On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon, to the complete surprise of the American public, announced that he would be visiting communist China in 1972. It was an abrupt, about-face departure from a stance the vehemently anti-communist Nixon had campaigned upon. But the lost lives and political costs of the Vietnam war—as well as the insistent advice of Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger—led Nixon away from his intransigence and into a momentous meeting that would shape the course of American diplomacy and international affairs for decades.

Forty years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon became the first and only president to announce his resignation from office. Thank God he did, because Nixon was a gill-breathing bottom-dweller, a paranoiac with a reverse-Midas touch, turning everything he contacted into turd. But his disgraceful quitting also screwed us.

President Obama's random public stroll made headlines yesterday, but his impromptu walk recalled a far more bizarre event—Richard Nixon's strange, infamous late-night trip to the Lincoln Memorial.

Chris Brown has words for Oprah, Susan Boyle's songs are beating Whitney and Russell Crowe wants to beat a gossip columnist. Oh, yes, it's your Friday morning Gossip Roundup.

Thirty-seven years after Watergate, Bob Woodward is still America's most famous print reporter. But did you know he's one of those "I'm so impartial that I don't vote" reporters? Maybe because of how his last vote worked out:

This week, a former New York Times editor revealed that the NYT got handed the Watergate storywell before the Washington Post had it, but they just...forgot about it, or something. Now the full scope of this foolishness is coming out; the comedy of errors continues to this day: