen mayor of Providence, Buddy Cianci.

And Scocca weighs in on that Daily News biopic.

OK, most people showed up at the Manhattan Republicans' Lincoln Day Dinner to hear Arnold joke that he'd lent Pataki his "support" -- and Pataki is still wearing it!

But for geeks like us, it was an opportunity to scout out the Party's troubled 2006 ticket, the trio who will face Democrats Spitzer, Clinton, and whoever emerges from the Cuomo-Green-etc. bloodbath.

The likely Republican trio seems to consist of Secretary of State, and ex-Dinkins appointee (though he never served), Randy Daniels on the top, seeking the Governor's mansion. He got warm applause at the dinner, a product perhaps of all the work he's done with the mid-level Republican activists. Good for the dinner, not sure how many votes it's worth. (The Dinkins name apparently doesn't get you far in Republican circles; perhaps that's why the years 1992 to 1995 are missing from Randy's official bio, although his tenure as press secretary to the Prime Minister of the Bahamas does make the cut.)

Meanwhile, a well-sourced GOPer told us that the Pataki fundraising operation has begun to coalesce around a Senate candidate, Edward Cox. He's Richard Nixon's son-in-law, we've been told excitedly a couple of times, though we're not sure which voters will consider that an asset. We did have a chance to meet him, however, and he's a very tall, slim, courtly guy with a scratchy voice and refreshing bluntness that he'll no doubt lose if he decides to run.

Would he take a few questions? we asked him.

"We've been ducking," he replied, and turned away.

At the bottom of this ticket is by far the strongest candidate of the three, Jeanine Pirro, the Westchester District Attorney. The chatter in the room -- and we somehow suspect she's heard this argument as well -- was that her otherwise quite good odds in the Attorney General's race won't survive the weak top of the ticket, and so she should take on Hillary. The other half of that chatter, however, is that she doesn't buy that theory, and that she'll be running for AG.

We asked Pirro, dressed in a pink wool skirt-suit, about her plans, and she got halfway through a standard, friendly line about how much she likes her current job before switching to her rivetingly intense spiel about sexual abuse, which is her favorite topic.  read more »

"I'm fighting for the civil confinement of sexual predators. That's my mission," she declared with her trademark scowl, and we would have offered a false confession on the spot, if she'd asked.

We take a look this week at how unlikely Borough President candidate Brian Ellner gets a big chunk of his support from the fashion world, most of whom probably think that "campaign" refers to the new Valentino line of off-the-shoulder gowns.

Some of his backers include Diane von Furstenberg and Ingrid Sischy, who are throwing a fundraiser for him in late March at von Furstenberg's meatpacking district studio. Of course, this support from Madison Avenue may not actually help him at the polls, considering that a few of his fundraisers aren't even eligible to vote because they're either British, registered Republicans, or unfamiliar with the position he's running for -- "Borough President? What is that?" said Mr. Giannelli, who matched a chocolate-brown velvet Paul Smith blazer with Adriano Goldschmied jeans. "Do they go to fashion shows?"  read more »

At least Ellner will look sharp on the campaign trail:

"And just as Richard Nixon turned to Henry Kissinger on matters of foreign policy, Mr. Ellner has Jeffrey Kalinsky, the owner of Jeffrey New York, for equally crucial guidance. 'The political part is not my forte,' said Mr. Kalinsky, who has offered to help Mr. Ellner with wardrobe refinements. 'Brian looks every bit the part of a U.S. Senator in training.'"

Terry George's Hotel Rwanda, from a screenplay by Keir Pearson and Mr.  read more »

My comrades were all atwitter on Nov.  read more »

Americans do not listen to their betters. George Soros is richer than most Americans.  read more »

Agnès Jaoui’s Comme une Image ( Look at Me), from a screenplay by Ms.  read more »

"Hey, man!" hollered a young Latino kid in a Yankees cap, recognizing Patrick J.  read more »

Suddenly, after a long period of denial and scoffing, people are talking about the possibility again  read more »

The remains of Ronald Reagan, fresh off their funeral tour, were settling in their California tomb.  read more »

Did we, as molting Iraq hawk David Brooks recently wrote, go into that country with a "childish fant  read more »