“The Strong Man” Visits Yorba Linda

July 3, 2008 by James Rosen | Filed Under Foundation News, National Archives, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Nixon family, Presidential libraries, Richard Nixon, Watergate | 6 Comments 

Greetings once again, supporters and students of Richard Nixon! Just a note to report on my visit to the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda this past June 17, and to thank all the folks there who made it a special and unforgettable experience for me.

John H. Taylor and Sandy Quinn of the Nixon Foundation, and Tim Naftali and Paul Musgrave of the National Archives, and their respective associates, were unfailingly gracious as they led me through the museum and archival areas, and various meals, explaining the storied past and bright future of the institution.

Exceptionally powerful and moving was the personal tour I received from Olivia Anastasiadis, the Library Curator, of the small frame house where President Nixon was born. The smell of history literally overcomes you as you step inside and see firsthand the modest but proud home where the young Nixon grew up, buffeted by illness, financial anxiety, and family tragedy. You commune, trance-like, with the era just before the Great War, represented in the period antiques, piano and sheet music, and other artifacts furnishing the home, many the original possessions of the Nixon family. It was a real challenge to contain my emotions as I stepped foot into the small bedroom where Richard Nixon was born; there I pondered the incongruous enormity of the life he led — the global stakes of his atomic-age presidency, with its virtuoso masterstrokes and sad ending — and the humbleness of its origins. That the house is just a few steps away from the simple, spare headstones and burial places of the former president and Mrs. Nixon inevitably adds to the emotional impact. I can’t imagine anyone, Nixon supporter or detractor, or the previously disinterested citizen, coming away from the experience unmoved, and I strongly recommend it to all Americans.

As a former college intern, in the summers of 1987 and ‘88, at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, the branch of the National Archives that (for now) controls the presidential papers and tapes, it was a pleasure to meet the many students donating their time to the archives this summer. “See what you can become?” Tim Naftali said jokingly to the interns, as we posed for a photograph together. Whether I make a fitting model toward which any young person should aspire I am reluctant to say, but I am unhesitating in stating here my admiration for these students’ passion for history and their earnest dedication to government service.

The discipline of “Nixon Studies” is, of course, in its infancy, and the plans for the institution’s expansion, including the construction of a 15,000-square foot facility to accomodate the presidential materials and the researchers who will examine them, are exciting, indeed. No regime in human history has ever been, or likely ever will be, as well and richly documented as the Nixon administration; as a result, students and scholars will have a grand time of it over the next century and beyond, poring over all the papers and tapes and enjoying the window they offer, uniquely, into policymaking at the highest levels of the postwar American government. The decisions taken now by those helming the Foundation and Library will shape this emerging discipline for decades to come, and one hopes the Nixon family will also remain actively engaged in these decisions.

That evening, in the Library’s auditorium — soon to be demolished and remodeled — John Taylor introduced Tim Naftali, who then introduced me for a brief lecture before a generous audience. Tim then served as moderator during a robust question-and-answer session. First, however, the audience was treated to a long-lost clip from NBC News’ coverage of the federal indictments, issued on May 10, 1973, of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, in connection with the so-called Vesco case — charges on which both men were eventually tried and fully acquitted. The clip, led off by anchor John Chancellor, neatly conveyed the immediacy of broadcast news in the saturation-coverage era of Watergate, and, too, the camera-crew frenzy that surrounded those, like Mitchell and Stans, caught in the middle of the maelstrom.

After my impromptu remarks, the audience poured forth with questions submitted to the moderator on index cards which I saved after the event, and whose contents I reproduce below. We didn’t get to all of the questions reproduced below, but we covered a lot of them; I reprint them as evidence of what was on the audience’s mind.

Lastly, there was a book-signing in the well-stocked gift shop. There I happily purchased two shot glasses adorned with the embossed seal of the Library, and was pleased to make the acquaintance of the volunteer staff, an irrepressible gang of the kindest, loveliest ladies you’ll ever meet, each and all attractively attired in red, white, and blue uniforms that bespoke their patriotism and unmistakable inner goodness.

Thanks again to all those in Yorba Linda who made my trip such an informative and enlightening visit, with especial thanks to Jonathan Movroydis, my Sherpa, chauffeur, hard-nosed interrogator, and master of this blog.

Yours gratefully,

James Rosen

Author, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate” (Doubleday)

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED AT MY LECTURE:

1. How has [sic] the media changed since Watergate?

2. Why is it that all inquiries about John Dean’s Watergate role seem to end up in the hands of judges rather than historians?

3. What did the break-in at Watergate actually give to the people who ordered it?

4. Please comment on MacGruder’s [sic; Jeb Magruder's] statement [IN 2003] that he heard President Nixon approve [the] Watergate break-in.

