Richard Nixon On Health Care in ‘74, ‘94, And Today

24 Responses to “Richard Nixon On Health Care in ‘74, ‘94, And Today”

1. Christa on February 22nd, 2010 4:44 pm

   “Any sensible reform of the nation’s health care system must start with the patient, not with the government. The most powerful force inflating health care costs has been a system of insurance that removes the patient’s own incentive to shop for value.”

   This is very true, but you can’t get price listing for treatments. Health care is not subject to market forces; it never has been and never will be. There isn’t an upper limit to what people are willing to pay to not die. Health savings accounts are terrible ideas, from someone who’s had to live with them. Oddly enough, people never seem to budget in huge amount of money for car accidents, cancer, or any of the other surprises that are sent peoples’ way. Even if they did budget, almost no one can afford to pay for those events without help.

   The biggest thing you’re missing here, and the most important problem with this piece, is that the Clinton plan is not on the table today. It has very little to nothing to do with the plan that the Democrats have put together. I also haven’t seen anything from the Republican’s this go around that doesn’t say, no new taxes, no cuts to medicare, and basically no doing anything to solve what is a very real problem. I will grant the only exception is Paul Ryan who is willing to make cuts, but only if it doesn’t come into effect until after the Boomers are out of the system. You know, his base here in South Eastern WI.

2. DC Dude on February 22nd, 2010 5:59 pm

   Oh, brother. “President Nixon spent his entire life fighting against the central planning and nationalized industries of the Soviets. Though not all his domestic policies reflected the same distrust of centralized bureaucracies, Republicans should not allow liberals to claim Nixon’s imprimatur on their health care scheme.” Dog whistles for conservatives, only, no one else welcome. What a way to lose readers. Especially ones who’ve studied about the presidency and American history and the Soviet Union.

   What in the world is it about liberal bloggers that is so scary that it triggers what seem to me like real over-reactions? I don’t get it. The Soviets? Seriously? We ordinary Americans really need a new version of Godwin’s Law. Nothing undermines a purported discussion of current events in the United States than mentioning the Soviets in the same sentence as American liberals. Who comprise a tiny 20% of voters. Whose most prominent bloggers keep criticizing the current administration for being too moderate, too centrist. Who don’t seem to have much of any influence.

   I read this posting and thought, “what’s this doing here, I didn’t click on NRO.” I looked at the author bio and saw that he is a lawyer and a fellow with the National Review Institute. Isn’t this supposed to be site which draws as readers people from across the political spectrum — liberals, moderates, and conservatives? I come to it to see people who know something about Richard Nixon and government discuss his legacy and his administration in an historical context. After viewing the forum on CSPAN on the effective use of a president’s time, I had hopes that this site was serious about history and that it had no need for putting a partisan spin on things. I thought the New Nixon was reaching for an audience interested in candid discussions of history, political science and the presidency, not the sort of crowd drawn to an ideological, advocacy oriented entity such as National Review.

   Please. The New Nixon people – why do you want to mix advocacy and history. You’re bound to #FAIL and end up preaching to an echo chamber if you do that.

3. Brandon Alsup on February 22nd, 2010 6:46 pm

   @Christa – “Health care is not subject to market forces; it never has been and never will be.”

   Then why do drug companies and hospitals have advertising budgets? No need to if they don’t have to deal with market forces and their demand is set (and unlimited) as you say.

   I personally would like to see the first step of health care reform being the forcing hospitals, insurance companies, drug companies, and all to be competitive. Require direct listing of treatments at least for more common things and create an environment that encourages consumer choices. Think of a mall but filled with healthcare providers! After that you can start to tackle the uninsured population.

   Interesting post Daniel.

4. MK on February 22nd, 2010 7:38 pm

   Although I rarely recommend books by people other than historians, I do recommend Carl Bernstein’s biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge. Bernstein takes an in depth look at the Clinton health care reform effort and isn’t afraid to tell it like it was about all sides.

   I’m very familiar with Nixon and I have to say, I largely shrugged of what he wrote about health care reform in Beyond Peace. I think it was a tactical error for RN to write, “If enacted, it would represent the ultimate revenge of the 1960s generation.” I voted for RN but I came to believe he mishandled a lot of the upheaval he faced from the “1960s generation.” Of course, he was only human. He had nothing to gain by writing about health care reform that way and a lot to lose. That being the case, it would have been better to leave out that sentence.

   There was a bigger problem, too. For some of us who once had been Republicans but had become Independents by 1994, referring to the 1960s generation that way not only seemed unconvincing, it came across as incredibly weak. Why? Because it seemed like nothing more than a nod to culture war blather. Remember some of the silliness that surrounded discussions of Bill and Hillary Clinton? Hard to remember but Bernstein’s book covers it all. With that in mind, what RN wrote about the ‘60s generation comes across as the obligatory checking off of what one had to say to keep one’s cred with voters who liked that sort of thing and will punish you if you deviate. A very dispiriting reminder of conformity and how people can end up incredibly boxed in and seemingly rigidly bound even when they have long standing experience in the political world. RN could have done a lot better than that. I have no idea what he really thought, the tapes I listened to for his presidency obviously weren’t running then. It was sad for me to see a smart man whom I had worked to elect president while in high school in 1968 write what came across as pandering boiler plate stuff in his last book. He should have stretched, manned up, and reached higher.

