something about Tim Weiner’s “One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon”

One Man Against the World takes aim at Richard Nixon and fires off damning details about the 37th US President's moves on Watergate and the Vietnam War. The author, former New York Times national security reporter Tim Weiner, is not kind to Nixon. In these pages we follow the words and actions of a man who is as ruthless, secretive, and calculating when negotiating his own government as he was bombing Southeast Asia. The usual suspects populate the narrative: Nixon's assistant John Ehrlichman, Attorney General John N. Mitchell, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, White House Counsel John Dean, and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

Although many of these events have already been chronicled, Weiner adds to the canon of Nixon-oriented literature details and quotes derived from newly available sources, including Nixon's infamous White House tapes. I enjoyed reading this fast-paced account.


Notes:

• The list of convictions and sentencing terms at the end of the book was an effective way of punctuating the narrative. 
• Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during Nixon's tenure.

"Nixon's The One," Harry Shearer (episode 5 of 6) 

On the helpfulness of health news

The New York Times article "Journals Asked To Cut Details Of Flu Studies" reports that

a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

At first I read this as the story of an unserious government response to a serious problem: the threat of bioterrorism. But more likely it's just bad reporting--unhelpful and uninformative at best, borderline alarmist at worst. The reason is that by emphasizing this one advisory board request, the reporting (similarly appearing in other publications) de-emphasizes other government-coordinated efforts at preventing and monitoring bioterror threats. As a result, the reader comes away thinking that the editors of a few scientific journals play a larger role in the drama of national security than they actually do, and that bioterror is a more imminent threat than it actually is.

NPR leaves us in the dark

The NPR story Conservatives Step Up Attacks On Public Funding For Birth Control takes the usual route, replaying Conservative and Liberal positions on funding birth control and the abortion issue, but then makes two sad attempts at shedding light on the debate. First attempt:

Abortion opponents are correct that widespread access to birth control hasn't eliminated abortions in the U.S. — although the number has declined considerably over the last two decades.

The author assumes that (1) eliminating abortion was the goal and that (2) such a thing is possible. Both assumptions are incorrect. Furthermore, the line could have been more honestly written as, "Birth control advocates are correct that the number of abortions performed has dropped dramatically due to widespread access to birth control".

The second attempt to shed light on this debate comes at the end of the piece:

Still, the question remains, why is it only now that objections to birth control are being raised in public? John Green, a political science professor who studies religion and politics at the University of Akron, says he thinks it has a lot to do with the recent battles over federal spending in general, and the new health law in particular.

The author doesn't pursue this theory to its end by asking why the budget battles even started under Obama. This is a reasonable question given the fact that (1) the US has run a budget deficit since Reagan held office 30 years ago and (2) the current Recession was not caused by Government Debt. She did not point out that budgets only become the big issue when a Democrat occupies the White House; the last threat at Government shutdown came under Clinton.

This is poor reporting. If the author was investigating a murder, she might ask "Why did the suspect kill the victim?" and receive the answer "Because the victim made him mad." Shouldn't she then ask, What did the victim do to make him mad?