Four decades later, although a lot remains to be learned about the causes of cancer and its cures, progress has been spectacular.  An article by Vicki Rock in the Somerset County, Pennsylvania, Daily American, published to mark the anniversary of the Act, explains:

Forty years ago a diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence. Oncologists only had two or three drugs to use in treating patients. Fewer than one-third of patients with a diagnosis of cancer lived five years. Almost no children with a diagnosis of the most common form of childhood cancer, acute leukemia, lived five years. There were no CAT or MRI scans. Many cancers were only detected during autopsy. In those days every patient who died in a hospital had to be autopsied.

“I have memories of patients — I would think he doesn’t look that sick and I knew this patient is going to die and I can’t do anything about it,” [Dr. Aiman] Daghestani [of the Somerset Oncology Center] said. “We couldn’t treat them much; we didn’t have anything. Family members came to me and asked me not to tell the patient he had cancer. I told them I wouldn’t lie, but I would say tumor or mass and it depended on what the patient understood or what he asked.”

Now all cancers are treatable. In 2011 nearly 90 percent of children diagnosed with acute leukemia will be cured and nearly two-thirds of all people diagnosed with cancer will live at least five years. Still about 600,000 Americans die every year of cancer, second only to heart disease.

“I believe every patient should have the possibility of a cure,” Daghestani said. “I believe hope is important. We work for a cure. We never guarantee an outcome — the final outcome is in God’s hands.”

He has had patients referred to him whose family physicians have said will only live a few months and those patients have been treated and lived for several years.

Millions of patients have now benefited from continued advances in cancer research. There are advances in early detection, improved therapies and a better understanding of the genetics driving different forms of cancer. Prevention and early detection are still the keys.

Another important article about this anniversary, by Amanda Gardner, is at USA Today’s site.  This stirred my interest because it opens by describing a Bostonian, Jack Whelan, who learned in 2006 that his frequent nosebleeds were signs that he had developed a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma affecting the bone-marrow cells, Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. The disease is little known to the general public, partly because it is so uncommon – about fifteen hundred new cases are diagnosed in the United States every year.

However, I did not have to consult the Online Dictionary to spell Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, because I was diagnosed with it in March 2009.  Had I received this diagnosis forty years ago, as the article points out, my chances of survival past five years would have been almost impossibly remote.  But today, thanks to advanced treatments such as the chemotherapy I periodically undergo, the prognosis of survival in my case stretches up to two decades or more given the current state of research into Waldenstrom’s, and may lengthen as new therapies are discovered.

Further on in Ms. Gardner’s article, the most pressing problem involving cancer treatment today is summarized:

Doctors now also know that “multi-modality” therapy — meaning the combined use of surgery, radiation and drug therapy — “has given people the best chance for good outcomes for particular kinds of cancer,” said Benz.

But while there’s been undisputed progress, “it’s very incomplete progress,” Benz and others acknowledged.

“If you look over the past 40 years, on some fronts we’ve actually been winning and on some fronts we’re losing terribly,” said Brawley. “We are our own worst enemy in terms of battling cancer with tobacco control, diet and exercise and getting everybody adequate preventive screening and treatment.

“In excess of 200,000 of the 500,000 lives that will be lost from cancer this year could have been avoided if we simply adopted all the cancer-control technologies that we’ve learned over the last 40 years,” he added

Yes, research over the last forty years has shown that the surest way of preventing most cancers is to get the tests done that detect them early enough for effective treatment, and not to indulge in the kind of habits that may increase the risk for them.  (However, it’s hard to speak of preventing Waldenstrom’s, since its cause is still rather a mystery – though, as the USA Today article reports, only this month researchers at the Dana Farber Center in Boston learned that a gene mutation is present in 90 percent of those with the disease.)

Vermont Public Radio’s site has a long podcast concerning the anniversary; its page features a photo of RN signing the Act.

Finally, the Annapolis, Maryland Capital has an article by Erin Cox. It concerns Patti DiMiceli, a citizen of that city who, thirty years ago, lost her four-year-old daughter Amber to a rare muscle cancer that tore through the child’s skull and into her brain before killing her.  On Friday, Ms. DiMiceli will pace back and forth in front of the White House – on a day when the temperature is expected to go no higher than 45 degrees – for twenty-two hours, to commemorate the 22 million Americans who have died since the National Cancer Act was signed into law.