5. Should John Mitchell have turned down the Atty. Genl. job?

6. On Joint Chiefs [spying against Nixon and Kissinger] — elaborate please.

7. What do you consider to be John Mitchell’s greatest accomplishment?

8. You received an award in 2003 for being the funniest journalist [sic; celebrity!] in D.C. What earned you this honor, and, can you tell us a joke?

9. How do you view Mitchell’s 1987 recorded opinion that the CIA was behind the whole [Watergate] thing? [brackets in original]

10. You developed an early interest in Richard Nixon. In what ways did you “reach out”?

11. So what are we to believe out of Congress?

12. What sparked your interest in writing this book? And what will your next book be about?

13. How involved was H. [Hillary] Clinton in changing the testimony of witnesses between the executive sessions and the public sessions[?] Who was involved in the changing of the testimonies[sic]? [sic; the questioner confused my discussion about the variations in testimony between the executive vs. public sessions of the Senate Watergate committee with the hearings of the House Judiciary Committee during its impeachment deliberations, on which Senator Clinton worked as a young attorney, and which I did not discuss at all]

14. You seem to dismiss Martha Mitchell as a ridiculous + inconsequential figure. Was her role totally w/o importance in the history of the Nixon administration?

Katherine B. Loker: A Gift Of Love

June 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Foundation News, In Memoriam, Nixon Library | 1 Comment 

Katherine with fellow Nixon Foundation board members John Barr, Don Bendetti, Kris Elftmann, and Hubert Perry

News came on Thursday afternoon that Katherine Bogdanovich Loker, who would’ve been 93 in August, died earlier in the day after suffering a stroke at her Oceanside, California home on Saturday morning.

My colleague Cheryl Saremi had talked to her three days before her illness. She’d asked about our ping-pong diplomacy rematch a few weeks ago, which a trip to Boston, all by herself, undoubtedly for Harvard’s commencement ceremonies, had kept her from attending. She said she was deeply sorry that another commitment would keep her away from Bruce Herschensohn’s talk last week, but she promised Cheryl we’d see her soon.

If that day had come, she would’ve called to say she’d be on the Amtrak from Oceanside to Fullerton, all by herself. We would’ve picked her up at the station and brought her to the Library in Yorba Linda, along with a carry-on brimming with discussion items, ranging from Nixon Foundation financial statements and notes she’d received from Tricia Nixon Cox or Julie Nixon Eisenhower to clippings about President Nixon or Sen. Clinton (a rock-ribbed Republican, she especially loved getting and chuckling over mass mailings from Democrats). While going through her agenda items, we might have had an egg salad sandwich and coffee at a little table in the Museum Cafe of the Katherine B. Loker Center. After three rich hours, we’d have put her back on the train to Oceanside.

Thus it was, no doubt, with trustees and staffers at all the institutions she loved and supported in addition to the Nixon Foundation: The University of Southern California, where she was a star runner in the 1930s and of which she is one of the top five benefactors ever; Harvard, alma mater of her late husband Donald, World War II veteran, actor, and businessman; California State University, Dominguez Hills, renowned for its diversity and academic excellence; the California Science Center and Los Angeles Music Center, and the California Hospital Medical Center near downtown LA, where she kept a small apartment that served as her base of operations for attending USC home games and entertaining grandchildren.

One of seven children of Antoinette and Martin J. Bogdanovich, who emigrated from Yugoslavia in 1908, Katherine grew up in San Pedro, where she’ll be buried next Thursday. Her father became captain of his own fishing boat and founded a cannery in 1917; by 1953, it was called StarKist Foods. Donald Loker served as StarKist’s vice president. When the Loker Center opened, providing new offices for the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation, Katherine donated Mr. Loker’s desk for the executive director’s office. Still taped onto a pullout leaf is the plant’s telephone directory (”Fish Room, Plant 1, 202-210″).

Katherine left it there on purpose. She did everything on purpose. Our former chairman, Don Bendetti, who oversaw the design and construction of the Loker Center and White House East Room, soon recognized that there was no detail beneath her attention. Her only requirement was that the project be “just perfect.” Lucky for us, Don thought in the same terms, so that the building, which opened in 2004, is a worthy symbol of her graciousness and style.

Nixon Foundation Chairman Kris Elftmann had also come to know and love her, and he had this to say:

Katherine Loker was a woman of seemingly infinite vision, energy, and drive, with a loving heart singularly focused on leaving the world better than she found it through a near-lifetime of her and her beloved late husband Donald’s discerning philanthropy. As a devoted friend of President and Mrs. Nixon, she participated in countless ways in the protection and extension of his legacy of peace, including by playing the lead role in the establishment of the Katherine B. Loker Center and the White House East Room at the Nixon Library. If her schedule permitted, she never missed an event at the Library. We will miss her laughter, love of politics, and sharp insights about all aspects of our work. A great runner at her beloved USC, she ran a great race for all her years. She was the greatest friend any institution, and any person, could have.

Writes Fred Dent, former Secretary of Commerce and another member of the Nixon Foundation board:

A great lady and a devoted friend of the Nixons who will be sorely missed.

Author and commentator Bruce Herschensohn writes:

She has been such a good friend beyond any measure….She never talked to me about herself but with that happy, almost gleeful and even young expression on her beautiful face, she always talked to me about good things regarding others.

From Nixon Foundation Secretary-Treasurer John Barr:

A truly remarkable lady in so many ways, and always so interesting to spend time with her….Our future board meetings will not be the same. Nothing ever really slowed this woman down.

Katherine leaves devoted and talented daughters Deborah and Katherine, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, of all of whom she was infinitely proud. Our hearts also go out to her longtime adjutant, Evelyn Goodall.

A viewing will be held next Wednesday, July 2 from 3-9 p.m. at McNerney’s Mortuary and Chapel, 570 West 5th Street, San Pedro; funeral services will be on Thursday, July 3 at 10:30 a.m. at Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church, 870 West 8th Street, San Pedro. Katherine’s family invites donations in her memory to any of the institutions with which she was associated.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Medium Roast

April 4, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Foundation News, News media, Nixon Administration figures | Leave a Comment 

Friends of Dennis Prager, the nationally syndicated radio talk show host, chose the Nixon Library’s White House East Room for a roast Thursday night to celebrate his 25 years in broadcasting, but you could tell their hearts weren’t in it. Everybody likes the bookish, genial Prager so much that the vengeful, passive-aggressive energy that makes for a classically mean roast was missing. Besides, Prager appears to have no idiosyncrasies beyond buying stereo equipment and enjoying a Diet Coke and cookie (eaten with a knife and fork) for breakfast, as reported by his longtime executive producer and co-author, Allen Estrin (left).

Other roasters included fellow Salem Communications hosts Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved and longtime friend Bruce Herschensohn (right, in photo and in life), who spoke earnestly if bogusly of Prager’s birth and boyhood in China a year before the 1949 communist revolution. Prager’s parents, Max and Hilda, roared with delight, having raised their two sons in Brooklyn. No Sinophile, Bruce had made up the name of Prager’s Chinese home town.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin (center), Prager’s schoolmate at Yeshiva Flatbush, provided one of several conflicting accounts of Prager’s hapless performance on the school’s basketball team during an exhibition game in Madison Square Garden. During his own remarks, Prager set the record straight. Called in a minute before the final buzzer, the lanky but not especially adept senior (”I didn’t care about basketball, I didn’t want to play basketball, but there were no 6′4″ Jews, so I played basketball”) couldn’t get his teammates to tell him what basket he should run toward. After a jump ball, he ran in the wrong direction and found himself alone with a ref, who said, “What are you, some kind of schmuck?”

Before over 800 of his family members, friends, and fans, who listen to Prager, Hewitt, and Medved on KRLA-AM 870, Prager spoke of how moved he is each time he learns that he has affected someone’s life for the better and how surprised to learn how close his listeners feel to him. When he announced not long ago during drive time that he was getting divorced, many wrote to say that they’d pulled onto the shoulder and wept. Having gotten his start in LA radio as the host of a program called “Religion on the Line,” he said he’d developed an abiding affection for priests, pastors, monks, and the other faith leaders he’d interviewed. Today, he’s especially proud of serving as a bridge between Christians and Jews. Invited to participate in a debate at a national convention of nonbelievers held on Easter Sunday, he said he’d begun his remarks by saying, “Only in America can a Jew wish a bunch of atheists a happy Easter.” As regular listeners know, he believes that America’s strength and spirituality are closely linked: “If there is one thing in our country that is truly an endangered species, it’s not a frog or a plant, it’s the United States of America as a Judeo-Christian country,” he said Thursday night.

Hewitt, left, a former Nixon Library director, and Prager are shown as producer Estrin played a clip in which his boss had confidently predicted that Gen. Wesley Clark would win the Democratic nomination in 2008.

They’re, Um, Communists

February 26, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under China, Foundation News, International Affairs, News media | Leave a Comment 

On the BBC yesterday (BBC radio’s 45-minute daily compilation of highlights, NewsPod, is available for free at iTunes), two British directors got what the correspondent called “the Spielberg test.” They were in Beijing as their short films were premiered as part of the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in August. In the wake of the U.S. director’s resignation as a consultant to the opening ceremonies — in a letter to Chinese officials, he complained they weren’t doing enough to mitigate the tragedy in Darfur — the sheepish UK directors were asked how they felt about being in China as part of the government’s big propaganda. The pair were discomfited and said they might have something more to say about it all in a week or so.

