It's easy to look back on those strange days at the end of September 2003 and identify the warnings signs about Putin and Russia that American policy… - Rachel Maddow

Calvin Coolidge in 1924 had signed into law radical restrictions on immigration, but not before publishing a stinging little essay in Good Housekeeping magazine titled “Whose Country Is This?” Immigration restrictions, Coolidge wrote under the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, were a necessary first step in walling off white America from “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” These types, he implied, could be identified by nationality and skin color. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.

No doubt Agnew felt it helped his cause to get that little bit of fiction out there again in 1980. But he had made a critical error at a critical time. By writing about the conversation with White, Agnew had waived any attorney-client privilege that protected exchanges with his lawyer. And that mistake was a very big reason why Spiro Agnew, finally, would get some measure of comeuppance.

Librarians and archivists and teachers are the Fort Knox of memory, history, and truth. We must defend them with everything we’ve got.