"It's like when Richard Nixon went to China to see what the Chinese were up to."

One of my favorite New York Times features this year has been the "100 Days" blog posts examining the presidency from FDR through Obama. I love the writing and history in these posts and I especially like how so many of the comments are intelligent and genial, as opposed to what you might find on Youtube (and sometimes the comments are just cute, like the person who commented "for the record" that he was born on Nixon's inauguration day). The post on Nixon's trip to Europe by Roger Morris is excellent.

"In London as elsewhere, there were embarrassing incidents involving the president’s sheer physical clumsiness. In the midst of impressing the British Cabinet with a review of world politics, he fumblingly turned over an inkwell on an heirloom table. (On his return to the White House he would soon ban any soup being served at state dinners, since he almost invariably dribbled it on himself or the table.)"

In other Nixon blogging news, I discovered the Richard Nixon Presidential Library has a blog. I'm not sure how affiliated it is with the Nixon Library (other than the fact that the RNPL links to it) because it talks more about Obama administration and politics in general. But it is a pretty interesting conservative-moderate political blog.

It might be the kind of blog Nixon would have written. I know I would have loved to see what Nixon thought of Gordon Brown. But my favorite post by far is the one that asks, referring to the movie Apollo 13, "What If Hanks Had Played Richard Nixon AND Jim Lovell?" For the record, it would have been absolutely amazing, Nixon blog. I can't wait for their post that asks "What if Frank Langella played both Frost and Nixon; how much would our minds have been blown?"