“Scout’s honour: A priceless family portrait” reads the headline for an article in The Glengarry News, sent to us by an old friend. Diane Coombs, a former journalist, learned that her grandfather, the late F. E. L. Coombs, had been photographed by Karsh. Ms. Coombs was delighted to find a series of images of her grandfather on the National Library and Archives of Canada’s database. Our colleagues at the Archives are regularly digitizing Karsh’s early sittings.

Frank Edward Lewellyn Coombs was photographed in 1936 when he was working in Ottawa as editor of Scouts Canada publications. A world war veteran, he was editor of the first Canadian Boy magazine in 1921, and founded The Scout Leader, where he served for 25 years. An obituary read: “Few men have made a greater contribution to Canadian Scouting than Frank E. L. Coombs.”

Referring to this portrait, Mrs. Karsh said recently: “Yousuf’s relationships were not only with kings and queens! Everyone was photographed with the same respect, and he was yours 100%.”

Marian Anderson had sung across Europe, to kings and queens, to packed houses, yet in the 1930s she was denied the right to sing in her own country’s capital because she wasn’t white.

Anderson had been denied the right to perform at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her color. Instead, and at the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes permitted her to perform at the Lincoln Memorial, where, on April 9, 1939, she sang before a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions.

Read more about Marian Anderson and the other Karsh Sitters involved in this story.

“Genius draws no color lines” – Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior.

 

Ravi Shankar was born on this day, April 7, in 1920. Karsh photographed Shankar in 1968. One year prior, Shankar had performed a well-received set at the Monterey Pop Festival. While complimentary of the talents of several of the rock artists at the festival, he said he was “horrified” to see Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage. “That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God.” Read more (Wikipedia)

Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, died on this day, April 8, in 2013. She served from 1979 to 1990, making her the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century. Thatcher was photographed by Karsh in 1976 at the House of Commons, when she was Leader of the Opposition for the Conservative Party.

Charlton Heston died on this day, April 5, in 2008. He was photographed by Karsh in 1956 during filming of “The Ten Commandments”, both in-costume, and behind-the-scenes with his son, Fraser (who is himself a film director, producer, screenwriter and actor).

“The Ten Commandments” was directed by Cecil B. de Mille and also starred Yul Brynner as Ramesses II.

On this day, April 3, in 1948, President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan, named after General George C. Marshall, Secretary of State, who advocated a significant U.S. economic and political commitment to post-war European recovery.

Karsh photographed General Marshall in 1944 when he was Chief of Staff of the United States Army, and again in 1950, shortly after his tenure as United States Secretary of State. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

See Marshall in his 1944 Sitting.  See some other Nobel Prize winners photographed by Karsh.

In 1942, with the strong support of leading aviation executives, the Harvard Business School established the Aviation Research Program to develop vital information and guidance that would benefit the industry’s rapidly accelerating war effort. An HBS advisory committee of industry and government representatives was formed to direct this work under the chairmanship of William A. M. Burden, who had been named Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Air in 1943. Harvard Library holds the Burden papers and Harvard University Archives holds this Karsh print of Mr. Burden, who was photographed in 1946. See the Harvard Business School’s Baker Library Archive for more.

A restoration centre to preserve the work of Ernest Hemingway has opened in Cuba.

The restoration center built by the Cuban National Cultural Heritage Council and Finca Vigia Foundation of the United States is located on the 15-acre property where Hemingway lived in a tree-shaded, airy Spanish-style home, a glimpse of which you can see in the background of this portrait of Ernest and Mary Hemingway, made by Karsh on his visit in 1957.

Hemingway moved to Finca Vigia in 1939, the year before For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, and wrote The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream while he was there, according to local scholars. He left Cuba in 1960. Read more of the official press release.

Karsh described Hemingway as the shyest man he ever photographed. Read more.

Architect I. M. Pei’s glass and metal pyramid, the Pyramide du Louvre, is thirty years old. It is surrounded by three smaller pyramids in the main courtyard of the Palais du Louvre in Paris. The large pyramid serves as the main entrance to the Louvre Museum and was completed in 1989.

“‘Buildings are for people to enjoy,’ the Chinese-American architect told me. The appreciative millions who throng through his creative public buildings – the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Kennedy Library and the addition to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fragrant Hill Hotel outside Peking, or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland – respond instinctively to I. M.’s ‘dedication to humanity through architecture.'” Karsh: A Biography in Images

Pei was still designing into the 2000s, and he turned 100 in 2017. See more I. M. Pei by Karsh.

The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I premiered on this day, March 29, in 1951, at Broadway’s St. James Theatre. It ran for nearly three years, making it the fourth longest-running Broadway musical in history at the time, and it would go on to win the Tony Awards for Best Musical; Best Actress for Gertrude Lawrence, and Best Actor for Yul Brynner.

The King and I is the fifth musical by the team of composer Richard Rodgers and dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II, who Karsh photographed together in 1950.

Karsh photographed Yul Brynner in 1956. See more.

Physicist Safi Bahcall’s new book Loonshots (St. Martin’s Press) “reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior and the challenges of nurturing radical breakthroughs. Drawing on the science of “phase transitions” Bahcall shows why teams, companies, and other mission-driven groups will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice.”

Humphrey Bogart illustrates the “transition from smooth flow to turbulent flow” in this fascinating book, whose subtitle is “How to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries.”

Read more.

On this day, March 27, in 1958, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev replaced Nicolay Bulganin as Soviet premier.

Karsh photographed Khrushchev in April, 1963, when the furs had been returned to storage. However, Karsh asked: “Mr. Khrushchev, I would like the biggest fur coat in Russia possible to photograph you in.” And to my delight, he gave the go-ahead signal and within half an hour after that a big fur coat was produced.”

Read more about Karsh and Khrushchev.

This portrait of Princess Grace dominates the cover of Australia’s Who magazine special collector’s edition.

See more photographs of Grace.

Eleanor Roosevelt was an American diplomat and activist who served as the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945 during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s four terms in office, making her the longest serving First Lady of the United States. Roosevelt then served as United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952. She was vocal in her support of the civil rights movement. The Roosevelts (who were distant cousins) were married on this day, March 18, in 1905.

According to Wikipedia, the Roosevelts’ marriage was complicated from the beginning by Franklin’s controlling mother, Sara, and after Eleanor discovered her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, she resolved to seek fulfillment in leading a public life of her own. She persuaded Franklin to stay in politics after he was stricken with a paralytic illness in 1921, which cost him the normal use of his legs, and began giving speeches and appearing at campaign events in his place.

Following Franklin’s election as Governor of New York in 1928, and throughout the remainder of Franklin’s public career in government, Roosevelt regularly made public appearances on his behalf, and as First Lady, while her husband served as President, she significantly reshaped and redefined the role of First Lady.

This portrait of René Lévesque, the 23rd Premier of Quebec (1976-1985), is included in a book about Canadian Supreme Court justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, (out now from University of British Columbia Press). Also included are Karsh’s portraits of Alice Desjardins, a judge of the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal; and one of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

The Auckland Museum published a small guide to their collection curated by director David Gaimster, titled “Director’s Choice”. This Karsh portrait of Sir Edmund Hillary is in the Museum’s collection, and they reproduced it in the guide to illustrate a piece about Hillary’s diary entry for the 1953 Everest expedition – his diary being described as “possibly the greatest treasure in the Hillary Archive.”

See another portrait of Sir Edmund Hillary by Yousuf Karsh.

The John Buchan Story is a museum dedicated to the life, work and legacy of the novelist, historian, and politician John Buchan, also known as His Excellency The Right Honourable Lord Tweedsmuir. The organization recently acquired a First Nations cape and accompanying gauntlets owned by Buchan, and are using this photograph from 1936 as part of their exhibit.

