Essay of the Week

In the years before he ran for President in 1968, Richard Nixon’s publicists promoted a New Nixon.  It was the same old Tricky Dicky with the rough edges smoothed away.

The old Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy in 1960; then Pat Brown defeated him in 1962, when he ran for the Governorship of California. The hope after that was, as Nixon himself put it, that the press would no longer “have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Nixon had always had trouble with the press.

But this was not to be. You just can’t keep a good scoundrel down.

A highly charged yet nuanced take down of the scheming Hillary camp, the dithering Republicans, old versus new electoral strategies, praise for Jim Webb, and much more--by the always luminous Andrew Levine.


TS