Ms. DiMiceli will be carrying a poster asking for an end to the “war on cancer.”  By that, she wants more funding for programs to prevent cancer from developing, and less money directed to drug companies chasing that elusive “cure” for the disease.

Science still has a long way to go in terms of learning all the causes of the multifold forms of cancer, and coming decades may bring new ways of preventing and treating them that we can only dimly envision now.  But this is a case where I feel rather in the same mood as Ben Stein when he concludes one of his “Diary” posts at the American Spectator’s site by thanking Richard Nixon, as he so often does.  Mr. President, thank you for signing the National Cancer Act of 1971 into law and for beginning a process which has helped give me hope that I can reach threescore and ten, and hope to go beyond that.

Photo: President Nixon with Dr. Averill Letton, President of the American Cancer Society, in the White House East Room during the signing ceremony of the National Cancer Act of 1971 on December 23, 1971.

Photo courtesy of Vogue (Photographer: Annie Liebovitz), from left: Senator Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Bush, Streep, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, Tricia Nixon Cox, Madeleine Albright, NWHM Joan Wages, Representative Carolyn Maloney, and Senator Susan Collins.

Top Photo and caption on right courtesy of Vogue (Photographer: Annie Liebovitz): Crusaders for a new National Women’s History Museum, from left: NWHM president Joan Wages, Madeleine Albright, Senator Susan Collins, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Bush (seated on ground), Representative Carolyn Maloney, Patricia Nixon Cox, Dr. Maya Angelou, Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Streep, the museum’s spokesperson, in a Carolina Herrera coatdress.

Speechwright is interesting and unique in that it’s both an autobiography and a guide to the craft of speech writing. What inspired you to write a book of this scope?

Serendipity, pure and simple. In 2000, I was looking for a document in my files and came across an old manuscript I had given up as hopeless. But I saw some things I liked, so I did a lot of cutting and re-writing. The result was an article in The Presidential Studies Quarterly, June 2001, “His Heart’s Abundance: Notes of a Nixon Speechwriter”. That was the genesis of Speechwright.

What is a “speechwright?”

I believe writing speeches is something less than an art, but something more than a mechanical exercise. I prefer to think of it as a craft, and that is why I prefer the word “speechwright” instead of the usual “speech writer”. A speechwright puts together a speech out of separate pieces (introductions, one-liners, policy statements, jokes, exhortations to action, contributions made by policy experts or other writers, the boss’s additions and deletions to the drafts), the way a wheelwright puts together a wheel. Authors write to make something lasting and beautiful; speechwrights hammer, drill, saw, and otherwise push around words to craft something ephemeral but useful.

What sparked your interest in political rhetoric?

I was born and grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, where, under the Democratic Party machines of The Boss of Bosses, Mayor Frank Hague, and his successor (and enemy), John V. Kenny, hard-ball politics was part of everyday life. Like most boys, I was not interested in politics and knew little about it. But in Jersey City politics was in the very air we breathed (along with the usual urban industrial pollutants), so when I started to pay attention to politics, it was natural for me to listen to the words politicians used, and wonder why and how they used them.

Can you describe your education as a speechwright? What did you read?

At the heart of my youthful reading was fiction. From famous writers like James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and John O’Hara (especially his Appointment in Samara) to best-selling books like Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, James Jones’ From Here to Eternity and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, I read omnivorously, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. I might add I learned a lot from John Courtney Murray’s We Hold These Truths, an examination of the philosophical foundation of the United States, seen from a sophisticated, balanced, scholarly understanding of the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the philosophy of natural law.

And then, one night, an epiphany: quite by accident, I came upon William F. Buckley, Jr. being interviewed on television. I had never heard him speak, although I was vaguely aware he had written a notorious book, God and Man at Yale. What could a Yale snob who talked like Little Lord Fauntleroy have to say to me? At first I found him affected and slightly ridiculous, but as the interview continued I began to listen to what he was saying in that unique aristocratic drawl. I liked what I heard. The wit, the easy manner, the civility, the reasonable, if not always persuasive, arguments–all quite captivating.  I subscribed to National Review and, in 1960, had my first paid article published in the magazine, a satire on Japanese student riots called “Rave, New World”. (Oh well, it sounded clever at the time). I began telling people I was conservative, although I was not totally sure what that meant.

It is difficult to explain how important National Review was to me in its early, scrappy, confident, irreverent, tough-minded, happy-warrior days. Every two weeks I awaited the newest issue and read it straight through, learning about conservative principles not in some text-book fashion but in the slam-bang, head-on collisions of clashing ideas and current controversies that constituted NR’s unique glory. Those ideas and controversies were not always about the magazine’s differences with liberalism. Many of the most fervent arguments were among conservatives themselves as they tried to define and explain conservatism from differing viewpoints. So National Review was not simply a by-the-numbers catechism of conservative principles but an intra-family battleground where arguments over freedom and virtue and libertarian and traditional values were fought. There was a lot I had to learn and NR proved to be my post-graduate school of political and cultural education.

I learned that sometimes important arguments are not those you have with your opponents but with your allies (the most important, of course, are the arguments we have with ourselves). NR proved to be my post-graduate school of political and cultural education.

How did you become part of the Richard Nixon’s speech writing team?

One day in April, 1967, in the University of Pennsylvania library, I read a magazine article portraying Nixon as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. This was not a consensus view at the time, and the argument for Nixon deeply impressed me. Although he was held to be ritually impure by most activist conservatives, I had always found him intriguing. I had, in fact, cast my presidential vote for him in 1960, a decision frowned upon by members of my family who took their Democratic politics straight, no chaser. When I left the library that day, I went back to my office at the Graduate School of Education, where I worked in a Master Teachers program, and quickly typed a letter to Nixon, urging him to run for president. Here, in part, is what the letter said:

Dear Mr. Nixon:

May I offer two suggestions concerning your plans for 1968? 1. Run. You can win. Nothing can happen to you, politically speaking, that is worse than what has happened to you. Ortega y Gasset says in “The Revolt of the Masses: “. . these are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission . . .”. You, in effect, are lost. That is why you are the only political figure with the vision to see things the way they are and not as leftist or rightist kooks would have them. Run. You will win . . . Good luck, and I know you can win if you see yourself for what you are: a man who has been beaten, humiliated, hated, but who can still see the truth.”

Near the end of May I received a letter from Leonard Garment, a lawyer in the Nixon Mudge firm. He said he was impressed by my letter and that I should have a talk with him. So in June I went to New York and met Len. Aside from being an excellent lawyer, he was a talent scout for Nixon’s political operation. Len was fast-talking, witty, friendly, and a fellow jazz lover, not at all the idea I had of a Wall Street lawyer. He was a birth-right Brooklyn Jewish non-ideological liberal and I was a street corner conservative Irish Catholic from Jersey City. We were outsiders among Republican insiders, but we had one thing in common: we both admired Nixon for his brains and his grace under pressure (see the Hiss case for details). Len suggested I send him anything that came into my head–slogans, one liners, ideas, gimmicks, anything. That, essentially, is how my speech writing career started, not with complete speech drafts or even inserts for speeches, but with little things, words and phrases, and especially one-liners.

Can you describe the first time you met Richard Nixon?

In December of 1967, my wife Katherine and I received an invitation to a Christmas party at the Nixons’ Fifth Avenue apartment. When we walked out of the elevator, which opened to the apartment itself, Nixon was standing amidst a crowd, unmistakable, even with his back toward us. He shook hands, looked me in eye, grinned and said: “Oh, yes, Bill Gavin, the one liner man.” So there I was, sipping wine at a party given by Richard and Pat Nixon. Being a study-hall monitor in Abington High School was nothing like this.

You talk about the importance of writing to the voice of your speaker. What was President Nixon’s voice?

Richard Nixon had two great strengths as a speaker, aside from his fierce, manifest intelligence. First, he had the ability to deliver a rousing speech, a talent honed in decades of speech making, all over the country, on the Republican political “rubber chicken” circuit. Second, he had a good voice, maybe even a great one for a politician. Time Magazine once called his unique sound “a buttery baritone”, smooth, rich, and masculine. I believe his voice was superior to that of any president in my lifetime.

President Nixon liked your ability to write with “heart”. What did he mean by that? How did you relate your style to his voice?

I think heart meant to him a quality of writing that evoked aspects of what I later came to think of as “depth rhetoric”, words and images that are derived from and speak to the imagination rather than to the intellect. Heart is not necessarily eloquence because its object is not to provide a quick thrill but to take the listener away from the everyday world of politics into the hidden word of myth and mystery that lies just below the surface. Nixon did exactly that in his 1968 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Miami.

You were the central contributor to the 1968 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did you help him write?

