Time’s Man (Whoops, Person) Of All Time

December 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Secretary Clinton | 1 Comment 

Tonight, Diane Sawyer, former aide in the Nixon White House who also was an editorial assistant for RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, made her debut as anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight. She did not get around to mentioning her old boss.

But over at NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams found some time for the thirty-seventh President. He reported on a blog called Teqnolog, which this weekend examined the thousands of images at Time magazine’s site to determine whose face had appeared on that venerable newsmagazine’s cover more often than any other.

The winner was not a complete surprise. I recall reading in Time once or twice in the last fifteen years that Richard Nixon had been on the cover more often than anyone else. But Technoloq did a breakdown on the 15 others who had appeared on the cover ten times or more. Here they are:

RN – 48 covers
Ronald Reagan – 45
Bill Clinton – 33
George W. Bush – 31
Jimmy Carter – 27
Barack Obama – 24
Gerald R. Ford – 20
Lyndon B. Johnson – 19
George H.W. Bush – 18
Dwight D. Eisenhower – 18
Hillary Clinton – 16
John F. Kennedy – 14
Saddam Hussein – 12
Franklin D. Roosevelt – 11
Al Gore – 10
John McCain – 10

It should be mentioned that these figures include covers in which the sixteen mentioned appear with other people, such as Henry Kissinger, or Leonid Brezhnev, or each other. (In fact, in 1976 Reagan, Carter and Ford were on the same cover.) In Nixon’s case, he appeared by himself on 24 of his 48 covers, while FDR and Hussein were solo on almost all of their covers.

It may not be much of a surprise that the Secretary of State was the only woman on this list (though the former Governor of Alaska may catch up by 2012), but to have Saddam Hussein appear on more covers than, say, Stalin or Castro or Gorbachev or even Churchill is somewhat startling.

The blog pointed out that President Obama, in less than two years, or about 100 weeks, since he scored his first Time cover, has risen to sixth place on this list, while it took RN until the early Seventies, nearly two decades after his first appearance, to get to 24 covers. Teqnolog remarked that at this pace, it would take Obama only another two years to surpass RN, by which time he’d still be in his first term, and that if he were re-elected and featured as frequently as he is now, he could perhaps have his face on as many as 150 covers.

And even if the President failed to be re-elected, he’d still stand a good chance of building on such a number – FDR, JFK, Reagan, and of course RN were on the cover more than once after leaving office.

Obama/Edwards: The Ticket That Never Was

November 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Election 2008, Election 2012, Hillary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

In recent months little has been heard about the scandal that forced former Senator (and 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate) John Edwards from political life. A grand jury in North Carolina is now hearing testimony regarding the question of whether funds earmarked for his 2008 presidential campaign were diverted to pay the living expenses of Rielle Hunter, who in February 2008 gave birth to a daughter who, it is widely reported, was fathered by Edwards. I wrote about “the Edwards Zone” a number of times in 2008 at TNN, but developments since I last discussed the case have been as bizarre and murky as ever, so I’m waiting to see what comes out of the grand jury’s deliberations.

But a passage in the new book The Audacity To Win by David Plouffe is worth mentioning. Plouffe, the campaign manager who handled President Obama’s race for the White House last year, says in it that just after then-Senator Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Obama in the New Hampshire primary in January 2008, “a senior Edwards advisor” telephoned him with a remarkable offer.

The advisor pointed out that Edwards’s failure to win in Iowa (where he finished second, just ahead of Clinton but well behind Obama) or in New Hampshire made it unlikely that he would be the nominee. The advisor also observed that Clinton’s win in the Granite State had put Obama in a difficult position going into the next primary in South Carolina. He proposed a solution: that Edwards drop out of the race, endorse Obama, and be anointed by the Illinois senator as his running-mate should he receive the nomination. The two senators would then campaign jointly. The Edwards advisor argued that this would give Obama the edge in South Carolina, Edwards’s native state, and in the other Southern states on Super Tuesday, and thus guarantee him the nomination.

Plouffe took this offer to Obama, who rejected the idea. The advisor then informed Plouffe that he would approach Clinton instead, but if the notion was even presented to Hillary, no evidence has turned up so far.

Leaving aside the question of why Edwards thought he might help lead a Democratic ticket to victory in the fall when his onetime mistress was due to give birth in a few weeks after this idea was floated, the proposal had one obvious flaw. In 2004, when Edwards ran with John Kerry, it was widely trumpeted by his supporters that as a Southerner he would help win North Carolina, and perhaps Florida, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, for the Democrats. As things turned out, the whole South (and mid-South) went Republican. In 2008, Obama won Florida, Virginia and North Carolina on his own; having Joe Biden, a Pennsylvanian serving from Delaware, was no particular plus.

Obama was also probably aware of an earlier case where a presidential hopeful committed himself to a running-mate before actually being nominated (or having the nomination locked up). In 1976, just before the GOP convention got underway, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, in the hope of gaining the support of enough delegates to overtake President Gerald Ford’s lead, announced that he would select Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, regarded as a moderate-to-liberal figure, as his running-mate.

This choice generated little enthusiasm among the delegates Reagan sought, but it did upset his conservative base, with Sen. Jesse Helms urging the drafting of Sen. James Buckley to be Reagan’s running-mate instead. As a result, Reagan lost the nomination – though so narrowly that, though few liberal pundits believed it at the time, his ultimate journey to the White House was a sure bet.

For Obama to do something similar would have been a grave misstep; even if Edwards didn’t have the baggage he carried, had the Obama/Edwards ticket gone down to defeat in November 2008, it’s all but impossible that the Illinois senator would have been a viable candidate in 2012 or any time after. So, as the President looks back on 2008, he can rest assured that he made a wise choice.

Clinton on Nixon

November 4, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Book Review, Hillary Clinton, History, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Just as Nixon was considered the only president who could open diplomatic relations with China, Clinton was the only one who could bestow upon Nixon the kind of public credibility he so desired.

—Monica Crowley

“Nixon in Winter” (1998)

In my library, I try to keep one or two good biographies of each president since FDR.  This timeline of course, corresponds with Richard Nixon’s political career.  The recently released book, “The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President” will not disappoint those who are interested in Richard Nixon and his interactions with Bill Clinton during Nixon’s final years.

Much has been written about President Clinton’s eulogy of President Nixon where Clinton states “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”  In the Clinton Tapes, Clinton told Taylor Branch that he received a lot of grief for the tone of the eulogy.  However, Clinton “wanted to frame Nixon as the last liberal in a larger historical cycle, by highlighting his innovative proposals for the environment, income maintenance, and comprehensive health insurance.”  {See Branch, “The Clinton Tapes,” (2009) p. 153.}

I was struck by how Clinton viewed RN much more sympathically, even though Clinton was from the opposite party and had a different political philosophy.  It is his wife that holds the partisan grudges of the past.  This is illustrated in a story about where Presidential portraits are to be hung in the White House.  Hillary was adamant that the Nixon official portrait be taken upstairs and hidden from view.  {See “Clinton Tapes, p. 284.}

In spite of his wife’s partisanship, President Clinton saw RNs foreign policy experience, especially as it related to Russia in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War; to be the biggest asset to Clinton.  There were other reasons as well, as President Clinton hoped that RN could provide political cover with Republicans in Congress regarding aid to Russia. {p. 124.} RNs trip to Russia in 1993 turned out to be a valuable resource to President Clinton.  The report of the meeting in Russia was in the words of President Clinton: “the most brilliant communication on foreign policy to reach him as president.”  {p. 135.} The former president had a glowing review as well. The following telephone call between the two was “the best conversation with a president I’ve had since I was president”, according to RN. {See Crowley, “Nixon in Winter,” p. 129.}

It was most interesting to compare what the 42^nd thought of the 37^th and vice-versa.  The best source material to accomplish this is Monica Crowley’s second book on her professional time with Nixon, the previously cited “Nixon in Winter.”

According to Crowley, RN wasn’t enamored with Clinton at first.  RN saw that Clinton’s election showed that the country “had adopted a more permissive view of personal morality,” a precedent for lower moral expectations.  {See Crowley, p. 321,322} Still RN courted Clinton from the beginning, writing him a note congratulating Clinton on running an excellent campaign for president in 1992. {p. 103-104.} Crowley notes the irony that it was Senator Bob Dole, the future nominee who would run against Clinton in the next election; as the very person who brought the two together. {p. 127-128}

It would be fair to say that Nixon would still have his doubts about Clinton.  He would cite Clinton’s indecisiveness and failure to lead “were robbing America of the extraordinary power, leverage, and creditability it had done so much to achieve.”  {p. 139} Nevertheless, through renewed access (as RN thought the previous president didn’t consider his advice) Nixon warmed up to Clinton.  He was an attentive pupil in the area of foreign affairs.

Crowley sees the relationship between Clinton and Nixon well:

Nixon was a realist and knew that Clinton sought his advice for his own benefit, not for Nixon’s.  But Nixon, aware that his position close to Clinton’s ear guaranteed him access and influence, flattered Clinton as Clinton flattered him.  It was a mutually beneficial relationship: Clinton got much needed foreign policy advice for the nation’s elder statesman, and Nixon got a measure of public credibility and access to the president. (p. 135}

In several ways, it can be argued that the teacher-student relationship that the new president had with the recognized elder statesman was RNs last attempt of both redemption and service to his country.

Bob Greene, Richard Nixon, Civility, And Mystique

September 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Interviews, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

Yesterday, Bob Greene – the veteran journalist, not Oprah’s trainer – wrote a column for CNN.com about the nation’s winter of partisan discontent. (Well, yes, it is September, but the air did get perceptively colder this morning.)

For decades, Greene’s column at the Chicago Sun-Times, then the Chicago Tribune, was syndicated across the country, and many of his two dozen books were bestsellers. Seven years ago this week, a scandalous incident from 1988 involving a female high-school reporter surfaced and resulted in Greene’s dismissal from the Tribune. Since then he has maintained a much lower profile, but from time to time he still has unexpected and fairly perceptive things to say.

Sunday’s column opens with a reference to high-school “chicken” races. As longtime readers of Greene know, the days of his adolescence in the early 1960s, and his childhood memories of the 1950s, are never far away from his mind, so the allusion to Rebel Without A Cause is not unexpected. Then he draws a comparison between teenagers frantically racing toward a collision, and the intensity of the current debate over health care and “big government.” Greene expresses the view that when compared to the feelings generated in the last few months, even the arguments surrounding the 2008 election seem to evoke a vanishing atmosphere of civility.

