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Hope Lives   

So far the Yorba Linda fires appear to be west of the Nixon Birthplace, Grave, Wedding Chapel and Museum, but watch the skies! 

Excitable locals are monitoring the situation.

Nowhere to Go But    

As he shows Barack Obama around to measure the White House drapes,    George W. Bush can take quiet pride knowing that he has secured another presidential first, surpassing Richard Nixon in the American people’s dislike.

Seventy-six percent disapprove of Bush’s performance, compared with sixty-Six percent for Nixon as he boarded the last chopper ride.

All Bush needs now is for a magnanimous President Obama to pardon him, and the healing will begin!

 

‘the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.’

Spot The Uninvited Guest!

   The Nixon Legacy lives on, in the form of the desperate schemes his presidential library was forced to undertake before they collapsed into the arms of the National Archives.

Now the Archives runs a lot of the place, but the Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation still controls some of the buildings and grounds.

The centerpiece of their tiny realm is a “recreation” of the White House East Room,     if the East Room had monster skylights.

In the words of Nixon daughter Julie Eisenhower, “It’s more beautiful than I expected“.

Wedding guests do the usual classy wedding things…

Plaster the bride with bills

Wear unfortunate shoes 

Pose with available machinery

Bring mystery guests to the table

  & pose by the Nixon grave!

Return To Yesteryear! 

“Mills of the gods”  visits the opened to the masses and gussied up Johnson Ranch outside Austin,  and comes away whimsically impressed by the old monster’s lair:

“The newly opened office brought back a flood of memories of mid-sixties furnishings and decorations. God but it has hideous. They had to tear up a very nice room to bring it back to the schlocky state Lyndon had left it in. Cheap paneling, a large T.V. built into the wall, crummy portrait of the homeowner , phones with six lines, hunting knife, everything but the head of a deer… Here were the tools of his domination of the Western world for five years. Here were the telltale signs of the Texas farm boy from Southwest Texas State Teachers College, overcompensating so that he could overcome in his own mind the fact that he was not like a Kennedy.”

The enduring weirdness of past greats is of course our endless obsession at Presidents”R”Us.  True LBJ completests should check out a brief-lived but commendable effort at Minor Tweaks, where an impressive collection of Johnson oddities was accumulated in a short period.

Memories Are Made Of This   

First in peace, first in war, and first to build a gigundous museum for himself.  Franklyn Roosevelt’s great initiative to make history the way he liked it spawned our  glorious  presidential library industry, but what about the poor slobs before him?

Herbert Hoover built the first post-FDR prequel library, and we’ve recently had the Lincoln. But other Great Guys have been left to the mercies of families, local historical societies, and rich eccentrics.

But now, new hope for history’s remainders!

Congress is moving to correct the nation’s sad neglect of past presidents, offering the Pre-Hoovers matching funds if their mom and pop museums can claim to have raised new money.  The bill began as a straight subsidy of Staunton, Virginia’s exciting new Woodrow Wilson Library and Museum, which commemorates Wilson’s vital first [and only] year spent in the tiny burg.  Sponsors  then somehow morphed the bill into a past president catch-all,  introduced on September 11th to ensure that the terrorists don’t retrospectively win the War To End All Wars, or something.

Results may very in your area, but Staunton’s vital Wilson documents being “preserved” at  are largely copies of documents elsewhere, proudly boasting that:

“The archives microfilm collection includes the Wilson holdings at the Library of Congress and the National Archives.”

Making the entire enterprise somewhat beside the point except as “economic development.”