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Return to Yesteryear

Freed from the burdens of Front Runnership, John McCain has the time to let his mind run free, dreaming of his likely never-to-be Presidency.

Engaging in the one-on-one interaction so prized by New Hampshire voters, Mccain gave a tour of his most admired Presidents.

The Boston Globe managed to feign surprise that Harry Truman made the list. And not for the glories of the early Cold War, firing MacArthur or integrating the Army.

McCain’s Truman fixation was on the little man strolling about with a single bodyguard.

“”He could walk out of the White House and take a walk with one Secret Service agent. One Secret Service agent!…My, how times have changed.””

Indeed. In 1951.

Truman’s temporary home at Blair House was attacked by Puerto Rican Nationalists. A policeman and one of the Nationalists died.

Congress responded by formalizing the Secret Service’s protective role, and enumerating who would be covered.

Plain Spoken, Flame Broiled

Harry Truman’s real estate/memorial empire continues to blossom, despite his death 35 years ago, adding properties he couldn’t possibly remember and some he’d probably just as soon forget.

The House has passed a bill directing the Secretary of the Interior to consider adding the Harry Truman Birthplace to the National Park Service. Mr. Feisty spent his formative first eleven months in the home, which has been a state park since 1959 when the United Auto Workers gave it to Missouri. The site closed due to unspecified “hazardous conditions” shortly after the House vote.

The Independence Missouri house Truman lived in before and after his presidency was acquired by the Park Service in the 1980s. Since then they have gobbled up two Truman in-law houses around the corner, and acquired a neighboring house at 216 North Delaware. .

The NPS bought into trouble with these homes and two of them are getting new foundations.

The Park Service does own the Truman farm near town where young Harry slaved for his father until World War I saved him, but the “boyhood home” at 909 West Waldo in Independence remains in private hands.

The Truman Historic Site sits in an historic district named for him, and in theory there’s nothing to stop the Park Service from buying them everything in sight.

Gift From God

The wiseacres at the Journal of Improbable Research have a running tally,

“MAY WE RECOMMEND–
The Science of G. Bush“

where they keep up on any and all scientific papers with a Bush as author. Now we learn that Bush also found work as a bible scholar.

It’s almost as if the current George Bush was channeling his new pen pal Kim Jong Il, providing “On the Spot Guidance” to scientists and experts in all areas.

Bullets bounce off, facts won’t deter them. The Clinton Library has become the never ending story for the right and careless reporters, each supposidly new revelation stoking rage and generating acres of blog ink with insightful headlines on the order of “HMMMMM.”

And if possible, a Sandy Berger reference.

Further proof is the silence which has greeted a lengthy interview with the actual person in charge of all the Presidential Library’s archives. Assistant archivist for presidential libraries Sharon Fawcett spoke to The National Journal, and illuminated many of the myths that lay over the Clinton archives.

Result? Zippo in Technorati, until The New York Sun‘s Josh Gertstein wrote a piece claiming facts contradicted her professions of openness.

It’s a classic shape shifting story.

Headline: “2,600 Pages of Clinton Records Withheld”

– What? They are records of Clinton’s Administration, now held by the National Archives and being processed for release or not at the Clinton Library. You could say “Clinton Records” is headline shorthand, but they are not his possession. And it further’s the line that no matter the outrage, the answer is Clinton.

Who done it? Gerstein doesn’t know but chooses to lay it on Clinton’s designated paper flack catcher Bruce Lindsey. Lindsey is the person assigned to review documents for Clinton, as provided for in current law. And archives operates in part under a letter in which Clinton laid out areas he was concerned to review. Read down in the piece to where the Archives spokesperson says “Not all of those pages were closed by Mr. Lindsey, in fact, the National Archives does the first set of processing. … At least some of those materials were closed by our archivists.”

How big is the document universe and how slow is release at the Clinton Library? Fawcett’s numbers show that the Clinton is not out of line from the pattern for Ex Presidents.

In 2009 Archives’ ten people in Little Rock hope to go through a new 200,000 out of 118 million document pages in the Clinton Library. Archives has done 8 of the 43 million pages at the Reagan, 5.5 million of 34 million at the Bush Library.

And Clinton couldn’t put his papers out now if he wanted to.

“The Archives still has to conduct a review for other restrictive categories: for national security, for third-party privacy information. These records will be highly sought after when they come out, so we need to go through and redact phone numbers and Social Security numbers, and other information that could be damaging to a person’s personal privacy, so those are the kinds of things that slow down the process… that’s the kind of information that we go through page by page and look at.”

There is endless detail more in the interview, it isn’t the last word and I’m perfectly prepared to enjoy the Clinton Conspiracy when it’s proven, but until then the Unstoppables could take a rest.

But won’t.

Is there a more stirring locator in American journalism today? The New York Times’ Patrick Healy tags along as Hillary Clinton trolls the frozen Iowa wastes – and you are there!

The dutiful Lyndon Johnson/1948 Texas Senate race analogies have been made.

Johnson’s in the news more legitimately in Supreme Court filings over Indiana’s Voter ID law. Ballot Access News reports that the Texas Attorney General gets the election year wrong in part of his filing. He also uses this fairly clear case of ballot box stuffing to justify forcing ID requirements on voters – the remote in service of the unproven.