Bob Gates is really emblematic of the modern CIA. He joins it in 1968, just a day before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And, of course, he rises very quickly. In less than six years, he's on the National Security Council staff, at the closing weeks of Richard Nixon's presidency and then on into Gerald Ford.
When dealing with American politics, you try to follow the money, and that's where it leads you. It doesn't take you to the electoral college or to Princeton. It takes you down the darker alleys of American life.
Many mainstream winemakers use indigenous yeasts rather than commercially grown ones to ferment their grapes - precisely what natural winemakers advocate.
Nixon officials foreshadowed both the historic distinction and seamy underside of the presidency.
Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self-advancement.
Slow food, free-range, no steroids, eat local, and natural winemaking are all part of a general yearning for simpler times. But the fact is that most winemakers these days, big and small, have drastically lessened the use of chemicals in the vineyard, embracing such concepts as organically grown, biodynamic, and sustainable.