To prove this point, he tells of traveling the country last fall, asking various ordinary Joes (plumbers or not) and Janes whether they planned to vote for then-Senator Barack Obama or Senator John McCain – and then asking them what they found to admire in the man they did not plan to vote for. He quotes an Obama voter who, not unexpectedly, admired McCain’s fortitude as a POW in Vietnam, and a McCain voter who observed that Obama was energetic, charismatic, intelligent. “People seemed to welcome this exercise,” says Greene, but then he glumly muses: “Somehow, it feels that a similar experiment would be doomed to failure now,” and that “it feels like we’re all in one of those old hot-rod movies[....], speeding straight toward each other’s headlights.” And then he wonders what can be done about it:

One answer may be found in an unlikely place — in words spoken by the most divisive political figure of his era.

Richard Nixon, in his first inaugural address during a time of widespread public rage in the United States, talked about “reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.”

Nixon’s presidency would end in shambles. But on its first day, here is what he said about how to soothe the anger that was consuming the nation:

“To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves. … To lower our voices would be a simple thing.”

Some people’s feelings about Nixon undoubtedly cloud their opinion of everything he ever did. Yet what he said as he took office in a time of nonstop partisan conflict is worth considering as we pass through similar days:

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

Bob Greene has thought about RN’s life, and the lessons to be learned from it, for a long time. Indeed, in his mid-twenties he covered the 1972 campaign and wrote a book about it, Running. a decade later, he scored a one-on-one interview with the ex-President, which stretched over several of his columns and is included in his 1985 book Cheeseburgers, and extensively excerpted in his 2004 book Fraternity: A Journey In Search Of Five Presidents.

In that interview, Nixon reflected at some length about how a President should be perceived by the public. He told Greene: “A president must not be one of the crowd. He must maintain a certain figure. People want him to be that way. They don’t want him to be down there saying, `Look, I’m the same as you.’ . . .In all the years I was in the White House, I never recall running around in a sport shirt, let alone a T-shirt. Or sneakers and the rest.”

When RN said this, he had in mind leaders he greatly admired like Charles De Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, or Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – men whose rather austere and remote personal style nonetheless commanded enormous respect and admiration from their countrymen (or, as would be said now, countrypersons). While this sort of political style has generally been less admired by American voters, as the careers of John Quincy Adams – or Richard Nixon – demonstrate, there’s no doubt that most Americans do want their Presidents not to be too folksy or too accessible to the public. Dwight Eisenhower certainly struck the right balance. He was from middle-class, heartland America – but he was not “the same as” the ordinary voter. Ronald Reagan, as “down-home” as he could be, was always meticulous about keeping a certain mystique around his personality.

In the case of Barack Obama, the mystique has started to fall away, in a rapid and, for many of his followers, disillusioning manner. Twelve days ago he delivered a speech before Congress on health care which, in itself, was a good effort at rallying the nation to his cause, though far from a grand slam or a home run – more like a double. Then the Congressional leadership became preoccupied with punishing Rep. Joe Wilson for shouting “You lie!” during the address, and forced a vote on the matter which seemed to many Americans like an exercise in pointless overkill. Obama’s latter-day Brain Trust seemed aware of this, but no one in the Capitol Hill Democratic leadership was bothering to take heed of their concerns.

Today, Newsweek.com has a blogpost about the latest poll data. It turns out that most of the surveys do find an increase in Obama’s favorability ratings following the speech – but by one or two or, in CNN.com’s survey, five points, from 53 to 58. Compare this to the polls following Richard Nixon’s November 3, 1969 speech on Vietnam, when 77 percent of Americans expressed support for his policies – a spectacular rise from the President’s numbers before the speech. Even Jimmy Carter’s notorious “malaise” speech in 1979 temporarily lifted his approval rating from 25 to 37 percent, before the Iranian hostage crisis lowered it for good.

Last weekend President Obama, evidently wishing to build on what small momentum his speech generated, took the unprecedented step – for a President, anyway – of appearing on five Sunday-morning talk shows on the same day: NBC’s Meet The Press, CBS’s Face The Nation, ABC’s This Week, CNN’s State Of The Union (formerly Late Edition) and Univision’s Al Punto.

This garnered the President the distinction of having achieved something approaching what media folk call a “full Ginsburg.” Back in 1998, in the first frenzied Sunday after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, that ex-intern’s attorney, William Ginsburg, appeared on the first four of the aforementioned shows as well as Fox News Sunday. This achievement remained unique for about five years, then Vice President Cheney duplicated it, to be followed by then-Senator John Edwards (during his weeks as Sen. John Kerry’s running-mate) and then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. The last to manage it was then-Senator Hillary Clinton in the fall of 2007 when she was still the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent (and, in the minds of many in the media, virtually the President-elect).

But it’s one thing for even a Vice-President to undertake such a feat – and another for a President to think he has to make the rounds of the talking-heads programs. (Or, for that matter, the talk shows – if the Chief Executive feels he needs to make his case on The Late Show With David Letterman as I write this, can Carson Daly or Chelsea Handler be that far behind?) When that President pointedly declines to appear on Fox News Sunday, apparently because the network decided not to broadcast his speech to Congress, the semblance of a mystique certainly diminishes, and some, like Dwight Schwab of examiner.com, are even ready to compare Obama’s quarrel with Fox to Nixon’s difficult relationship with the networks. (For me, another analogy comes more readily to mind – former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s honeymoon with the media in 1998 that so rapidly turned sour. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So it makes sense for President Obama to try to follow in the path RN outlined in that first inaugural – a path RN himself found difficult to follow, because of the polarization that he inherited – and also to maintain an image befitting a President instead of a Sunday-morning regular. The right approach for him is not to start thinking about going on Olbermann, Matthews, King and Maddow – or Conan, Colin, and the two Jimmies – on the same night, but instead to focus on the effectiveness of getting his message across on the stage that only a President can command.

