Nixonian Listening

Factoid of the day: Richard Nixon liked to work while listening to Richard Rodgers' (and Robert Russell Bennet') score for the early 50s television series Victory at Sea.

As I write in my chapter on performances that remembered the Pacific Front, Senator McCarthy was also fond of dressing up and playing soldier, a role he called "Tailgunner Joe." He even received a belated Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, largely on the basis of falsified records. His famous war injury was actually, biographers believe, the result of a hazing ritual.