Summary: All eyes will be on the stage in Cleveland on Thursday night, as ten Republicans will participate in the first debate of the 2016 election cycle. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a presidential hopeful four years ago who had his experiences with debates, talks about lessons learned and offers advice to anyone who gets on the same stage as Donald Trump. But even if the race for the White House seems surreal at times, it is still better, for the most part, than the dysfunctional way Congress has been behaving in recent years. Two former House members, Tom Davis (R-Va.) and Martin Frost (D-Tex.), have written a book, "The Partisan Divide: Congress in Crisis." Both Davis and Frost are quite partisan themselves. But they see what is going wrong and they work together to offer solutions. In our "This Week in Political History" feature, we go back 51 years to August of 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson briefed the nation on what was described as an attack on U.S. ships by North Vietnamese PT boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Prof. Edwin Moise of Clemson University talks about what Johnson said had happened and compares it to what actually did happen. The action in the Tonkin Gulf is seen as the event that rapidly increased American involvement in the Vietnam War. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