I Just Flew In From District Court, And Boy….

August 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Comedy, Hillary Clinton | Leave a Comment 

From 1993 until 2001, few figures were more prominent among the critics of the Administration then in charge than Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch, who, during those years, launched eighteen civil suits against the Clinton White House, and was often to be found on Fox News during its early years, speaking of litigation to come.

After the 42nd President and his spouse moved to Westchester County, however, less was heard from the Florida-based attorney. He made some waves early in 2003 when, perhaps in the spirit of bipartisanship, he joined the Sierra Club in a suit against Vice President Cheney, seeking the release of documents concerning energy policy. But soon afterward he left the organization he’d founded to launch an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate in Florida. In the six years since, he’s turned up in the news occasionally – in 2006 when he sued Judicial Watch charging mismanagement on the part of his successors, and earlier this year when it was reported that his new book, having been lost in the shuffle at HarperCollins after the departure of Judith Regan who’d acquired it, was to be issued by a smaller Florida press.

But this morning’s Washington Times reports that Klayman has just undertaken an entirely new career – as a stand-up comedian, currently performing at the Funky Buddha Lounge in Boca Raton. The competition in this field in South Florida is pretty stiff – ranging from veterans of the circuit like Dave Attell and Greg Giraldo to, well, really old comics like Jack Carter and London Lee. But it is true that Mort Sahl is seen in West Palm Beach and St. Petersburg and Orlando less often since he started doing things like teaching at Claremont McKenna College. So there seems to be an opening for Klayman to try his hand at political humor.

The lawyer-turned-humorist informed the Times’s Jennifer Harper that he thinks of his new enterprise as being in the tradition of his 1990s work: “I have not given up as ‘freedom fighter, but with the Obama/Clinton crowd in power it’s better to laugh than cry. Besides, the Clintons always tried to portray my lawsuits as a joke.” He promises to take his act to LA and New York if things go well in Florida. Wonder if there’s a chance that he’ll show up at the next Comedy Central Roast.

Forcing Her Way Back In

July 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Hillary Clinton, International Affairs, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

Buried behind a cadre of White House aides and special envoys, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is beginning to find her voice. Laura Rozen reports:

After missing two overseas trips due to surgery to repair a broken elbow, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to deliver a major foreign-policy speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington next week before departing for India and the ASEAN conference in Thailand on Friday, July 17, aides say.

Guiding the speech are Anne-Marie Slaughter, the director of the State Department’s policy planning office, and Derek Chollet, her deputy, among others. In a “smart power” oriented address, Clinton plans to discuss ways the United States can promote nuclear nonproliferation, combat violent extremism, and improve food security, along with other themes. “She will highlight the … goals of U.S. policy (not her goals — the country’s),” one official familiar with the preparations stressed on condition of anonymity.

But Clinton’s planned speech is clearly meant to raise her own profile as well. In her first six months as Barack Obama’s top diplomat, the secretary has faced something of an underappreciated challenge: proving that she is a loyal lieutenant to her former presidential primary rival while projecting that she owns the Obama administration’s diplomatic portfolio.

Obama Shapes The Court, Chapter One

May 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Hillary Clinton, News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Secretary Clinton, Supreme Court | Leave a Comment 

It seemed difficult on Wednesday to come up with a more dramatic finish to the forty-fourth President’s first Hundred Days then Sen. Arlen Specter’s party switch, but with a few hours left in the day Supreme Court Justice David Souter managed it by phoning White House Counsel Greg Craig to state that he planned to retire from his position when the Court’s current session wraps up in June. (This, according to Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic Monthly website.)

Various friends of the Justice from the Granite State had already begun hinting that such a move was in the works, and after forty-eight hours or so of rampant speculation, President Obama himself, in the finest LBJ tradition, strode into Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s daily briefing a few hours ago to inform reporters that he had just received Justice Souter’s formal letter announcing his retirement plans.

And thus begins a ritual which we will likely see twice and perhaps thrice more in the Obama Administration. Justice John Paul Stevens is now 89 and, if he stays until the end of Obama’s first term, will have beaten both Oliver Wendell Holmes’s record for age and William O. Douglas’s for duration of service. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is now battling cancer and, though still a strong and spirited force on the high court, her retirement sometime in the next eight years seems probable. And, if Obama makes it into a second term, he will most likely be replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy, the perennial swing vote in close decisions. Thus, the President has the opportunity to alter the ideological balance of the Supreme Court in a way that would resonate decades into this century.

(And then again, he might be surprised. When the first President Bush selected Souter at the urging of his Chief of Staff John Sununu, the latter assured one and all that the choice was “a home run” for conservatives – which proved to be just about the last thing that could honestly be said about it.)

A number of articles and blogposts since yesterday morning have discussed the various prospects to replace Souter. Two of the more notable are today’s AP article by Mark Sherman and Jennifer Loven, and a Washington Post online discussion with Robert Barnes, the paper’s man covering the Court beat.