Just before the 1968 acceptance speech I sent in a few paragraphs to Nixon about the importance of American children. In the speech, he developed the children theme, speaking of the blighted lives of some American kids. And then he delivered what many believe is the most moving passage of the speech (and it was all Nixon; he used what I had given him, but then wrote something I had never thought of):

But this is only part of what I see in America. I see another child. He hears the train go by at night and dreams of far away places he would like to go. It seems an impossible dream. But he is helped on his journey through life A father who had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade, sacrificed everything so that his sons could go to college. A gentle Quaker mother, with a passionate concern for peace, wept quietly when he went to war but understood why he had to go. A great teacher, a remarkable football coach, an inspirational minister encouraged him on his way. A courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and defeat. In his chosen profession of politics, first scores, then hundreds, then thousands, and finally millions worked for his success. Tonight he stands before you–nominated for President of the United States. You can see why I believe so deeply in the American Dream.

He read the words with precision, with conviction, and, most importantly, he had a propulsive rhythm going, the words moving inexorably forward, no hesitations, no glitches, until he reached the culminating line about the American dream. There was an instantaneous roar from the crowd, and he had a slight smile on his face, but it was not one of triumph. He didn’t have to gloat. He had nailed it. For a man whose critics condemned him for cold-blooded political decision-making, lack of feeling, and an obsession with the gritty details of political maneuvering, he had taken a risk in talking about something deep beneath the surface of political programs and policies, a place where dreams and fears and longings live. This was the kind of thing Nixon had avoided during his career. His heart was not a place he liked to visit publicly, and he offered no guided tours. But he had taken the chance, and won.

What did he say to you after the speech?

On Friday morning, August 9, 1968, the day after the acceptance speech, in the American Scene Room of the Hilton-Plaza hotel in Miami Beach. Nixon, thanked his campaign workers for our hard work. He was on his way out of the ballroom when one of his aides said to me, “Gavin, we‘ve been looking for you. The Boss wants to speak to you.” Nixon walked over, put his arm around my shoulder–a most uncharacteristic gesture by this most private of men–and, smiling broadly, guided me away from his cheering, whistling, applauding crowd of admirers. My fellow campaign aides looked on in amazement and, I suspect, incomprehension. Why was the brand-new 1968 presidential candidate of the Republican Party, a world-class political figure, talking privately with this guy? Nixon kept his right hand on my shoulder and said, with a big smile, “I just want to thank you for your contribution last night. You could tell I used your themes. After the speech I was looking for you, but we couldn’t find you.”

We talked about the speech, and then he said words that changed my life and the life of my family:

Now Bill, I know I haven’t been using a lot of your stuff recently, but I can’t overdo it or else I’ll sound corny. I don’t want to sound corny. But I want you to make the campaign tour. You’ll be on the plane with Buchanan and Price and Safire. You write with heart. There aren’t many who can write with heart.

Nixon did not have to take the time to talk with me. There were no cameras present, no media. The incident never was reported in the press. There was no political payoff in his kindness, no hidden agenda. He, one of the most important people in the world, came looking for an obscure staffer at the magic moment of a great, improbable triumph, to say thanks, and he did it solely out of the kindness of his heart, a motive his fierce and (still) unforgiving enemies could never comprehend. It is hard for me to imagine any other presidential candidate in either party, in my lifetime, who would have done what he did that morning.

Does the speech giver have to be a speechwright? Was Richard Nixon a speechwright?

He was very much a speechwright, and a good one. At one point in the 1968 campaign, all the writers got a memorandum (“From: RN”), outlining what he wanted for the rest of the tour:

“I don’t think we are yet hitting the mark,” he wrote. He then offered some general guidelines:

“Don’t be cute or gimmicky–just hit hard with crisp one-liners whenever they are appropriate. . . most of our excerpts suffer from not being current and livelier. This could be corrected by simply spending a little more time reading the daily news summaries and zeroing in on some of those problems . . . we should drop in regular statements, about two a week from now on, that are meaty, substantive, they will not have any impact on voters but they will impress the press.”

Nixon’s memo can still serve as a handbook for political speech writers, especially during a campaign: Hit the mark. Hit hard. Be crisp. Zero in. Don’t be cute or gimmicky. Be current. Put your opponent on the defensive. Try to shape press coverage.

Tactical. Direct. Doable. Pure working rhetoric. Pure Richard Nixon. He was content to make solid arguments with his words, so he could get the chance to make history with his actions.

The original Nixon White House speech writing team with the President (left to right): Ray Price, Lee Huebner, Pat Buchanan, William Gavin, James Keogh, and Wiliam Safire.

How would you rate President Nixon among the great American political orators?

I do not think of President Nixon as an “orator” a word which has overtones of old-fashioned, nineteenth century grandiloquence, bombast, and “speaking-to-posterity“ grandeur. He could deliver a rousing speech with the best of them, but to me his heart and his mind were concerned chiefly with the problems directly before him. He usually did not aim for the big, sweeping rhetorical moment–although he could pull it off when he had to– but he wanted a speech to be something more than a friendly chat. Time and again, during his presidency, he went beyond mere political goals and spoke to deeper aspects of political reality. Yes, he could be eloquent when he needed to, but I think at heart he was what President Eisenhower used to call “a meat and potatoes” speaker.

What is President Nixon’s greatest legacy?

I believe his legacy falls into three categories:

–His comeback, from 1962 to 1968 is the greatest in American history, and students of politics will be –or should be–reading about how he did it for years to come.

–In 1969, when Nixon came to office, he was opposed by the most powerful political force in America, then and now–the left liberal media-academic-political complex. But four years later President Nixon won an overwhelming victory over a candidate who clearly articulated and fervently believed in the message of Nixon’s most savage enemies. His victory under such circumstances is unique in American history, and shows that intelligence, persistence, courage and fortitude can achieve victory over what appear to be insurmountable odds.

— His success in foreign affairs, involving a mixture of “soft force” (the opening to China) and hard force (the bombing that brought the Vietnamese Communists to the negotiating table) was a masterwork of experience, skill, and an uncanny sense of timing. In the tired phrase we use today, Nixon was always willing to “think outside the box”. No one else in his generation of leaders–and certainly no one today– could have achieved what he did in foreign affairs.

— He came within a hairsbreadth of creating a lasting new majority, combining traditional Republican votes with those of previously Democratic union, ethnic, and religious groups. He targeted voters with traditional conservative values who didn’t like what left ideologues had done to the Democratic party. His astounding success in 1972 wasn’t an accident. President Nixon knew that these voters, the heart of the New Deal coalition, were ready to make the big switch.

Watergate, of course, is not part of his legacy, but it is part of his history. Pathological Nixon haters still claim that Watergate was the inevitable result of Nixon’s fatally flawed character. To them, Watergate defines Nixon, the Great Satan. Others, and I count myself among them, see Watergate as a tragic, avoidable, unfortunate, but aberrant series of uncharacteristic blunders and misjudgments made by one of the great political minds in American history. But the legacy that I have listed above cannot be denied by any fair-minded observer.

Click here to read Gavin on his memories of President Nixon’s kindness.

A perfect gift! Get Speechwright just in time for Christmas. Click here to order now.

Photo: President Nixon, House Minority Leader Robert Michel (center), and William Gavin (right) in Michel’s Capitol Office in 1990. After writing for RN, Gavin wordsmithed for Michel, Senator James Buckley, and President Ronald Reagan.

One by one, the mothers and fathers stepped forward to receive a hug, a thank you and a Christmas ornament engraved with their child’s name on it.

As they cradled the symbol of remembrance, some shared words of gratitude for those who had come to reflect on their families’ sacrifices. Others saluted the Christmas tree before them, and one laid a kiss on the brass ornament itself.

Then, fighting back tears, these parents of fallen service members hung their personalized ornament on the boughs of the Hometown Heroes tree, a Christmas tree at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum honoring local service members who gave their lives in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Click here to read more.

Photo: Claudio and Evelyn Patino of Yorba Linda, the parents of Marine Cpl. Claudio Patino IV, killed an action in Afghanistan in June 2010, hang an ornament in honor of their son on the Nixon Foundation’s Hometown Heroes Christmas Tree during ceremonies in the East Room last Sunday.

The panel was comprised of Nixon era labor officials including William J. Kilberg, former Solicitor of the U.S. Department of Labor; Michael Moskow, senior staff economist on the Nixon White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Judge Laurence Silberman, also Solicitor and later Undersecretary of Labor. Ann McLaughlin Korologos, President Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, served as moderator.

During his remarks, Kilberg discussed the long term impact of the 37th President’s labor policy and how – through greater government advocacy for workers – it led to organized labor’s decline in influence over American politics.

