I'm pretty much willing to bet the house that, 42 years ago today,

when President Nixon made this announcement, nobody would've thought that an OPERA would result from the trip!

"Any nation can be our friend without being any other nation's enemy." 

Now THAT, boys and girls, is foreign policy! 

(Well, when you're not carpet-bombing Cambodia.)

 

 

There's a free screening of "All The President's Men" (1976) tomorrow at 2 PM at CCSU...

..which brings up three distinct Watergate memories for me:

In April 1973, on a visit to Washington DC with other 6th-Graders from Guardian Angels School from Cincinnati, Ohio, while going past the Watergate Apartments, our tour guide offered, "and here's that place you've been hearing so much about on the evening news!"  [Evening news?!! Doesn't THAT sound dated?]

In the late spring and summer of 1974, coming home from school and watching the hearings with my mom, while she ironed, and cooked, and cleaned.  Committee members Ervin, Baker (my personal fav), Inouye, and Weicker I knew almost as well as Rose and Bench and Perez and Concepcion.

When the film version of All The President's Men was released in 1976, the entire student body and faculty of The Covington Latin School marched down Madison Avenue in Covington, Ky  to the Madison Theater because ATPM was deemed an important film for us all to see.*

I'm pretty sure I've seen the film several times since, but I'm looking forward very much to tomorrow afternoon!  (And my affection for the film also explains how a mid-70s film made the cut in a "classic" Fridays film series...not that great films weren't made in the '70s -- and beyond -- but, to my mind, there'll always be something special about a movie from before, say, 1963!)

*The school had done this once before for Godspell (1973) and would do it again in 1982 or '83, when I was a faculty member, when Gandhi was released (which wasn't nearly as good as either of the earlier films.  That Richard Attenborough's just overrated).

"Nixon's Seduction of Frank Sinatra"

...you could do all this or just have him play a lot of golf with Spiro Agnew!

A Portrait of the President as a Young Man?

Have you heard about the newly discovered painting that some are saying is our new President when he was younger?

Former members of the Bush administration are already criticizing him for not wearing a coat and tie when he posed.

Relatedly, my favorite Presidential portrait of ALL time is that of Richard M. Nixon painted by Norman Rockwell.

Love him or hate him...his portrait is FABULOUS!

Loyalty and Innocence

Yesterday, at the Hartford Armory, I gave a talk to a local "Red Hat" ladies club on Frank Sinatra by focusing on songs he recorded and things he did in January. (I always try to have a different selection of songs when I speak -- even if I'm going over the same territory again and again -- and, with Sinatra's long career, it's quite easy to do.)

One song was the Sammy Cahn special lyric for the first Reagan Inaugural Gala (1/19/81), "Nancy (with the Reagan Face)," based upon the Phil ("Sgt. Bilko") Silvers lyric in honor of the birth of Frank's eldest child in the early 40s, "Nancy (with the Laughing Face)."

Sammy was a life-long Democrat (unlike Sinatra who became a Republican in the early '70s during his brief retirement and stayed). Indeed, in 1972, Frank campaigned with the Vice President and actually sang "THAT'S why Spiro is a...CHAMP."

Oops.

Anyway, Democrats were quite angry at Sammy Cahn for his willingness to aid the opposition by writing this special material for Frank, but he always placed his loyalty to his dear friend Francis Albert over that to a political party. I applaud that sense of priorities...besides if anyone voted for Nixon/Agnew in 1972 because of the really awful Cahn rewrite of "The Lady is a Tramp," then the McGovern campaign must have had real problems!

I also played a brief snippet from the Kennedy Inaugural Gala that Frank produced twenty years earlier (1/19/61) and was struck by the very partisan nature of all the talk by Kennedy and Sinatra alike. Clearly meant as a true victory party in a way that would seem quite unseemly and not terribly presidential now, there was no "now's the time to come together." It was, rather, "We beat 'em!"

Ah, the glories of a time BEFORE 24/7 news coverage -- when not every event had to be played before a world-wide audience, when every emotion had to be played close to the vest.

As I was driving to the talk, I was listening to Sinatra's recording of "(You and Me) We Wanted it All" which contains a wonderful lyric as he recalls the time when he and his lost love were still together and happy. He longs for the days of innocence (and ignorant bliss):

...Back when we were dumb.
How did we become so smart
and learn to break each other's heart?