The AP dispatch focuses mainly on possible female candidates, since Obama has indicated more than once that he wishes to have a woman serving alongside Justice Ginsburg. These include Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor, Sandra Lynch and Kim Wardlaw from the U.S. Court of Appeals.

In the Post discussion, three names are tossed around by Barnes and those offering comments. These are (very bizarrely) Harriet Miers, the Bush nominee whose name was withdrawn in favor of Samuel Alito’s a few years ago; Harvard constitutional-law professor Laurence Tribe (who, despite calling our Chief Executive “the best student I ever had,” is at a disadvantage owing to his gender); and, inevitably, the name that has been repeatedly showing up in the ruminations of bloggers (such as Ambinder), pundits and reporters alike: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

TNN readers will recall that last year I pointed out more than once that one of the surest ways Sen. John McCain could mobilize the grassroots as the GOP nominee was to emphasize that an Obama victory could result in the elevation of then-Senator Clinton to the high court. But the McCain campaign never really followed up on this suggestion, which I was not alone in making.

With a Congress that would almost certainly be ready to wave through any Obama selection (barring Harriet Miers, of course), the possibility has now emerged that the Clinton brand of liberalism could become as strong a current of American law as the activism of the Warren years or the laissez-faire regulatory approach of the 1920s and 1930s Courts, and that this may be a major counterbalance to any resurgence of conservativsm for the foreseeable future.  For this and for many other reasons, there’s a lot of suspense involved in what Obama will decide, and it will keep building as May goes by (since the White House apparently plans no announcement of a nominee until the end of the Court’s current term).

Moderate Taliban?

April 2, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, History, Islam, Obama administration, Richard Nixon, Terrorism, War on Terror | 4 Comments 

He was gearing up for just another day of hard work in a mundane job – but at least it was a job. And it happened to be at one of the most prestigious and famous restaurants in the world. In fact, it was on top of the world. Never mind that he didn’t have regular access to the spectacular views from the establishment that occupied the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, he could catch a glimpse here and there on his breaks.

On September 11, 2001 the sky was clear and the view was especially breathtaking. But the beauty of that scene would give way to an explosion of horror in a brief and life-shattering moment. Manuel Emilio Mejia – kitchen worker at the Windows on the World restaurant – would become a victim of mind-boggling terror. His friends and family would grieve and the nation would remember.

Then time would go by and, though those closest to him in life would never fade in their passionate memory of him, the nation would move on – not just to life as usual, but even toward an eventual awkward shift as patriotic fervor and a national sense of resolve morphed into ominous forgetfulness. Some even started to want to “reach out” to those who were responsible for Mejia’s tragic death, as well as nearly 2,800 others who died that fateful, but now long-gone-not-likely-to-happen-again-because-better-people-are-in-charge, day.

New York City’s medical examiner has announced that they have positively identified – via DNA technology – the remains of 54-year old Manuel Emilio Mejia. His name will be in the news for a few days as this announcement cycles through the media. But it will quickly fade into a footnote, because – you see – we are moving on, we are reaching out, we are charting a new course, and we are making the age-old mistake of every generation – by willfully forgetting the past.

The Greatest Generation never forgot Pearl Harbor. That’s one of the things that made them great.

These days – as we witness the spectacle of world leaders gathering in London and talking mostly about the economy – the war on terror is over as a nomenclature as if changing terminology can change reality. But there is a gigantic elephant in that G-20 room. So many of the nations represented have a persistent and growing “Muslim” problem. And it seems as if the so-called “best and brightest” of the most “progressive” nations simply insist on ignoring it.

Can anyone imagine any leader in, say, late 2001 or early 2002 talking about rapprochement with the radical Muslim world with political impunity? Yet here we are not even eight years out from unspeakable horror – with so many evidences since of foiled plots and sinister plans – ready to engage the enemy in ways suggesting he’s not so bad, after all.

Is anyone really noticing that President Obama is much more comfortable talking about his bona fides with the Islamic world as someone who seems to instinctively understand – than he was as Candidate Obama? Sometimes it’s subtle – as when he referred to Iran, in a legitimizing manner, as “The Islamic Republic of Iran” on March 19th – a far cry from the “axis of evil” rhetoric of his oft-ridiculed predecessor. Words are always code; listen carefully.

Of course, the most significant shift in body language, not to mention policy, by the new administration is in the idea of reaching out to the moderate Taliban to make some kind of deal. Or as I am tempted to refer to it: Operation Jumbo Shrimp – An Exercise in Oxymoronic Geopolitics.

Moderate Taliban?

Would FDR have reached out to moderate Nazis? Is it possible for a fanatic to be a-little-bit-pregnant with poisonous ideology?

History tells us that fanatical regimes have a field day with naïve adversaries. Neville Chamberlain comes to mind. He thought he could do business with Adolf Hitler and in doing so he gave away much of the European store.

Lyndon Johnson often lamented that if only he could sit down one on one with Ho Chi Minh, they could actualize the president’s favorite Bible passage from Isaiah, “Come now let us reason together.” Never mind that he always took that scripture out of context.

Sure, Richard Nixon used diplomacy and détente in his day, but it is important to understand context and nuance. As Nixon put it in his book, Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World:

There are two kinds of détente: hard-headed and soft-headed. Hard-headed détente is based on effective deterrence. This kind of détente encourages the Soviets to negotiate, because it makes the cost of Soviet aggression too high. Soft-headed détente, by contrast, discourages negotiation, because it makes the cost of Soviet expansion so low that the Soviets find the rewards of aggression too tempting.

