This is funny. I was the second guest today on Fresh Air. The first was Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I don't know Mr. Perlstein or his book but apparently, those who burnish and defend the name of Richard M. Nixon are not happy with what Mr. Perlstein has written.
Over at the weblog of The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation, Frank Gannon — a longtime historian and defender of R.M.N. — writes the following…
At least on the basis of this radio interview, the author and historian and author turns out to be an effective and engaging author and polemicist. Fresh Air itself — inadvertently to be sure — provides an editorial comment by pairing Mr. Perlstein and Nixonland with another author and his book: Mark Evanier's King of Comics — a book about the comic book artist who created such Marvel superheroes as the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, and X-men.
So it turns out that Fresh Air had a theme today: comic book renderings of superheroes and supervillans.
It might interest Mr. Gannon to know that my book is actually titled Kirby: King of Comics and that it's about a man named Jack Kirby. When I recorded the interview on Monday, we taped way more than was aired…and one of the exchanges that was dropped was a discussion of how when Mr. Kirby created one of his great master villains, Darkseid, he based much of the character on the man he thought was then the most dangerous and sinister human being alive…Richard Nixon.
I don't know if that section of the discussion was dropped because they decided to have the Perlstein interview occupy the other half of the hour. But if they'd left it in, we could have had a real theme show.