Transition At ABC News

December 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 6 Comments 

Last week, Diane Sawyer, onetime aide to President Nixon in the White House and, after his resignation, at San Clemente, concluded her decade-long run as anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America; in rather symmerical fashion, she was replaced on Monday by George Stephanopoulos, who came to national notice as one of Bill Clinton’s top advisors in 1992 (and White House communications advisor during that president’s first term).

On Friday, Charles Gibson, after three years anchoring ABC’s World News Tonight, made his final broadcast. This Monday, Sawyer will replace him.

These transitions, as Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune points out, are being made with a minimum of fuss. ABC’s top executives keenly recall the backlash that resulted from the hoopla surrounding Katie Couric’s debut as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and the corresponding decline in that network’s ratings. Their object is to maintain ABC’s place as the second-most watched evening news show (after Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News) and, hopefully, build from there.

Only time will tell if Sawyer can increase viewership from the base generated by Gibson’s low-key appeal. But her presence in the anchor chair serves as another reminder of the wide-ranging impact the Nixon era has had on today’s world.

Safire As Person Of The Year

December 17, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Though Ben Bernanke took the honors, Peggy Noonan wanted fellow speechwriter and columnist William Safire to win Time Person of the Year:

As a speechwriter, William Safire made Spiro Agnew sound fizzy — “nattering nabobs of negativism” was his alliterative classic — and helped Richard Nixon explain his policies. But it was in his Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper column that Safire became Safire. There he honed a natural pugnacity — a desire to “mix it up,” as he put it. And boy, did he wade in. When everyone was putting down Washington Mayor Marion Barry, he was alone in criticizing violations of Barry’s privacy. He voted for Bill Clinton but pulled no punches toward him or Hillary. He gave me some of the best professional advice I’ve ever received: Write what you experience and see, because “what history needs more of is first-person testimony.” Once, when I got a tough book review, he called and joyfully barked, “Welcome to the NFL!” At the time, it was not a cliché. He probably made it a cliché. He probably coined it.

Black And White And Red (Ink) All Over

December 12, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under New Media, News media | 3 Comments 

Recently I wrote about the editorial chaos erupting at the Washington Times, the daily that has provided a conservative viewpoint in the nation’s capital for twenty-seven years. Earlier this month came the news that within the next few months the paper will undergo radical changes. At least 40% of the staff will depart and the paper will switch to primarily free circulation, apparently planning to compete to some degree with Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz’s conservative giveaway daily the Washington Examiner. The price for paid subscriptions will increase substantially as the Times de-emphasizes that part of its distribution. Local and entertainment news will be diminished, as the paper focuses on covering national and international stories, and providing conservative op-eds. Greater “synergy” will be developed with the Times’s new talk-radio show and with its website.

When these changes were announced, Editor & Publisher, the magazine which has been the bible of the newspaper business for over a century, put up an informative article on its website, and normally I would link to this. But I’m linking to the Los Angeles Times’s article on the subject instead because yesterday brought the news that E&P, after years of chronicling one newspaper closing after another, will itself end publication effective immediately, since its corporate parent, Nielsen (the TV-ratings company), was not able to find a buyer. This puts E&P’s staff of ten out of work, including the magazine’s editor, Greg Mitchell, who made his name with two books on California elections of years past: The Campaign Of The Century (about Upton Sinclair’s 1934 run for governor) and Tricky Dick And The Pink Lady (describing RN’s contest with Helen Gahagan Douglas for the Senate).

With the departure of E&P, Jim Romanesko’s Medianews site sponsored by the Poynter Institute becomes the leading clearinghouse for news on journalistic happenings. Since it’s in cyberspace, it looks set to stay – at least for a while.

Neal Gabler And The Politics Of Resentment

December 6, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media, Richard Nixon | 7 Comments 

Most congenial: Good friend and Whittier classmate Hubert Perry says that RN might have not been the most talented player on the college football team, but he was the most popular.

In recent times, Neal Gabler’s penchant for originality has seemed to atrophy.

His latest article in the Los Angeles Times – in which he asserts that Sarah Palin has inherited the “politics of resentment” from RN– appears to have been ripped out of the pages of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland:

In contemporary times, no one mastered it as well as Richard Nixon, who came by his anger honestly as a poor boy growing up in Southern California, where he felt ostracized by the local “in” crowd. He spent a lifetime trying to get even. Nixon was able to turn his entire existence, much less his political career, into a battle between them and us, the Brahmins and ordinary folk, which made his loss to John F. Kennedy more than a personal political loss. To him, it was a galling defeat of the common man by his presumed social betters.

Gabler goes on to rant bitterly about how RN would subsequently tap into the social resentments of the “silent majority” and would ride those resentments all the way to the White House in 1969.

Hubert Perry, a 96 year-old life long resident of Whittier, California, and a boyhood and college friend of RN, says Gabler’s statements indicate bad research at best, or at worst an outright lie.

Perry, who attended both Whittier High School and College with RN, remembers an affable and hardworking young man, who was very much part of his local community.

“At night he went out for football,” Perry explained. “he wasn’t the best player, but he gave the team a shot-in the arm.”

RN was also a skilled debater and tried out for several plays in college.