Hard-headed détente, backed by the force to make deterrence credible, preserves peace. Soft-headed détente invites either war or surrender without war. We need détente, but it must be the right kind of détente.

The idea of dealing with so-called moderate Taliban reminds me of a story from the 1920s in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In 1921, the Soviet Cheka (predecessor of the KGB and modern day FSB) created a fictitious movement known as The Trust (or Trest) and for more than half a decade this purported neo-monarchist organization wrought havoc on western intelligence operations.

The Cheka was a powerful weapon in the hands of Lenin and his gang as they imposed their will on the population and the military. Under the leadership of the infamous Felix Dzerzhinski, The Trust became a vital and effective counterintelligence operation. Using the name Monarchist Association of Central Russia, they targeted various “counterrevolutionary” elements inside Russia as well as in other countries, convincing them that their organization was a front for an effort to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

People tend to believe just what they want to believe so this initiative was highly successful. As they drew opponents of the regime into their web of deceit – boatloads of money and all – they had their enemies right in the line of fire.

Those pesky Commies sure didn’t play fair. They even lied. Can you imagine? Lying in the service of fanatical ideology? For some reason, the impressive sounding lies of fanatics seem to resonate with those who tend to underestimate the darker side of human nature. Later, under Stalin, the Soviets created a loose confederation of international groups under the banner of the Popular Front. This effort neutralized much opposition to emerging Soviet influence. It was all proven to be a fraud when the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in August of 1939. Fanatics have a real problem with the truth and they don’t play fair.

Bummer, huh?

By now, many Americans are somewhat aware of the Islamic doctrine of Taqiyya – the idea that deceit is a legitimate weapon when dealing with infidels (read: “We the People”). Grasping the fact that our determined enemies will at times use monumental deceit to further their cause is vital right now. Yet, too many – especially those in key positions today – are willing to risk our future on better angels that simply don’t exist.

U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently offered Taliban fighters an “honorable form of reconciliation” and waxed philosophical about efforts to “separate the extremists of al Qaeda and the Taliban from those who have joined their ranks not out of conviction, but out of depression.” Apparently, their “depression” is now all better.

But what if – maybe, just maybe some of those who respond to the new Obama olive branch do so, say – deceptively (cue the scary music here)? It would be not only naïve to think this couldn’t happen; it would be downright dumb.

During the past 100 years we have lurched from one war to another, one ideological conflict to another, seldom really learning important lessons. The seeds of World War II were in the aftermath of its numerical predecessor. The Cold War grew out of mistakes and miscalculations from its forerunner. And the war we now fight – against a virulent ideology and determined enemy – though involving new weapons, still sees some of the old plays being run effectively by cynical adversaries.

It’s like we are Charlie Brown and our adversaries are Lucy holding the football just begging us to kick it – again.

Right Again, Mr. President

February 23, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under China, Hillary Clinton, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

President Nixon, Beijing, February 21, 1972:

If [our two peoples] can find common ground to work together, the chance for world peace is immeasurably increased.

Secretary of State Clinton, Beijing, February 22, 2009:

[B]y continuing to support American Treasury instruments, the Chinese are recognizing our interconnection. We are truly going to rise or fall together. We are in the same boat.

Socks   1989 – 2009

February 22, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Hillary Clinton, In Memoriam, Presidents, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

Socks, who served as the  White House Cat from 1992-2001, died on Friday near his waterfront home in Hollywood, Maryland.  The former First Feline was believed to have been twenty, although there are some discrepancies involving his date and place of birth.  He had not been well recently, and was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw.  His death was the result of an assisted suicide of which he may not have been entirely aware, although he probably knew that something unusual was going on.

The Clintons broke new ground by having a cat as the sole White House pet.   Indeed, they  plowed relatively unfurrowed ground by having a cat at all. The first White House cat was Abraham Lincoln’s tabby, which, in that President’s simple but eloquent way, he named Tabby.  The first twentieth century First Felines belonged to TR — Slippers and Tom Quartz.  Calvin Coolidge had an alley cat named Tige.

Then there were no further White House felines for more than four decades, until Susan Ford’s Siamese Shan briefly took up residence in the Executive Mansion.  Shan was immediately followed by another Siamese successor, Amy Carter’s Missy Malarkey Ying Yang.

Socks was a stray adopted by Chelsea Clinton in 1991 and brought to live in the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock. She named him because his markings made him look like he was wearing socks.  Socks moved with the family to Washington and was the sole Presidential pet for several years until President Clinton acquired a chocolate lab puppy he named Buddy. Such introductions —even if made slowly and scientifically— are often unsuccessful.  And that is how it was for these two: Socks and Buddy were like oil and water.

The First Lady noted that Socks “despised Buddy from first sight, instantly and forever.”  President Clinton said: “I did better with…the Palestinians and the Israelis than I’ve done with Socks and Buddy.”

When the Clintons left the White House, they took Buddy to their new home in Chappaqua, New York, but left Socks under the care of the former President’s White House secretary, Betty Currie.  The reason given was that the new home was too small to keep the two pets apart.  Buddy (1997-2002) died as the result of an accident after running away.  His obituary in The New York Times was headed “Buddy, Socks’ Nemesis, Is Dead.”