“There was an open relationship with organized labor which represented a more substantial part of the private workforce then than it does now,” Kilberg said. “Nevertheless the AFL- CIO remained neutral in the 1972 race and Nixon garnered significant blue collar support. Indeed, the so called Reagan Democrats were originally a creation of Richard Nixon.“

Click here to watch the whole program at C-SPAN.ORG.

Photo courtesy of Bruce Guthrie (left to right): Michael Mokcow, William Kilberg,  Ann McLaughlin Korologos, and Judge Laurence Silberman.

Let’s say you’ve given everyone you know who would truly appreciate such a present a coffee mug with RN meeting Elvis on it.  Or the framed RN-Elvis photo itself.  Or coasters with the Presidential seal.  Or one of those now quite rare copies of Real Peace, from the limited edition that the former President published himself before Little Brown did the trade edition.  Or one of the shirts or the pens or the posters, or the other items at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace gift shop.

You may wonder: what can you get for this Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, that your favorite Nixon fan would truly love?  A couple of months ago it was announced that Eric Bana would be playing Elvis in an upcoming feature film about the famous 1970 meeting; Danny Huston, son of the late director John and grandson of Walter, is reported to likely be cast as the President, and Princess Bride star Cary Elwes is to direct. But this project is still at a rather early stage so it will be a while before you can stuff the Blu-Ray in your favorite Nixon fan’s stocking.  There will be some new books appearing for the Nixon centennial in 2013, but that’s still a year away.

But there are, I am happy to say, some new items available at the gift shop, which can be readily obtained online.  Two of these have been made to honor First Lady Pat Nixon for her centennial next year: a very pretty Christmas ornament, and an elegant coffee mug.

And, if you’re looking for a present that involves RN as well, there’s a special something that is the work of a Californian lawyer named Paul Carter, working with the artist Jean-Louis Rheault: an illustrated map of Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties in the Golden State, showing all the significant sites connected with the lives of Richard and Pat Nixon in that area.  These include not just familiar ones like the birthplace in Yorba Linda, San Clemente, and the locales around Whittier where RN grew up, but places like La Habra Heights, where RN and Pat made their first home above a garage in 1940; Dana Point, where the young lawyer proposed to the schoolteacher; the towns on the eastern side of the San Gabriel Valley where the future President made his name as an attorney; and many other places.  The back of the map usefully supplements the visuals with many highly informative paragraphs about these sites.

A column by the Orange County Register’s Frank Mickadeit describes how the map came into being.  Mr. Carter was still in grade school the year RN left office and, rather atypically for a Nixon fan, grew up with no particular interest in him.  But his mother had made it a point to encourage him to use his spare time for volunteer work, so while completing his education at CSU-Fullerton, he applied for a position as a docent at the Nixon Library not long after it opened in 1990.

In those days, the former President made it a point to visit the Library whenever he was in the area and so Mr. Carter met him several times.  These experiences led him to learn more about the Nixon family’s history in the Southland. Several years ago,  in a conversation with the mayor of Whittier, Mr. Carter asked about the sites in the town connected with RN.  The mayor replied, “We’ve kind of lost track of them.”

The attorney went to work, meticulously tracking down many little-known locations associated with the President and First Lady.  The Register column features a photograph of him presenting the resulting map to David and Julie Eisenhower.  As that picture shows, the map is quite large enough for framing and display.

So for $4.99,  the Library’s gift shop can send it to you, or it can be obtained from Mr. Carter himself at richardnixonsocal.com (which also has much else of interest about RN), or on Amazon.  Rest assured, there’s never been a Nixon-related item like this one before – and it’s one that will provide you and your favorite “Nixon nut” with many engrossing hours of education and entertainment.  Indeed, you may find you need two maps – one for your wall, and another for your glove compartment whenever you’re traveling in southern California.

Photo courtesy of Frank Mickadeit: Paul Carter with David and Julie Eisenhower at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in November 2010.

House Sergeant-at-Arms Wilson “Bill” Livingood, who led the chamber through some of the greatest security crises in the history of the U.S. Capitol, is retiring after nearly 17 years in the post.

The affable and low-key Livingood served with the Secret Service for 33 years before being appointed sergeant-at-arms in January 1995, standing as the top security officer on the House side during the tense moments of Sept. 11, the anthrax scares and the 1998 shootings of two U.S. Capitol police officers.

Photo courtesy of The Associated Press.