Queries & Comments

President’s Prerogative

Hershel Shanks’s interesting First Person (“Privies and Privacy,” BAR 38:02), on royalty receiving guests while on the toilet, calls to mind the recent case of President Lyndon Johnson. As Nigel Hamilton puts it in his American Caesars (Yale, 2010). “[Johnson] was rude, boorish, taunting, humiliating, thinking nothing of urinating into the sink in his office while still interviewing someone ... or [in his bathroom] leaving the door open and defecating while dictating, or speaking with an aide or visitor” (p. 210).

What Jews Should Know About the New Testament