In his junior year, RN was elected student body president (far from being a resentful wound licker, he was elected as an officer — usually president — of every class between high school and college).

A fellow Quaker, Perry’s father Herman L. Perry was the branch manager at the Bank of America in Whittier. “He knew everyone in town,” Perry explained, and would later help RN join a Whittier law firm, following his graduation from Duke University law school and his acceptance to the California state bar.

If it matters much, he was very in with the local “in” crowd. So much so, that he was approached to run for office early on. The President in his own words:

I joined the Kiwanis club of La Habra and the 20-30 Club, a group for young business and professional men between those ages. By 1941, I had pretty well established myself in the community. I had been elected president of the 20-30 Club, and was the president of the Whittier College Alumni Association., president of the Duke University Alumni of California, president of the Orange County Association of Cities, and the youngest member ever chosen for the Whittier College board of trustees. I was approached by several of the town’s Republican leaders about running for the state assembly. I was flattered and interested in this suggestion, but the war intervened.

After his service in World War II, RN was encouraged by Herman Perry to run for California’s 12th district against Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis:

Dear Dick:

I am writing you this short note to ask if you would like to be a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1946.

Jerry Voorhis expects to run – registration is about 50-50. The Republicans are gaining.

Please airmail me your reply if you are interested.

Yours very truly,
H.L. Perry

P.S. Are you a registered voter in California?

Gabler also apparently fails to grasp some key historical trends.

In a series of debates, RN successfully challenged Voorhis on the issues. But his eventual surge to victory reflected the national mood of the 1946 midterm elections. President Harry Truman became increasingly unpopular for his handling of the economy, and was hampered by a dreadful approval rating of 32 percent.

The Republicans would pick up 55 seats nationwide and take control of the House of Representatives.

It’s no wonder that Gabler’s Times piece (which talks about resentment, but positively seethes with it) reflects a failure to understand what RN and his times were really like.

Community man: RN with PN and daughter Tricia at their house in Whittier in 1946.

Setting The Record Straight

November 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Cold War, History, International Affairs, News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 2 Comments 

Last month the International Republican Institute honored Henry Kissinger with its 2009 Freedom award in recognition of his contribution to the security and progress of the United States.  HAK was introduced by his old friend Senator John McCain, and his former associate and fellow Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

HAK was interviewed by historian Niall Ferguson, a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and currently the holder of professorial chairs at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School.

After the presentation of the Award, HAK sat down for a conversation with writer and historian Niall Ferguson.  As an opener, Professor Ferguson asked if there is any historical parallel between our experiences in Afghanistan today and Vietnam back in the day.  HAK’s reply was concise and memorable:

First of all, I have a perception of Vietnam which is not the majority media perception of Vietnam.

I think in essence we defeated ourselves.  Vietnam was a problem of the American soul and not of the American performance.

And until we accept this we are not going to learn the lessons of the period.

We entered a war with decent motives and attempted to pursue it by judgments that turned out to be not applicable to the situation because they were drawn from a European experience.

And when I say “we” I mean the Kennedy and Johnson administration.

President Nixon attempted to disengage us from that war. And, while he is accused today of having prolonged the war, the only decision he made that prolonged the war was his refusal of the communist demand that, at the beginning of the peacemaking process, we had to replace the Government of Vietnam with a communist-dominated government, and after which we would have to withdraw our troops under fire.

Those two conditions he refused, and if that is prolonging the war, we would do it again.

The whole program, as broadcast by C-SPAN, concluding with the Kissinger-Ferguson conversation, can be seen here.

HAK at the IRI dinner, chatting with Gen. Brent Scowcroft, his erstwhile assistant and subsequent successor as National Security Adviser.

More Turbulence In Washington Media

November 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under New Media, News media | 1 Comment 

This month has seen a number of shakeups in the world of Washington newspapers, which in recent years have been feeling the pinch caused by falling circulation, dwindling advertising revenues, and repeated staff cutbacks.

On November 16, the weekly Washington Blade, America’s oldest newspaper aimed at a gay audience, went out of business a month after celebrating its fortieth anniversary, when its parent company, Window Media of Atlanta, abruptly went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. No warning was given to the staff of 21, which learned of the paper’s demise when a Window Media employee phoned them to say the parent company’s offices had had its locks changed.

But, undaunted, the Blade staff got to work on putting out a new paper as soon as they’d moved their belongings out of their old offices, and the following Friday saw the first issue of DC Agenda. But the new paper faces the same questions its predecessor did about losing advertisers to the internet, and wooing readers from the generation accustomed to getting its news through a keyboard and screen.

This week, the Washington Post took another step toward ceding its status as a national newspaper to the New York Times. The paper announced that it was shutting down its remaining out-of-town bureaus in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, and bringing the reporters posted there to DC. The plan is to send reporters outside Washington only when major news stories occur. But one has to wonder if anyone pointed out some simple facts to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. Suppose “the big one” really hits Los Angeles. Just how long would it take to get reporters into a city devastated by an earthquake? Would it not make more sense to keep one or two reporters in the city, so that they could begin reporting within the regular news cycle? 9/11 also comes to mind; in the days after the tragedy, it was extremely difficult for anyone to enter Manhattan.

Finally, there’s the turmoil at the Washington Times, the daily founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and operated (reportedly at losses exceeding $50 million a year) since 1982. Since Sunday, the paper has not published its usual comic strips and crossword. But that’s the least of its problems. Early this month, the paper’s president, Tom McDevitt, was fired; its executive editor, John F. Solomon (formerly of the Washington Post) quit; and in mid-November Richard Miniter, the Times’s editorial page editor, told Howard Kurtz of the Post that he had been fired from the paper (though it still lists him in its staff box) and that he was suing his former employer for discrimination, saying that he was coerced into attending one of Rev. Moon’s famous mass wedding ceremonies as a spectator.

A week ago, Joseph Farah’s World News Daily site (which has a number of contributors formerly associated with the Times) reported that more staff cuts are imminent and that the print version of the newspaper could vanish within sixty days, to be replaced (a la the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) by an online-only entity. It would be an unhappy fate for a newspaper which, though rarely reaching a circulation of 100,000 in a metropolitan area with several million potential readers, still managed to score with solid national-security reporting, mostly thanks to Bill Gertz, who might have received a Pulitzer had he worked for any other newspaper on that beat. (Not to mention its often-outstanding sports coverage and its excellent book reviews, especially in the days when its literary section was run by the late Colin Walters.)

It’s hard to know what’s going to happen next in the print world, but I’m hoping that there’s still some time to go before the days when my fingers are smudged with newsprint will be as bygone as the times they were smeared with the ink of a typewriter ribbon.

Worth 2000 Words

November 18, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, China, History, News media, Pat Nixon, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

37: February 1972

44: November 2009.
The White House ID for downloading this photo is “hero_greatwall_LJ-01-60″

The “Other Challenges” Of Garry Wills

November 14, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Afghanistan, American Politics, Barack Obama, International Affairs, Military, News media, Presidents, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

The new issue of the New York Review of Books has a short op-ed, which first appeared as a blogpost last week at the magazine’s site, by Garry Wills, professor emeritus at Northwestern University and author of several dozen books about religion and American history. His efforts in the latter field include his Pulitzer-winning Lincoln At Gettysburg, and his bestselling 1970 book Nixon Agonistes, which, in many ways, became the template for many of the books critical of the thirty-seventh President since then.

Wills’s article, in the space of about six hundred words, offers his opinion about what President Obama should do in Afghanistan. After the President returns from his whirlwind trip to Japan and China, it will be time, as Sen. John McCain pointed out this week, to make the final decision about how many more troops to commit to the eight-year fight against the Taliban, and for how long.

A considerable number of voices in the media and in the blogosphere have argued in recent weeks that the plan toward which the President seems to be leaning – an increase in the troop levels in Afghanistan, whether or not this corresponds to the 40,000 that the commanders in the field think is required at this point – is not one he should undertake. Wills is one of these voices.

In his article he contends that the arguments in favor of maintaing a military presence in Afghanistan are “the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War.”

It’s worth mentioning that when President Nixon resigned in August 1974, I don’t remember any column or op-ed piece on the subject – and they were legion – which said that the Vietnam War was an ongoing conflict that Nixon had passed on to Gerald Ford. As far as the liberal pundits were concerned in those days, we were well and truly removed from that conflict for good. The North Vietnamese took such sentiments to mean that if they tried to overrun South Vietnam, the United States would do nothing to stop them.

And in the spring of 1975 this proved to be true when Congress rejected President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger’s appeals to aid South Vietnam, disregarding the promises made by President Nixon to protect the sovereignity of that nation when the Paris peace accords were signed in January 1973 – promises made to protect peace, but which Wills, evidently, regards as an extension of war.

He goes on to say that “when we did withdraw, the consequences were not as fatal as those we incurred during the years that saw the deaths of over 50,000 of our soldiers and many more Vietnamese.” Well, it’s true that while many died in Vietnamese prison camps after the South was defeated, the numbers were not equivalent to the number of Vietnamese that died in the course of the war. But in Cambodia, a nation that fell into the hands of the Khmer Rouge at the same time as South Vietnam was conquered, far more civilians died in four years of “peace” than in the preceding years of war.

Cambodia is worth keeping in mind when one looks at what follows in Wills’s commentary:

Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from president to president. Among other things, this will give our military a needed chance to repair the wear and tear on men and equipment that the overstretched regular services and the National Guard have suffered, and to make them ready for other challenges.

We are in Afghanistan in response to a challenge, if one could call the bloodbath of 9/11 such. The Taliban, with no provocation from us, allowed Osama bin Laden and his henchmen to use their nation as a base to launch the vicious attacks of that day. In the eight years that Americans have fought and died to make sure that the Taliban would not have the chance to abuse the rule of a nation in such a fashion again, it has become more and more clear that, if it were allowed to regain power, it would not only take bloody revenge on every man and woman hoping for a civilized life in Afghanistan – that is to say, perhaps as large a percentage of the population as died in Cambodia – but would do its best to help its allies in northwest Pakistan overthrow that nation’s government, and thus gain control of nuclear weapons. Then we would see “other challenges,” on a scale so abominable that “wear and tear” on our tanks and airplanes would be the least of our worries.