John Buchan is a national figure within both a Scottish and UK context. Through his prolific writing and by his many and varied contributions to public life, he was a highly influential figure, particularly during the inter-war period. His final role as Governor General of Canada, and the popularity of film adaptations of his novel “The Thirty Nine Steps”, have also helped to give him an international reputation which continues to this day. As a novelist, historian, journalist, politician, soldier and public servant, his influence can be seen in numerous areas of the first half of the twentieth century.

Learn more about The John Buchan Story.

Learn more about Karsh and Buchan’s own rich history.

 

“American Portraits” is on view at The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, now through May 5, 2019. Curator of Collections and Exhibitions Kirsty Buchanan gives an overview of the exhibition and Karsh’s contribution to the art world.

In 1945, Karsh became naturalized Canadian citizen number 10 and was given a passport. The Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, invited one representative from each of the 10 provinces to receive the first passports, nominating Karsh as the representative from Ontario. In 1995 Karsh was invited to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Canadian passport; he was the only honoree still living.

Today is the Presidents’ Day federal holiday in the United States which is celebrated annually on the third Monday of February in honor of George Washington, the first President of the United States.

Karsh photographed twelve United States Presidents, from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton. He also photographed many foreign presidents, and corporate presidents. A free-text search in our Sittings database returns all of them, from a 1936 sitting with Dr. Karl T. Compton, President, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, to Mr. Alonzo L. McDonald, President, Bendix Corporation, 1981.

On Presidents, from Regarding Heroes:

Yousuf Karsh had made formal portraits of all of the American presidents since Herbert Hoover, twelve in all. Now, early in the year 2001, at age ninety-two, he was frail and long retired when the staff of George W. Bush approached him. They wanted to fly the president to Boston, where Karsh had resided since closing his Ottawa studio nine years before. The newly elected leader would be at the photographer’s disposal, they promised, more so than was usual. Mrs. Karsh recounts that the president’s staff said to Jerry Fielder, the twenty-five-year primary assistant to Karsh who was handling the urgent request, that they would even be satisfied with a perfunctory portrait set up by the studio staff if Karsh would just release the shutter. This last effort at accommodation made them seem not only overly eager but also uninformed about what a Karsh portrait entailed.

It is understandable that Bush’s staff was anxious about not getting a sitting with the one photographer who had become a legend by recording those he personally considered to be the shapers of history and culture. To be among those Karsh included in his photographic pantheon and publications was an honor that dignitaries, political figures, and celebrities sought of him to the last days of his career. An additional attraction for Bush’s people must have been that Karsh was not a partisan portraitist, and thus there was an expectation that he would not infuse the image with a personal political judgment, even subliminally.

(Karsh) had become an institution in his own right, someone who was expected to participate in what had grown to be one of the many cultural expectations of the ritual of passage to the presidency.

The Rockwell Museum is the current host of “Yousuf Karsh: American Portraits,” on loan from the National Portrait Gallery. Among their Karsh-related activities is a quiz: Which Karsh subject do you most identify with? Visit their exhibition page.

“Take the quiz to find out which Karsh subject you most identify with, then find your celebrity alter ego’s portrait. Does your result match up?”

Karsh photographed dozens of plays at the Dominion Drama Festival from 1933 to 1938. The Drama Festival was an organization in Canada that sought to promote amateur theater across the country. In 1935, he photographed René Arthur in the role of Prince Metternich in the play L’Aiglon, by Edmond Rostand.

This photograph of René Arthur is in the collection of the Canada Science and Technology Museum. Arthur (1908-1972) had a productive career as a writer, playwright and radio and television host, but in the 1940s he was secretary to Liberal minister in the Legislative Assembly of Quebec, Valmore Bienvenue and in 1960 he resumed public service and became deputy chief of the office of the Premier of Quebec, Jean Lesage. (geneanet)

On this day, February 11, in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison.

