Anatoly F. Dobrynin, RIP

April 9, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Cuba, International Affairs, National Security, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Russia, UN | Leave a Comment 

Yesterday, the death of Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986, was announced in Moscow. He was 90.

Few diplomats served as long in Washington as Dobrynin. (One who served longer was Ernest Jaakson, who was the representative of the Estonian government-in-exile in Washington, then of the revived nation of Estonia, from 1965 until 1993, and who replaced Dobrynin as dean of the capital’s diplomatic corps in 1986, rather to the latter’s irritation.) During those three-plus decades, he served five Soviet leaders (Khruschchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev) during six Administrations (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan).

The two most significant achievements of Dobrynin’s tenure in Washington came in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and ten years later, when he played a central role on the Soviet side in negotiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. The Cuban crisis came six months after his arrival in DC, following a period serving as United Nations Undersecretary-General under Dag Hammarskjold. During the months before President Kennedy learned of Soviet missiles on Cuban territory, Dobrynin managed to establish contacts with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that proved to be the basis of the back-channel negotiations that ultimately defused what, to date, has been the most dangerous military situation the world has faced since 1945. None of Dobrynin’s predecessors as Soviet Ambassador had shown anything approaching his diplomatic poise and skill; had he not been on the scene, events might have taken a tragic turn.

A decade later, Dobrynin, negotiating with National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger, helped to assemble the ABM treaty, which, for nearly forty years, has been the cornerstone on which the disarmament agreements between the US and USSR (and later Russia) have been built. He also considerably facilitated the process which led to the SALT I agreement of 1972, and helped further the meetings between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev which resulted in full-scale detente between the superpowers.

It should be emphasized that Dobrynin, despite his willingness to steep himself in American culture and his genial persona, was always a loyal representative of the Soviet regime and its ideology. When faced with the human-rights stance of President Carter, he gave no ground, and, in the years before Mikhail Gorbachev gained power, took many a hard-line position where Soviet actions abroad were concerned, especially in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. In his 1995 autobiography, In Confidence, he made it clear that he was unhappy to see the Soviet Union disintegrate. But it should be remembered that as a diplomat, he was committed to dialogue over confrontation, wherever and whenever he thought it possible, and that commitment helped the process which ultimately decreased and finally ended the dangerous tensions of the Cold War.

The Russian site RT.com offers these tributes from Dr. Kissinger, who so many times faced the Ambassador across a negotiating table, and Donald Kendall, a close friend of President Nixon’s:

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remembers Dobrynin when, during the Cold War, he was working in Washington DC, heading the Russian Embassy there. “First he was my professional partner,” says Kissinger, “and then gradually, he became my friend.” Even though, he says, the Soviet politics of those times which the ambassador was standing by, often went against the US policies, “he was always trying to achieve peace, to reduce tensions and to stand by a more peaceful life on the planet,” says the former US Secretary of State. “I think of him with respect and warm-hearted feelings,” concludes Kissinger.

“I hope Dobrynin will get the memorial that he deserves,” said Donald Kendall, former head of the PepsiCo in an interview to ITAR-TASS news agency. He suggested that both Russia and the United States should put a monument to Dobrynin, as a sign of honor and respect for his achievements.

Kendall is convinced that Dobrynin’s “fantastic diplomatic skills” have several times “saved the relationships” between Moscow and Washington. “I have stressed this many times, that if in those times there would have been a different ambassador in Washington, then there could have been a real war between the two countries.”

The Next Castro?

January 3, 2010 by Jim Gallen | Filed Under Afghanistan, Annals of the Obama Administration, Cuba | 1 Comment 

With the coming of a New Year we are again reminded that on January 1, 1959, now 51 years ago, Fidel Castro and his band of rebels rolled into Havana and established a Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.  Castro is now enjoying his senior status as a thorn in the side of his eleventh American Administration.  Originally regaled as the “Robin Hood of the Caribbean” and the “George Washington of Cuba”, the gradual realization that Castro was a Communist became an embarrassment to President Eisenhower and may have hurt Vice-President Nixon in the 1960 election.  The Bay of Pigs fiasco, intended to oust Castro, weakened the credibility of the new Kennedy Administration.  Claims of Castro’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination have never been completely silenced.  Castro backed insurgencies throughout Latin America presented shifting challenges to the Johnson and Nixon Administrations.  Intervention in Angola would attract the attention of President Ford and contribute to the impression of a bungling President Carter leading the U.S. into a period of decline.  Castro’s support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua would lead President Reagan into aiding the Contras, which spawned the greatest scandal of his administration.  With the fall of his Soviet sponsors, Castro faded into the role of a minor irritant whose major influence on the U.S. was to drive the Cuban community in Florida, with its growing influence, into the arms of politicians seen as “tough on Castro.”  With the rise of his soul-mate, Hugo Chavez, Castro became a cult hero whose comments were given enhanced attention.  Despite decades of attempts by Exiles and the CIA to achieve regime change or assassination, Castro, protected by his status as a Head of State and Soviet missiles, has lived to peacefully transfer power to his brother and slide into the role of an elder revolutionary.  Absent unforeseen turmoil, Fidel will probably pass on quietly of natural causes.

