A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Why was Nixon impeachable but somehow Trump isn't? The times, they have a-changed since the 1970s. There are various reasons as to why Richard M. Nixon was easier to consider impeachable in the 1970s and Donald J. Trump seems to be “untouchable.” The biggest factor is, of course, the differences in the political environment in which both Administrations existed. Nixon was elected in 1968 and took the Presidential oath of office on January 20, 1969, and was re-elected in November of 1972 and managed to stay in office until he resigned on August 9, 1974. Trump was elected in November 2016 in a vastly different electoral and cultural environment. Nixon’s Presidency took place at a time when the Internet was not quite a thing; a proto-Internet existed in 1969, but it was essentially limited to the federal government and academia. The Vietnam War and its divisiveness were sowing the seeds of social discord that made Trumpism possible. The war - which America was losing an...

What was the first big historical event (such as when the Berlin Wall came down) that you can remember and how old were you? Because I was born eight months before JFK’s assassination and was a baby at the time, I have no memory of that. My mom and an older half-sister, of course, were of “the age of reason” on November 22, 1963, so they had vivid memories of that tragic event. I have vague memories of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as a dim awareness of the unrest all over the world due to the Vietnam War and social upheaval in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. The first big historical event I recall with clarity (albeit enhanced by my watching documentaries and dramatizations on the topic) was Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon in December of 1968. The biggest historical event I recall as a kid, though, was the Moon landing 50 years ago. I was six and living in Colombia at the time, but like most of the world, the media the...

Can you believe that Donald Trump said on television "I gave him (John McCain) the kind of funeral that he wanted,” but “didn’t get a thank you?” Of course, I believe it. This is, after all, Donald Trump we are talking about, is it not? The Donald is a combative, spiteful person. He has a habit of putting his sights on an individual - like the late Sen. McCain - or a group (such as the Central Park Five or immigrants from Central America) and vilifying them. In the case of Sen. McCain, the animus began when Trump declared his candidacy for President as a Republican in 2015, which McCain was opposed to. The feud, which Trump personalized as much as possible. escalated when he said he did not admire military people who “got caught,” (an allusion to McCain’s five and a half years-long stint as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War). He’s not a hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. -  Donald Trump, July 2015. Trump, of c...

(C) 2009 Picador Books In 1989, when Rick Atkinson was on a leave of absence from his job as   a staff writer at the Washington Post, Houghton Mifflin published his first work of military history, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of the West Point Class of 1966. Based on a series of interviews with three West Point graduates of the titular Class of ’66, The Long Gray Line earned rave reviews for its intimate and often painful account of a handful of American boys who entered the U.S. Military Academy, endured the brutal hazing and harsh discipline of cadet life, and graduated during the Johnson Administration’s rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. James Salter, the Post’s book critic at the time, hailed The Long Gray Line as being “enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist’s brilliance.” Another contemporary reviewer, writing in Business Week, called Atkinson’s first major work of military history “the best book out of Vietnam to date." Two decades...

(C) 1990 Dell Books Question: What do readers get when a romance novelist - Danielle Steel - attempts to push the literary envelope and creates a love story set in Vietnam-era America? Answer: Depending on one's particular tastes and sensibilities, either (a) a fascinating literary break from Steel's norm (glitzy love stories set in the world of the rich and famous) and a crowd-pleasing tearjerker/historical novel or, (b) a well-meant but vacuous exercise in fluff which awkwardly crams every tragic event in American history into a standard-issue "awakening of consciousness" story involving a Steel heroine who finds true love in the middle of a chaotic decade. 1990's  Message from Nam  represents Steel's first stab at trying to break out of her Problems Faced By Very Wealthy People in Life and Love mold and respectability as a more well-rounded writer of fiction.  As a writer aiming for a larger audience, Steel apparently figured that in the post- Platoo...

Episode Ten: The Weight of Memory (March 1973-Onward) Written by: Geoffrey C. Ward Directed by: Ken Burns & Lynn Novick While the Watergate scandal rivets Americans' attention and forces President Nixon to resign, the Vietnamese continue to savage one another in a brutal civil war. When hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops pour into the South, Saigon descends rapidly into chaos and collapses. For the next forty years, Americans and Vietnamese from all sides search for healing and reconciliation.  On September 28, 2017, "The Weight of Memory (March 1973-Onward)" premiered on the 300 or so affiliates of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Written by historian Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, it was the tenth and final episode of The Vietnam War, an 18-hour-long examination of "one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history." Ten years in the making,  The Vietnam ...