Karsh photographed Mandela in June of 1990, during Mandela’s formal visit to the Canadian parliament. Mandela was vice-president of the African National Congress (ANC) at the time, and he addressed a joint session of the House of Commons and the Senate, the first time in four decades a non-head of state had been given the special privilege. Mandela praised Canada for supporting the anti-apartheid movement and asked the government not to lift trade sanctions on South Africa – a request then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney proudly obliged. Canada lifted the sanctions in 1993, the year before Mandela became president.

Twenty years earlier, the country took a stand against apartheid when John Diefenbaker played a key role in having South Africa excluded from the Commonwealth. Read more.

See more Nelson Mandela by Karsh.

Ronald Reagan was born on this day, February 6, in 1911. After a career in radio and film, Reagan served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989.

Reagan was also photographed by Karsh in 1969 as Governor of the State of California, and in 1980 as President-Elect.

See contact sheets showing Karsh’s visit to the White House to photograph the President in January, 1982.

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling Karsh exhibition, “American Portraits”, opens at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY, on February 8, 2019. The exhibition includes 48 iconic portraits, including photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe, Jonas Salk, Marian Anderson, Elizabeth Arden, I.M. Pei, Helen Keller, Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, and first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy. The curator of this exhibition was National Portrait Gallery Senior Curator of Photographs, Ann Shumard.

“American Portraits” will be on view from February 8, until May 5, 2019.

Jackie Robinson was born one hundred years ago today, January 31. Robinson is legendary in the United States for being the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. Karsh photographed Robinson in 1957, the year after Robinson had retired from the game.

Robinson also was the first black television analyst in Major League Baseball and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o’Nuts. In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York.

Jamie Bernstein and Steve J. Sherman’s book Leonard Bernstein 100: The Masters Photograph the Maestro is out on the shelves now (Powerhouse Books, 2019). The book is chock full of personal letters, scores, as well as many photos, including this frame from Bernstein’s 1985 sitting with Karsh.

“Leonard Bernstein was constantly being photographed, but unlike most, he was photographed by some of the greatest visual masters of the 20th century, including Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ken Heyman, Yousuf Karsh, Stanley Kubrick, Gjon Mili, Arnold Newman, Ruth Orkin, Irving Penn, and W. Eugene Smith.

To mark his centennial, curator and photographer Steve J. Sherman and Jamie Bernstein, Lenny’s eldest daughter, present this remarkable collection of 100 iconic images, which tell the Maestro’s life story through the unique vantage point of these image-makers and their revelatory (and sometimes never-before-seen) photographs.

A foreword by Bernstein’s three children, along with a selection of Bernstein’s handwritten music sketches, letters, speeches and poems, further enhances this intimate journey into the life of an artist who changed the face of the 20th century.” (Powerhouse)

See another frame from the sitting.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an American federal holiday marking the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. It is observed on the third Monday of January each year.

The idea of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday was promoted by labor unions in contract negotiations. After King’s death, U.S. Representative John Conyers (a Democrat from Michigan) and U.S. Senator Edward Brooke (a Republican from Massachusetts) introduced a bill in Congress to make King’s birthday a national holiday. The bill first came to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979. However, it fell five votes short of the number needed for passage. Two of the main arguments mentioned by opponents were that a paid holiday for federal employees would be too expensive, and that a holiday to honor a private citizen would be contrary to longstanding tradition (King had never held public office). Only two other figures have national holidays in the U.S. honoring them: George Washington and Christopher Columbus.

Soon after, the King Center turned to support from the corporate community and the general public. The success of this strategy was cemented when musician Stevie Wonder released the single “Happy Birthday” to popularize the campaign in 1980 and hosted the Rally for Peace Press Conference in 1981. Six million signatures were collected for a petition to Congress to pass the law.

Senators Jesse Helms and John Porter East (both North Carolina Republicans) led opposition to the holiday and questioned whether King was important enough to receive such an honor.

