The anti-Maga talkshow: after 70 years, PBS’s The Open Mind still has it

Alexander Heffner and Olivia Chow, the mayor of Toronto, speak for a series called Mayors of the World on The Open Mind. Photograph: Courtesy of The Open Mind

In December 1973 the public television current affairs programme, The Open Mind, held a special edition devoted to what its main guest, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, dubbed the “imperial presidency”.

The televised roundtable discussion was well timed. Escalating oil prices from the Opec crisis were wreaking havoc with the global economy, the Watergate scandal was blazing in Washington, and Richard Nixon was looking increasingly Richard II-like in the Oval Office as he attempted to pull off what Schlesinger called an “escape from accountability”.