WWND

May 14, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media | 1 Comment 

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie answers a question asked by Newark Star-Ledger reporter and editorial page editor Tom Moran at a press conference yesterday in Trenton:

Another President With “Game”?

May 14, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Nixon family, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Sports | 1 Comment 

Many articles about President Obama have suggested that he is the first President to display any considerable skill as a basketball player. (Herbert Hoover used to toss a six-pound medicine ball over a volleyball net, but Hooverball’s another game altogether.)

But such may not be the case, as recounted in Alex Pappas’s article about President Nixon’s grandson, GOP congressional candidate Chris Cox. Recalling the time he spent with his grandfather, he says:

“I remember we went to lots of baseball games together and played basketball together. I tell you, he had a mean shot from the top of the key.”

And from a story by the Associated Press:

The aspiring politician says his grandfather, who mostly talked with him about the Mets and Giants before his death in 1994, when Cox was 15, did provide advice that may come in handy between now and November.

“What he would tell me is the only way you lose is if you stay on the floor,” Cox said. “You’re going to get knocked down time and time again, but keep coming back. And keep trying. The only time you lose is when you stop trying.”

Tom Shachtman Writes About Barack Obama (Sr.)

May 11, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, News media, Presidents, U.S. History | 6 Comments 

There has been considerable discussion in TNN about The Forty Years’ War, Len Colodny and Tom Shachtman’s book about foreign policy in the Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush eras. But it was not the only book Tom Shachtman published last year. St. Martin’s Press also published his Airlift To America, which tells the story of how Kenyan labor and independence leader, Tom Mboya, arranged with the help of American friends to sent many young East Africans to study in the United States between 1959 and 1963.

Most of the students came over on aircraft chartered by the African American Students Foundation, a group organized by Mboya and William X. Scheinman, with the help of both white and black sponsors, including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Jackie Robinson. Although the late Barack Obama Sr., father of the forty-fourth President, did not travel to Hawaii on one of these flights (he came to Honolulu on a commercial flight, financed by two American teachers he’d met in Kenya), his stay in the Aloha State, where he met and married Stanley Dunham and fathered the future President, was made possible in large degree by scholarships from the AASF (at the recommendation of his mentor Mboya).

David Remnick’s recent bestselling biography of President Obama, The Bridge, has stirred up interest in this program again, and Shactman has a short article at the New York Times’s website discussing it. (See also this letter to the Times Book Review by Cora Weiss, who was executive director of the AASF.)

70 Years Ago Today–May 10, 1940

May 10, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Europe, History, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Richard Nixon admired Winston Churchill and when he wrote his book about Leaders in 1982 he profiled Churchill first.

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain at the age of 65 on this date in 1940. May 10, 1940 was a moment of dynamism militarily and politically as Hitler’s forces swept across Belgium en route to France. One purported bulwark—the famed Maginot Line—quickly became a relic, while one supposed relic—Mr. Churchill—began his finest hour.

Writing about that time now 70 years ago, Richard Nixon said:

The Second World War gave Churchill a backdrop commensurate with his larger than life abilities and personality. It seems a sad fact of life that great leadership seems most evident only under the terrible conditions of war.

Churchill himself later recorded his thoughts about that moment in May of 1940 as part of his voluminous memoir of World War II:

Thus, then, on the night of the tenth of May, at the outset of this mighty battle, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.

During these last crowded days of the political crisis, my pulse had not quickened at any moment. I took it all as it came. But I cannot conceal from the reader of this truthful account that as I went to bed at about 3 a.m., I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. Eleven years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the last six years had been so numerous, so detailed, and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or for want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams. — Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm

“Stay Free”

May 10, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under In Memoriam, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures | Leave a Comment 

Alaska Lt. Governor candidate and Chair of the U.S. Arctic Commission Mead Treadwell on Walter Hickel:

Gov. Wally Hickel, who invited me in to his world when I was a high school grad visiting Alaska in 1974, and in the 36 years I worked with him, here in Alaska and around the world, helped me learn a million things — about Alaska, the world, business, ethics, and staying free –passed away 90 minutes ago.

“Stay Free.” I don’t know if it will be his epitaph, but he said many times that’s what it should be, and that’s what we should live by.

Historians will take many slices of Wally, but my take is this: Tonight Alaskans lost a leader who, again and again, showed us how to stand up for our potential and how to achieve it. He was most proud that he helped delay Alaska Statehood, unt il Congress guaranteed the 103 million acre land grant to the State (of Alaska’s 375 million acres) that came with our star on the flag. For Alaska, that made all the difference. We are a whole state instead of one split in half as the Eisenhower Administration suggested with a partition to make Arctic Alaska a defense reserve. The North Slope oil fields helped all of us build an economy, and our people live in one Alaska, not a state and a territory which would have disenfranchised Alaska’s North Slope residents.

In my last conversation with him of length, at breakfast in the Pantry of the Hotel Captain Cook, with Malcolm Roberts and Carole Chambers, he encouraged me to run for Lt. Governor this year. He could not have been more bullish about Alaska’s opportunities, and, speaking of them, told Malcolm in a later phone call, “Get the job done!” At breakfast that day, he had that totally amused smile on his face as he asked us to repeat back to him stories he’d told us over the years.