President Ronald Reagan originally opposed the holiday, citing cost concerns. When asked to comment on Helms’ accusations that King was a communist, the president said “We’ll know in thirty-five years, won’t we?”, in reference to the eventual release of FBI surveillance tapes that had previously been sealed. But on November 2, 1983, Reagan signed a bill, proposed by Representative Katie Hall of Indiana, to create a federal holiday honoring King. The bill had passed the House of Representatives by a count of 338 to 90, a veto-proof margin. The holiday was observed for the first time on January 20, 1986. Wikipedia.

The International Vladimir Nabokov Society has recently launched an extensive website, The Nabokovian, to celebrate the heritage of this great Russian-American writer. We worked with the society to ensure this portrait of Nabokov by Karsh from 1972 is included in the Nabokovian website’s photo gallery.

The Bauhaus was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught.

The UK’s Sunday paper The Observer published an article this weekend, Bauhaus at 100: what it means to me by Norman Foster, Margaret Howell and others in which architects, designers and other creatives talk about how its ideas have shaped their work.

The school existed in three German cities: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime.

An inquiry from a relative of one of the workers from Atlas Steel came in, and so we added a couple of images to the website. The American Publicity Director of Atlas Steels approached Mr. Karsh in 1950, saying “that for years I had been glorifying the great of this world… what about trying my hands at glorifying the humble ones of the earth.” Shortly afterwards, Karsh found himself in Welland, Ontario, at the Atlas Steels plant. He had never photographed in an industrial plant before. The images would become Atlas Steel’s 1951 Annual Report, and would join Karsh’s work with Ford of Canada and Sharon Steel in the book Industrial Images.

The official caption for this image read:
“When Karsh first saw George Guglielmo standing watching him with face protector uplifted he was reminded of an ancient Roman gladiator. George’s parents came, in fact, from a village near the Eternal City. In effect, he is an apprentice today following in the footsteps of his gigantic boss, ‘Tiny’ Stirtzinger, 1,000 ton headman.”

In the Atlas 1951 Annual Report Gugleilmo is described as having an almost medieval appearance, chosen by Karsh as it illustrated the “sturdy, independent character of a man who makes Atlas Steels.”

See more industrial images.

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay on this day, January 17, in 1942. He converted to Islam after 1961 and in 1964 changed his name from Cassius Clay, which he called his “slave name”, to Muhammad Ali. Karsh said of his sitting:

“I photographed (Ali) in 1970, as part of a series of young people for ‘Look’ Magazine… Muhammad Ali arrived at my New York studio with a breathless young editor trailing behind. They had jogged together from the ‘Look’ offices, the young editor carrying Ali’s heavy portable telephone  which Ali said kept him in ‘constant contact with the world.’”

Read the rest of the Muhammad Ali story.

In an ArtMarket Insight, Artprice states: “After decades of inertia, the market for the great abstract artist Hans Hartung is gaining momentum thanks to support from leading galleries and museums.”

The article goes on to mention that “A major adept of ‘gestural’ painting in the 1920s and 30s (i.e. well before the great American ‘action’ paintings of Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Motherwell…), Hans Hartung (1904-1989) played a key role in the history of 20th century painting. However, after receiving full recognition during his lifetime (in the 60s and 70s), the German artist fell into relative market oblivion for roughly three decades. Today the amnesia concerning Hans Hartung’s work appears to be lifting and his work is attracting a lot of attention from important galleries and major cultural institutions.”

Apparently, Hans Hartung has never been in such demand. Read the rest of the article.

More Hans Hartung by Karsh.

American actress, singer, dancer and comedienne Carol Channing has died. Channing was photographed in April, 1956. Earlier that year, Karsh had photographed several Hollywood stars including Charlton Heston, Anita Ekberg, Joan Collins, and Audrey Hepburn.

