Sometimes I look at my life as big long list of failure after failure. Others would look at it as a panoply of success after success. When I’m having a good day that funnels towards a bad one,  I realize that though there are relative successes, what I’ve become is one thing- mediocre. Does everyone have greatness inside of them? Is there an inner Oprah in everyone?

This was an interesting article on conditioning and mediocrity— so I guess I’ve been adequate, and on occasion, more than adequate. Not sure how I feel about that. I was raised to always want to be superlative. Somehow adequate just doesn’t feel good enough…

Conditioning and mediocrity - are fears limiting our creative potential?

In his book Totally Fulfilled, Dean Graziosi notes “We all have limiting beliefs inside us whether we know it or not, and they may be the main reason some of us can’t get to the next level in life… Chances are, without realizing it, you’ve been conditioned for mediocrity.”

A recent highly circulated and critiqued condolence letter by Lindsay Lohan to the family of Robert Altman [who directed her and many other actors in the film “A Prairie Home Companion”] ended with, apparently, what was meant to be a reference to a quote of Altman: “Be Adequite” [as she misspelled it.]

According to a news story [St. Paul Pioneer Press July 20, 2005] about the making of “A Prairie Home Companion” director Robert Altman used the phrase “That was adequate” to indicate he had shot enough takes of a scene. One of the stars of the film, Virginia Madsen, said when he tells an actor their performance is “more than adequate, that means it’s good.”

Garrison Keillor further explained, “It’s that Midwestern reticence,” noting that Altman grew up in Kansas City, Mo. “The distrust of superlatives is rather strong.”

Using that sort of muting of “excessive” enthusiasm for comic effect is one of the pleasures of Keillor’s radio show - but it may also be another form of conditioning toward suppression of passions which can energize our talents.

Columbia Business School Professor Srikumar Rao, in his book Are You Ready to Succeed?, details some of the forms of conditioning we can be subjected to that limit us.

He asks, “Are you beset by fears? Are you terrified of spiders or snakes or one-eyed albino pirates? Do dark spaces or soaring heights make your palms sweat? Or does the thought of going to parties, giving speeches, making presentations, or speaking up for something you believe in that is unpopular scare you silly?

“Are you numbed by the specter of being stuck in the same dreary career and never achieving the potential you know you have? I regularly hear about all these and many, many more.

“But where did you pick this up? These fears are all a result of your conditioning… from your parents and teachers and role models.. the media that surrounds you.

“Marketers call it cultural conditioning - your tendency to consume products and think in ways that conform to the broader society that you are a part of. This conditioning not only restricts you, it also prevents you from exploring pathways that could lead you to freedom. That is why you feel boxed in and enervated.”

[The photo, by the way, is from the article Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, by Jeffrey Kluger, Time Magazine Nov. 17, 2002 — about highly sensitive people. A whole other topic, but maybe not so unrelated.]

This show was engaging, enthralling and fascinating. Makes you want to fly away to the dreamscape of Japan if only for a weekend.

http://www.studio360.org

February 06, 2009

Sticker Me Beautiful

Kurt lands in Tokyo’s Shibuya — glitzy and bustling, it makes Times Square look quaint, and it’s the epicenter of teen culture. Kurt meets up with blogger Lisa Katayama, who takes Kurt to a girl haven: the sticker picture booth. Striking poses against glittery pink and purple backdrops just might be Japan’s secret to happiness.

Check out Studio 360’s travelblog

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• SLIDESHOW: Step Inside the Sticker Booth

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Schoolgirls Grow Up

The Japanese schoolgirl image was made famous by comic books and cartoons. But not everyone thinks they’re so kawaii (cute). What do Japanese women make of this archetype? Lisa Katayama met three young art stars whose work reclaims and re-invents female pop imagery, in some disturbing ways. But don’t call them feminists.

Toast Girl in Action:

• SLIDESHOW: Not Your Mother’s Paintings

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Nerd’s Paradise

Roland Kelts, an expert in Japanese pop culture, takes Kurt to Akihabara, a retail paradise for otaku — obsessive fans of manga and other Japanese culture. But a recent tragedy casts a shadow over the fun and games.

Kurt Geeks Out in Akihabara:

• SLIDESHOW: Kurt in Toyland

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This Is Their Youth

Young adults in Japan are unemployed, disenchanted, and depressed. Roland Kelts talks to poet Misumi Mizuki, novelist Ryu Murakami, and other artists to understand why. And he finds that Japan’s troubled youth might be changing the country for the better.

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The Lion

Kurt stumbles into a temple for classical music fans, with scratchy records played at the altar.

• SLIDESHOW: Inside The Lion

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Tokyo Old and New

What is essentially Japanese in design? One designer compares it to tofu. Architects Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Shigeru Ban, designer Reiko Sudo, and poet Shuntaro Tanikawa show Kurt how Japan brings tradition and innovation together. His search takes him through the streets of old Tokyo to an island in the Inland Sea.

• SLIDESHOW: Japanese Design Today
• SLIDESHOW: At Naoshima

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Pico Iyer: Outside Man

Travel writer Pico Iyer has lived in Japan for 20 years. And while he knows the locals still see him as an outsider, he told Kurt that this status helps him pay attention to his surroundings.

(Aired January 30, 2009)

• VIDEO: Kurt and Pico in Nara Park

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No Time for Tea

The tea ceremony is a 400-year-old ritual for serving green tea. But in Japan’s techno-centric society (increasingly fueled by coffee) can the tea ceremony survive? Studio 360’s Jenny Lawton talked with tea masters, old and young.

(Aired January 30, 2009)

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Suicide Forest

Aokigahara is the forest at the foot of Mount Fuji. It’s mythologized in Japanese literature as a sacred place for people to end their lives -– and every year close to a hundred suicides are committed there. Studio 360’s Pejk Malinovski went there to uncover why it lingers in the Japanese psyche.

(Aired January 30, 2009)

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Domo Arigato

Studio 360 in Japan is supported, in part, by the Freeman Foundation and the United States-Japan Foundation.

Till Children Do Us Part

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Published: February 4, 2009

Olympia, Wash

Ruth Gwily

HALF a century ago, the conventional wisdom was that having a child was the surest way to build a happy marriage. Women’s magazines of that era promised that almost any marital problem could be resolved by embarking on parenthood. Once a child arrives, “we don’t worry about this couple any more,” an editor at Better Homes and Gardens enthused in 1944. “There are three in that family now. … Perhaps there is not much more needed in a recipe for happiness.”

Over the past two decades, however, many researchers have concluded that three’s a crowd when it comes to marital satisfaction. More than 25 separate studies have established that marital quality drops, often quite steeply, after the transition to parenthood. And forget the “empty nest” syndrome: when the children leave home, couples report an increase in marital happiness.

But does the arrival of children doom couples to a less satisfying marriage? Not necessarily. Two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, Philip and Carolyn Cowan, report in a forthcoming briefing paper for the Council on Contemporary Families that most studies finding a large drop in marital quality after childbirth do not consider the very different routes that couples travel toward parenthood.

Some couples plan the conception and discuss how they want to conduct their relationship after the baby is born. Others disagree about whether or when to conceive, with one partner giving in for the sake of the relationship. And sometimes, both partners are ambivalent.

The Cowans found that the average drop in marital satisfaction was almost entirely accounted for by the couples who slid into being parents, disagreed over it or were ambivalent about it. Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.

Marital quality also tends to decline when parents backslide into more traditional gender roles. Once a child arrives, lack of paid parental leave often leads the wife to quit her job and the husband to work more. This produces discontent on both sides. The wife resents her husband’s lack of involvement in child care and housework. The husband resents his wife’s ingratitude for the long hours he works to support the family.

When the Cowans designed programs to help couples resolve these differences, they had fewer conflicts and higher marital quality. And the children did better socially and academically because their parents were happier.

But keeping a marriage vibrant is a never-ending job. Deciding together to have a child and sharing in child-rearing do not immunize a marriage. Indeed, collaborative couples can face other problems. They often embark on such an intense style of parenting that they end up paying less attention to each other.

Parents today spend much more time with their children than they did 40 years ago. The sociologists Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson and Melissa Milkie report that married mothers in 2000 spent 20 percent more time with their children than in 1965. Married fathers spent more than twice as much time.

A study by John Sandberg and Sandra Hofferth at the University of Michigan showed that by 1997 children in two-parent families were getting six more hours a week with Mom and four more hours with Dad than in 1981. And these increases occurred even as more mothers entered the labor force.

Couples found some of these extra hours by cutting back on time spent in activities where children were not present — when they were alone as a couple, visiting with friends and kin, or involved in clubs. But in the long run, shortchanging such adult-oriented activities for the sake of the children is not good for a marriage. Indeed, the researcher Ellen Galinsky has found that most children don’t want to spend as much time with their parents as parents assume; they just want their parents to be more relaxed when they are together.

Couples need time alone to renew their relationship. They also need to sustain supportive networks of friends and family. Couples who don’t, investing too much in their children and not enough in their marriage, may find that when the demands of child-rearing cease to organize their lives, they cannot recover the relationship that made them want to have children together in the first place.

As the psychologist Joshua Coleman suggests, the airline warning to put on your own oxygen mask before you place one on your child also holds true for marriage.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College and the director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, is the author of “Marriage: A History.”

I don’t know him… but I respect what he has written, and the grace with which he is viewing his death:

After being picked up for the new “Special Mission Aviation Department Head”, my wife, Danica, and I got orders from the wonderful paradise of Hawaii flying with VPU-2 to familiar Corpus Christi, TX training new aviators in the TC-12.

Matthew Thompson
Go Navy Beat Army!!

I heard this on NPR as a short news blip, and looked up the full story:

Family members of convicted rapist Timothy Cole and rape victim Michelle Mallin are scheduled to appear in court today to clear the rapist name.

Posted in February 5th, 2009

by Claudette Rothman in America, courts

Tim Cole was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the rape of Michele Mallin. Courtesy of the family of Timothy Cole

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Today in an Austin, Texas, courtroom, convicted rapist Timothy Cole’s family and the victim he is accused of raping, will ask a judge to clear the dead man’s name.

In 1985, Cole, who was a student at Texas Tech high school in Lubbock, Texas, was accused of raping sophomore student Michelle Mallin.

On the night of Sunday March 24, 1985, Mallin told police that while she was parking her car, a black man approached her and asked her if she had jumper cables because he was having some car problems.

“All of a sudden,” she said, “The man opened the door of my car and forced himself in and then he put a knife to my throat at the same time, and pushed me over into the passenger seat and started to drive away.”

She told police that her attacker drove her car without gloves and smoked the entire time he was driving the car.

The only description that Mallin was able to give Texas police was, her attacker was a black man, who was a chain smoker, drove her car without gloves and had a knife to her throat.

Texas police later showed Mallin a picture of a young black man, and thinking that they had more evidence, she identified the man in the picture as her attacker.

On the same night that Mallin was raped, Texas police saw Cole waiting for a friend who was working at a pizza parlor near Texas Tech, which was a few blocks from where Mallin was raped, and took a picture of him.

Prior to meeting his friend at the pizza parlor, and at the same time that Mallin was raped, Cole was studying in his apartment while his brother was playing cards in the living room with several people.

Although everyone who were playing cards testified that Cole was studying, and, authorities had medical records that said Cole suffered from asthma, and his fingerprints were nowhere on the car, Texas police arrested  him for the rape of Mallin.

During his trial, the district attorney attacked Cole’s witnesses as brash, slick liars who would say anything to save their friend.  In the end, the jury convicted Cole to 25 years in prison.

While in prison, Cole told his sobbing story to inmate Jerry Wayne Johnson.

Johnson, who was a chain smoker and was serving time for raping two women, one, a 15 year-old white student that he snatched from her high school, holding a knife to her throat, listened very carefully to Cole’s story.

Johnson waited until the statute of limitation ran out and in 1995; he wrote a letter to the district court in Lubbock, Texas, confessing to raping Mallin.

Not receiving any replies, he wrote another letter asking for an attorney so that he could legally confess.  Again, he was ignored.

In 2007, he tracked down Cole home address, and thinking that Cole was paroled, he wrote the young man a letter with his confession.

Cole’s mother, Ruby Session, opened the letter, read it, and just could not believe her eyes.

After going to the media with the letter, Lubbock D.A’s office announced that it would run modern DNA tests.

When the results came back, it was Jerry Wayne Johnson’s DNA on the swabs in the rape kit, not Cole’s.

The Innocence Project of Texas tried to get a court to clear Cole’s name, but no judge in Lubbock would grant them a hearing.

They went to a state judge in Austin with their facts, and a hearing for relief was granted, for today, Thursday February 5, 2009.

On December 2, 1999, Cole died in prison at the age of 39 from an asthma attack.

Rape victim Mallin said that she would take the stand to clear Cole’s name, “Even though I know I did everything I could in my heart of hearts to do the right thing.”

Today I visited one of my best friends who just got home from having brain surgery. She’s in her 30’s, has a beautiful little one-year old girl, and is still a happily married newlywed (she was married like two days before she conceived… really!). She had a benign (thankfully) tumor removed, that the doctor told her had been there for several years— just growing, growing, pushing, pushing, until finally her ophthalmologist noticed that the pressure around her optic nerve was elevated. That was it.

I’m grateful… so grateful that she is okay. That her daughter will still have her mother for years to come. That she can ride the wave of marriage, and hopefully always land of safe ground. In my own life, I feel like I have had a tumor growing and growing, festering and festering for years. I’m trying to figure out if I should get rid of it. I’ve lived this long with it. Had good days and bad days with it. When I look at my best friend and see how happy she is to have her life back, I wonder if I will ever feel that way, too…

Gotta get this book (taken from npr.org):

Excerpt: ‘The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III’

Raymond Carver, “The Art of Fiction”

by Introduction by Margaret Atwood, edited by Philip Gourevitch

 The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. II

Introduction by Margaret Atwood, edited by Philip Gourevitch
Picador
Paperback, 464 pages
List price: $16

NPR.org, January 28, 2009 · Interviewer:

Is it true that you celebrated your first publication by taking the magazine to bed with you?

Raymond Carver:

That’s partly true. Actually, it was a book, the Best American Short Stories annual. My story “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” had just appeared in the collection. That was back in the late sixties, when it was edited every year by Martha Foley and the people used to call it that — simply, “The Foley Collection.” The story had been published in an obscure little magazine out of Chicago called December. The day the anthology came in the mail I took it to bed to read and just to look at, you know, and hold it, but I did more looking and holding than actual reading. I fell asleep and woke up the next morning with the book there in bed beside me, along with my wife.

Interviewer:

In an article you did for The New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story “too tedious to talk about here” — about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?

Carver:

The story that was “too tedious to talk about” has to do with a number of things that aren’t very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay “Fires,” which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that a writer is judged by what he writes, and that’s the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of pay-off from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories. I was beginning to see that my life was not — let’s say it was not what I wanted it to be. There was always a wagonload of frustration to deal with — wanting to write and not being able to find the time or the place for it. I used to go out and sit in the car and try to write something on a pad on my knee. This was when the kids were in their adolescence. I was in my late twenties or early thirties. We were still in a state of penury, we had one bankruptcy behind us, and years of hard work with nothing to show for it except an old car, a rented house, and new creditors on our backs. It was depressing, and I felt spiritually obliterated. Alcohol became a problem. I more or less gave up, threw in the towel, and took to full-time drinking as a serious pursuit. That’s part of what I was talking about when I was talking about things “too tedious to talk about.”

Interviewer:

Could you talk a little more about the drinking? So many writers, even if they’re not alcoholics, drink so much.

Carver:

Probably not a whole lot more than any other group of professionals. You’d be surprised. Of course there’s a mythology that goes along with the drinking, but I was never into that. I was into the drinking itself. I suppose I began to drink heavily after I’d realized that the things I’d wanted most in life for myself and my writing, and my wife and children, were simply not going to happen. It’s strange. You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat or a thief. Or a liar.

Interviewer:

And you were all those things?

Carver:

I was.

I was recently asked about how I could contribute to the diversity of an organization. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this question. Here’s my answer:

     I grew up in a very small town in the southeast corner of Missouri, the daughter of very motivated and successful Korean parents. When I was five years old, I had my first brush with prejudice. Jennifer Watson (names have not been changed to protect the perpetrator) refused to let me jump rope with her because I was “too black.” This incident should give some insight into just how “monochromatic” my little town was. It didn’t take long for everyone to realize that this little girl with exotic black eyes and hair straight out of animé was not much different after all.

     I never gave much thought to how my presence anywhere was chalking one up for diversity. My father did, which is why he insisted I attend the Naval Academy to mitigate the losses he deemed would affect me as a “double minority.” When I was recruited for the Korean American Midshipmen Association (KAMA) at the Academy I lasted for one bowl of rice and two plates of bulgogi before I threw in the towel. I told them if I wanted to celebrate and embrace my Korean-American heritage, shouldn’t I be doing it with non-Koreans for impact?

     When I had my service interview to be accepted into the naval intelligence community, a commander asked me how I would deal with being a double minority (my dad was apparently on to something) in a field that was dominated by men. I told him that I would deal with it the way I deal with every situation- do the job and do it well- earn the respect of my subordinates, peers, and superiors not because I’m a woman who can get the job done, or a Korean who can get the job done, but as a person who can get the job done. A month later the commander approached me at half-time of a Navy football game and said he was looking forward to me joining the intelligence community.

     What I am trying to say through these examples is that despite the relative lack of diversity in my hometown and even in Annapolis, I view diversity as the necessary norm. This perspective drives me to break barriers that have been placed in front of so many because of people’s or places’ inabilities to embrace diversity. 

     Ironically, it was neither my ethnicity nor my gender that made me aware of my perceived place in this world- how “diverse” I was. It was my religion. When I converted to Islam almost twelve years ago I had to fight to “fit in” again. I had a woman empathetically shake her head at me and yell across a checkout line that she knew what I was going through because she, too, had lived in Saudi Arabia (where I had never been). A young man at an ATM machine told me that “my people” should go back to “where you came from.” An associate at Radio Shack told me that they didn’t carry an international TV antenna because, “this is America!”

     These incidents reminded me that books can very often be read by their covers, and that my view of diversity is not necessarily embraced by everyone. I don’t resent that. I don’t fight back combatively. But, I am driven to change what is all too often the response to these types of verbal presumptions. The type of response that the Muslim community newspaper hoped I would engage in.

     I fall back on why I left KAMA, instead introducing seaweed sprinkles and white kimchee to all of my American friends. I defer to staying quiet on the line while a client I haven’t met complains to me about the strange Muslim he’s dealing with, and then cordially meet him the next day at Starbucks (wearing a headscarf) to discuss our contract. I go back to telling the present editor of the newspaper I began that I think he’s being unprofessional and doing a great disservice to the Muslim community by printing what I believe to be a propagandistic collection of biased editorials paraded as news.

     I have always been fiercely motivated, disciplined, and independent. As a now “triple minority,” the very best I can do is be the best person I know how. I value integrity, honesty, and flexibility. Life and work is full of unanticipated twists and turns that manifest themselves in all sorts of crazy ways. I cherish these twists and turns. I thrive on creating solutions that hopefully bring people together in new and unanticipated ways.

     I always tell people that I am a mutt: “I am the strangest Korean you’ll ever meet. I’m tall, I’m not lithe, and I wear a headscarf.  I’m an American Korean who married an Egyptian who has predominately Pakistani and Naval Academy friends. I only read French, only understand Korean, and read, speak, and understand Arabic. I can make a mean Korean-Pakistani version of a typical Egyptian dish.”

     My own diversity enables me to see past people’s differences and focus on the truth of their likenesses.

 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480037,00.html

22-year-old Natalie Dylan is selling her virginity in an online auction and has reportedly received over 10,000 bids.

A 22-year-old woman is selling her virginity online — offering her body to bidders nationwide in an auction that reportedly has netted a $3.7 million offer — and the law isn’t doing a thing to stop her.

The FBI isn’t interested. The U.S. attorney doesn’t care. Everything is fine by local police, and she isn’t breaking any laws.

That’s because Natalie Dylan, a made-up name for a real 22-year-old California college grad, is marketing her maidenhead in Nevada, where prostitution is legal.

But some religious legal groups are objecting to the sexual sale, saying they are concerned that its influence may reach beyond the borders of the “Battle Born” bordello state.

“It does seem crazy,” said Mathew Staver, director of the Liberty Center for Law and Policy. “The rest of the country has an interest in stopping that kind of activity from spreading from Nevada to their home state.”

Staver said because the bidding was being conducted online, federal law could be applied to stop the auction from going through.

“Nevada has been out of step with the rest of the country for many years with regards to prostitution, and that’s why I think it’s important for federal prosecutors to look into this, so that Nevada does not dictate the morals and moral decency for the rest of the nation,” Staver told FOXNews.com.

But federal authorities said there wasn’t much they could do about the case, and deflected attention toward local statutes.

“Being that prostitution is legal in the area that she’s listing from, and she’s over 18 and it’s consensual, I would defer it to local police authorities,” said David Staretz, a spokesman for the FBI’s Las Vegas field office.

The Postal Inspection Service, which monitors the Internet for some illegal transactions, is “currently unaware of any specific fed prohibition against this activity,” said spokesman Al Weissman.

The office of the U.S. attorney in Nevada said that it has prosecuted over 200 cases in the last six years involving the solicitation of minors online, but it had never worked on a case like this involving adults.

The Moonlite Bunny Ranch, the brothel that is arranging and hosting the deal, sounded especially gung-ho about Dylan.

“Natalie is a virgin and would like to sell this priceless and rare commodity in a very exclusive and private setting,” says the Bunny Ranch Web site.

While the commodity’s rarity may be debatable, more than 10,000 bidders have come forth to put a price tag on Dylan’s purity. And if the Bunny Ranch’s owner is to be believed, someone has offered $3.7 million, a price far above rubies.

“One time only she will appear at the bunny ranch and give up her virginity to the highest bidder,” says the brothel’s Web site in a needlessly repetitive statement. Dylan says she is trying to finance graduate studies for her sister and herself.

Some legal experts say they’re well within their rights to make the sale.

“It’s a First Amendment issue. You can advertise goods or services that are illegal where they’re advertised but legal where they’re performed,” said Marc Randazza, an attorney specializing in first amendment law. “What’s she’s advertising is as legal as toast with the crust cut off where she is.”

Randazza said some prosecutors might be eager to jump on the case, but that this “commercial speech” is protected.

“If this is legal where it’s being advertised” — in Nevada — “the government can’t say you can’t advertise it here,” he told FOXNews.com.

Wired president: Obama creates an e-mail trail

‘Anything that Obama’s thumbs tap out into the ether is of historical value’

By Pete Yost

The Associated Press

updated 3:02 p.m. ET, Fri., Jan. 23, 2009

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama is the first wired president, ready to exchange e-mail with close friends and advisers. When do the rest of us get to read them?

We may have to wait until as late as 2028, depending on when Obama leaves office as president. That’s according to leading presidential historians who make their living hunting through records at the National Archives and Records Administration.

White House lawyers maintain that Obama’s messages are subject to the Presidential Records Act, a post-Watergate law intended to stop former presidents from carting away the records of their time in office. But the law also gives ex-presidents exclusive access to their own records for lengthy periods, allowing them to cash in on memoirs that rely on material the public hasn’t seen.

“Basically, anything that Obama’s thumbs tap out into the ether is of historical value and has to be saved,” said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private Washington-based group that seeks to open government information to the public.

Obama’s electronic circle of friends includes some senior staffers and some personal friends who “are able to BlackBerry with the president so he can stay in touch with them,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Friday.

Historians already are drawing parallels between Obama’s e-mails and the communications habits of some of his predecessors. President Richard Nixon dictated late-night memos on important and mundane subjects, giving historians an opportunity to peer inside the administration of the only president to resign from office.

“I wrote a whole chapter in my book from those late-night memos,” said University of Wisconsin Professor Stanley Kutler, author of “The Wars of Watergate.”

Under the Presidential Records Act, former presidents and vice presidents can restrict access to some of their records, including confidential communications with advisers, for up to 12 years. If Obama were to serve two full terms, that would put the release date for many of his records at 2028.

Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made such claims. Former President Bill Clinton was more open, waiving some of the privileges invoked by Bush and Reagan.

Five years after a president leaves office, the public can begin requesting documents. Reagan released huge chunks of material after only five years, including many on his meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 2001, President George W. Bush gave former presidents and vice presidents more authority beyond the 12-year period to claim executive privilege. Obama overturned Bush’s order on his first full day in office this week. Bush’s order enabled the withholding of papers that contained military, diplomatic or national security secrets, communications among the president and his advisers or legal advice.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28816112/