One of Mrs. Currie’s White House assignments was to be in charge of the copies of Leaves of Grass that the President inscribed and sent to some of his most special admirers. Mr. Clinton used Leaves of Grass as an aphrodisiac. Cats use grass as an emetic. Perhaps the President, despite his Oxford education, confused the two —which are, in fact, very different — and naturally assumed that Mrs. Currie would end up with Socks.

As is not uncommon with the Clintons, even something as simple as a deceased pet has become a subject of controversy.

When Mrs. Clinton was elected to the United States Senate, she bought a big house off Massachusetts Avenue, and many of Socks’ supporters assumed that he would soon be reunited with his beloved and much-missed mistress.  Indeed, Senator Clinton’s office confirmed that hope. Alice J. Pushkar, the Senator’s director of correspondence, sent the following reassurance to the many concerned citizens who wrote in this regard:

Thank you for your recent e-mail in regard to Socks.  The Clinton family appreciates your concern.  To make this time of transition as easy as possible for Socks, the family decided that it would be best, while the Washington residence is being readied for occupancy, if he stayed with someone that he knew and with whom he has spent a great deal of time in the last eight years.  Betty Currie who knows Socks well and shares the family’s concern for Socks’ well-being offered to take Socks to her home.  I understand that he is quite content and settling in very quickly.

The house was completed several years ago, but Socks was never reclaimed.  He briefly surfaced as an issue in Senator Clinton’s recent presidential campaign, when her attempts to “warm up” her personality were undercut by questions about her treatment of her cat.

Caitlin Flanagan wrote an article in The Atlantic in which she noted that, “In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list.  But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”  Ms. Flanagan noted that the First Lady had published a book of kids’ letters to Socks and had preached  that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition.”

The presidential bid was not successful and Socks’ status once again receded from the public view.  Now family friend and presidential historian Barry Landau states that this ostensible abandonment was not as a result of any lack of care or kindness.  ”The truth be known,” he said over the weekend, “Betty asked if Socks could come live with her. The Clintons didn’t abandon Socks. They were totally conflicted. It broke their hearts, but they knew it would be the right thing for Socks’ welfare.”

Mr. Landau, however, may have been exposed to too much catnip.  He also claims: ”Socks didn’t act like a cat. Socks was very dog-like, and Buddy and Socks got along well.”  Not speaking ill of the dead is one thing, but that kind of historical revisionism borders on the Stalinesque.

Socks’ passing has been noted around the world, including in The New York Times, and the Washington Post, which had been reporting on his declining condition, and which claims to be the first news outlet to report his passing.  It was also commemorated on Wonkette:

Socks the Cat, sorta beloved pet of the Clintons, died on Friday in the care of retired Clinton secretary Betty Currie. And why was Currie watching over Socks? Because when Bill Clinton left the White House for New York, he brought along newer pet Buddy the Dog, who was soon run over and crushed to death by a car. Socks was supposedly going to live in Hillary’s fancy new house in Washington, but Hillary was never quite “ready” to allow her own pet — a helpless animal — to move to Georgetown. So poor old Socks was stuck with Mrs. Currie, or poor old Mrs. Currie was stuck with Socks. But at least they were no longer stuck with the Clintons. The end.

(November 1992: paparazzi surround the new President-Elect’s pet on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock.)

Own Your Feelings, Mr. President

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

In China and throughout Asia on the 37th anniversary of 37’s historic visit to Beijing, the Secretary of State is getting rave reviews. In the end, that could be bad for her. Early this morning somewhere in the White House or Old Executive Office Building, someone read this in the New York Times and muttered, “Well isn’t that special! We’re stuck back here saving Joe the Plumber’s mortgage, and she’s turning the world on with her smile”:

Mrs. Clinton is exploiting both her megawatt celebrity and her training during the presidential campaign. On Friday, nearly 3,000 female students packed an auditorium at Ewha Womans University in Seoul to hear Mrs. Clinton deliver a speech that ranged from North Korea’s nuclear threat to the challenge women face in balancing work and family.

A standing-room-only crowd at the University of Tokyo listened to Mrs. Clinton discuss how the United States should rebuild its ties to the Muslim world. Toward the end, a nervous young woman, who said she played on a baseball team, asked Mrs. Clinton how to become as strong as she was.

“Well, I played a lot of baseball, and I played with a lot of boys,” she replied, to peals of laughter.

Mrs. Clinton said she was skeptical that these appearances alone would lead to changes in the policies of foreign governments. But by connecting with people on a personal level, she said, she believes she can help mold public opinion, which, in turn, can influence governments.

“President Obama has an extraordinary capacity to do that because of the really positive feelings that he personally engenders,” she said. “To a lesser degree, I have some of the same capacity.”

The Times also notes, “Henry Kissinger, this isn’t,” perhaps failing to grasp the irony. It wasn’t lost on RN when the media fawned over HAK while reviling his superior. I wonder how Obama will react to having unleashed a superstar of his own. Clinton’s purported political perfect pitch evaded her when she said that she shared the President’s charismatic gifts, albeit “to a lesser degree.” Good thing she said that last bit. To extend her own sports metaphor, while she “played with a lot of boys,” she definitely doesn’t want to call out Obama for a game of one on one.

The Ginsburg Slam, Or Meeting The Media

February 4, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, economy | Leave a Comment 

Eleven years and three days ago, when the nation was ten days into the trauma that was l’affaire [Monica] Lewinsky (or Lewinski, as the late Richard Grenier initially spelled her name in his Washington Times column), the personal attorney of the errant intern, William H. Ginsburg, came to the nation’s capital and introduced a new term into the language of broadcasting.

