My Nixon Foundation colleagues Kris Elftmann and Kathy O'Connor and I felt
Our destination was the lavish new Captiol Visitor Center, the $621 million installation you access from an underground entrance halfway to the Supreme Court in order to protect Sen. Harry Reid from smelly tourists. Again, we expected to be battling crowds, but it was pretty much we and the statue of Po'pay from New Mexico. Perhaps 20 others were along for a breathtaking new film about the
Naturally, I looked for Christian highlights among the artworks in our greatest secular temple. In John Gadsby Chapman's 1840 painting "The Baptism of Pocahontas," on display in the rotunda, that's her brother turned away in protest as one of my fellow Anglicans, the Rev. John Whiteaker, does the deed, evidently a prerequisite for her marriage to John Rolfe. (Our gracious young guide said the protester was her father, but the Architect of the Capitol sets him straight.)
Wandering around the Obama-fixated capital, I remembered Garrison Keillor's rueful "We're all Republicans now" from the early years of the Bush Administration. These days the rue is on the other foot. As I walked up 12th Street, I passed the headquarters of the Republican Committee of the District of Columbia, where the party's pervasive dysfunction was appropriately expressed by a word-processed sign announcing that the doorbell was out of order.
Republicans associated with The Nixon Center, the Nixon Foundation's nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, were feeling somewhat more au courant Monday evening at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. After all, we were honoring the exceedingly relevant Admiral Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs will be President Obama's chief military adviser at least until late 2009. The smart money says he'll be reappointed for a second two-year term. Besides, The Center's foreign policy realism, halfway between isolationism and neoconservatism, correspond
During the reception, I spotted the peripatetic Steve Clemons, whose influential "Washington Note" blog is also known for its humane, realistic perspective on international affairs. I asked him to pose with Singapore's ambassador to the U.S., scholar Chan Heng Chee, a loyal fri
After paying tribute to President Nixon's foreign policy vision, Admiral Mullen called on the U.S. to make better use of its diplomatic and economic clout in addition to its military power. Good intelligence also plays a vital role in the war on terror, which meant that Orange County's Julia Argyros, wife of Nixon Center founding chairman George Argyros, was in a unique position to get up to date during her dinner conversation with Michael V. Hayden, director of Central Intelligence.
Meanwhile, Kathy (left) was getting caught up with Sharon Fawcett, deputy archivist of the U.S. in charge of all the
Sharon was having a little breather before returning to the gargantuan task of preparing President Bush's records for the long ride down to Texas and the soon-to-be-built Bush Library at SMU. She and her Archives colleagues face unprecedented technological challenges. She told us, for instance, that all the electronic records created by previous Presidents equal 2% of W.'s e-records. Among Sharon's most vital responsibilities: Making sure scholars can still read all those e-mails and attachments in 50 or 100 years without making hard copies of everything. Try getting an old file from a five and a quarter-inch floppy, for instance.
By the time all that's done, there'll be an Obama Library to plan -- in four or eight years, depending on whom you ask. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Godspeed on Tuesday, 44!
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