Journalist Robert McGarvey wrote an article for Troy Media this week, reflecting on “the enormous contribution of newcomers to Canada.” It is Karsh’s immigration story that McGarvey uses to make his point.

Here are (Karsh’s) impressions of arriving in Canada, cold and alone as a youngster almost a century ago:

“On the stormy New Year’s Eve of 1924, the liner Versailles reached Halifax from Beirut. Her most excited passenger in the steerage class must have been an Armenian boy of 16 who spoke little French and less English. I was that boy…

“For the moment it was enough to find myself safe in Canada, the massacres, torture and the heartbreak of Armenia behind me; to feel, even then, that I was coming home.”

These are stirring turns of phrase given the difficulties this young boy faced in escaping the horrors of genocide and the obvious challenges he would continue to face as a stranger in Canada.

The fact that Karsh felt at home so immediately speaks to a special quality of Canadian officialdom: never at a loss when it comes to completing their paperwork, these Canadian bureaucrats are a beacon of light compared with most border officials.

That young boy not only adjusted to his new country, he thrived. He became, in time, one of the most famous artists of the 20th century. Karsh was an international sensation, producing iconic photo portraits of world figures during and after the Second World War.

Read the rest of Mr. McGarvey’s column for Troy Media.

Read Karsh’s biography.

New evidence has emerged linking an RAF veteran to the death in 1961 of the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in a mysterious plane crash in southern Africa.

In the UK Sunday publication the Observer, reporting team Emma Graham-Harrison, Andreas Rocksen and Mads Brügger write:

Jan van Risseghem has been named as a possible attacker before, but has always been described simply as a Belgian pilot. The Observer can now reveal that he had extensive ties to Britain, including a British mother and wife, trained with the RAF and was decorated by Britain for his service in the second world war. Film-makers investigating the 1961 crash for a documentary, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, have found a friend of Van Risseghem who claimed the pilot confessed to shooting down the UN plane. They also gathered testimony from another pilot that undermines one of his alibis for that night. Read the rest of the article.

 

By request from a client in the Netherlands, these two portraits of American fiber artist Lenore Tawney have been freshly scanned.

Tawney began weaving in 1954. Her early tapestries combined traditional with experimental, using an ancient Peruvian gauze weave technique and inlayed colorful yarns to create a painterly effect that appeared to float in space. Because of her unorthodox weaving methods, Tawney was spurned by both the craft and art worlds, but her distinct style attracted many devoted admirers. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. (Wikipedia)

Karsh photographed Tawney in November, 1959, for House Beautiful. He photographed several others for the magazine in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, including Frank Lloyd Wright.

On January 10, 1920, the League of Nations was formally established when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took effect. When war broke out in 1939, the League closed down and its headquarters in Geneva remained empty throughout the war.

The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the U.S. State Department in 1939. The text of the “Declaration by United Nations” was drafted at the White House on December 29, 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins. (Wikipedia).

Karsh photographed several Secretaries General and others with roles at the United Nations. See the Sittings.

Richard Nixon was born on this day, January 9, 1913. This double portrait was made and published in January 1969 as Nixon took office as the 37th president of the United States.

Nixon of course is notorious for resigning before he could be impeached. It took a long time for the media and for public opinion to come around to Nixon’s culpability as is explored in depth in Slate‘s podcast “Slow Burn“(2017). Journalist and podcast host Leon Neyfakh wrote:

Why are we revisiting Watergate now? The connections between the Nixon era and today are obvious enough. But to me, the similarity that’s most striking is not between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon (although they’re both paranoid, vengeful, and preoccupied with “loyalty”), or their alleged crimes (although they both involved cheating to win an election), or the legal issues in the two cases (although they both center on obstruction of justice).

Rather, it’s that people who lived through Watergate had no idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, or how it was all going to end. I recognize that feeling. The Trump administration has made many of us feel like the country is in an unfamiliar, precarious situation.

Read more from Leon Neyfakh.

See the Nixon Sittings.