Yesterday’s announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 conspirators will be tried for murder in New York is a reminder of what American servicepersons in Afghanistan are trying to protect us from. I hope that during their trial, enough testimony is presented about the Taliban’s acquiescence in bin Laden’s evil to remind even Garry Wills of why we have to fight in Afghanistan, and why the consequences of withdrawal would be so tragic.

In his op-ed, Wills says that Obama should get our troops out of Afghanistan even if the response to such an action results in his being a one-term President. A man so familiar with American history should remember that the subject of his Pulitzer-winning book persevered in 1864, in the face of calls from many of the pundits of his day to make peace with the South on its terms, and, within a matter of months, prevailed. The Gettysburg Address, indeed, explains just what the United States is fighting to preserve and protect now. Perhaps Northwestern’s professor emeritus of history should reread it.

Keeping The Faith

November 9, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, In Memoriam, News media, Nixon Administration | Leave a Comment 

“Man’s God leans toward order,
God’s Man leans toward chaos,
and the tension in that eternal tug-of-war
generates the energy of freedom”
—William Safire
From The First Dissident:
The Book of Job In Today’s Politics
—– and printed in the program for Friday’s Memorial Service

On Friday morning, University Hall in Washington’s University Club was filled with people —family, friends, colleagues, admirers— gathered for “A Celebration of the Life of William Safire.”  Bill died on 27 September, and several of the speakers noted the suddenness of that sad event.  Not many knew of his recent diagnosis of pancreatic cancer; and even some who knew were taken by surprise when they heard the news.

Who else but Bill Safire could have brought together in one room such an eclectic and contradictory collection of men and women?  Rs and Ds, libs and cons, inkstained wretches and Cabinet Secretaries, leakers and leakees, younger and older — all joined in the loss of their most common denominator.   The Nixon Administration was represented by many  of Bill’s former colleagues; the Nixon Foundation was represented by Ron and Anne Walker.  Helene Safire was there, along with Bill’s son and daughter Mark and Annabel.

The Hill’s publisher Martin Tolchin, who was Bill’s friend from their days as classmates at the Bronx High School of Science (and spearcarriers at the old Met) and his erstwhile colleague at The New York Times‘ Washington bureau, observed that loyalty, friendship, integrity, humor, and contrariness, were the qualities Bill brought with him to life’s table.

Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. recalled the controversy, both inside and outside the paper, that surrounded his father’s decision to hire Bill —fresh from the Nixon White House— as an op-ed page columnist in 1973.  And how, four years later, the hire was vindicated when Bill won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.   Marty Tolchin had earlier recalled how the initial chilliness to its newest member began to thaw when, at a Times Washington bureau summer party, Bill, fully clothed, instinctively jumped into a swimming pool to rescue a colleague’s struggling youngster.

Along with most of the speakers, Ann Korologos reminisced about Bill’s great capacity for friendship and his love for language.  She recalled their many lunches at Washington’s legendary Loeb’s deli.  However long the line would be, once Bill was spotted, a tongue sandwich on rye would immediately materialize at his table.

Daniel Schorr read the transcript of the buoyant phone message Bill had left for him regretting that a touch of sciatica would prevent him from attending Dan’s 93rd birthday party at the end of August — only weeks before Bill was gone.

Judith Miller  observed Marty Tolchin’s charge to write ‘750 words, column length.”   She talked about Bill’s great generosity with his time, his sources, and his story ideas.  Bill championed the freedom of the press —what a mild statement of his devotion that is— and she thought the most fitting memorial would be naming the Free Flow of Information Act, now being considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Bill Safire Federal Shield Law.  (Senator Patrick Leahy, whose Judiciary Committee is now considering S.488, spoke later and said that The Federal Shield Law would be passed.)

Marvin Kalb was CBS’ Moscow bureau chief when Vice President Nixon arrived there in 1959, and he watched Bill orchestrate, manage, and photograph the world-famous debate that took place amidst the typical American kitchen he was there to flack.

Charles Krauthammer saluted Bill as the consummate columnist — a man who combined old fashioned shoe leather reporting with a strong set of beliefs and a pellucid style.

Don Rumsfeld reflected on Bill’s closeness with his family  and the palpable joy he took in living life —and in the life he led— and how that happy contagion was the basis of so many friendships.  He recalled the times the Rumsfeld and Safire families had spent together over the four decades from 1969 to 2009.

Senator Leahy echoed the warmth and closeness of the Safire family and the wide circles of friends they embraced.

Only one speaker was a no-show: Rahm Emmanuel, who sent word that he had been called into an all-morning meeting with the President.  (There was little speculation regarding the subject of that meeting.)

The last speaker was Bill’s daughter Annabel, who has clearly inherited her dad’s wit and way with words.

Marty Tolchin recalled that Bill never ended a conversation by saying “good-bye.”  He always said “keep the faith.”  And those were the words that closed the celebration.

