Nicholas von hoffman 60 minutes show

Nicholas von Hoffman died yesterday. He was fired from that last job after the night he compared Richard Nixon to a dead mouse on a kitchen floor. At this point it makes no difference whether he resigns, thereby depositing himself in a sanitary container, or whether Congress scoops him up in the dustpan of impeachment. But as an urgent national health measure, we've got to get that decomposing political corpse out of the White House.

I'm trying to think of the last time von Hoffman had a big moment of public notoriety.

Kilpatrick and Nicholas von Hoffman debated what would happen if President Nixon was formally investigated.

It was probably in , when Andrew Sullivan started handing out a sarcastic " Von Hoffman Award " for " stunningly wrong political, social and cultural predictions. After a few years, an abashed Sullivan confessed that von Hoffman had had a point, and he renamed the prize for Dick Morris. Von Hoffman got his start as an activist, not a journalist, and in the '50s he was a lieutenant of sorts to the Chicago-based organizer Saul Alinsky.

My review of Radical , von Hoffman's memoir of his Alinsky days, is here. From there he drifted into reporting, filing lively dispatches for the Chicago Daily News and then The Washington Post. He wrote sympathetically about the counterculture and the civil rights movement, unsympathetically about Nixon and the Vietnam War; he developed a reputation as the Post 's in-house New Leftist.

And that he was, more or less. But like the more anarchistic New Left types —and like his old boss Alinsky —von Hoffman didn't have much faith in big government.

Kilpatrick and Nicholas von Hoffman discussed whether or not the trial should be televised.

By the early s, when he had his newspaper column and his 60 Minutes job, that distrust sometimes led him to unexpected positions. Take the time he devoted a column to the notion that the John Birch Society offers a useful "corrective to our thinking. But he didn't add any caveats in when he wrote a piece praising the foreign policy views of the isolationist Ohio senator Robert Taft.

After quoting extensively from a speech the late Republican had given two decades earlier, von Hoffman announced that Taft was "right on every question all the way from inflation to the terrible demoralization of troops.