   Speaking of manning up, I’m glad to see Andrew Sullivan mentioned here. He is one of my favorite bloggers, really a cool guy. He tries to work his way through really complex issues, isn’t afraid to zig and zag and even to back up and reconsider things as he works his way around issues, and, above all, comes across to me as incredibly courageous. The blogging world needs more people like him. On days when I only have time to look at one blog, Sully’s Daily Dish is the one to which I turn. Glad to see him cited and I hope this essay sends more people his way, athough he already has a large readership. I have to confess, I mostly give The Corner a miss. I did used to look at what David Frum wrote when he still hung out at NRO but he is long gone, of course. But by all means, keep reading Sully, I highly recommend him.

5. David Emig on February 22nd, 2010 8:12 pm

   Must admit that I was one of those who believed that RN would have supported Obama’s health care plans. After all, it possesses some of the aspects of RNs health care plan in 1971. In the New York Times today, it states the opinion that Obama’s plan is more moderate than either RNs plan in 1971, or Clinton’s plan in 1994. However, RNs words in his last book certainly are convincing evidence that RN would have opposed the current plan, being more in favor of McCain’s idea of health care savings accounts. Which, by the way, would only perpetuate the current broken system.

   Trying to insert historical figures into modern life is a slippery slope. These historical figures don’t have to account for modern factors. Even in the early part of 1994, there wasn’t the virtual power and influence of the health insurance cartel and their lobbyists that there is today. Health care costs weren’t through the roof, a symptom of a free market health care system gone amok. Surely, RN (or staff like Ehrlichman) would have seen the modern health care system as a larger challenge than even the days of 1994. Would RN have chosen his philosophy over the “situation on the ground?” It seems that the right wing does just that.

   My opinion about the health care debate was expressed in “Health Care at Morton’s Fork” that I posted in September of last year.

6. MK on February 22nd, 2010 8:25 pm

   David, I agree that tryting to insert historical figures into present day situations does put one on a slippery slope. Conditions in 1994 were different than they are now, in any number of areas. I never would predict what RN would do, assuming he felt he had some freedom of speech and didn’t have to shape his published thoughts to fit any particular agenda.

   However, one can look at long term consequences. I do believe that the way RN and more importantly Spiro Agnew handled the anti-war movement during his administration ultimately weakened the United States. What did the red meat speeches pennhed for Agnew by Pat Buchanan about the nattering nabobs of negativism do to help the public mature and grapple with serious issues, such as when a nation should ask its young men to put their lives on the line? Nothing that I could see, and I have to admit I cheered those easy applause lines back then, as a young college student.

   Sure, RN was boxed in — the policy making world is adult and the political often very high school-ish. It would have taken a truly great man to rise above that and find a way to reconcile the two worlds in a way that helps America. But we might have gone down another, better road, if RN and LBJ before him could have treated the voting public like adults. And I say that as someone who wore “Tell it to Hanoi” and “Silent Majority” buttons during the Nixon administration.

   If you’re interested in a columnist who talks about civic maturity (and immaturity), I recommend David Brooks in The New York Times. Most other pundits shy away from stuff like that.

7. David Emig on February 22nd, 2010 9:33 pm

   MK–I did think your take on Beyond Peace was interesting. In reading both volumes of Crowley’s books, I am coming to the understanding that RN became more conservative as he got older. Or if you listen to the tapes, was more conservative in private than in public. (I would defer to your experience with the tapes.) Or perhaps he felt that he didn’t have to be so centrist in his thinking, since he wasn’t in public office or running for public office.

8. MK on February 22nd, 2010 10:02 pm

   Thanks for the response, David. It’s hard to assess what happened to RN as he got older. How many people feel as if they have to (or are forced to) resign the office of the presidency? What does that type of terrible public action and humiliation do to a person? Who around him can help him with that? I wish RN had been spared that but as he said, he gave his enemies a sword.

   I’m not a fan of Crowley as she appears on tv, too shrill and angry for my taste. I would much rather read David Brooks or Michael Gerson or David Frum than Crowly (or anyone of her ilk). We Independents are independent for a reason. I am very much a “let’s agree to disagree” type of person. Given the fact that my parents were forced to live under Soviet Communism briefly, and know what real totalitariansim is like, I focus strongly on diversity, freedom of speech, and the ability to disagree. I really dislike feeling I can’t “deviate” or that someone with an opposing view will try to destroy me for not toeing the line. I tend to turn away from people who never, ever admit their side did something wrong and always blame the other side. (Just as one would in a marital or family relationship, come to think of it.)

   Obviously, mentioning Soviets in a U.S. context never works for me. In fact, I recently had an interesting chat about that with a relative who knows something about totalitarianism.