In the room with him at the hospital last weekend, I was reminded of something he did with his kids, and those of us on his staff from time to time, when things got tough. We’d grab both hands, hold them for a few seconds and say “battery chargers” to each other, eye to eye. His spark could start a lot of cold engines, and stir a lot of hearts.

Godspeed, Wally Hickel, and love to your family. He often asked that he be buried standing up — so he won’t have to get up to fight! And he often joked he hoped St. Peter would send him back, because there are just so many good things left to do.

Happy Mother’s Day From The Nixon Foundation

May 9, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Holidays, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Courtesy of Foreign Policy Magazine photo feature “Leaders and their moms:” Senator Nixon with mother Hannah Nixon at her home in 1951.

Hickel Was One Of A Kind

May 8, 2010 by Ronald H. Walker | Filed Under In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

Wally Hickel was one of a kind. When President Nixon appointed him Secretary of the Interior, he asked me to help Wally get his office organized. Secretary Hickel became my first boss in the Nixon Administration and my life long friend.

When Frank Sinatra sings, “I did it my way,” he is talking about Wally Hickel.

People will remember that President Nixon fired him when a letter he wrote, expressing concern for his five sons and opposition to the Viet Nam war, was leaked to the Washington Star. Years later, at the Hickel’s home in Anchorage, I was able to bring the two of them together and they re-connected with mutual respect and friendship.

Together, Wally and I saved the historic Ford’s Theater from becoming a morbid museum to a martyred President. Today it is a vibrant, thriving, living theater and together we received the Lincoln medal from Frankie Hewitt and a grateful Ford’s Theater Society.

Anne and I send our love and deepest sympathy to his wife, Ermalee and their family.

Ron Walker
President, Richard Nixon Foundation

Oil Spills And Federal Leadership

May 8, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Environmental issues, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Walter Hickel’s death comes at a time when the nation is focused on the causes and consequences of offshore oil spills.  As the newly-minted Secretary of the Interior —literally newly-minted, having only been confirmed six days earlier— Wally Hickel had to deal with one of the worst such disasters.

On the afternoon of 29 January 1969, a Union Oil platform six miles off the Santa Barbara coast suffered a blowout.  Over the next eleven days, workers struggled to cap the rupture while hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spread into an 800 square mile slick that killed wildlife and tarred beaches along 35 miles of pristine coast.

The Hickel Senate confirmation hearings at been bitterly controversial; they set new levels of political acrimony that, finally, even embarrassed some of the interlocutors.  When the vote was finally taken after RN’s inauguration —making Hickel the last confirmed Cabinet member— the new President called and suggested that the new Secretary relax for a weekend at Camp David.

In a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation in 2003 with Charles Wilkinson and Patricia Limerick —co-founders of the Center of the American West— Wally Hickel recalled those events:

So I was confirmed and the president called and said, “Wally, go to Camp David. You’ve been through a terrible thing.” So I went up to Camp David, I left my chief of staff in Washington. I was up there one day and he called me. He said, “Mr. Secretary, they’ve had a terrible oil spill down in Santa Barbara.” He said, “It’s really bad.” And I said, “Well, get me a plane, let’s get out there.” And I hadn’t even been in my office yet. I got down there and we flew out to California and the Coast Guard met me and God, the people. It was rough.

They flew me out to see that. There’s pictures of that. I saw this tremendous flood of oil. And the people were saying, who was in office, and they were saying, “Take that Union Oil thing. Do this. Do that.” I was at the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara that night. It was 1:30 in the morning. Fred Hartley was there, Union Oil. I didn’t know what authority he had. It didn’t make any difference. I said, “Fred, I’m going to shut you down.” And he said, “Mr. Secretary, you don’t have the authority to shut me down.” That stopped me for about a second and a half. I walked over and looked him right in the eye and said, “Fred, I just gave myself the authority.”

I walked out of there. I got on the phone and called the attorney general’s office and got the answering service. It was very early in the morning there in Washington, about 5:30 or so. I said, “You find me a way that I can shut them down, I just did that.”

I got on a plane and went back to Washington and got back there about ten o’clock the next morning. The Attorney General called me and said, “Mr. Secretary, we think we have something that will really please you. We found a regulation that was put in in 1834 that says that the Secretary of Interior is responsible that our natural resources not be wasted.” I held on that and won the case.

The problem with that was I got the regulations sent to me the first day down there in their office and the previous administration had given them [Union Oil] the right to drill offshore, and I didn’t mind that. But the regulations they used were the same as on land. So in reality, Union Oil didn’t break any regulations.

So I go back out to Santa Barbara and it was really wild. We had a meeting in a convention hall; there were two to three hundred people. They were saying, “Get Union Oil. Do this.” I said, “Wait a minute. They didn’t break any laws. We didn’t have the right regulations.” And they calmed down. I said, “That is not Union’s oil. It belongs to us. It’s the commons.”

I closed them down and we had hearings later. But those hearings were tough. I had no animosity. I sat there. God must have caused that spill in Santa Barbara because it brought the commons in to me.

Alaska was the commons. I had had that battle since 1951 when I took it to Washington. It started the environmentalist thinking. It started that thinking and it became a busy two years. But that was part of the hearing. Long story, but I don’t know how to make it shorter.

New York Times Obituary of Walter Hickel

May 8, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Environmental issues, In Memoriam, Nixon Administration figures | Leave a Comment 

The New York Times has just put up a lengthy obituary of Walter J. Hickel, two-time Alaskan Governor and President Nixon’s first Secretary of the Interior who died last night in Anchorage.

With Governor Hickel’s passing, George P. Shultz (Secretary of Labor, 1969-1970) and Melvin R. Laird (Secretary of Defense, 1969-1973) are now the last living members of the Cabinet that entered office with RN.

Walter J. Hickel   1919-2010

May 8, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Environmental issues, In Memoriam, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

“The conservationists cheered me when we fought against pollution or when we preserved park lands; they attacked me when we advanced the Alaska Pipeline and the North America energy grid. My friends and associates in business were equally perplexed. I was not their guy. I was not anyone’s guy.”

RN’s Conservationist

May 8, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Environmental issues, In Memoriam | Leave a Comment 

December 11, 1968: RN announces his appointment of Alaska Governor Walter Hickel as Secretary of the Interior.

Former Alaska Governor and RN Interior Secretary Walter Hickel died today. He was 90.

Hickel was a trail blazer for President Nixon’s environmental agenda early on, leading the cleanup after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil rig explosion and conservation efforts for the Florida everglades . He was also a proponent for the first Earth Day, celebrated 40 years later at the Nixon Library this past April.

The AP has more:

An “Alaska boomer” with complex views on environmentalism and developing the state’s oil-rich resources, Hickel railed against “locking up” the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling and used settlement money from the Exxon Valdez oil spill lawsuit to help repair Prince William Sound.

He frequently described Alaska as an “owner state” and advocated that the state’s wild frontier should be developed responsibly to preserve its value.

Hickel’s political career started in the early 1950s as a crusader for Alaska statehood, both at home and in Washington. He was also involved in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act which helped pave the way for the trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

Hickel’s was a quintessential Alaska rags-to-riches story. Born in Kansas, he arrived nearly penniless in the small city of Anchorage in 1940, taking advantage of the city’s rapid growth following World War II to build a multimillion-dollar construction and real-estate fortune.

“I used to think about all the great countries of the world where I might want to go, because there was no room or opportunity in Kansas for me to do the things I wanted to do,” he wrote in his 1971 book, “Who Owns America.”

Through the years, Hickel never lost the “can-do” attitude that made him a rich man, nor did he stop thinking about ways Alaska could further develop its natural wealth.

Camelot And Sacred Cow–Tipping

May 7, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Entertainment, History, Media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV, U.S. History, UK Politics | 2 Comments 

Whatever his obvious faults and flaws, it is somewhat understandable that Richard Nixon would ruminate about how Jack Kennedy got away with a lot during his assassination-shortened presidency. And there is no doubt that the 37th President of the United States saw all of the “Camelot” hype as mythology born of cynical public relations. While Nixon was being criticized for conducting a purported “Imperial” presidency by the likes of Arthur Schlessinger (a pro-Kennedy historian), he no-doubt resented the cult of personality that survived his old rival’s violent death.

RN would be 97 today—JFK would be 93 in a couple of weeks. It’s hard to envision the forever-young Kennedy as an old man, though we saw Nixon live into his 80s. They were friends at first, with Nixon the early-on transcendent figure. Then came the rivalry marked by increased and enduring bitterness. But it was always more complicated than that.

Americans too young to remember either man have been taught the party line that Kennedy was a great man and Nixon was a bad man. JFK was the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis—Nixon was the villain of Watergate. JFK had charisma; Nixon had no charm—and so it goes.

The truth is actually quite different.

The History Channel is moving forward with production of an eight-part mini-series scheduled to air next year called, The Kennedys. Greg Kinnear (Little Miss Sunshine) will play JFK and Katie Holmes will play Jacqueline. The producer is a man named Joel Surnow, who is the creator of the highly successful and soon to expire series, 24.

Surnow is also reputed to have politically conservative tendencies (Gasp! Horrors!). Reportedly, the upcoming dramatic portrayal of the years of the New Frontier will include material about some of Kennedy’s flaws—and the guardians of his image are mobilized to “stop the smears.”

I say it’s about time that popular culture is exposed to the truth about the man behind the Camelot myth—before fact is fossilized.

The John F. Kennedy who will be portrayed in the new series will, reportedly, be a real life character—warts and all. And some of those warts had the potential to morph into cancer. In fact, there is a credible case to be made that had Kennedy lived beyond that fateful fall day in 1963, and managed to be reelected in 1964, he may not have survived a second term, legally and politically. That’s right. As Hugh Sidey suggested before his death in 2005—the same Hugh Sidey, who as an editor at Time Magazine during the Kennedy years, was also a Camelot insider—JFK’s various and sundry moral, ethical, and judgmental, pecadillos might very well have led to his actual impeachment.

Was the Kennedy administration a Watergate waiting to happen?

Possibly this new mini-series will popularize information that has long lain dormant in histories that are hardly read anymore. All the pieces of the puzzle are long established matters in the public domain—hiding in plain sight, but obscured by the powerful rays of cultish brilliance. But finally, those pieces are being assembled in a way that may accurately characterize a man who was likely guilty of actions much worse than what brought Mr. Nixon down in 1974.

From the improper use of the FBI in matters of surveillance and investigation in matters not at all related to national security, to misuse of the Secret Service, to his affair with a mistress of a major crime boss with its attendant compromises, Mr. Kennedy played by his own rules against the backdrop of the last gasp of an age of media mercy. He lived on the edge, from his monumental sexual addiction, to his experimentation with illicit drugs, to his dependence on substances that, while not illegal, seemed grayish—John F. Kennedy’s time was running out. People were always covering for him (some of the same ones still are). But was it only a matter of time before someone broke rank?

If Watergate taught us anything, it was that it is hard to keep a lid on a big story—even in the White House.

The story of Jack’s faults is, though, more than the tale of a bad boy—he may very well have compromised national security. Mr. Kennedy’s fascination in 1963 with an unfolding scandal in Great Britain likely had to do with the fact that he was beginning to worry about his own bailiwick. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s government was then being rocked by a sex scandal involving one John Profumo, the Minister for War, and a notorious woman named Christine Keeler who had at least two boyfriends: Profumo and a Soviet naval attaché named Yevgeny Ivanov. And there were other women.

Why would this discomfit JFK? Well, because he had been flying rather close to the same kind of flame at the time. In fact, among the “other women” involved in the British scandal were two trollops, Suzy Chang and Maria Novotny. Both had been involved “romantically” with Kennedy. So it was quite possible that the scandal that eventually led to MacMillan’s government being voted out in 1964 might have by that time tarnished the name of the President of the United States.

Interestingly, while John F. Kennedy visited the United Kingdom and broke bread with MacMillan one Saturday in the summer of 1963, a story was beginning to break stateside. It appeared briefly in the New York Journal-American (Hearst paper) and spoke cryptically of “a man who holds ‘very high’ elective office” who was involved with some of the women being mentioned in the Profumo matter.

The story was pulled after one edition following pressure from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

But beyond this, there was actually another “bimbo” problem plaguing JFK, and this one had to do with a German girl by the name of Ellen Rometsch. Said to strongly favor actress Elizabeth Taylor, she was a 27-year old prostitute who regularly “serviced” Mr. Kennedy in 1963.

Rometsch was from East Germany and had been a member of the Communist Party and many thought she was, in fact, a spy. She was paid by JFK for sex and participated in what could only be described as orgies in the White House pool. The party girl visited Kennedy at least ten times that spring and summer. When confronted by J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, about the fact that Rometsch was likely a spy, Bobby Kennedy worked feverishly to have her deported—and she was soon en route to her homeland behind the Iron Curtain.

The story went away, but not all that far away. Less than a month before Kennedy’s fateful trip to Dallas, one Iowa newspaper broke a story: “U.S. Expels Girl Linked to Officials.” In the article was the tidbit that this woman had been involved with “some prominent New Frontiersmen from the executive branch of the government.” But those were the days before White House reporters went for the jugular asking tough questions.

Why is any of this important now? It matters simply because there tends to be a measure of selective amnesia when it comes to iconic figures. If a myth better serves current political purposes this trumps truth.

Had John F. Kennedy lived and had his shortcomings been investigated and written about with Woodward-Bernstein-like passion, he may not have been reelected in 1964. And if he did manage to win that race, and investigators did their jobs, JFK might very well have been impeached or brought to the place of resignation.

Then again, that may be fantasy, because it was unlikely that Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post in those days, and inbred Kennedy crony, would have allowed any such story to go forward. At any rate, it all went away that sad November day and we are left with a legend that does history, not to mention the American people, a disservice.

Stephen Kronish is the screenwriter for upcoming mini-series, The Kennedys, and he insists that they are “not out to destroy the sacred cow.” But as Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency, recently wrote:

In an age when Americans periodically swoon for imperial presidents, a little sacred cow-tipping would be a public service.

Kent State, 40 Years Later

May 4, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Music, News media, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of one of the Nixon era’s most tragic events, when four students were killed by Ohio National Guard gunfire at the campus of Kent State University during an antiwar demonstration. The shootings were followed by a nationwide student strike, and thousands of students descending on Washington to protest. (It was at that time that President Nixon made his famous early-morning visit to the Lincoln Memorial, which I’ll write about in a few days.)

The deaths of the students were preceded by the burning of a building used by Kent State’s ROTC chapter. One member of the chapter was William Schroeder, one of the students who died. Another was David Rust, who at the time was planning a military career and took a job maintaining the chapter’s rifles. The events of May 4 changed his mind and made him decide to go into journalism. He’s been a cameraman with CNN for nearly thirty years, and at the channel’s website he writes about the events of that day:

As I watched the four days unfold, I was struck by the images I saw in person and the stories on the national news.

I heard news reports of “thousands” of student protesters, but I had only seen a few hundred in the protests before May 4. Many were like me, just watching what was going on.

It amazed me that the events unfolding at this small university could affect people’s opinion of their country and their government.

I was also impressed by the dramatic photos that captured the events, including one shot by John Filo, a Kent photojournalism student.

It showed a 14-year-old girl kneeling beside the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of the dead students. The photo earned a Pulitzer Prize for Filo. It also had a huge impact on the American public.

The power of the media coverage of the Kent State protests opened a whole new world for me.

For the first time I began to think about journalism. Six week later, when school reopened, I began to take my education more seriously. My grades dramatically improved, and I started focusing on a profession. I returned home to California and started taking writing and photography classes at Pasadena City College. The more I learned, the more obsessed I became with the news business.

With the help of friends working for televisions stations in Los Angeles, I learned to operate a television news camera.

Two years later, I heard about Ted Turner’s new experiment in 24-hour news, and I started working for CNN’s bureau in Los Angeles.

It all started with an unexpected lesson learned from a tragedy 40 years ago.

And at Time.com there’s an article about “Ohio,” Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s song, recorded later in May 1970.

Unanswered Questions About Kent State

May 4, 2010 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Domestic issues | 1 Comment 

On the 40th anniversary of the Kent State protests, Fox News’ James Rosen has a new article in the Washington Times in which he reveals declassified FBI files that suggest the National Guardsman were shot at first:

Now largely forgotten, the torching of the ROTC building was the true precursor to the killings at Kent State because it triggered the deployment of the National Guard to the fevered campus.

That deployment climaxed in bloodshed on the afternoon of May 4, 1970, with the guardsmen, clad in gas masks and confronted by angry, rock-throwing students, firing their M-1 rifles 67 times in 13 seconds, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder.

A report submitted to Attorney General John Mitchell in June 1970 stated “there was no sniper” who could have fired at the guardsmen before the killings.

Numerous witnesses corroborated this.

A female freshman provided the FBI with a sworn statement that “there was no shot before [the guardsmen's] volley, and there were no warning shots fired.” The Justice Department’s internal review cited statements by six guardsmen who “pointedly” told the FBI that their lives were not in danger and that “it was not a shooting situation.”

Yet the declassified FBI files show the FBI already had developed credible evidence suggesting that there was indeed a sniper and that one or more shots may have been fired at the guardsmen first.

Rumors of a sniper had circulated for at least a day before the fatal confrontation, the documents show. And a memorandum sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on May 19, 1970, referred to bullet holes found in a tree and a statue — evidence, the report stated, that “indicated that at least two shots had been fired at the National Guard.”

Another interviewee told agents that a guardsman had spoken of “a confirmed report of a sniper.”

It also turned out that the FBI had its own informant and agent-provocateur roaming the crowd, a part-time Kent State student named Terry Norman, who had a camera. Mr. Norman also was armed with a snub-nosed revolver that FBI ballistics tests, first declassified in 1977, concluded had indeed been discharged on that day.

Then there was the testimony of an ROTC cadet whose identity remains unknown, one of the pervasive redactions concealing the names of all the FBI agents who conducted the interviews and of all those whom they interrogated. Although presumably angry over the demonstrators’ destruction of the campus ROTC building, the cadet’s calm, precise firsthand account nonetheless carries a credibility not easily dismissed.

Before the fatal volley, the ROTC cadet told the FBI, he “heard one round, a pause, two rounds, and then the M-1s opened up.”

The report continued that the cadet “stated that the first three rounds were definitely not M-1s. He said they could possibly have been a .45 caliber. … [He] further stated that he heard confirmed reports of sniper fire coming in over both the National Guard radio and the state police radio.”

The cadet also told the FBI he observed demonstrators carrying baseball bats, golf clubs and improvised weapons, including pieces of steel wire cut into footlong sections, along with radios and other electronic devices “used to monitor the police and Guard wavelengths.”

Separately, a female student told the FBI she “recalled hearing what she thought was [the sound of] firecrackers and then a few seconds later [she] heard noise that to her sounded like a machine gun going off, but then later thought it may have been a volley of shots from the Guard.”

The cadet also told the FBI he observed demonstrators carrying baseball bats, golf clubs and improvised weapons, including pieces of steel wire cut into footlong sections, along with radios and other electronic devices “used to monitor the police and Guard wavelengths.”

Rosen goes on to explain that the declassified documents show that the Kent State protests weren’t spontaneous nor unplanned:

Separately, a female student told the FBI she “recalled hearing what she thought was [the sound of] firecrackers and then a few seconds later [she] heard noise that to her sounded like a machine gun going off, but then later thought it may have been a volley of shots from the Guard.”

Absent the declassification of the FBI’s entire investigative file, many questions remain unanswered — including why the documents quoted here were overlooked, or discounted, in the Justice Department’s official findings.

At a minimum, the FBI documents strongly challenge the received narrative that the rioting in downtown Kent was spontaneous and unplanned, that the burning of the ROTC headquarters was similarly impulsive and that the guardsmen’s fatal shootings were explicable only as unprovoked acts.

A Historian’s Responsibility

May 4, 2010 by David Emig | Filed Under History, News media, Politics, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 4 Comments 

Recently the New Yorker came out with allegations that Stephen Ambrose (famed WWII and Nixon Biographer) exaggerated his contact with Dwight Eisenhower, General of the Army and 34^th President of the United States.  {See: Raymer, Richard, “Channeling Ike,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.}

The late Dr. Ambrose {1936-2002} was the author of some 25 books during his 40 year career.  He was one of the most popular World War II historians, the writer of Band of Brothers (2001), and the technical adviser to “Saving Private Ryan” Steven Spielberg’s D-Day blockbuster.  Ambrose’s three volume biography of Richard Nixon: {The Education of the Politician [1913-1962](pub.1983), “The Triumph of the Politician [1962-1974](pub.1987)”, “Ruin and Recovery [1974-1990](pub.1991)”} stand out as almost required reading for Nixon scholars.

Towards the end of his prolific career, Ambrose was accused of by his critics, and excused for being a virtual “history factory.”  A Stephen Ambrose Inc. who employed his children as research assistants.  {See: Plotz, David, “The Plagiarist: Why Stephen Ambrose is a Vampire”, Slate Magazine, January 11, 2002.}

The current controversy centers on the beginnings of Ambrose’s association with Ike in 1964.  Ambrose’s account, last stated in To America (2002), was that Eisenhower sought out Ambrose after reading his first book, Halleck: Chief of Staff (1962).  The recently retired Eisenhower was especially interested in Lincoln’s Chief of Staff’s story because Eisenhower was interested in writing a book about George Marshall, the Chief of Staff during the Second World War.  Eisenhower wanted Ambrose to work with him on his papers and finally his biography because he figured that Ambrose would be fair.  {See To America pp. 153-154}

Seven years later a different version of events emerged.  Last year, the deputy director of the Eisenhower Library, Tim Rives was looking for documents and the like for his exhibit on Ambrose’s writing on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the Eisenhower’s biography.  Rives discovered letters in the archives of Stephen Ambrose soliciting contact with Eisenhower.  It was Ambrose who sent the Halleck book along to give Ike “the opportunity to see some of my writing.”  Another letter was more forward.  “It therefore seems to me that the time has come to begin the scholarly biographies of the leaders of World War II, I would like to begin a full scale, scholarly account of your military career.”  The New Yorker article strongly states that Eisenhower never approached Ambrose, but the editor of the Eisenhower papers, Alfred Chandler, took Ambrose to see Eisenhower at Gettysburg.

This isn’t the most serious charge in the article. Although having boasted about hundreds of hours of interviews with Eisenhower, a recent search of the historical record might suggest otherwise.  Rives states that records of Eisenhower’s schedule for the years of 1964-1967 show that Ambrose met with Eisenhower three times, for a total of five hours.  These records show that Eisenhower was somewhere else or in other meetings, during some of the times Ambrose has listed as having an interview with him.

However, to read Ambrose’s writing through his biographies and in his account of his relationship with Eisenhower in Ambrose’s last book, it is difficult to discount Ambrose’s familiarity with his subject.  Eisenhower did write the foreword to Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, (1966).  “To America” also describes discussions about more mundane things, such as Ike’s recommendations of restaurants in the area.  {p. 161.}   The New Yorker also brings up the point of just how much of Eisenhower’s career in the military and as President could be discussed in five hours.  Perhaps the author relied more on his knowledge of Eisenhower’s papers, and interviews with other principals than his five hours with Eisenhower.  The record only shows a difference in accounts, without displaying the motivation behind it.  Ambrose, like most biographers, never detailed what historical documentation he valued over others.

It is interesting to note that while Dr. Ambrose has dates for the interviews in the book in question Supreme Commander (1970); in subsequent books on Eisenhower such as the two volume biography and the consolidated Eisenhower: Soldier and President (1991), Ambrose only mentions “Interview with DDE” and doesn’t specify a date.  Maybe it is merely a mistake of a young historian who quietly learned his lesson.  We truly cannot know for sure, since the professor isn’t here to tell us.

Stephen Ambrose was no stranger to controversy about his scholarship.  In the recent piece in the History News Network, entitled “How the Ambrose Story Developed,” the articles cites seven Ambrose books that are in possible question for plagiarism.  According to an article in Forbes Magazine, this habit dates back to his Ph.D dissertation, Upton and the Army (1964). {See: Lewis, Mark, “Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis,” Forbes Magazine, May 10, 2002.}  Must we factor in these tendencies in our assessment of his historical analysis?

A few famous historians have been called on insufficient citation.  Most notably Doris Kearns Goodman, who had the remaining copies of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987) destroyed, made corrections to future editions, and owned up to the mistakes.  (See: Goodman, Doris Kearns, “How I Caused That Story,” Time Magazine, January 27, 2002.)