While Fidel’s influence and irritation coefficients have been declining, those of Osama Bin Laden have been rising.  Slated for capture or death by President Clinton and the target of cruise missiles in 1998 because of his role in attacks on U.S. Embassies in eastern Africa, Bin Laden became Public Enemy # 1 after the September 11 attacks.  Despite President Bush’s proclamation that he was “Wanted: Dead or Alive” and over eight years of manhunts, Bin Laden remains at liberty to fire periodic audio or video messages of threats or suggestions to the Western public and their leaders.  Speaking of the Tora Bora Battle of December 2001, John Kerry said:  “When Bush had an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden, he took his focus off of him, outsourced the job to Afghan warlords and bin Laden escaped.” He would later claim that Bin Laden’s last minute tape cost him the 2004 election and, as recently as last month, wrote:  “If we had captured or killed Bin Laden, the world would look very different today. His death or imprisonment would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat, but our failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism. It left the American people more vulnerable, and it inflamed the strife that now threatens to engulf Pakistan and Afghanistan.”  Now President Obama is entangled in the War in Afghanistan which was begun to deprive Bin Laden and Al Qaeda of sanctuaries from which to launch further attacks against the West.  Through all this, Bin Laden, protected by his band of tribal militants, roams the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.  For how long will this outlaw avoid justice?  For how long will Western politics be influenced by his tapes and even his continued life?  For how many presidents will the capture or death of Bin Laden be an elusive goal?  Will he, in the end, be the next Castro, who will continue to avoid the long arm of the U.S. until, full of days, riches and, in the eyes of some, honors, he will die, perhaps at a time and place unknown to his pursuers?  The story develops.

Life At Age 72

November 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security | Leave a Comment 

Some weeks ago I wrote here about W. Kendall Myers, the State Department employee who, for nearly thirty years, spied for Cuban intelligence in this country, all the while appearing to his friends and neighbors (the latter including some retired “spooks”) to be no more than just another amiable, slightly scatterbrained scion of an old Washington family – in his case, the Grosvenors, some of whom played major roles in founding the National Geographical Society.

Yesterday, Myers, the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, appeared in Federal court and pleaded guilty to plotting to commit espionage and to wire fraud. At the same tim his wife Gwendolyn pleaded guilty to plotting to gather and transmit national defense information. Under the agreement reached between her attorneys and the prosecution, she will serve six to seven and a half years in prison.

The couple also agreed to be fully debriefed by investigators about the specifics of their spying, and Myers agreed to forfeit all of the $1.74 million he earned as a State Department employee. In lieu of that sum, the couple agreed to turn over all their financial assets to the government, including the 37-foot yacht, docked in Annapolis, in which they once hoped, one day, to sail off to Havana to spend their sunset years.

But W. Kendall Myers will not be enjoying the blissful sunshine of Cuban beaches, nor the occasional phone call from Fidel Castro (who was so appreciative of the Myers’s work that he cleared a few hours in his schedule to meet them when they made their way to Havana in the 1990s). Instead, for what he did, he will receive the mandatory sentence – life imprisonment. And since he is 72, it really is life – the penalty imposed for betraying the trust of a nation’s secrets.

Ted Sorensen’s Alternate History

October 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, International Affairs, Interviews, National Security, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Russia, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

This week Theodore “Ted” Sorensen, who was John F. Kennedy’s closest aide from 1953 until the president’s assassination a decade later, appeared at Canada’s University of Western Ontario in London to speak about his career and to promote his recently published autobiography Counselor. While there, he was interviewed by Ian Gillespie of the London Free Press. Naturally, the 81-year-old Sorensen is asked what his most vivid memory is of the Thousand Days, and just as naturally, he replies that it was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. He speaks of the enormous weight he felt, as a “34-year-old kid,” when drafting JFK’s letter to Soviet leader Nikita Khruschchev – a document which, he knew, might make the difference between peace and nuclear annihilation. The article continues:

Sorensen says things might have turned out quite differently if Richard Nixon had defeated Kennedy in the presidential election campaign of 1960.

“In that same fall of 1962, when Kennedy showed the kind of patience, discipline and wisdom that I mentioned (in the book) and resolved the Cuban missile crisis without firing a shot, Nixon was having a self-destructive campaign for governor of California,” he says. “Imagine if he had been in the White House and faced with the challenge that faced Kennedy?”

Well, as tens of millions of TV viewers know, last month Seth MacFarlane had no trouble imagining what would have happened; in the season-premiere episode of his Family Guy series, precocious infant Stewie Griffin and his canine sidekick Brian, with the help of an alternate-realities machine Stewie’s invented, visit several worlds differing from our own. With a push of the button, the baby and dog find themselves in the twisted, crumbling ruins of their hometown, Quahog, Rhode Island. “What happened?” Brian asked. Stewie consults the machine and replies, with his authoritative British accent: “This is what would have happened if Nixon had been president in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

In-deed, as Dr. Zachary Smith used to say long ago. Last year, I read the transcript of an interview, as yet unpublished, which had just been conducted with a pundit whose words often appear in the columns and on the airwaves of the US and UK.

The pundit was asked about the most tragic events in the career of President Nixon. In his reply, he emphatically said that RN’s defeat by JFK in 1960 was one of the most tragic events in American history. Asked to explain, the journalist (whose identify might surprise the reader, but who will remain unnamed, since the interview has yet to be published) expressed the view that, had RN assumed the Presidency in January 1961:

a) the Bay of Pigs operation would have received full air support, thus resulting in the overthrow of Fidel Castro’s regime;

b) as a consequence, there would have been no Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, and thus no Cuban Missile Crisis;

c) the resulting setback in Soviet power and prestige would have forced Khruschchev to agree to detente a decade before Dr. Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy set it in motion and thus might have hastened the end of the Cold War as early as the 1970s.

As for Sorensen’s (and Macfarlane’s) suggestion that having Richard Nixon in the White House in October 1962 would have produced disaster, it’s worth noting that the President handled himself very well when faced with unexpected and dangerously escalating events during the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973.

Alger And Priscilla Hiss, 2009 Model

September 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security, News media | Leave a Comment 

In early June of this year readers of Washington’s two dailies woke up to the news of the arrest of a much-liked, sophisticated, rather affluent local couple. W[alter] Kendall Myers, when FBI agents put the cuffs on him, was 72 years old; a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and scion of the Grosvenor family that guided National Geographic magazine for a century; and a former high official at the State Department and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s ultra-prestigious School of Advanced International Studies. His wife, Gwenolyn Steingraber Myers, was a 71-year-old South Dakotan who had come to Washington as an aide to Senator James Abourezk in the 1970s and, in recent years, had been working at Riggs Bank and at a bookstore in DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. The couple lived in an elegant co-op at the Westchester on Cathedral Avenue, and, in 2007, acquired a 37-foot, state-of-the-art yacht which they named Helene. Both had reached retirement age, and, like many well-off couples in their sunset years, were just counting down the days until they could board their boat and head south for good.

Except in their case, they weren’t planning to dock their yacht in Boca Raton or Jupiter, or even Key West, and go looking for a comfortable little house. They meant to go all the way to Havana, to the nation for whose spy agency they had worked for nearly thirty years. It was for espionage that they were arrested by the FBI this summer.

At the time of the Myerses’s arrest, the Washington Post and the Washington Times published lengthy articles. The Post’s writing about the couple noted that in the mid-1970s, not long before meeting his Gwen, Kendall Myers, who had recently divorced his first wife and had trouble making his child-support payments, had drunkenly slammed his car into another vehicle one Thanksgiving Eve and that a teenage girl, Susan Slattery, who was in the other vehicle, died as a result, for which he received three years’s unsupervised probation. The tone of the quotes from Myers’s friends suggested that this unfortunate incident had somehow unsettled an otherwise upstanding citizen and had sent him down the path to espionage.

Ah, if only Alger Hiss had friends like that – or, for that matter, could have used something like that for an excuse. The new issue of Washingtonian magazine features a lengthy article by Toby Harnden, the US correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, which presents by far the most complete picture of the Myerses and their misdeeds set down on paper or cyberspace to date. (At this point the article is not online, so readers are urged to proceed to their nearest bookstore and newsstand and look for the October Washingtonian among the “city” magazines.)

Like any well-written account of the spy world, the article is thoroughly fascinating, from beginning to end. Among its most remarkable passages is one describing the other residents of the Westchester. As it happens, several of the Myerses’s neighbors, according to one resident, were or are in the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency – and an upstairs neighbor is an FBI agent. Not one of these neighbors remotely guessed that the tall, bespectacled, well-mannered, bright but rather glib Foreign Service officer in their midst had actually spent decades, with his wife, hunched over a Sony radio purchased with Cuban money, carefully deciphering messages from those “numbers stations” that pop up around the shortwave dial. None of them knew that a man who once had angled to be George W. Bush’s special envoy to Northern Ireland had, in 1995, spent four full hours with a grateful Fidel Castro. None of them knew that two agents working to the detriment of American national security were walking, every day, down the hallways where a former Westchester resident, Barry Goldwater, had once walked.

Instead, it was up to diligent FBI agents to listen to the broadcasts, carefully narrow lists of suspects, and look for clues. How about this one: the Cubans’s code name for Kendall Myers was “Agent 202″ – the DC area code. How many Scoobysnacks would the Great Dane need to puzzle that one out? And Gwen Myers’s handle was “Agent 123.” Impressive, no?

Probably the most arresting passage in Harnden’s article is the one describing how the Myerses were recruited to work for Cuba. They were not approached in some distant land which has diplomatic relations with the Castro government. They were not approached by someone who’d managed to go under deep cover in Little Miami and make his or her way up north. Rather, they were approached by a Castro lieutenant of long standing, who’d fought in the mountains with Fidel, Raul and Che, by the name of Carlos Ciano – an operative at the UN’s Cuban mission in New York, who, thanks to the Carter Administration’s conciliatory attitude toward the island nation’s diplomats, was moving completely at will between Manhattan and Washington in the late 1970s, meeting and “greeting” leading policymakers at various informal brunches and parties sponsored by sympathetic Capitol Hill staffers and others. It was at one of these that Ciano met Kendall and Gwen Myers.

Gwen Myers, as explained in the article, had a thoroughly left-wing background – one of her sons, according to a South Dakota neighbor, made no bones about being, literally, a card-carrying Communist – and it apparently was through her that Kendall Myers took the fateful step from being a liberal State functionary, like thousands who never give a thought to betraying their country, to becoming an operative for Cuba.(The resemblance to the influence that Priscilla Hiss’s views had on Alger in the early years of their marriage, as described in such books as Allen Weinstein’s Perjury and Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, is quite striking.) It’s difficult to overstate the implications of all this as the Obama White House and various Democrats on Capitol Hill assure us that it’s time to let old quarrels with Havana be patched up.

Harnden also looks into the auto accident which is said to have had such a troubling psychological effect on Kendall Myers. It turns out that, for a man of almost forty, he handled the whole matter as if he were a particularly spoiled seventeen-year-old. He sent Susan Slattery’s family a letter that, although missing an apology, concluded: “It is a tragedy for me too.” During a recess in the civil case brought against him by her family, he told her father: “You people can’t touch me.” Harnden then wryly quotes a character in a David Ignatius novel, a CIA psychiatrist: “Treason is the ultimate mid-life crisis.” Be that as it may, Kendall and Gwen Myers appear set to conclude their lives in prison.

The nuttiest quote in the article comes from James Abourezk. The former Senator was the first person Gwen Myers called after her arrest, and he states: “If we had ended the embargo years ago, there would have been no spying and none of this stuff would have happened. To me, if the Cubans are spying, it would be a defensive thing.” Really?

There’s a lot more of interest in the article – the description of Kendall Myers’s deep Anglophilia, especially his fascination with those model modern Englishmen Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; the fact that his PhD thesis was a contrarian defense of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy; and a lot more. All in all, this is a fine, must-read work of journalism. Don’t miss it.

A Community Organizer Takes On The World

September 25, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Annals of the Obama Administration, Barack Obama, Cuba, Domestic issues, Economic issues, History, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, UN | 2 Comments 

President Barack Obama’s visit to the United Nations this past week, complete with a major address and some quality time with a gavel, was yet another step in the process of seizing a much sought after role. For decades, U.S. presidents have routinely been referred to as leaders of the free world. For all practical and theoretical purposes now, though, the appellation “free” no longer applies.

We should now be saying that he’s the leader of the world, period.

Until now, the various elements of a particular president’s philosophy and methodology have usually been categorized dichotomously: domestic policy and foreign policy. And since they both involve issues that seldom fly that close to each other – except for matters of trade – the occupants of the Oval Office have generally been analyzed and graded on them separately by historians.

The prevailing wisdom is that a particular president may have been strong on one and weak on the other. Rare was the leader who got high marks for what he did here as well as his approach to things abroad. Sometimes it had to do with passion. Richard Nixon was fascinated with foreign policy, seeing it as the premier role for a president. And in spite of a solid domestic record (which was impressive in some areas), the 37th President is largely rated highly for his achievements on the international stage.

Even for those who seemed to be effective both domestically and diplomatically, there were few similarities in philosophy and methodology between the two vastly different arenas. That is, until now.

Mr. Obama has a philosophy that runs as a common thread between his approaches to everything he touches from the U.S. economy, to national security, and even, yes, foreign policy. What is this important piece of the puzzle? Simple. Though he pays lip service to one of the most basic issues of human nature and how people relate to and interact with each other on a micro or macro scale, his actions actually minimize – or at least, marginalize – a fundamental instinct common to every person, group, community, and nation on the earth.

Self-interest.

The call du jour from the mountaintop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is for all of us to rise above, or in new age parlance “transcend,” mere mortal self-interest. On the domestic level this means that capitalism – a mean, primal, greedy, and materialistic approach to economics that steals from the poor to give to the rich – must be replaced (slowly, but surely) with a more enlightened approach; one that emphasizes social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth.

This is all the rage these days. It may be called “progressive,” but it’s really a barely-if-at-all disguised form of socialism. If it walks like a duck, it’s a duck. If it digests food like a goose, it’s…well.

Never mind that this naïve experiment has never really worked well anywhere, and instead of practicing “to each according to need; from each according to ability,” it actually devolves into “to each according to need; from each according to lack thereof.” As Margaret Thatcher famously said: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

You also start running out of freedom. Planned economies involve a construct where the individual trades (wittingly, or not) liberty for some perceived value – all supposedly accomplished on the wings of so-called better angels. The bigger the wings and more aggressive the planners, the greater is the loss of freedom. Capitalism, on the other hand, though often accused of being selfish and cynical, recognizes man’s inbred propensity for selfishness and taps into it.

The father of capitalism, Adam Smith, who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, referred to this as a “system of natural liberty.” And flaws, cycles, weaknesses aside, it has worked pretty well here in our country. This approach to economics is, in fact, woven into the national fabric.

Everyone gets free healthcare in Cuba. But it’s a good thing there, because the average wage earner in that nation makes less than $30.00 per month, including the doctors. And three out of four workers in that country – where a little more than 50 years ago economic development was the highest in Latin America and advanced even by European standards – now work for the public sector (read: the government tab).

But don’t hold your breath while waiting for Michael Moore to make a movie entitled, “Cuba: A Sad Story.” His current movie, a rant about the evils of capitalism, will be released next week in theaters. Of course, Moore wouldn’t make a movie, or do anything for that matter, out of self-interest. Would he?

It’s no secret if you want a high standard of living in countries with planned economies (the collective version of fixed incomes) you go to work for the government. As you climb the ladder you get better Dachas. This was only true here in the U.S. during the days of the Great Depression and New Deal.

Of course, in fairness, the anti-capitalists are just getting started.

On the international front, lip service may be paid here and there to the concept of national self-interest, as when Mr. Obama told the good old boys and girls at the United Nations the other day: “Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests.” However, one just knows that a big fat conjunction is coming signaling the real point: “But,” (see, I told you) “it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 – more than at any point in human history – the interests of nations and peoples are shared.”

Really?

The president’s hyperbolic assignation of this year notwithstanding, is it even remotely true that China or Russia share our interests? And even leaving the roguish states out of the discussion, is it at all realistic to ask any nation to act against, or in any way minimize, its own interest – no matter how compelling or romantic the call? And is it even just a little bit ironic that in a speech with the line, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” our president calls everyone to follow the magnanimous lead of America, now that the Bush administration has been replaced with a collection of more responsible political gnostics?

President Obama does not have separate principles for his domestic and foreign policy approaches. There is one common thread. It’s out with the old and presumably outdated self-interest and in with a brand new era of quasi-utopian-top-down-we-know-best-because-we-are-enlightened peace and prosperity.

Let bells all over the world ring as empathy breaks out all over.

“The time has come to realize that the old habits, the old arguments, are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people,” President Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. But as ambitious and idealistic – even resonant to some – as such a statement is, the fact is that our fundamental nature as human beings has not changed throughout the course of history. Technology has changed, knowledge has increased, landscapes have morphed, and kingdoms and nations have come and gone, but as the Shakespeare of the prophets recorded six centuries before Christ:

All flesh is grass, and the goodliness there of is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth… – Isaiah 40:6-7

The simple, resilient, and undeniable fact is that self-interest is here to stay as long as the world turns. And any philosophy or vision, utopian or otherwise, that fails to take this fact into account, is doomed to failure.

In the waning days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, he would sometimes lie awake at night worrying about things; the war, his Great Society dreams, and even his own health (his father died relatively young, and Johnson feared the same fate). Occasionally he’d wander the halls finding his way to a portrait of Woodrow Wilson, a man who had been at the pinnacle of power and influence, only to be eventually devastated emotionally and physically by events and the pressures of his office.

LBJ wondered if he’d wind up the same way. After all, didn’t he just want something better for everyone – a higher standard of living and a world safe and at peace? And, hadn’t he been described as a colossus and the most powerful president since FDR, just a few years earlier?

Mark Twain used to say that “history never repeats itself, but it rhymes.” He was right. The cycles of history are not exact, but one time can resemble another and often does.

And one of history’s most enduring lessons is that if anyone begins a visionary journey with dreams and even ideals that fail to take into account the simple fact that people, businesses, communities (organized or otherwise), nations, and groupings of nations all share a passion for themselves, it is like starting with the premise that 2+2=5. This may only seem to be a small error, but when carried out exponentially it becomes a monstrosity.

Castro, Nixon, And The Revolution

September 3, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Cuba, Richard Nixon, Russia | Leave a Comment 

Cuban leader Fidel Castro pictured with Vice President Nixon at The White House in April 1959 following his takeover of Havana earlier that year.

“If Nixon wins our revolution won’t last,” said Cuban President Fidel Castro just before the 1960 election. Last week — and nearly 50 years later — the island’s state controlled media, in a tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, took another gratuitous swipe at RN:

“The Kennedy family, in particular the assassinated President, John F. Kennedy, were representative of a new generation of Americans confronting the old and dirty politics of men in the mold of Nixon…The Kennedy family’s (role) in Barack Obama’s electoral victory should not be overlooked. Without that moral, political and financial support, the dirty saga of the Bush and Nixon clans would be continuing.”

Considering their dear leader — a fatigue wearing altruist — is no practitioner of “dirty politics,” RN could have indeed been an obstacle to the exportation of El Presidente’s empyrean utopia.

The same utopia which uprooted an entire social class, which created one party rule, which censored opposition media, which jailed political and ideological opponents, including former ally Huber Matos, a rebel Army Commander, who Castro accused of being an agent for “reactionary forces.” Matos — like many others — was summarily beaten and confined to a bedless unlit cell, serving “every minute” of his 20-year sentence.

Writing at the American Thinker, author Humberto Fontava recounts Castro’s butcher-in-arms Nikita Khrushchev, who expressed his pleasure with the 1960 election outcome with a snicker:

“We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along,” snickered Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs, confirming Nixon. “Security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy’s death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba.”

Bernard Barker, 1917-2009

June 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cuba, Nixon in the News, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Bernard Leon Barker, Cuban-born of American parents (and a citizen of both countries since the age of 18, though an exile from the land of his birth for a half-century), died in Miami yesterday at the age of 92. At the age of 24 in December 1941, Barker became the first Cuban-American to join the American armed forces after Pearl Harbor, and served with distinction in Europe. When he was 44, in the spring of 1961, he was one of the organizers of Brigade 2506, the spearhead of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion.

But for the last thirty-six years it was more or less a given that his obituaries would focus on the fact that he was one of the five men arrested in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, along with Frank Sturgis, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and James McCord. Unlike some of his colleagues (notably E. Howard Hunt) who expressed bitterness toward President Nixon in the aftermath of that break-in, Barker unhesitatingly told a reporter in 1997 that he considered RN “one of our best presidents.”

(This Miami Herald article is a fairly good overview of his career but inaccurately states that Martinez is the last survivor of the five men; in fact, McCord is still living in Colorado.)