   In the current issue of TIME, Peter Beinart calls for more places where people can debate issues. He points to “current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing the other side make its case.” Although Beinart looks at issues from the 1980s onwards, I believe the problems started during the Vietnam War. Although I was a Nixonite from 1968 to 1974, I never was afraid of people who didn’t support RN back then and never felt the need to use a scorched earth approach with them, perhaps because deep down I understood how unsettling the idea of asking young men to die in a war was. It really is too bad that we entered on a path of civic immaturity back then which has zigged and zagged around, rising a little higher at times, then sinking back down, since then. I’m disappointed in RN’s poor tactical choices in Beyond Peace, but as I said, he was only human. And he was tremendously affected by Vietnam and “the wars of Watergate.” It would have taken a lot of courage and a saintly disposition to end up in a different place.

9. MK on February 23rd, 2010 10:43 am

   Just out of curiosity, since Mr. Suhr is associated with the National Review Institute, I looked over at The Corner during my lunch break just now to see if that site linked to his essay. Sure enough it did.

   I’ve long thought The New Nixon seemed trapped between a rock and a hard place. There’s a Jekyll and Hyde quality to it. Is it a site where people want to dig down beyond the superficial and to examine Richard Nixon and his legacy, with discussants from across the political spectrum welcome? Or is it an advocacy site geared towards cheerleading for one party or ideology and bashing of another? Not everyone feels comfortable getting into overtly political discussions so if it has the latter goal, the most partisan end up with an advantage over those who prefer relatively objective examination of the past. Sometimes TNN seems to lean one way, sometimes another. Recently it seems to have leaned more towards the scholarly but I don’t now know where it is headed.

   At some point, someone will have to come up with a strategic vision for it. If it ends up as an advocacy site, I would recommend disassociation with the Nixon Foundation and the dropping of references to events at the presidential library. The foundation needs to attract visitors of all types to library events, yet implicit metamessages can signal “loyalists and Republicans preferred” even if stated messages do not.

   I’m not saying there is a right and way wrong way to approach blogging. But I do believe there are potential clashes in goals and methodologies in areas relating to policy questions and presidents which require more reflection. One of the more thoughtful historian bloggers, Timothy Burke, raised a related issue recently on his blog, “Easily Distracted.” Dr. Burke discussed the concept of disarmament in blogging at
   http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/2010/02/18/rock-and-hard-place/#comments
   noting:

   “I think there’s still a complicated perspectival choice between trying to study a group of people or an institution ethnographically and engaging them as fellow citizens with whom you intensely disagree. If I set out to understand a group in their own terms, to gain an emic understanding of their rhetoric and practices, if I see the world as they see it, I achieve insight at the potential cost of having a permanently asymmetrical, insulated relationship to that group and its goals. That is, unless they take a similar interest in understanding me and my world in a similarly curious, open-minded, investigatory fashion.

   There are times where I think it’s more honest and in a roundabout way more respectful to just come out with your dukes up and straightforwardly fight against initiatives or ideas from socially or ideologically distant groups that threaten your own values, no matter how much their ideas are rooted in an authentic habitus of their own. There’s a kind of equality in that struggle, an acknowledgement that you’re engaged in a fight over institutions or policies with people who have an equal right as citizens to push their beliefs.”

   Burke addresses issues far beyond those which the bloggers at The Corner (whom I’ve described as an insular fraternity) address (or are permitted to address by unwritten rules of an advocacy site.) A year ago, Dr. Burke talked about the importance of studying the unlike, not just the like, with an eye to understanding it. He wrote of the presidency, “The hardest challenge, in many ways, falls in the space in between the titular, symbolic Presidency and its interior deliberative work, in the way that the President and his officers operate within the public sphere, in how they formulate and present and defend policy in front of and in dialogue with the public. This is hard because it requires a very fine distinction between the voices that authentically speak from a habitus or perspective that’s at odds with the worldview of the President and his advisors and much more calculated and cynical bids at “framing” that come from a well-oiled machine that approaches public dialogue as a pure instrument, as a zero-sum exercise which either advances or defeats narrow self-interests.

   The distinction between the two is most easily glimpsed if you cultivate a taste for the unlike, force yourself to speak in unfamiliar and uncomfortable tongues, travel across ways of seeing and talking as one might travel across geographies. This commitment is not a safe, happy kind of venture of unity-in-difference, not a boat ride through “It’s a Small World”. Listening to the unlike, speaking the unfamiliar, can be draining, painful, frustrating. And at the end of any journey, you’re perfectly entitled to conclude that you like your established ways of talking best, that there’s something wrong with a stranger’s world and voice. But I think the person with the taste for the unlike can hear better the difference between a public voice that comes from somewhere real and a cynical attempt at framing that comes from some rag-and-bone shop think tank.”

   It’s in the ability to muse about things of that nature and to acknowledge the disarmament issue’s pros and cons that you see the real difference between the amount of available intellectual oxygen and permissible scope in a scholarly blog and a political advocacy blog.

10. Daniel Suhr on February 24th, 2010 11:59 am

    Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments on the post. Please allow me to make a few comments in reply.

    Christa, I agree that pricing transparency is a problem, and one thing that we need to do is make that information more available to the consuming public. Car accidents and cancer may be hard to budget around, but that’s why we take out insurance. Part of the problem with our current health care system is that it’s really not about insurance, it’s about pre-paying for basic expenses like doctor’s visits (compare how we pay for basic, regular dental care with how we pay for basic, regular medical care).