Another Of The “Other” Richard Nixons

November 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under New Media, News media, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Between 1969 and 1974, when there was nothing especially urgent to report, newspapers used to routinely publish articles about ten-year-old Little Leaguers or 95-year-old nursing home residents or 38-year-old insurance salesmen named Richard Nixon, which would describe how these otherwise ordinary Americans coped with having the same name as the President – the jokes they would hear, the raised eyebrows when they would fill out a form or sign a hotel register (back in the days when hotels had registers), etcetera.

Articles like these are frequent whenever a new President takes office. Or were frequent, that is, for it seems fairly likely that the forty-fourth President is the only person in this country named Barack Obama. (A situation with which I can sympathize, as I appear to be the only person on Earth with my name, although there are Robert Nedelkovs in Canada and Australia.)

And so it is that the New York Times website has taken to running posts about people around the country named for President Obama’s forty-two predecessors. (Remember that Grover Cleveland was the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President.) The site has already posted about an African-American in New York named George Washington, and a fellow named Calvin Coolidge who is a distant relative of the thirtieth Chief Executive. (As, indeed, is the case with just about everyone named Coolidge in the country, including the popular actress Martha Coolidge, whose usual onscreen roles are about as far removed from the persona of Silent Cal as can be imagined.)

The other day, the site posted about Richard Nixon, for decades a firefighter in Atlantic City, New Jersey, who now lives in retirement not far away in Brigantine. There’s nothing especially out of the ordinary in the post – as I said, it’s much the same as the articles that used to appear four decades ago. But it does show that in this age when we hear so much about the decline of print, online journalism does follow the traditions of its predecessor in various small ways.

Max Holland On The “Other” Deep Throat

November 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Last week I wrote of Max Holland’s highly interesting article in this month’s Washingtonian magazine concerning the unnamed lawyer connected with the Washington Post who (according to H.R. Haldeman in a conversation with RN on Oct. 19, 1972) had told a friend at the Justice Department (the late Henry Peterson, who then told John Dean, who told Haldeman) that Mark Felt was providing information about the Watergate affair for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s articles.

A considerably longer version of this article, with much greater detail (especially concerning the late Edward Bennett Williams) can now be found at Holland’s washingtondecoded site. It’s very much worth reading for anyone looking into that perennial question of what Woodward and Bernstein knew, and when (and from whom) they knew it.

Nixon Center President In Time Magazine

October 31, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media, Nixon Center, Russia, The National Interest | Leave a Comment 

Nixon Center President Dmitri Simes has a new op-ed in Time Magazine, in which he argues that the Obama administration needs to make talking with Russia a priority in order to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

The U.S. needs to start taking Russia seriously if it wants Moscow’s help on Iran. The Administration insists that its “reset” of relations with Russia is a major priority. Unfortunately, as in many other policy areas, the President and his team try so hard to satisfy their critics that they appear unwilling to make critical choices, doing just enough to raise hopes but not enough to realize them. The Administration, for example, announced in mid-September that it was unilaterally dropping plans to base advanced missile-defense interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic. Critics said Obama had given away the East European store to Russia in the vague hope of getting assistance on Iran. But a month later, literally on the same day that the U.S., Russia and others were negotiating with Iran in Vienna, Vice President Joe Biden was in Warsaw confirming plans to deploy Patriot ground-to-air missiles in Poland, and a U.S. official said in Tbilisi that “the process of Georgia’s deeper integration into NATO is very important.” No statement was likely to trouble Russia more.

The following weekend, when Obama called Medvedev to look for support on Iran, he received a polite but noncommittal reply. After the call, Russia’s top negotiator, Sergei Ryabkov, publicly urged “maximum patience” and “additional incentives” for Iran, neither of which is attractive to Washington. A senior official in Moscow told me that if the U.S. permanently stations Patriot batteries in Poland, Russia may proceed with deliveries — which had been suspended — of S-300 antiaircraft missiles to Iran. Such systems could significantly increase the cost of any air strikes. “Obama is beginning to repeat the Bush pattern,” the official said, “where deeds do not match words.”

Working with Russia to block Iran’s nuclear program will not be easy. Obama will have to do much better than he did when trying to win Russian support for Chicago’s Olympic bid: he called Putin two days before the crucial vote, when Moscow was already committed to Rio, and offered nothing in return to the rather unsentimental Russian Prime Minister. Sadly, this too little, too late approach to Moscow on Iran’s nuclear program may force the Administration to make precisely the decision it hopes to avoid: between a nuclear Iran and a new and dangerous war in a critical region.

He Came, He Saw, He Muddled The Facts

October 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, Culture, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Rocco Landesman, who was appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts by President Obama last May (as a replacement for Dana Gioia, the eminent poet who was its leader during the Bush administration), comes from an affluent and remarkable – make that downright colorful – St. Louis family.

His uncle and aunt, Jay and Fran (Deitsch) Landesman, have for sixty years been familiar figures of, in turn, the New York, St. Louis, and London avant-garde scenes, crossing paths with everyone from Jack Kerouac to Barbra Streisand to the Beatles to the Sex Pistols; last year their son Cosmo told the story of their lives in his book Starstruck. (Here it’s worth mentioning that Fran Landesman co-wrote the jazz semi-standards “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most” and “Ballad Of The Sad Young Men” with the late Tommy Wolf, later to be the musical director of Donny and Marie Osmond’s variety show.)

Rocco has had a somewhat more conventional career. After graduating from (and teaching at) the Yale School of Drama, he ran an investment fund for a decade until joining Jujamcyn Theaters, which operates a handful of the most prestigious showplaces on Broadway. In this capacity he produced some very considerable hits, including the late Roger Miller’s Big River; Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-winning Angels In America; and Mel Brooks’s blockbuster musical adaptation of his film The Producers. He’s also ventured, not quite as impressively, into horse racing and minor league baseball.

Last week, Landesman spoke before a group called Grantmakers In The Arts. He described what he sees as the vastly improved state of American culture since the inauguration of the forty-fourth President, in contrast to the cultural desert of much of the proceeding decade, then remarked:

“This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

Since these words were first reported, many bloggers and columnists have remarked on them. What is thoroughly apparent from reading them is that the NEA chairman’s knowledge of the literary achievements of American presidents – and world leaders, for that matter – is a bit on the sparse side.

For one thing, it is a well-documented fact that Herbert Hoover, before, during, and after his Presidency, wrote every word of his many books and countless speeches, in a public career that stretched for a half-century from the 1910s. And there has never been much dispute that Jimmy Carter has written all or most of the contents of the two dozen books that have poured from his pen since leaving office in 1981, including his ventures into children’s fiction, the novel, and poetry.

While some Presidents, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote rather little on their own apart from letters, others have been more involved in the writing process. President Nixon made a point of crediting the editorial assistance of others with his books, but what he did not write unassisted as a first draft, he always revised and reshaped, and the really important parts of his books were, much more often than not, entirely his own work.

These include the lengthy opening section of Six Crises, describing the Alger Hiss case; at the time RN worked on it, in 1961, only seven or eight books had been published on the case (most being the work of Hiss apologists), and of these only Whittaker Chambers’s Witness was a truly first-hand account of the events. So it was up to RN to describe the incredible twists and turns of the story, as he had seen them unfold in 1948 and 1949.

Landesman’s notion that President Obama is the most powerful person to qualify as a writer since Julius Caesar is also mistaken – quite apart from the fact, pointed out by a number of writers already, that it’s curious for a member of the Obama administration to compare our Chief Executive to the man who destroyed the Roman Republic.

For example, in the second century AD Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, a man who ruled a territory far larger than Caesar ever controlled, wrote his immortal Meditations in the downtime (as we’d call it now) of his campaigns against barbarian tribes. It’s true that Meditations was more in the way of a notebook than a carefully thought-out manuscript. But subsequent rulers have written full-scale books.

Henry VIII of England wrote a defense of Catholicism against Martin Luther, long before he led his nation out of the Church; for this he was given the title “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope, which the present Queen still uses. James I of England, around the time his subjects established the first permanent colony in Virginia, wrote a book warning of the baleful influence of witchcraft. In more recent times, Vladimir Lenin wrote a number of full-scale books and dozens of pamphlets while bringing the USSR into existence. Joseph Stalin, who fancied himself a literary and cultural critic, seemed always to be plugging away at a book, in the few moments he could spare from terrorizing his countrymen. And there was nothing Mao Zedong liked better than to pen some lines of poetry, when the mood struck him.

To mention a man far less powerful, Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha wrote many volumes of garrulous memoirs toward the end of his life, and kept novelist Ismail Kadare out of jail and writing so that he could personally edit his work – much as Russia’s Nicholas I once said to Alexander Pushkin, “it is I that will be your censor.”

Yesterday, Rocco Landesman offered a clarification (of sorts) of his remarks. In correcting his mistakes, he manages to make a few more. He says that Obama “wrote, on his own, the manuscript for his first book and went looking for a publisher.” This was not the case. Obama, when a student at Harvard Law School, was approached by literary agent Jane Dystel after the New York Times wrote about him. He contracted with Poseidon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write the book that became Dreams From My Father. Several years later, with Obama out of law school and back in Chicago, but with no book finished, S&S canceled the contract. Ms. Dystel then took the project to Random House’s Times Books imprint, which acquired it, and the future President then completed his MS and the book was published.

Landesman also acknowledges that while Abraham Lincoln “never wrote a whole book per se, his writings were collected in one.” Now, the most complete collections of Lincoln’s writings have been in a number of volumes; one book, even thin-paper and over a thousand pages, wouldn’t hold them all if the innumerable legal papers he drafted before 1861 are included.

Before drifting off into an account of his new friendship with National Council of the Arts member Lee Greenwood (of “God Bless The USA” fame), Landesman manages to make one misstep of sorts; when speaking of books with a presidential byline, he says that “one important one, it is generally accepted, was written by a ghostwriter without credit.”

Several bloggers have already wondered if this refers to John F. Kennedy’s Profiles In Courage and the reports that have circulated since shortly after the book won the Pulitzer Prize that Theodore Sorensen was responsible for at least most of the text. Though Sorensen acknowledged in his recent book Counselor that he did write the first draft of most of the chapters, which were then revised by the future President, the Kennedy family has always been very sensitive about any suggestion that Profiles was not, in the last analysis, JFK’s own work. But it may be that Landesman had another book in mind: Ronald Reagan’s post-presidential effort An American Life, which was widely reported at the time of its publication to be essentially the work of professional ghostwriter William Novak. In any event, Landesman’s sentence is a rather gauche one. And his performance as NEA Chairman, so far, makes one wish that the capable and eloquent Dana Gioia were still in that position.

