“I keep telling you fellows I don’t like to do this sort of thing.  I can think of nothing more boring, for the American public, than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens. . .  I don’t think the people want to be listening to a Roosevelt, sounding as if he were one of the Apostles, or the partisan yipping of a Truman.”

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, seemingly a thousand years ago.