so, let's welcome kevin mattson and "just plain dick. ." [applause] >> thanks for that wonderful introduction and always a pressure to be at "politics and prose" one of my favorite places to be. what i'll do is talk for a while and then obviously be eager to entertain questions that you might have about the book. and about its relationship to contemporary politics or what have you. what brought me to write this book was i had always heard the term "checkers" throughout my life. a checkers moment, a checkers speech. and i really wanted to understand what that meant to understand the speech, in its origins, and also to put it in a kind of water context. so that's what i began with. i think it's in some ways one of the most important speeches in postwar american history, and is certainly had a lot to do with explaining the rise to influence of richard nixon and that in and of itself tells us that it had a lot to do with a lot of contemporary american politics because of nixon's influence on our contemporary political culture. what i really wan

i want to welcome tonight kevin mattson. we are celebrating the publication of his book, "just plain dick." how many of you were around when the checkers speech was given? and i am sure many people in the audience tonight will also have been around in the tv audience. it brings back a lot of memories, and it is particularly appropriate that this is the night before an election and this book is about the 1952 election and an american context of the 1952 election and kevin mattson will tell us about it. but you know there is a nice tradition in and politics and prose of having wonderful stuff the night before the election. we were talking 12 years ago with a discussion of arguing the world between a discussion with daniel bell, irving kristol, urban howe, matt glaser and four years ago we had a new york review book and some of the contributors, elizabeth drew, michael tomasky, jonathan krieg landed and others were talking about the problems that whoever the new president would be was likely to face. and anticipating an obama w