10.24.69

October 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | 1 Comment 

Forty years ago today, Time magazine asked a question that the President would answer definitively on 3 November.

“The Fugitive,” Guest Starring Carl Bernstein?

October 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, White House | 1 Comment 

Late last week Alexander Cockburn, one of the elder statesmen of unreconstructed radical journalism, posted an article on his CounterPunch.com site in which he discussed President Obama’s prospects of prevailing in his feud with Fox News. Unlike many more mainstream journalists, he seems to think that the President might actually prevail over the channel that shamelessly gives a forum to He Who Shall Not Be Named, as Glenn Beck was yesterday identified, in Harry Potterspeak, in a Senate committee hearing by Democratic lawmakers too scared, or something, to mouth his moniker aloud – I kid you not.

In his column, Cockburn, like many another left-leaning pundit this week, takes note of the Nixon White House’s conflicts with liberal newsmen in the early Seventies. (And, unlike most of them, he points out that not all of the press corps in those days endorsed lapses in objectivity and decorum. As an example Cockburn mentions the famed moment at a news conference when Dan Rather, upon being greeted with applause when RN called on him, replied to the President’s question, “are you running for anything?” with “no, Mr. President – are you?” and points out that many of Rather’s peers thought that the crack was inappropriate.)

Then Cockburn follows with this paragraph, by way of arguing that the Nixon White House was not especially skilled in fending off attacks from the press:

Actually it’s a measure of how sloppy the Nixon people were that across the entire Watergate Scandal they failed to excavate Carl Bernstein’s family ties to the Communist Party, nor the fact that every few weeks Bernstein would take time off from his investigative labors with Bob Woodward and drive up to Vermont to visit his cousin Shoshana who at that time was living under an alias in Brattleboro, one jump ahead of the FBI which had her on its Ten Most Wanted list as a radical bomber. People often overestimate the surveillance capacities of the state. One leak of that info to one of Nixon’s pet columnists and the Watergate scandal would have been over.

Huh? Good ol’ lovable Carl Bernstein, winner of his hometown’s Howdy Doody contest in the 1950s? Carl, with his all-American love of classic rock’n'roll? (Even while looking into Watergate he reviewed concerts for the Washington Post.) Carl, who’s visited a thousand college campuses (last week making a rare appearance with Bob Woodward at the University of Texas-Permian Basin) genially lecturing the students about the noble profession of journalism?

Of course, the Pulitzer winner’s hard-working middle-class parents and the difficulties they faced over their political views a half-century ago have never been a secret – he wrote a whole book about them, Loyalties, back in the 1980s – but never has there been any word before that he once used to drop in, from time to time, on a New England cousin who was wanted by the FBI.

Well, after some Googling, I figured out who Cockburn must have been talking about.

Between July and November 1969, New York City was hit by eight bombings of the offices of such institutions as Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, and General Motors, as well as Federal facilities. Most of the bombings occurred in the late-night hours and produced no fatalities, although one of them, hitting the Marine Midland Building, produced nineteen injuries. On November 12, just after the last of these attacks, a radical in his thirties, Sam Melville (a would-be nom de guerre, no relation to the novelist) was arrested (along with George Demmerle, the FBI informant who’d put the authorities on his trail) as he was loading dynamite onto National Guard trucks outside the 69th Regimental Armory in midtown Manhattan. Melville was found guilty of the bombings, sent to Attica Prison, and was killed there during its 1971 riots. His girlfriend and co-conspirator Jane Alpert was arrested at the same time as himself, but jumped bail a month before her sentencing and went underground, ultimately emerging to serve a prison sentence.

Another suspect in the cast who dropped out of sight while the authorities were searching for her was Patricia (or Pat) Swinton. Ms. Swinton, at the time of the bombings, was advertising manager of Rat, a radical-feminist underground paper for which Ms. Alpert wrote. Ms. Swinton ultimately made her way to Brattleboro, Vermont, where she settled down on a commune called Total Loss Farm (celebrated in a “classic” counterculture-era book by Raymond Mungo, whose subsequent works include a biography of Liberace). There, she took the name Shoshana – which indicates that she was the cousin of Carl Bernstein to whom Cockburn refers. (In 1975, she was located and apprehended, then acquitted by a Federal jury. Contrary to Cockburn’s heated description, Ms. Swinton was never on the Ten Most Wanted list.)

Of course, close students of Carl Bernstein’s career will realize that, back in ‘72, the ready availability of a particular organic substance, the medicinal value of which is now regarded as a legally recognized fact in fourteen states (and this week, tacitly, by the White House), was probably what brought him to Total Loss Farm almost as much as looking in on his wayward kinfolk.

But Cockburn’s claim that exposure of the journalist’s visits to Ms. Swinton would have resulted in Watergate being “over” is a tenuous one. It’s not especially a sure thing that Carl Bernstein would have been let go by the Post had they learned he was hanging out with a fugitive cousin in a Vermont commune – after all, this was the heyday of radical chic, and even a figure as elegant as the Georgetown doyenne Kay Halle would routinely offer her hospitality to a variety of unkempt rock stars and hippies in town to work for George McGovern.