    I have no problem acknowledging that Nixon may have gotten more conservative on some issues as he grew older. In the health care chapter in Beyond Peace, he also noted how much bigger the health care problem had gotten from 1974 to 1994, and what a greater government intervention that would have required in response. So changes to the situation on the ground made him less likely, not more likely, to support a big government answer to the problem.

    As to your final comment, MK, I think it should be noted that the TNN folks have been pretty even-handed on this matter. If you click the “healthcare” category tag, you’ll see that TNN has posted numerous stories which hail Nixon’s progressive approach to health care in 1971/74. My piece was meant to balance these numerous references to his ‘71 and ‘74 speeches and proposals with his book chapter from ‘94.

11. MK on February 24th, 2010 3:33 pm

    Thanks, Mr. Suhr. Your post addressed current policy issues, not just past events in 1971 and 1994, and would have been fine at The Corner. At TNN? I’m not so sure. The Nixon Foundation is in a tough spot right now. Moreover, it is difficult to project what RN would do, given demographic changes since 1971 and 1994. Ross Douthat touched on some in “The Party of AARP” at his blog at the NYT on 2/22. As does Mr. Emig, I avoid predicting how RN would act. Not only can it be difficult to say whether his policy or political side would prevail, I know from listening to thousands of hours of his White House tapes that he sometimes held differing public and private views. The Miller Center noted one such instance: “His Family Assistance Program was bold, innovative-even radical-and, apparently, insincere. ‘About Family Assistance Plan,’ Haldeman wrote in his diary, the President ‘wants to be sure it’s killed by Democrats and that we make big play for it, but don’t let it pass, can’t afford it.’ One part of Nixon’s welfare reform proposal did pass and become a lasting part of the system: Supplemental Security Income (SSI) provides a guaranteed income for elderly and disabled citizens. The Nixon years also brought large increases in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits.”

    TNN is in a somewhat sensitive position just now. It recently has done quite well in focusing on historical and educational outreach although it hasn’t entirely shed partisanship. Why does this matter? Because scholars are watching. Since July 2007, the Nixon Foundation has had to work with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration which administers and staffs the Nixon Presidential Library. This federal repository has held Nixon presidential records since 1977. It merged in 2007 with a private library run by the Foundation in California which housed some of Nixon pre- and post-presidential papers. The private library’s first director, Hugh Hewitt, raised alarm bells for me in 1990:

    “Hewitt told The [Los Angeles] Times that researchers will ‘obviously, certainly’ be screened on the basis of the content and slant of their contemplated work.” The newspaper noted on July 8, 1990, “I don’t think we’d ever open the doors to Bob Woodward. He’s not a responsible journalist . . . The LAT reported that Hewitt defended the partisan use of the facility. “’President Nixon’s always been a Republican, he’s always been partisan, he’s always stood for certain things,’ Hewitt said. ‘It would be far more of a taint to let the premises be used indiscriminately by groups who oppose everything he worked for.’” This is antithetical to the neutral and objective NARA ethos, which ignores altogether whether someone supports or opposes the subjects of its archival collections. In NARA’s culture, one in which I was imbued and which still informs my outlook on such matters, that simply is not relevant. Material open to one person is open to all, the agency serves the American public, period.

    The LAT noted that “skepticism about the [private] library comes not only from Nixon’s critics, but from such renowned presidential scholars . . . and from Nixon’s supporters, such as Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution and a former special assistant to the Nixon White House. Anderson said that the ‘only way (the library can) get credibility in the academic world’ is to have all of Nixon’s presidential documents and make them available to everyone. Anderson is among those who believe that Nixon’s comeback from ignominy is justified and long overdue, given his achievements in domestic and foreign policy. But he worries that assembling an incomplete archive and imposing restrictions on who may use it will hamper Nixon’s bid for legitimacy. ‘The objective use of the (presidential) papers is critical to that process,’ said Anderson, who served as Reagan’s economic policy adviser. ‘Let the gates open. The total story is what’s important and that overshadows all the smaller parts, complete with their mistakes.’”
    John Taylor replaced Hewitt and served as director of the Nixon Foundation until January 2009. But it would be 17 years before the library merged with the federal repository. Of the modern federal presidential libraries administered under the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955 and the Presidential Records Act of 1978, none existed for so long as private entities. Nixon’s also are the only records over which lawyers wrangled publicly and fiercely with NARA over the regulatory definitions of “abuse of governmental power” and “historical significance.”
    Taylor learned and matured despite this baggage. As Neda Oreizy noted in 2008 in “On the Job: A Nixon Man,” “When Nixon died in 1994, Taylor was named one of two co-executors of the estate. He has considered himself a Nixon man for 27 years, but it has not all been good—for the first half of those Taylor says that he was almost rancorous in support of Nixon’s tarnished presidency. ‘I think what had happened was that I had become personally wrapped up in it and I was perceiving attacks on him as one would attacks on their dad in the school yard.’ He later realized that it wasn’t helping Nixon’s image, changing any minds or healthy for himself. . . Taylor had dealt with years of legal entanglement in his career and a broken marriage at home, leading him to a moment of mid-life reconsideration. After realizing that the missing element in his life was religion, he entered Claremont University’s seminary with the support of his family and the Nixon Foundation Board. He was ordained in January 2004 as a priest in the Episcopal Church. . . ’It was processing pain and brokenness and weakness and vulnerability and all the things that end up being the tools of ministry,’ Taylor says.”
    More so than that of other Presidents, Nixon’s historical and archival legacy is laced with adversity, not just for him and his family and associates but also for NARA. And its handling has drawn more skepticism than usual from scholars. Please consider carefully the protest in 2005 described at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20050310/index.htm regarding the proposed merger of the Nixon Foundation run-library with the federal.
    I come to TNN for anthropological study. Especially now, I want to see where the Foundation stands on a spectrum between the Hewitt’s 1990 stance and the maturity of Taylor in 2008-2010. There is a lot at stake. Nixon’s presidential materials have been in government custody since the passage of the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act (1974). I helped move them out of the White House in 1977 after the Supreme Court upheld the Act (Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 US 425 (1977)). Under 36 CFR §1275, members of Nixon’s family have the right to file objections to NARA’s release of historical information from the White House tapes and files in federal custody. In July 2007, the federal entity and the private library merged. The challenge for the Nixon Foundation is how the public will view its relations with the National Archives and vice versa. This is a sensitive time, as NARA is shutting down its Nixon Presidential Materials Staff in College Park, MD on 02/26/10 to begin a massive move of presidential records to California. NARA and the Foundation have differing stewardship obligations. Can they work together to ensure non-partisan operation of the merged library? Time and TNN will tell.
    [Posted on personal time @ 5:33 pm EST].