What is plagiarism?  According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, (as quoted in Wikipedia) it is the “use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.”  My definition is simple.  It is the lifting of another person’s words, then representing them as your own.  When you describe a event in someone’s life that has been described by different authors…then one reaches a grey area of interpretation. How can there not be similarities?  This is illustrated when comparing Ambrose’s account of RNs hospital experience in 1975 in “Ruin and Recovery,” with a similar account 16 years earlier in Robert Sam Anson’s book, “Exile.”  {See Lewis, Mark, “More Controversy For Stephen Ambrose,” Forbes Magazine, January 9, 2002.}  While the examples in the article might be a case of insufficient citation, they do not reach the level of plagiarism.

However, making up dates for interviews is a different plateau of error.  While corrected quietly in future works; the sin of creating interviews in “The Supreme Commander” give the reader a false impression that he was writing with Eisenhower’s perspective. As mentioned earlier, for this latest controversy, Dr. Ambrose isn’t here to offer a defense, reason or excuse.

This whole Ambrose controversy should serve as a cautionary tale for all of us.  It is a reminder to tighten one’s craft.  Plagiarism, insufficient citation, and other errors can be taken care of in the cases of established historians like Goodwin, and Ambrose.  After all, the great publishing houses can repair the damage by correction.  While the established historians would be assessed by the totality of their work; these errors would be fatal to the career of the beginning historian and his or her first book.

Great care and attention must be put towards citation.  In my other vocation in the legal profession, proper citation is a given.  There are legal consequences for failure.  During the plagiarism charges regarding The Wild Blue (2001), Dr. Ambrose wrote on his website, “I tell stories.  I don’t discuss my documents.  I discuss the story.  It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take?  I am not writing a Ph.D dissertation.”  (Quoted from Kirkpatrick, David, “As Historian’s Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources,” New York Times, January 11, 2002.)

Fair enough.  While histories and biographies shouldn’t turn into dissertations; we as biographers and historians do write for two audiences.  One is the casual reader of history – who is looking for a good, interesting read without the distraction of footnotes within the text.  Current biographers such as Edmund Morris, Richard Reeves, and David McCullough use source notes at the back of the book rather than footnotes.

The other audience is fellow historians and students of history.  Accurately quoted and cited source materials; whether it is from a secondary source, or an interview, or letter is essential.  Doris Kearns Goodwin put it best when she said: “The writing of history is a rich process of building on the work of the past with the hope that others will build on what you have done. Through footnotes you point the way to future historians.”  (See: “How I Caused That Story.”)  After all, no writer of history or biography wants to jump in the abyss…

For the modern historian without Professor Ambrose’s reputation; the making up of interviews of their main subject would be an unpardonable offence.  With modern technology, there is no excuse for not accurately accounting for all interviews with your subject.  They must be treated and cited like any other document or secondary source material, with the date and place of interview listed.  This includes the extra step of transcribing of all interviews, a process that is invaluable for documentation.

The historical jury is still out on how Professor Ambrose’s scholarship will finally be judged.  In the end, after the author is long gone….the work must defend him.  As our work as historians and biographers must defend us.

Whenever I visit the Nixon Library, I always stop by President and Mrs. Nixon’s gravesite to pay my respects.  Once there, I sense an overwhelming responsibility.  The voice that tells me…  “Get It Right.”

Goodbye To All That

May 3, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Art, History, Supreme Court, Terrorism, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

The Supreme Court announced this morning that visitors will no longer access the building by ascending the 44 marble steps steps and passing under the words “Equal Justice Under Law” to enter the great central hall through the massive bronze doors depicting the history of the development of justice and law in the western world from ancient Greece to 19th Century America.

A Court press release stated: “The new entrance, which will serve as the primary means for public entry, was designed in light of findings and recommendations from two independent security studies conducted in 2001 and 2009.  The entrance provides a secure, reinforced area to screen for weapons, explosives, and chemical and biological hazards.”

Justice Breyer issued a Statement —in which Justice Ginsburg concurred— regretting the surrender of symbolism to security.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

MONDAY, May 3, 2010

Present: Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy, Justice Thomas, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Sotomayor.

Statement Concerning the Supreme Court’s Front Entrance Memorandum of Justice Breyer, with whom Justice Ginsburg joins.

I write with regret to note the closing of the Court’s front entrance. The Supreme Court building is currently undergoing extensive construction, and the Court has decided that, after this construction is completed, visitors to the Court—including the parties whose cases we decide, the attorneys who argue those cases, and the members of the public who come to listen and to observe their government in action— will have to enter through a side door. While I recognize the reasons for this change, on balance I do not believe they justify it. I think the change is unfortunate, and I write in the hope that the public will one day in the future be able to enter the Court’s Great Hall after passing under the famous words “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Cass Gilbert faced a difficult problem when he was commissioned to design the Court’s present home. The Court was to be built on a small, irregularly-shaped plot of land adjacent to both the Capitol and the Library of Congress, two powerful and prominent architectural competitors. How was Gilbert to create a distinctive, yet fitting, home for the Court in these circumstances?

