RobKirkpatrick.com

Okay, so turns out I was on NPR’s All Things Considered afterall.  It’s kind of a funny little skit on 40th anniversary burnout.  You can hear it and read the transcript at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120652963 

I don’t know that I would cite the Wendy’s burger as a huge anniversary moment, but to each his own…

Thanks again to Travis Larchuck at NPR for including me in the spot.

- Rob

Richard Safire, the New York Times columnist and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, passed away today at 79.

Safire wrote the “contingency” speech that Richard Nixon would have read on television in the event that the astronauts of Apollo 11 had been stranded on the moon, as I discuss in 1969.  If not for Neil Armstrong’s quick thinking during his lunar approach, it’s something that very well could have happened.  And if Buzz Aldrin hadn’t figured out how to flip the broken ignition button with a ball-point pen… 

Here’s a link to the speech, courtesy of Gawker:

http://gawker.com/5369364/william-safires-finest-speech

Rutgers Magazine has a nice blurb about 1969 in its Spring 2009 issue, in a little feature entitled “A Rich Cast of Charaters” on me and fellow Scarlet Knight author Jayne Anne Phillips…

Nineteen sixty-nine. What a year! So many events took place in America, forever changing the political, social, and artistic landscape of the nation. Richard Nixon. Neil Armstrong. Joe Namath. Butch Cassidy. Forty years later, Rob Kirkpatrick RC ‘90, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), relives the events, and the people behind them, in his fast-paced, readable book. Kirkpatrick is also the author of Magic in the Night: The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009).

…It always sounds a little funny to me to hear a book described as “readable” (as opposed to “edible”?) but I’ll gladly take it.

-Rob