12. MK on February 24th, 2010 3:41 pm

    My apologies for formatting errors. I composed this in Word with some copying and pasting from various sources and did not proof to check paragraphing when I transferred to the comments box. Thanks for your patience, the error makes it irritating to read the comment..

13. David Emig on February 24th, 2010 10:31 pm

    Personally, I consider the Museum and the Archives separately. We’ve discussed my opinion that while the library had the right of advocacy as to the Museum, (like the Clinton, LBJ and Reagan Libraries); I understand and appreciated the evolution of historical objectivity at these institutions, and finally at the Nixon Library. To me, the Museum is the opportunity for the former President to make his case for his legacy and greatness.

    The archives, in my view, is a different breed of cat. The documents should be released as quickly as possible; within the procedures of NARA. I disagreed with the premise of the release of the “abuse of power” material first. The documents should have been released like any other presidents’ papers.

    Access to these documents of history being limited in a partisan fashion is counter to everything I believe in about fairness and objectivity. I consider the documents historical evidence of what RNs legacy is.

14. MK on February 25th, 2010 6:31 am

    David, I’m curious. Aren’t you a lawyer? Don’t lawyers based their arguments based on statutory and regulatory requirements, that is, on compliance, not on personal preference? We’re a nation of law. The law places the museum and the archives under the administrative umbrella of the federal entitity. For me, that’s the begin and end all.

    I do appreciate your speaking up on this and also at the Bostock thread. It’s useful for me to see that the idea of a nonpartisan museum is so difficult for associates of the old privately run library to accept. That being the case, more and more, I believe it was a mistake for the Nixon foundation to have petitioned Congress to change the law that required Nixon’s records to remain in the Washington, DC area. It seems to me that it would have been easier for everyone if the foundation could have continued private fund raising for a private, non-federal entity which could display whatever exhibits it wanted. And avoided situations where it dealt with an entity supported by appropriated, tax payer funds, altogether.

    And NARA could have retained its Nixon Presidential Materials staff for which I once worked in the DC area and focused on the archival, period. The foundation would have been spared these struggles to understand NARA’s concerns about bias in museum exhibits and the family’s only concern would have been retaining representatives who could object (or not) to what NARA proposed to open from the files, But as far as I can see, the law doesn’t permit a divorce, LOL.

15. MK on February 25th, 2010 6:35 am

    Jonathan, I noted above that TNN needs to decide if it is serves history and educational outreach or advocacy. (At the end of my comments, I’ll offer a suggestion for a third way on this.) In my view, it has been leaning more towards the former than it once did but its path still is unclear to me. That the people associated with Nixon are partisans is not in itself surprising. The speakers at the recent legacy session mentioned that. But they observed that they would try to present an objective overview of the effective use of a president’s time. To their credit, they largely suppressed partisan barbs and for the most part succeeded in giving a useful, historical overview. Well done, indeed.

    That RN thought in terms of personal and political loyalty and some members of his team still might do so is not surprising. Yet there are areas where this can get a president in trouble. Nixon was very intelligent and many things well. But there were areas where he needed to have someone push back, “no, we can’t do that,” as James Rosen demonstrated in his biography of Attorney General John Mitchell (The Strong Man). Two of the discussions that I heard on the once-secret Nixon tapes (some 2,000 hours now are open with another thousand undergoing review) showed this. One was when President Nixon asked that what he called members of a “Jewish cabal” be removed from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The other was when he discussed using Secret Service agents to get political intelligence on Teddy Kennedy. Both directives crossed ethical lines with civil servants that never should have been crossed.