With great respect to Mr. Spielberg, the BBC, and everyone else who is upset about China’s policies on whatever subject you please, what did they expect? Since 1949, China’s form of government has been — you can look it up on Wikipedia — a one-party totalitarian communist state which limits or denies most individual freedoms. This information was also available to the International Olympic Committee when Beijing was selected for the summer games this year. Everyone hopes China uses this moment of international attention to showcase progress on many political and cultural fronts. Yet think how China has changed the last 36 years, or even ten. No one should expect any miracles between now and August, beyond, perhaps, the near-miraculous national transformation already underway. China is also notoriously resistant to other countries’ notions about its foreign policy. Still, in a thrilling harbinger of peace after literally a half-century of war, the New York Philharmonic performed in North Korea today in part because China has been using its influence, as we trust it will continue to do, to pressure the North Koreans on their nuclear program. For the sake of millions of Koreans and tens of thousands of U.S. volunteers who have a stake in avoiding nuclear catastrophe, it would be appropriate to acknowledge China’s constructive role as we implore it to do more in Darfur and elsewhere.

Besides, as it is everywhere, change is coming in China. Last month, our three-member Nixon Foundation delegation visited the Beijing headquarters of the Olympic Organizing Committee, a gleaming skyscraper bursting with the energy of barely controlled chaos. It felt like a U.S. political campaign as bright, articulate, casually dressed young people herded their more conservatively dressed superiors among meetings. We met an official in charge of international media relations who complained that foreign reporters kept asking about Beijing’s pollution and traffic. (There was even more on his agenda that week as word leaked out about workers who’d died rushing to finish the so-called Birds Nest.) Reporters should be more positive, he suggested. We told him President Bush would agree, since in a 20-question news conference, 18 or 19 are likely to be negative. The official smiled graciously and was soon escorted to his next meeting by the future of China.

Welcome To the New Nixon

February 18, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Foundation News, National Archives, Nixon in the News | 11 Comments 

While the handover of the Nixon Library to the National Archives last year was a high point in our institutional life, it was a drag for us personally at the Nixon Foundation, what with being called liars, haters, and belligerent and hostile paranoids who had been mean to Carl Bernstein.

The attacks began in July when a reporter for the Associated Press, Gillian Flaccus, published an article containing a ham-handed poke at our integrity by historian David Greenberg. The private Library’s Watergate exhibit (removed by Uncle Sam a year ago) had text telling visitors that the famous 18 1/2 –minute gap on a Watergate tape might have been accidental. “It’s not only not true,” Flaccus quoted Greenberg as saying, “it’s the opposite of truth. There was a lot along those lines in the library, which was not a matter of interpretation, but flat wrong, a lie.” Having overseen creation of the original museum, and since some experts indeed said it was possible the erasure was accidental, I wrote an article about Greenberg’s charge for the Nixon Foundation web site. In an e-mail, he chastised me for getting “worked up” and said that Flaccus had misquoted him. He told me what he had meant to say was a lie was our exhibit’s presentation about a group of Democratic House members who in 1973 tried to persuade their leadership to leave the Vice Presidency empty long enough following Spiro Agnew’s resignation to enable the Democratic Speaker, Carl Albert, to become President in the event RN resigned. Writes one authority, “This is the closest to a coup d’etat that the country has ever come.” So that wasn’t a lie, either.

In addition to his denunciations via the AP at the time of the handover last summer, Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Will the Nixon Foundation…stay out of all questions of access to tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars?” Writing to him again, I said that he hadn’t yet correctly identified a lie in our museum and that, contrary to his derogatory implication, he was well aware that the Nixon family and Foundation had enabled the opening of massive caches of records. Contradicting his own article, Greenberg wrote back, “I did not imply that you are intending to ‘roadblock scholars on documents’.” For attempting to hold him accountable for falsely accusing us of being liars to tens of millions of newspaper readers, he accused me of “belligerence…hostility and paranoia.”

More such unpleasant qualities in your Nixon Foundation servants were identified by LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard in an October 2007 article celebrating Carl Bernstein’s appearance at the Nixon Library. My wife and colleague Kathy and I had hung out with Bernstein in Austin once. We even had invited him to go see Steve Earle at La Zona Rosa with us (he politely declined). We weren’t in Yorba Linda for his visit because Director Tim Naftali arranged it while we were on a cruise that had been scheduled for months. Goffard implied that we had snubbed Bernstein intentionally and went on to report that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar. Work it out peacefully, okay, guys? And next time, leave us out of it.

For including Kutler’s words in our museum, did my colleagues and I deserve to be attacked in the news columns of the LA Times? For our positions on Watergate issues about which gentlemen might differ, why did an historian call us liars? I guess there are folks who are even more emotionally invested in this Nixon stuff than we are. Richard Norton Smith, historian and visionary head of five Presidential libraries, is right: History really is too important to be left to the historians – or for that matter, to the journalists. That’s where you come in. Welcome to The New Nixon.