April 27th White House Correspondents' Dinner & Tanabe's The List

The April 27th White House Correspondents' Dinner is fast approaching. Whenever I hear about the Dinner, I think of Colbert's epic 2006 speech at the event:




But it sounds like it's now become something of a celebrity circus. Here's today's Washington Post editorial, "E! to livestream White House Correspondents’ Dinner red carpet for first time:"

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has finally, formally been crowned The Hollywood Petting Zoo.

E! Entertainment network announces Friday it will livestream the dinner’s red carpet for the very first time. The celebrity suck-up network will telecast highlights from the clambake the next night.

Ashley Judd, Connie Britton, Courteney Cox, Elizabeth Banks, Eric Stonestreet, Hayden Panettiere, Jon Bon Jovi, Kate Walsh, Kevin Spacey, Kristin Chenoweth, Matthew Perry, Nicole Kidman, Olivia Munn, Patricia Arquette, Shaquille O'Neal, Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara, and Tracy Morgan are expected on this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner red carpet,

E! noted. Conan O’Brien is hosting this year’s entertainment at the dinner in which, E! explained, Hollywood, media, “and political royalty” all come together for a night.

For a novel about DC correspondents, try The List by Karin Tanabe:

Meet Adrienne Brown, a twenty-eight-year-old Wellesley College grad who recently left her glamorous job at Town & Country for a spot at the Capitolist. Known simply as the List to Beltway insiders, it’s the only media outlet in D.C. that’s actually on the rise.

Taking the job means accepting a painful pay cut, giving up perks like free Louboutins, and moving back in with her parents, but Adrienne is certain that her new position will be the making of her career. And it is—but not at all in the way that she expects. The Capitolist runs at an insane pace: Adrienne’s up before five in the morning, writing ten stories a day (sometimes on her BlackBerry, often during her commute), and answering every email within three minutes.

Just when it seems like the frenetic workload is going to break her, she stumbles upon a juicy political affair, involving a very public senator—and her most competitive colleague. Discovering that there’s much more to the relationship than meets the eye, Adrienne realizes she’s got the scoop of a lifetime. But should she go public with the story?

Sex Scandal Rebounds & Klein's Primary Colors

From yesterday's Washington Post article "Vitter, Sanford and Weiner: Comebacks having a moment:"

It only took a few years in the Senate woodshed, and now the political rehabilitation of Sen. David Vitter looks complete. Our colleague Paul Kane Tuesday has Vitter — whose number showed up in the notorious black book of the “D.C. Madam,” causing the Louisiana Republican to admit before the cameras a “very serious sin” — back in the good graces of voters and colleagues alike. 

But the senator’s reversal of fortune isn’t unique. There seems to be a boomlet of political comebacks underway. Maybe it has something to do with the onset of spring, the season of renewal? Take Mark Sanford down in South Carolina. The former governor, who lied about hiking the Appalachian Trail while visiting his mistress in Argentina, has a legitimate shot at becoming the Republican candidate in the Palmetto State’s special congressional election. And in the three-makes-a-trend rule, there’s also former representative Anthony Weiner, who this month tested the waters with polls gauging the public’s willingness to put aside those photos of his undie-clad crotch he sent to a young woman who wasn’t his wife.

Want a novel about a politician who gets caught in a sex scandal and bounces back? Try Primary Colors by Joe Klein:

The book begins as an idealistic former congressional worker, Henry Burton, joins the presidential campaign of Southern governor Jack Stanton. As the primary elections grind on, Stanton's affair with Cashmere, his wife's hairdresser, comes to light and threatens to derail his presidential prospects...

Declassified Nixon Info & Mallon's Watergate

It's been a big year for declassified documents.  First we learned secrets about Pinochet, and now newly released tapes by LBJ reveal just how much Nixon was willing to damage the U.S. in order to further his own career. Here's the BBC article, "The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason':"

Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson's telephone calls provide a fresh insight into his world. Among the revelations - he planned a dramatic entry into the 1968 Democratic Convention to re-join the presidential race. And he caught Richard Nixon sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks... but said nothing. 

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign. He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. At a July meeting in Nixon's New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared. Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out... Publicly Nixon was suggesting he had no idea why the South Vietnamese withdrew from the talks. He even offered to travel to Saigon to get them back to the negotiating table.

To me, that seems almost as bad -- if not worse -- of a crime than Watergate: deliberately sabotaging peace talks in order to help your political campaign.

Anyway, to get more background on Nixon, try Thomas Mallon's novel Watergate

In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt’s sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter (“The clock is dick-dick-dicking”), and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself, home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the president’s attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars.

UPDATE:  a well-written review of Mallon's book can be found at Blogging for a Good Book.