This week, coincidentally, saw the emergence of a brand-new Watergate conspiracy theory: one of the bloggers at BleacherReport.com argues that the scandal was brought down on Nixon by “the gods of baseball” as punishment for not taking strong enough action to keep the Senators playing baseball in Washington in 1971. (Specifically, the post argues that RN should have theatened to draft the late Bob Short, the last owner of the Senators, into the Army unless he abandoned his plans to move the team to Texas.)

“Fidel Is Entrenched”

May 21, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Cuba, Latin America | Leave a Comment 

That means the Island nation has no immediate intention of reconciling the 50 year rift with their northern neighbors:

When Fidel became ill in mid-2006, Raúl took over as interim president and hinted that some degree of economic liberalization was on the way. (He officially succeeded Fidel in February 2008.) The Raúl-led government introduced a raft of small reforms — such as beginning to decentralize agriculture and allowing Cubans to purchase various consumer electronic products — that had a meager economic impact but raised expectations on the island. As Daniel Erikson, a scholar at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank, writes in his new book, The Cuba Wars, Raúl unleashed a relatively robust debate about possible economic reforms, which the Communist youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde characterized as a “revolution within the revolution.” Now Fidel has effectively squashed that revolution and Raúl has dialed back his reform talk.

Cuba Policy “At Odds With National Interest”

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cuba, Nixon Center, Richard Nixon, The National Interest | Leave a Comment 

Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, provides an early glimpse at a Senate report honchoed by Nixonian realist and GOP Sen. Richard Lugar, who says the 47-year U.S. economic embargo of Cuba hasn’t worked:

I call it the “slippery slope strategy” in which Lugar is shining a big spotlight on the inadequacy and failure of US-Cuba policy that for too long has been held in place by domestic constituencies who were working at odds with the American national interest. Lugar is pushing buttons and nudging Obama’s team into put itself forward constructively — and with these steps, it becomes easier to see the broader embargo as a serious anachronism and a mistake that needs remedy.

President Nixon would be pleased.

Happy Anniversary, Mr. Dictator

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cuba, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Conrad Black on Nixon, Kennedy, and the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s seizure of power.

“A Man Of The Center”

January 19, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cuba, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

It’s starting to look more and more as if the inauguration of President-elect Obama may augur an Era of Good Feelings not seen in the United States since James Monroe left the White House in 1825. Last week, a speaker at a public library not far from Richard Nixon’s hometown of Whittier, California had some complimentary things to say about the 37th President, and these were reported in the Whittier Daily News. In that part of our nation, this may not sound especially surprising, but some TNN readers might want to brace themselves nonetheless:

Listeners and readers of journalist Robert Scheer, known for his liberal views, may find it hard to believe that he liked Richard Nixon.

But that’s what he told his audience Thursday at the Santa Fe Springs City Library during his talk about the 2008 presidential election and his latest book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”

“Despite personal failings … Nixon was a man of the center,” Scheer said. “He was an adult.”

Yes, those words were spoken by former Los Angeles Times reporter and current San Francisco Chronicle columnist and truthdig.com editor Robert Scheer, as in the “left” of KCRW’s long-running panel show “Left, Right and Center.” (So long-running, in fact, that when it started Arianna Huffington was its “right,” a position now held by former Washington Times editor Tony Blankley.) As in the editor of the premier New Left journal Ramparts at the beginning of the Nixon Administration. As in the journalist who brought the diary of Che Guevara (the guy Benicio del Toro plays in that really long movie) to the United States from Havana and published it in Ramparts. As in a member of the editorial board of the Progressive Book Club.

Scheer’s remarks lead me to think that before Obama’s term is up, the New York Observer might actually say something good about Nixon.

Is Len Colodny Next?

January 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cuba, George W. Bush, Intelligence, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 4 Comments 

The website of the Washington Post yesterday featured an online chat between assorted websurfers from around the world and an author trying to promote his new book. That, in itself, is unsurprising; the Post hosts such a chat once or twice nearly every week. However, it is downright startling when the earnest young author in question happens to be Russ Baker and the book is the newly published Family Of Secrets, his study of the Bush family that claims the outgoing President’s father, our 41st Chief Executive, was somehow involved in arcane ways in the JFK assassination and in Watergate.

And it’s downright stunning to find Baker chatting there when the same book also extensively cites Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda and Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup in maintaining that Pulitzer-winning journalist Bob Woodward had, as a young Naval officer, all manner of intelligence contacts that somehow influenced his choice of career and choice of investigative subjects when he got out of the service. You have to wonder if this is the cue for Hougan or Colodny and Gettlin to issue updated editions of their books and see about using the Post’s cyberspace to present their meditations on the career of the author of The War Within.

But, having said all that, I have to inform TNN’s readers that the transcript of the chat does not have one reader after another asking about George de Mohrenschildt, Operation Zapata, the true origins of “Deep Throat,” the Townhouse mystery, or any of the other persons and things that enliven Family Of Secrets, though Baker, several times, refers to the numerous “revelations” in his book. Instead, a series of unexceptional questions about the highs and lows of the Bush era are asked, and Baker, usually, answers in quite workmanlike fashion.

I know that during these chats washingtonpost.com employs a moderator who screens questions submitted, to make sure that queries from cranks, the illiterate and/or muddled, and self-styled employees of African financial institutions do not turn up onscreen. The definition of what constitutes an “acceptable” question seems to be narrow sometimes.

Last year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turned up in the site’s discussions to talk about her new book. I used the occasion to send in a question about her reasons for urging then-Sen. Barack Obama, who had won the Democratic nomination partly on a platform of opposition to the Iraq war, to choose Rep. Chet Edwards, one of that war’s most steadfast supporters, as his running-mate. The Post’s moderator did not put it up, but opted instead to present queries on the order of: “How did you establish yourself as a woman who has both brains and a feminine side?”

I wonder if Russ Baker’s chat was similarly homogenized, and if so, who was doing the homogenizing. I keep having a mental picture of Bob Woodward himself hunched over the screen, making an expression familiar to Sunday-morning TV viewers and moving the mousepad to “delete” whenever a question comes up on the order of “What is your opinion of the claim of David Obst, the literary agent who sold All The President’s Men, that Deep Throat was a composite?”

And in yesterday’s Post proper, Nixon Library director Tim Naftali reviewed two recent books on the events of November 22, 1963: The Road To Dallas by David Kaiser and Brothers In Arms by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton. Though Tim, the author of the volume on George H.W. Bush in the American Presidents Series, does not mention Family Of Secrets in the review, my guess, based on his dissection of Kaiser, Russo and Molton’s conspiracist arguments, is that he would take a rather dim view of it. Tim advises those interested in the subject that, rather than the books under review, they’d do better to examine Reclaiming History (Vincent Bugliosi’s gigantic volume, the fruit of 20 years’s research, which was published two years ago to undeservedly poor sales), and also the work of Max Holland of WashingtonDecoded.com fame. (Here I should mention that earlier this week Max’s site posted a very informative and illuminating review of Brothers In Arms by Brian Latell, the author of After Fidel.)

Castro/Nixon

December 30, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Cuba, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

As the Cuban government celebrates the proud achievement of perpetuating Stalinism for 50 years, a reprise of a couple of my New Nixon blog entries from early 2008, as Fidel passed the fatigues to Raul. The first, posted on Feb. 23, was written after a distinguished journalist tried to lay what he characterized as the failure of U.S. policy at the feet of you-know-who:

In this NPR commentary, Daniel Schorr (a distinguished reporter and commentator and regular participant in Nixon Center programs in Washington) argues that 50 years of misguided U.S. policy toward Cuba began when Vice President Nixon, after meeting Fidel Castro, said he was “incredibly naive about communism.” Schorr implies that every misstep in U.S. Cuba policy, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Kennedy Administration’s assassination schemes, grew from RN’s observation. That’s hard to believe based on Mr. Nixon’s complete analysis, contained in a long memo he sent President Eisenhower after meeting alone with Castro for three hours in April 1959:

Whatever we may think of him he is going to be a great factor in the development of Cuba and very possibly in Latin American affairs generally. He seems to be sincere. He is either incredibly naive about communism or under Communist discipline — my guess is the former, and as I have already implied his ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed that those of almost any world figure I have met in 50 countries. But because he has the power to lead to which I have referred, we have no choice but at least to try to orient him in the right direction.

When Castro argued that his people didn’t want free elections because they’d produced bad results in the past, Mr. Nixon replied that he should therefore hold elections as soon as possible “to restore the faith of the people in the democratic processes.” Castro soon demonstrated that he had no interest in redeeming Cuban democracy. As for the naive faith in communism Mr. Nixon identified, it laid waste to Cuba’s economy and turned it into Moscow’s pawn (and a potential ground zero) in the missile crisis of 1962.

Mr. Nixon acknowledged the force of Castro’s personality, predicted his regional influence, and tried to persuade him to serve his people. How could he have done better?

 Too late for W. An opportunity for O?