Gilbert’s solution was to design an entrance that, in the words of architect and lawyer Paul Byard, “the processional progress toward justice reenacted daily in [the Court’s] premises.” Starting at the Court’s western plaza, Gilbert’s plan leads visitors along a carefully choreographed, climbing path that ultimately ends at the courtroom itself.  The Court’s forty-four marble steps, the James Earle Fraser sculptures Contemplation of Justice and Authority of Law, the Western portico with its eight pairs of columns standing high above the removed wings of the building, the Great Hall—each of these elements does its part to encourage contemplation of the Court’s central purpose, the administration of justice to all who seek it.

But the significance of the Court’s front entrance extends beyond its design and function. Writers and artists regularly use the steps to represent the ideal that anyone in this country may obtain meaningful justice through application to this Court. And the steps appear in countless photographs commemorating famous arguments or other moments of historical importance. In short, time has proven the success of Gilbert’s vision: To many members of the public, this Court’s main entrance and front steps are not only a means to, but also a metaphor for, access to the Court itself.

This is why, even though visitors will remain able to leave via the front entrance, I find dispiriting the Court’s decision to refuse to permit the public to enter. I certainly recognize the concerns identified in the two security studies that led to this recent decision (which reaffirmed a decision made several years ago). But potential security threats will exist regardless of which entrance we use. And, in making this decision, it is important not to undervalue the symbolic and historic importance of allowing visitors to enter the Court after walking up Gilbert’s famed front steps.

To my knowledge, and I have spoken to numerous jurists and architects worldwide, no other Supreme Court in the world—including those, such as Israel’s, that face security concerns equal to or greater than ours—has closed its main entrance to the public. And the main entrances to numerous other prominent public buildings in America remain open. I thus remain hopeful that, sometime in the future, technological advances, a Congressional appropriation, or the dissipation of the current security risks will enable us to restore the Supreme Court’s main entrance as a symbol of dignified openness and meaningful access to equal justice under law.

In one of the panels of the Supreme Court’s bronze doors, Chief Justice John Marshall and Associate Justice Joseph Story discuss the 1803 Marbury v. Madison opinion in front of the Capitol.

What Would Buckley Think About The Tea Party?

May 1, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, author of the standard biography of Barry Goldwater (and of a new book about William F. Buckley Jr.) argues that Buckley would have endorsed it:

Some of you may be saying, “But wait, wasn’t Bill Buckley an elitist, the ultimate patrician, the man with a New York City maisonette and a limousine and driver? Wouldn’t he dismiss the tea party people as a bunch of ignorant emotional backwoods yahoos?”

Well, according to a New York Times/CBS survey, supporters of the tea party are wealthier and better educated than the general public. More than 90 percent of them think the country is heading in the wrong direction. An overwhelming majority say that President Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and does not understand their problems.

Bill Buckley would be very comfortable with such yahoos. After all, it was he who said in a debate at Harvard University: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty.”

President Nixon And Arbor Day

May 1, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Environmental issues, Holidays, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

I suspect that Arbor Day, as it was when I was a child, is a holiday most familiar in the elementary schools of America, since it does not involve grownups getting the day off from work, except in Nebraska (not a state famous for its orchards and forests). On a (hopefully) sunny day at the end of April, fourth or fifth or sixth-graders go outside and either help plant a tree, or watch other people plant one. That’s the way I recall the process, anyway.

It wasn’t until recently, though, that I learned that it was President Nixon who standardized observance of Arbor Day by proclamation in 1970, fixing it on the last Friday of April. Here’s an article about the ways in which the day is observed.

The Gulf Oil Disaster And Memories of 1969

May 1, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Environmental issues, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

As I observed recently at TNN, it was a large oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, about a week after Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969, that focused the nation’s attention on pollution and ecology in a dramatic fashion, and helped spur the movement that led to the first Earth Day and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency the following year.

This week, the disaster that released enormous quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, near southeastern Louisiana, is threatening the fishing and shrimping industries of five states. This has been the big story, at a time when the Gulf region, like the rest of America, is trying to get on the road to economic recovery. But the environmental aspect also looms large, as Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation points out in the New York Times:

Oil, however, is too complicated for simple solutions. Whether this spill turns out to be the result of a freakish accident or a cascade of negligence, the likely political outcome will be a moratorium on offshore drilling. Emotionally, I love this idea. Who wants an oil drill in his park or on his coastline? Who doesn’t want to punish Big Oil on behalf of the birds?

Moratoriums have a moral problem, though. All oil comes from someone’s backyard, and when we don’t reduce the amount of oil we consume, and refuse to drill at home, we end up getting people to drill for us in Kazakhstan, Angola and Nigeria — places without America’s strong environmental safeguards or the resources to enforce them.

PJB – C-SPAN – 5.2.10 – NOON EST

May 1, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Ideas, Media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Politics, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Pat Buchanan will be the guest tomorrow on C-SPAN’s monthly three hour interview and call in show In Depth.

Back in the day: PJB in his EOB office.  RN recruited the youngster —his first hire for his new presidential campaign— in 1967 from the editorial page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.  He served on the White House staff until 1975.