It’s true that it doesn’t seem too likely that he and Bob Woodward could have stayed with the Watergate story had this been known. However, other reporters were chasing the Watergate saga too, such as the diligent, secretive, and staggeringly well-sourced Sandy Smith at Time, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Seymour Hersh at the New York Times. So Cockburn’s notion that Watergate would have fizzled away with Woodstein out of the picture, while it may conform to the version of American history taught by the Post every fifth June 17 and August 9, doesn’t really hold up under examination.

But this is a good occasion to mention an article by veteran journalist Max Holland in the new (November) issue of Washingtonian. (A longer version, according to the magazine, is to appear at Holland’s washingtondecoded.com site, but is not up yet.) In it, Holland looks at a long-standing Watergate conundrum: who was H.R. Haldeman talking about when, in a taped White House conversation on October 19, 1972, he told President Nixon that John Dean had learned that a lawyer associated with the Washington Post (and identified by Haldeman as formerly being with the Justice Department) had identified Mark Felt as the main source of Bernstein and Woodward’s Watergate stories?

Holland looks at a number of attorneys with Post (or Washington Post Company) affiliations at the time, and concludes that two men – the late Harold Ungar, who worked for Justice in the early 1950s and who was on retainer to the Post in 1972, and Edward L. Smith, Newsweek’s counsel at the time (and a onetime Justice attorney) – could fit Haldeman’s description, though Smith, still living, told Holland that he wasn’t the person who ID’d Felt. (Thanks to Maarja Krusten for letting me know about this article.)

Laughing Matters

October 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Humor, News media | Leave a Comment 

From a recent Onion:

Report: Majority Of Newspapers Now Purchased By Kidnappers To Prove Date

NEW YORK—According to a report published this week in American Journalism Review, 93 percent of all newspaper sales can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands.

“Although the vast majority of Americans now get their news from the Internet or television, a small but loyal criminal element still purchases newspapers at a steady rate,” study author and Columbia journalism professor Linus Ridell said. “The sober authority of the printed word continues to hold value for those attempting to extort large sums of money from wealthy people who wish to see their loved ones alive again, and not chopped into pieces and left in steamer trunks on their doorsteps.”

“These are sick, sick individuals,” Ridell added. “God bless them for saving our industry.”

CNN Leaves It There

October 13, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Comedy, News media | 3 Comments 

The revolution manqué has started to devour its own children.  But in a world where so much time is spent automatically bashing Fox News, it’s bracing to see at least some spillover skepticism aimed in CNN’s direction.  Of course the target here is fatuity not ideology.

Don’t Remind Us That Fred Gwynne Was Robbed…

October 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, Humor, News media, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

“It isn’t quite as inexplicable as Marisa Tomei’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but it seems pretty close.”
- Mark Halperin at Time.com, on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Sixty-Five Cents That Changed A Life

September 29, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under In Memoriam, News media, Nixon Administration figures | 2 Comments 

Victoria Moran is the author of a number of successful books on self-help and spirituality published by Harper and several other major imprints, and has appeared twice on Oprah Winfrey’s show. In 1976 she was a writer for a local magazine in her hometown of Kansas City, living from paycheck to paycheck and hardly thinking about whether the future might hold something for her beyond that metropolis. Then one day, as she was riding the bus, a man tried to board it who was lacking exact change for the sixty-five-cent fare. Rather than see the driver turn him away, she offered to pay the fare herself. The stranger thanked her for her kindness, introduced himself, and they fell into conversation. That chat changed her life. The rest of the story is here. Hint: the man on the bus, six years before, had, with the help of a Baltimorean of note, familiarized America with a word referring to the Indian subrulers of the Moghul empire.

Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be

September 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, News media | Leave a Comment 

Rule of Thumb #1 for President Obama:  When Howard Fineman starts looking fondly back to the Reagan administration, you know you’re in trouble.

Members of Obama’s own party know who Obama is not; they still sometimes wonder who he really is. In Washington, the appearance of uncertainty is taken as weakness—especially on Capitol Hill, where a president is only as revered as he is feared. Being the cool, convivial late-night-guest in chief won’t cut it with Congress, an institution impervious to charm (especially the charm of a president with wavering poll numbers). Members of both parties are taking Obama’s measure with their defiant and sometimes hostile response to his desires on health care. Never much of a legislator (and not long a senator), Obama underestimated the complexity of enacting a major “reform” bill. Letting Congress try to write it on its own was an awful idea. As a balkanized land of microfiefdoms, each loyal to its own lobbyists and consultants, Congress is incapable of being led by its “leadership.” It’s not like Chicago, where you call a guy who calls a guy who calls Daley, who makes the call. The president himself must make his wishes clear—along with the consequences for those who fail to grant them.

The model is a man whose political effectiveness Obama repeatedly says he admires: Ronald Reagan. There was never doubt about what he wanted. The Gipper made his simple, dramatic tax cuts the centerpiece not only of his campaign but also of the entire first year of his presidency.

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