    The National Archives is staffed by civil servants. I cannot tell how much the members of the Nixon Foundation or the bloggers at TNN have studied NARA’s culture. I was startled to see Bob Bostock refer to the NARA Nixon library director as biased against Nixon and suggest that he instead head the “Alger Hiss library.” Yet there are long standing clues to differing perspectives that could have led the two cultures to work out a modus operandi long ago.

    In the 1970s, Mr. Nixon’s lawyers objected to public access screening by the National Archives because their client’s “most private thoughts and communications, both written and spoken, will be exposed to and reviewed by a host of persons whom he does not know and did not select, and in whom he has no reason to place his confidence. This group will decide what is personal . . . and what is historical, to be opened for public review.” A three-judge panel found in 1976 that “Congress had ample reason to mandate screening by government archivists rather than control by Mr. Nixon, who lacks their expertise and disinterestedness.” A Supreme Court justice noted in 1977 that Mr. Nixon’s “view of what constitutes official as distinguished from personal and private materials might differ from the view of Congress, the Executive Branch or a reviewing court.”

    Thirty years later, I still see some uneasiness there. Personal and political loyalty to a man and party and commitment to a nonpartisan mission centered on revealing the facts of governance admittedly are difficult to reconcile. Perhaps the best one can hope for is a somewhat uneasy partnership between the Foundation and NARA, based on efforts to understand core values and operating principles and standards. I do see an option for Nixon supporters or associates who want to express partisan views on current events. Why not establish two blogs, TNN, which would center on education and outreach and would avoid the “BooHoo, Dems are CommieSocialistNazis-OMG-the-nation-is-doomed” arguments one see in the comment boxes of purely political sites, and a second, totally separate site where bloggers who want to post partisan essays can congregate? (I would have offered the same advice to a blog associated with the presidential foundation of a Democratic president in earlier years, had one existed, so bloggers could avoid association with any “OMG-Repubs are fascists” blather.) Of course, there couldn’t be any crossover by bloggers associated with the two, as that would defeat the purpose of setting up a white room blog for scholarly discussion of Nixon and government.

    Trying to mix the two in one site isn’t a good idea because it raises the question, will the Foundation permit NARA to put up exhibits that address where Nixon faltered as well as where he did well? Or release documents that provide a full picture of what happened during the Nixon presidency? Former Acting Archivist Frank Burke once wrote that the National Archives serves “not to implement the programs of the administration in office but to protect the records, good and bad, of the administrations of the past.” There must be no question that NARA’s Nixon presidential library will be permitted to do that.

    At one time, TNN linked to authors who write at the Corner. I assume that just reflected whom some of the TNN bloggers were drawn to. I actually learned something from that, come to think of it. But if you do establish a separate, purely political blogging arm, I would urge you to stretch and to include writers such as David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Kathleen Parker, and Peggy Noonan. The Corner comes across as way too cramped for me. That means the group has some weaknesses in trying to be spokesmen for an ideology. One is framing everything in stark left-right arguments and not recognizing how many people in the U.S. lean center-right or center-left and are put off by binary thinking. The other is a problem with style. I see The Corner as akin to a college fraternity, where if you encounter one of them alone, the individual member may admit quietly that some complex issues have more shades of gray and nuance than they can say in the setting of a group blog. But they’ll never be able to say it in the hearing of what come across to me as blustering, high fiving, self congratulating fraternity members. Moreover, there’s little sense at The Corner that people understand what undergirds good governance. It isn’t ideology. It’s personal integrity of the type shown by James Comey during the Ashcroft-Card-Gonzalez hospital showdown. The Comeys of the world, although Republicans, seem to be a mystery to the Cornerites.

    The Corner made no mention in 2008 of the OPR report about Monica Goodling and hiring problems during Alberto Gonzalez’s tenure at DOJ. It was a missed opportunity by bloggers who seem to yearn to be regarded as exemplary but who seem stuck in a cramped, limiting blogging culture. True moral courage means not advocating for people like oneself and sheltering only your own, but speaking out to protect people whom your own side has hurt. Those who intuitively understand that are the people with a moral compass whom one as an adult admires in a workplace (and first learns to admire as one navigates the challenges of high school socialization). If you think in terms of cliques and tribes, outside the political world it’s not the bossy, conformity demanding Queen Bees and Kingpins who rule by fear who genuinely are admired, although the former like to think that is the case, it’s the easy going, self confident but never arrogant Gammas.

16. MK on February 25th, 2010 7:03 am

    PS I should have made it clear, also, that if Nixon’s supporters and associates do want to set up a separate, partisan blogging arm, it should not be associated with the Nixon Foundation to avoid problems with perceived pressure on NARA. It’s in the Foundation’s interest that NARA be perceived, at least publicly, as able to comply with what the laws require. It could simply be a Nixonites forum which doesn’t have anything to do with the Foundation or the federal Library.

17. MK on February 25th, 2010 5:21 pm

    David, I want to apologize for sounding snarky when I asked earlier today, “aren’t you a lawyer?” I could have made the point that how one feels doesn’t matter when laws require something much more gently and to greater effect. You’ve always been very civil, kind and thoughtful, in your exchanges with me here. You didn’t deserve that.

