The Blaisdell Blog

  Today is National Dog Day.   Dogs are a supremely domesticated animal.   They read our moods, respond to our needs, love us even when we are not loveable and can be trained to be useful as well as companions.   I have owned two dogs in my adult life.   One was a white German Shepherd who grew up with my girls.   They could not have had a better friend.   The second was a neighborhood puppy.   His mother was a shepherd, but his father was a traveling man.   Like his predecessor, he was gentle, good natured and lived to make his family happy.   If you get the impression that I like big “doggy” looking dogs, you would be right. My dogs have been wonderful, loving and supportive animals.   Neither was particularly smart, but I know people I could describe the same way.   Since I am a scholar of Presidential history and this is a subject much in the news, I thought I would do a little research into Presidential dogs.   What...

Fifty years ago today, Colonel Ralph Albertazzie, then pilot of Air Force One, was flying over Jefferson City, MO with President Richard Milhous Nixon and his family on board.   He was taking the Nixons home to California. Passing the mid-Missouri air control, he received word that Vice President Gerald R. Ford had just been sworn in as President of the United States. Albertazzie contacted ground control and gave this message: "Kansas City, this was Air Force One. We are now redesignating SAM 27000." The reversion of the plane to its assigned tail number indicated there was no longer a President on board. Nixon had resigned a few hours before and was heading into a shameful retirement.   The resignation, the shame, the enduring stain on what was, in many ways, a laudable Presidency was the result of Nixon’s Presidential hubris and latent moral flaws.   I met Richard Nixon once.   I was at the Western States Young Republicans’ Convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico...