Roger Morris

When dealing with American politics, you try to follow the money, and that's where it leads you. It doesn't take you to the electoral college or to Princeton. It takes you down the darker alleys of American life.

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Venissa is a perfect destination for day-trippers from Venice proper who are searching for great food and a little adventure; it's a 30-minute jaunt by vaporetto from St. Mark's, quicker by water taxi.

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Slow food, free-range, no steroids, eat local, and natural winemaking are all part of a general yearning for simpler times. But the fact is that most winemakers these days, big and small, have drastically lessened the use of chemicals in the vineyard, embracing such concepts as organically grown, biodynamic, and sustainable.

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Nixon officials foreshadowed both the historic distinction and seamy underside of the presidency.

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I would have to say that Richard Nixon is probably the most gifted and skilled political practitioner, in his pre-presidential years, of all of the American presidents in the 20th century.

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Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self-advancement.

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Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he's on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon's presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.

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I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections.

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Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.

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Philadelphia's Schuylkill River has long been the mother of waters for mid-Atlantic rowers, just as the Charles, which separates Boston from Cambridge, is for New England boaters.

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Many mainstream winemakers use indigenous yeasts rather than commercially grown ones to ferment their grapes - precisely what natural winemakers advocate.

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Without sulfites, wine may smell and taste funky or re-ferment in the bottle. Many distributors and shop owners are consequently reluctant to stock wines made without sulfites.

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