    It’s no excuse but over the years I’ve found myself in countless situations where people talked about an outcome they wanted without addressing the underlying statutes. At one newspaper’s message board during the Bush administration, a poster called me “corrupt” for pointing out that there are no sanctions in the Presidential Records Act for not preserving White House emails. I argued that there was no reason for posters to call for Bush administration officials to be put in prison for that. (The Federal Records Act which applies to cabinet departments and agencies has more teeth in that regard that the PRA.) No amount of my arguing that we’re a nation of law and that the first thing to do is to look at mandates and what statutes require saved me from verbal fire from people who cried for imprisonment of Republican officials. I’ve caught it from the other side, too. Someone once remarked snidely that I must be a liberal and probably didn’t celebrate the Fourth of July when I tried to explain how we at NARA worked to open “abuse of government power” (AOGP) information in the Nixon tapes and files.

    Speaking of which, we opened AOGP material first because the law required us to do that. Acting U.S. Archivist Trudy H. Peterson (regarded in the archival community as a person of great integrity), wrote in an internal NARA memo on May 18, 1993 that she was concerned about piecemeal releases from the tapes, with Watergate segments having to be released out of context. As she put it, researchers would be left puzzling over what else was being discussed, until additional tape segments were released in subsequent, systematic chronological releases. Her memo was leaked from within NARA and reached Nixon’s lawyers. The Department of Justice, which represents NARA in court (yeah, I know, that doesn’t always work out well) had no chance to review it for privilege. Since Nixon’s laywers got it over the transom, it made its way into the court record in Kutler v. Wilson outside the normal document production process.

    Are you familiar with the decisions in Nixon v. Freeman? Nixon’s lawyers suggested that non-Watergate material not be released for 25 years or until after Nixon’s death (670 F.2d 357-358 (D.C. Cir. 1982). At that time, they seemed grudgingly accepting of the release of Watergate information (within a narrower definition than we ended up applying) out of context.

    At any rate, I do apologize. Too many years of arguing that you have to do what the law requires and cannot do what it prohibits provide no excuse for my hurried, snarky comment this a.m. I had composed my note to Jonathan and only saw your posting when I went to post it. I should have taken a deep breath and composed a response in Word instead of firing off a reply in the comments box.

18. David Emig on February 25th, 2010 9:48 pm

    No apology necessary at all, as I didn’t take offense. In fact, I am a civil litigation paralegal professionally. (Didn’t want to make a commitment like that with my Nixon writing.) My expertise is in complex litigation, the organization of massive document productions and the like. At San Diego State, I took a class in Archival Management. Over the years, it has benefited me in my legal and historical careers.

    I too fear the over advocacy of the Blog here sometimes. A few times, I have told my friends at the Nixon Forum that there are plenty of political forums, but one Nixon Forum. While I have been a advocate at times, I try to tie in RN in the piece.

    I do stand by my statements about the difference between archives and museum. To steal from the other side in the health care debate, I am a little afraid of government being the only sole interpretation of history. I think as time passes, and there is more information and interpretation available; the exhibit evolve. My problem is that the judgment was imposed not agreed to, and the contribution of the Nixon Library before NARA administration was so cavalierly disregarded.

    I would be very interested in reading Nixon vs. Freeman. I tried to get it online without success. There isn’t a law library in the general area, so I need to call on one of my legal friends to copy it for me. I would especially like to see the justification the Nixon lawyers would use to keep Watergate sealed for 25 years after RNs death. I don’t want to wait until 2019.

    Thank you for your courtesy, and your participation in this always fascinating discussion for me.

19. David Emig on February 25th, 2010 10:11 pm

    BTW on Crowley. She seems to have gotten more conservative since she left that show with Ron Reagan on MSNBC. I must confess that I blanch when I see her on Fox News. Still her two books on RN: “Nixon On the Record” and “Nixon in Winter” are quite interesting and some of the only writing we have of RNs post presidential years.

20. MK on February 26th, 2010 5:55 am

    Thank you for you most gracious acceptance of my apology. I’m reverting to my normal practice of composing in Word although even then, doing these hurried posts that way during breakfast before racing out of the house doesn’t save me from countless typos and syntax errors, LOL.

    Aha, I see part of what your problem is with the question of exhibits – who is doing the interpretation? The Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library used an advisory panel when it re-did its exhibits. As an article in the Dallas Morning News noted, “Harry Middleton, 86, said he and fellow staffers in the 1971 opening of the LBJ museum at the University of Texas at Austin were too close to the former president to give a highly critical account of the controversies that defined his tenure – especially the Vietnam War.
    It wasn’t until 1982, when historians and other outside experts helped redesign the museum, that it fully explored how the war split the country.”

    Should NARA’s Presidential Libraries only focus on the archival? That question is covered in a report to Congress on Alternative Models for Presidential Libraries issued last year. If you haven’t read it, you might find it interesting as it gets into detailed discussion of the exhibit function and other matters. See
    http://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/reports/report-for-congress.pdf I submitted comments for it but since I’m a former NARA insider, they were much more arcane that what most other observers offered. My comments centered on

    (1) whether or not there has been a chilling effect at the beginning of the life cycle of records (with officials afraid to write for the record and moving to oral decision making) since the passage of post-Watergate statutes and

    (2) whether having a museum component helped mitigate the shock for presidents protected while in office by imposition on subordinates of message discipline and by a protective cocoon of press spokesmen and surrogates of having their records thrown open for public examination.

