For televised briefings, Ari Shapiro is in the second row of the White House press room. Photograph by Chris Leaman.

In March 2010, Ari Shapiro began covering the White House for NPR. We asked him to reflect on his first year at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When I was a kid, my parents taught me that life becomes more interesting the more you learn. Our hikes in Oregon were richer once I could identify the birds, flowers, and wild mushrooms along the path. So I shouldn’t be surprised that in my first year covering the White House, I have become more interested in the presidency than I ever expected to be.

Here are some things I’ve learned.

1. Even the President gets razor bumps. During my first trip on Air Force One, President Obama visited the press cabin. As he stood next to my seat, I noticed shaving bumps on his neck. In that moment, he stopped being a symbol to me and became a three-dimensional human.

2. History makes the deadlines worthwhile. When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, I stood in the White House East Room watching the ceremony. It went longer than my editors expected, and I needed to get on the air. I was antsy, waiting for the ceremony to wrap up. Then I took a step back and realized I was watching history. I chilled out and soaked up the moment. It’s only radio.

3. The real Air Force One is more like the movie than the real West Wing is like the TV show. And you know you’ve spent too much time on the plane when you wipe your mouth with the napkin that says "aboard the presidential aircraft" instead of squirreling it away as a souvenir. Even the glamour of Air Force One wears off during a 26-hour flight to Afghanistan and back.

David Kris is stepping down as the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, and he leaves some very big shoes to fill. Kris is regarded as one of the best minds of his generation on national-security law, and particularly the confusing, nebulous world of electronic surveillance.

It’s not widely known that Kris played a tangential role in some of the secret maneuvering that created the Bush-era program of warrantless electronic surveillance, which some experts believe broke U.S. law. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as Congress was crafting the Patriot Act, Kris asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel whether the administration might change some wording in the law governing wiretaps of suspected spies and terrorists. Bush officials wanted to make it easier for the government to secure warrants in terrorism cases. Kris was in charge of making sure the Justice Department complied with the wiretapping law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and he knew the statute backwards and forwards.

John Yoo, the lawyer reviewing Kris’s question, and who had no experience arguing cases that used these kinds of wiretaps, replied that the administration’s proposed changes to the law raised no constitutional concerns. But then Yoo answered a question that Kris hadn’t even asked. Did the President have the inherent authority as commander-in-chief during wartime to bypass courts and warrants all together, and to personally authorize secret surveillance of people in the United States? Yoo concluded that he did.

When Virginia governor Bob McDonnell initially failed to mention slavery as he reinstated the Old Dominion’s observance of Confederate History Month this year, President Obama joined the chorus of condemnation. “An unacceptable omission,” he said, declaring himself “a big history buff.”

The President may need all the historical understanding he can muster as the nation begins to mark the Civil War’s 150th anniversary next spring and our first African-American chief executive becomes a focus.

For Obama to take a leading role in commemorating the Civil War “is what Americans expect—it’s what the world expects,” says Frank Smith, founding director of DC’s African American Civil War Memorial & Museum. But as McDonnell’s misstep illustrated, politicians had best proceed carefully when dealing with a war that many historians see as the most divisive—and decisive—time in the nation’s development.

Find out the defense budget since the [Vietnam] war began. Seventy-five going on a hundred billion. Nearly two hundred billion will be spent before its over. In 1949, it was 10 billion. No war, no money. The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.

That’s the nut of the political exegesis of American history that Donald Sutherland’s anonymous Mr. X delivers to Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s JFK, in a scene of monumental sweep that, fittingly, is played on the National Mall. Mr. X is a narrative fabrication, an amalgam of revisionist history and Stone’s auteur sensibilities. He’s also Stone’s alter ego, and for fans of epic conspiracy, this screed is one of the most satisfying ever filmed.

Stone is giving a variation on the speech today, tweaked for an Obama Washington in the fallout of the Bush years. This time, the organized social-war machine is firing at South American leaders such as Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, for whom Stone developed an affection while filming his documentary South of the Border. The movie is a whirlwind tour through South American countries that Stone thinks have been divided by an aggressive US policy. Think Michael Moore meets Howard Zinn, a cinematic corrective to the misguided and myopic perception the director thinks Americans have of leaders like Chavez, who once called George W. Bush “the Devil,” and who Stone calls “one of the warmest people I’ve ever met.”

In a packed dining room at Georgetown’s Ritz Carlton, Stone joined Q&A Cafe host Carol Joynt for her luncheon klatch’s season finale, ostensibly to talk about the movie. But the best parts of the conversation—which was really an occasionally interrupted monologue—played like scenes from the cutting room floor of JFK.

> > Check out our slide show from the star-studded red carpet. Click here! 

For more photos of Hollywood A-listers, check out our slide show of Tammy Haddad's annual White House Correspondents' Association Brunch. 

Speaking of Goldman, it turns out Solicitor General Elena Kagan—widely thought to be at the top of Obama’s high-court shortlist—has ties to the investment bank everyone loves to hate. She was a member of the Research Advisory Council of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute from 2005 to 2008. Could that spell trouble for her SCOTUS prospects?

The competition is getting stiffer. For weeks, the three frontrunners have been Kagan and appeals court judges Merrick Garland and Diane Wood. But when it came time for what appears to be his first formal interview of a potential SCOTUS pick, Obama sat down with Judge Sidney Thomas, a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thomas has been on Obama’s reported shortlist for weeks, but he hasn’t been given nearly as much attention as Kagan, Garland, and Wood.