All four major broadcast networks and CNN frantically wanted to get Mr. Ginsburg on the air,  with whatever revelations he might have about his client’s past deeds or future plans.  And he happily obliged them.  Between 9 am and noon EST that first of February 1998, he appeared on Fox News Sunday, Meet The Press, Face The Nation, This Week, and Late Edition — not revealing very much, but clearly enjoying the attention he’d garnered for being the keeper of the secrets of the minx sphinx in the Watergate.

The punditocracy was duly impressed, and “a full Ginsburg” afterwards became the chosen phrase to describe one who had managed to appear on the five Sunday morning talking-heads shows on the same day.  For more than two years, Mr. Ginsburg remained the only person who had accomplished this.

Then in July 2000, future Vice President Dick Cheney, shortly after his selection by then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, became the second to do so.  Four years passed, and then a few weeks before Election Day 2004, Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards blessed the airwaves with five different views of the most famous political coiffure before the Age of Blagojevich.

In September of the following year, Homeland Security Secretary Michael  Chertoff managed the elusive full Ginsburg, and in September 2007, Sen. Hillary Clinton, in her final months as President-presumptive, did the same — the only woman to undertake the feat so far, and the last person to date.

In this brave new world, the rules have changed a little.  Last month Late Edition was replaced on CNN by State Of The Union, which concludes one hour after its predecessor did, at 1 pm. Therefore, a full Ginsburg, from now on, will not quite be the heroic achievement it once was.

And another fact which has diminished the luster of the full Ginsburg was that, until now, no sitting President had ever undertaken anything resembling it.  But a variation on the old full G – which I’ll call the Ginsburg Slam – has proven to be yet another in the ever-growing list of the dubious achievements of the Obama Administration.

A little over forty-eight hours ago, as former Senator Tom Daschle sweated before a Senate committee not quite satisfied with his account of how he failed to pay taxes in timely fashion for the services of a limo and driver, the White House was still assuring one and all that no matter what, the President was solidly behind his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

But at 11 am yesterday morning Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice for the newly-minted post of “Chief Performance Officer,” announced that she was removing herself from consideration because of her own tax troubles, and about two hours later Daschle did the same.  The President and his advisors decided that damage control was the order of the day.  How to handle it?

It would seem that the most logical way to approach the problem would be for President Obama to simply stroll into the White House press room after arranging for a few minutes of airtime, inform the assembled reporters and the nation that he regretted that the decisions of Killefer and Daschle had to be made, wish them well, take no questions, and return to the Oval Office and more consequential tasks.

Instead, he arranged for face-to-face conversations with ABC’s Charles Gibson, CBS’s Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams, CNN’s Anderson Cooper (take that, Lou) and Fox’s Chris Wallace, informing each of them by turn, and at some length, that he had Screwed Up and was Really Sorry.  The mea culpas, taken together (or indeed separately), do not suggest Camelot redux.  After all, when John F. Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs invasion, he promptly took the blame for it — once – and was rewarded with the highest approval rating achieved by a President before George W. Bush topped him in the weeks after 9/11.

Instead, Obama’s use of several hours of President Time (time that could be employed to work on the economy, or terrorism, or finally choosing a pup for Malia and Sasha, or something) to repeat his regrets five times over and ask for forgiveness isn’t an approach calculated to impress our adversaries abroad, whether Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il or a nameless thug in western Iraq, that the Chief Executive is brimming with determination or resolve.   Rather, it brings to mind some of the unhappier moments of the Carter era.  You have to wonder what’s going to happen when the killer rabbit shows up.

The way in which the Daschle debacle was handled suggests that President Obama has a preoccupation with winning over the media that makes Lyndon Johnson’s agonies over each new Scotty Reston or Walter Lippmann column look almost, well, Nixonian.  It’s 180 degrees removed from the approach of George W. Bush, who may well be concerned now with what the historians will write but, when in office, reasoned that if he did the occasional sit-down with Brit Hume or Tony Snow or Tim Russert, then everything else would take care of itself.

One has to wonder what the future has in store.  Will MTV’s Kurt Loder or the correspondent from Disney Radio be added to the list of people to whom the President must speak whenever a bill fails to pass, or whenever he knocks over an unwary staffer on the basketball court?  It’s time for some realistic thinking about media relations in the West Wing.

In Sync?

January 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Islam and the West, Israel and Palestinians, Middle East | Leave a Comment 

President Obama was interviewed on Al-Arabiyah telvision yesterday to strike a more “conciliatory” and nuanced tone with the Muslim world than what was apparent during the “cowboy diplomacy” era of the Bush administration. But according to Jennifer Rubin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doesn’t sound that remote from the consistent, steadfast, and resolute President Bush:

Straight declarative sentences. A firm line on terrorism. An unapologetic tone about the United States’ ongoing humanitarian efforts for the Palestinian people. And an unequivocal stance in support of Israel’s right of self-defense. That sounds, well, downright reasonable.

Whether she is the lone voice in the wilderness or one of many conflicting voices emanating from the new administration (which seems to have a plethora of power centers) remains to be seen. But if she is going to maintain her influence as the President’s primary voice on foreign policy she better make sure everyone else is in sync with her. And right now that might not be a bad place to be.