    On the question of interpretation, archivists seek to avoid it in regards to records themselves. A March 1975 report to Congress on the Nixon records statute addressed this ethos. The Report to Congress on Title I of the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act noted that archivists should not tamper with records access due to the need to maintain “an objective view of the diverse research needs for information. This objectivity must transcend any desire to show the Federal Government in the best light.” (B-3) In explaining the need to provide maximum access to “abuse of governmental power” materials, the Report noted that “this will permit historians, journalists, researchers, and other members of the public to draw their own conclusions with respect to these matters, rather than relying upon a Government agency’s interpretation of the facts. This is consistent with both the fundamental preservation and access objectives of the Act, and the traditional role of the National Archives.” (G-8)

    So the “just the facts” approach at NARA is deeply ingrained.

    As to Monica Crowley, while I enjoyed her two Nixon books, I’ve never seen her on Fox. It’s been years since I watched FNC, I stopped around 2003. I do catch her occasionally on The McLaughlin Group but I don’t find I learn much from that show or others with a similar format. Too many of the debates seem formulaic, as if they rely on set talking points. I generally watch very little television, I’m much more drawn to the written word. Even there, I look for sources that shed light more so than those that use heat. Not surprisingly for someone who has worked in civil service positions for 37 years, I would like to see sites such as TNN focus on educating people on how government really works. Much of what I see on purely political sites associated with the right or the left is very superficial and, at times, misinformed.

    As to Nixon v. Freeman, it centered on the public access regulations for the Nixon records held by the National Archives, including the tapes with which I worked for a decade. The discussion of how to open the materials touched on a suggestion by Nixon’s lawyers that NARA proceed with opening the Watergate AOGP materials but hold off on opening non-Watergate segments for 25 years OR until after Nixon’s death. Nixon’s lawyers used the definition of Watergate agreed to in the so-called “negotiated agreement” between Nixon and the Archives. The court didn’t buy that proposal but very contentious litigation and the adversarial relations actually had that effect, at least with the tapes. (Whatever has gone on behind the scenes, you will find no public record of any other presidential library’s archivists lambasted by representatives of a former president the same way NARA Nixon Project employees once were. Fortunately, most of us didn’t suffer an longterm harm to our professional reputations although it was a bit of a shock at the time. The former director of the Nixon Project now is a senior executive at NARA.)

    As of 1992, when Stanley Kutler filed his lawsuit for access to the Nixon tapes, a mere 63 hours of the 3,700 total recorded hours had been opened. The testimony of witnesses such as I in Kutler revealed that we feds had identified an additional 200 hours of Watergate (AOGP) related conversation beyond that used or identified by the special prosecutor. Those 200 hours were not opened until the end of 1996. At that point, it was 2 years after RN had died and 22 years since he had left office. And that just was the Watergate portions. The tape chron releases still are ongoing, 36 years after RN left office and 16 years after he died. Like us archivists, Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, was too optimistic when he wrote in 1988 in an article in Prologue, a NARA publication, “The time has finally come, almost fifteen years after the end of the Nixon administration, when one may reasonably look forward to hearing . . . portions of the White House tapes. The National Archives’ processing of the tapes is virtually complete, and the agency is nearly ready to go forward with a schedule of phased openings.” As we found out, many fierce battles still lay ahead. Nixon v. Freeman just was a tiny part of all this.

    Thanks again for your gracious acceptance of my apology, it reflects well on you as do all your postings here.

21. David Emig on February 27th, 2010 5:41 pm

    “Car accidents and cancer may be hard to budget around, but that’s why we take out insurance.” You know, with all due respect, you grossly underestimate the problem. I saw your picture, and you seem to be a young man. I am as well, but take care of two elderly parents who thankfully are on Medicare.

    Total up the cost of cancer treatments, meds, doctor visits, surgeries, and hospital stays. Under the present insurance cartel system of health care; if your insurance runs out — you are truly screwed. Now that you have a pre-existing condition; you can’t get any more.

    What’s your free market solution to that?

22. Dave Klingler on February 4th, 2011 10:44 pm

    There is a series of logical disconnects in this piece.

    In general, the piece makes the assertion that because Nixon was opposed to the Clinton health care reforms, he would have staunchly opposed the Obama health care reforms. The assertion fails for lack anything more than a hand wave.

    The two acts that are now commonly attributed to the Obama administration are far more similar to the Nixon plan than the Clinton proposals or the McCain health savings card, and they attempt to include a mechanism for free market competition. While there is no doubt that Nixon was opposed to the Clinton proposals, to say then that Nixon would have been in favor of health savings accounts instead of a system highly similar to what he himself proposed is nothing more than the unjustified insertion of the Daniel Suhr’s opinion into Nixon’s mouth. Mr. Suhr, if you’re going to say that Nixon would have preferred McCain’s plan to his own, you need to make a better case, and you haven’t done that here.

1. Suhr on Nixon on Health Care « Gop3.com: The Triumvirate
2. Palin contortions « Exile on Mainstream

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